556: Apple Chips Are People

36:56You could, in theory, compare to the GPS speed, but that's not reliable enough. So instead, you have to look at the changes in the signal spectrum caused by the change properties of the under-inflated tire. The fact that you need to look at the signal input during driving means that it will take a short while before you can get a warning. It is, however, not the explanation for delay in showing the absolute pressure, as this is not something an ITPMS system can measure. So if you can get a reading of the pressure, you don't have an indirect system. Direct pressure monitoring systems, or DTPMS, which use battery-powered sensors in each tire, can provide immediate readings.

37:28However, this comes at the cost of higher battery consumption. To optimize battery life, many DTPMS systems only transmit data when they detect driving activity, which is especially important since these batteries are non-replaceable. So maybe they're sending, maybe the ones in your tires are sending them on different intervals, and they're out of sync with each other. Maybe batteries are dead. Maybe there's a software bug, but it is a good clarification that the cheapo system like I have in my car that just uses the wheel speed sensors that they already have to put on the car for ABS. It's not like they're cheaping out by not showing pressure.

38:00They just don't know. The car doesn't know the pressure because it's not a pressure sensor. It's just basically saying, hey, is the pressure different than it's supposed to be? I don't know what it is and I don't know what it was before. And that's why there's like a calibration when you get the tire light on my dashboard that comes on because the tire is low and you inflate everything to the right thing you have to manually reset the system and say now whatever the tires are at now uh this is how they should be which is why you should always do all four tires not just you know one that you think is low but direct tire pressure monitoring uh yeah that's that's a whole different can of worms and i'm not quite sure why you guys aren't showing the numbers we are brought to you this week by memberful monetize your passion with membership look here we're big fans membership programs they They are a great way to diversify your income, to build new revenue streams, and to give your audience bonus stuff.

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40:36All right, let's do some topics. I wanted to very, very briefly mention that I have been dabbling with the new, I think it's just for the new phones, but certainly new in iOS 17, the setting in your battery settings for topping out at 80%, kind of like you're in an electric car. My thought process here was, well, I've got the big boy phone now and it's got the big boy battery. So why not take some empathy or have some empathy for the machine, John, and top the battery out at 80 percent? And I've done this on and off for the last week or so, and I don't think I dig it. And I think that I don't like it because it stresses me out, which is probably a Casey problem.

41:18I am not saying that this is not something that you, the listener, should try. I'm just saying I didn't care for it. I am also of the opinion that showing your battery percentage in your status bar is barbaric because all that does is add stress in your life. And turns out when I'm not topping out, when I'm not at my maximum available battery charge, when I take the phone off the charger in the morning, I basically am just stressing myself out all day long. Great. I do think it is a very good idea. And certainly if I wasn't a complete dork that, you know, if I didn't upgrade my phone every year in the very wasteful way that I do, I would be more apt to try to run this.

42:01Like John, perhaps you would consider this particularly for future phones. But since I upgrade every year and since it just stresses me the crap out, I've decided that I'm probably not going to stick with it. But I do think I applaud the feature's existence. And I definitely think that I could live with it. It's just I would constantly be looking at my battery wondering, oh, what happens if I need to leave the house and I need a whole bunch of charge and I didn't expect it? And oh, my God, what are you going to do? I mean, I have that battery pack, but it's all the way upstairs. And I'm just like I was wrapping myself around the axle completely unnecessarily, which is why I think it's a Casey problem.

42:39But I do think that on an average day, the 15 Pro Max could get me through the day from 80%. I would probably hit, you know, 20 to 30 % by the end of the day on an average day's use. That seemed to be what I was getting, but it just stressed me out too much. And so in the same way that I've always had battery percentage off, like you should, I turned this off after a few days because it was just too much. it was too much for me yeah as a battery technology advances there'll be a nice software solution to this which is basically just to show 100 when it's at 80 uh that's a good point the big expensive batteries and electric vehicles pretty much all try very hard to not get you to charge it 100 i'm not sure if any of them outright lie to you some of them put a huge amount of the batteries in reserve uh like because again these batteries are the the most expensive component in the cars and uh by default you you know in many cars you can't charge them more than 80 unless you do the are you super duper serious and you're going on a road trip then you can go to all the way to 100 but they come basically out of the box like this option in the iphone that says just never charge over 80 because you got plenty of range for the 80 and because it lengthens the life of your battery uh draining your battery to zero or charging it to 100 or all things your battery does not like uh wants to be somewhere in the middle so if you never go to 100 it will lengthen life in your battery if you're planning on handing down your phones to like your kids or you know younger siblings or whatever turning this option on will make it so that when they get the phone when you're done with it the battery will be less fried um but of course it means you have to have a phone that's at 80 and for a regular size iphone i think 80 may not be enough to get through the day with the big one it might be as you know to casey but it's stressing you out because it's showing 80 but apple we're not at the point for battery technology where apple can do the software change that says yeah i just show 80 as 100 and show 100 as like you know change the color of the status indicator or something goes super duper topped off or whatever battery ultra battery pro max we're not there yet on the regular size iphone on the max maybe they could get away with it but uh you first of all if they did this you know it would be another gate it'd be battery gate like apple's lying to you they say your your uh battery's 100 but it's really at 80 never mind like you know the evs do this all the time like they would be sued instantly right but you know i can if if there was third-party control of this someone would immediately make a little system level utility that says show 80 as 100 in case he would use it and so he wouldn't be stressed out but this is there's no third-party system level utilities like that for the iphone so we just have to wait for apple to get around to it and you know if if you could snap your fingers and say hey apple for the same size and weight you could double the battery capacity then they could roll out this feature and they could make it an optional and they have a little switch that says show 80 is 100 in case he would turn it on and he would be fine but we don't have that magic battery yet.

45:30So we'll just keep waiting. In keeping with the theme of like grab bag topics, Marco, can you tell me about the seemingly terrible decision you made based on what's been put in the show notes? What we have in the show notes here and in the private show notes is AirPods Pro 2 as concert earplugs, which seems like you are just begging for all the feedback. But why don't you explain yourself and then we can all laugh at your terrible decisions. And by the way, let us know if they're the AirPods Pro 2.1 or the AirPods Pro 2.0. They were the 2.0 because this was actually about a month ago or something like that, a month and a half ago.

46:11So earlier in this summer or fall, I attended, of course, a Phish concert. I don't go to that. I go to like one concert a year. So I'm not like a concert power user here. So keep that in mind. But because I care about my hearing and I kind of need it for things, I typically wear some kind of concert earplug, set aside the ridiculousness of I'm paying good money to go to hear music that I then have to plug my ears up so I don't hear it too much. I know this is ridiculous, but this is how concerts are. So I would love for them to just turn it down a little bit. But unfortunately, they don't mix concerts just for my tastes.

46:53but anyway um so there is this is actually a very common uh request a common need for people to people who go to concerts a lot or a little and who don't want to you know blow their ears out so much that they cause hearing damage over time or that their ears are ringing for you know the whole rest of the night or whatever so there's this whole category of concert earplugs or musician earplugs and they're and those actually are two slightly different things but for the most part It's earplugs that are made specifically to reduce the amount of volume that you're getting, but to try to do it in a way that doesn't make everything sound like crap.

47:33That doesn't muffle everything and make it sound like you're listening through a pillow or anything. So the idea is reduce the level, but make sure that you're doing your best to let the frequencies through evenly. And that's difficult. You know, if you just stick your fingers in your ears, what you'll notice is that the frequencies are not muffled uniformly. You lose a lot more of the high frequencies, like the treble, the crispiness, that sound. You lose a lot more of that, and you keep a lot of, like, the bass, the low frequencies. And that's just because of various physics properties of plugging your ears and sound waves.

48:10so anyway so you can get earplugs that cost like you know 10 cents in a bulk pack that construction workers use and stuff you know just like those those little foam plug things you can get those and wear those to a concert and they will work just fine but it won't sound very good like you will kind of you will kind of feel like you know you're wasting your money a lot more in that in that scenario to see this concert because you're going to miss a lot more of the music and it won't sound very good anyway so there's this whole category of concert earplugs i have i did all the research a couple years ago when i started going to concerts again like i did all the research and bought a few and tried a few the funny thing is actually kind of kind of fun to try because the way i would try them would be to put them in and then put full-size headphones on and just crank the music up really loud and see like how do they sound how do they work so anyway i was able to test a few different ones so for quick reference before everyone writes in and tells me i didn't test their favorite one the ones i tested were eargasm the edemonic er20 earpiece vibes mumba and the soundbrenner minuendo they all suck the ones i spent the most time with were the soundbrenner minuendo those were the the least sucky among the group from in my opinion but they all suck they all promise that oh it's it's a flatter frequency response you'll hear the music really well, it still sounds like garbage.

49:31It kind of sucks because like you want to enjoy the concert again, like you want to enjoy the music and these concert earplugs while they are better than just, you know, the cheap little foam plugs, they're not that much better. And I think it's doing a disservice to people not having better options because ideally more, more people should be using some kind of hearing protection at concerts. but if it's going to ruin the way it sounds, most people won't do it. So ideally, we need a better solution. Now, I was curious, does active noise cancellation in ANC headphones like the AirPods Pro, does that actually protect your hearing?

50:15Now, I am not a doctor. I don't know if this physically does the same thing. does noise cancellation actually provide the same physical protection as earplugs and i don't know the answer but i decided to try it for this concert now so so for this concert i brought with me my soundbrenner minuendo because i wanted a point of comparison and i knew that if the airpods pro didn't work out i would switch back to those and i i spent like maybe a quarter of the concert with the soundbrenners. And then the other three quarters, I did the AirPods Pro. I should clarify that this was all, because it was about a month and a half ago, this was all done with iOS 16 and the iOS 16 version of AirPods firmware.

51:02So the AirPods firmware has actually changed decently much in the iOS 17. I was trying to get the beta to install on them, but it would not do it. Like the way you install an AirPods Pro firmware beta, you enabled a beta profile with these few steps and then just wait and just hope it does it sometime it's like face recognition and photos yeah they even tell you like this might take like 24 to 48 hours and i i didn't think to do this until the day the day before the concert left everything on on wi-fi powered open and closed the case a few times put the earpods in put took them out for a while like tried everything to like mix it up and kind of kind of kick them and it never installed it until like you know three days later so so i wasn't able to try the new features and and how they how they worked with things like adaptive audio like so i wasn't able to try any of that stuff but anyway with the previous ios 16 era firmware here are the results of how this went you know there's different modes of airpods pro there's the off mode where they're they're basically just earplugs and the off mode works but because again it's not doing any processing and it's just they're just at that point dumb plugs in your ears it muffled the treble and the high frequencies too much just like any other dumb earplugs would so i can report that you can actually use air if they fit your ears well you can use them for some level of hearing protection not a ton of hearing protection i wouldn't do this every day i wouldn't do this in like an industrial setting or like a construction site or anything but if you're going to a concert and you have nothing else and you want to protect your hearing you can just put airpods in your ears and that will do some level of that that's enough for like occasional concert going i also tried the full noise canceling mode and this actually worked too well uh it was way too quiet and the other problem with noise canceling mode is that it's very non-uniform in what it suppresses you know at a concert you have especially at a first concert there's a lot going on there's a lot a lot that's going on in that sound uh there's a lot of different you know frequencies and instruments and you know quiet parts loud parts gaps big parts um you know the maybe the airpods pro got a contact high from all the people around me who knows but so there's a lot going on there so the noise canceling mode i found was was not really suitable for it um what was interesting I thought if I just put on transparency mode will it blow my ears out the way the concert does and it turns out the answer is yes it will like I thought transparency mode would have some kind of limit on how loud it would go I could not find that limit it was and in all fairness the transparency mode when I would test I would like have it on and then I would take take them out and listen without anything in my ears.

53:53And it was pretty much indistinguishable. So the transparency mode did accurately transmit the audio from the concert transparently to my ears, which was actually pretty impressive considering how loud it was. But this wasn't really solving my problem because it was still way too loud because it was basically the exact volume of the concert. I mean, if you think about it, when you use them just as dumb earplugs, the amount of sound that they allow through when you're using them as dumb earplugs, is still going through when you're using them in transparency and then added to it is what the speaker inside the earphones is outputting so it doesn't surprise me that it was the same volume it would be it would be better if maybe like when you did like concert transparency that it only played like the highs like if it knew what kind of sound would be passively muffled by the plastic you know what i mean or the rubber or whatever your thing is but that's difficult because you can buy different tips for those things and so it may not know exactly what's being muffled but if they always know it's just the highest.

54:50But anyway, transparency mode is setting through everything. So you've got, like, for transparency mode to be volume limiting, when there are dumb earphones, you should hear nothing. Because then the only sound you would hear would be produced by the earphones, and then you can control the volume. But I think most of the sound you're hearing at a concert is sound that's just blasting its way right through those eartips into your ears, except for maybe the high frequencies. And then transparency mode is playing all the frequencies in your ear. And just to be clear on your advice of saying, hey, if you have nothing with you, you can use AirPods.

55:18only AirPods Pros or other AirPods that go in your ear canal. If you have like me, the AirPods 3, they're not going to do anything for you. Yeah, you need the kind that has like the squishy rubber tips, basically. So anyway, transparency mode was not going to do it. There's various options under accessibility. There's various headphone accommodations, various other things. I had a really hard time getting any of them to be good in this context. What I ended up doing and doing for the majority of the concert was in the AirPod settings, just in the regular settings page, there's an option down at the bottom called something like attenuate loud sounds.

55:54I basically would use transparency mode, but with that, with attenuate loud sounds turned on. That actually did a really great job overall. it was not ideal and i'll tell you why in a minute but overall it was way better than every single concert earplug i've tried by a mile a thousand times better in every way it was more comfortable it sounded better like it was less awkward it fit better like everything about it was better even in just this mode even though it was not perfect so the main problem i had with the with the attenuate loud sounds first of all is that it's dynamic so if they would really go at it you know got a nice loud part of the music it would it would bring it down but then if there was a quiet part it would then amplify everything back up again and then as soon as things got loud it would bring it back down like like a slow compressor it was a little distracting but it wasn't enough that i wouldn't enjoy the concert and it was and even even with that again still better than every concert earplug i've ever tried uh but that was a little annoying and also So it was a little bit too smart in the sense that like transparency mode and especially with the with the attenuate loud sounds option, but even regular transparency mode, it tries to be a little bit smart about what it sends through.

57:12it's not actually fully transparent like one thing i noticed recently which i i hope this is temporary um ever since i was 17 firmware updates for the airpods pro if i'm walking and say a car drives by it sounds weird for a second like it's not processing it correctly it tries to do something with like the tire noise of it rolling by and they're like certain certain like noise things that pass me in real life with transparency mode are being weirdly handled by it only since the iOS 17 firmware. So I hope this is a temporary bug or they're going to tweak or fix or something because it's a little bit weird.

57:50Anyway, in the concert setting, some of those smarts would get in the way a little bit of this feature. You know, certain frequencies, it would muffle a little bit more than others, maybe because they were louder than them. Certain noises, it would muffle more than others because maybe it sounded like white noise. It was trying to be smart. Ideally, give me an option. Like, I would love them to do this. I'm pretty sure I know why they won't. I think it would be a liability thing. But I would love for Apple to add something, whether it's called this or not, a concert mode for AirPods Pro. And again, they probably wouldn't call it that because they don't want the liability in case people actually hurt their ears or whatever.

58:25But I would love a mode in AirPods Pro. It's like transparency mode, but it just lowers everything by a certain amount of decibels. And of course, you know, they don't have to call it that in the interface. They can make it nicer and not use technical terminology so people don't need to know what these terms mean. But that's what I want. Transparency mode that just lowers all frequencies by a fixed amount that you can somehow control. Because if they did that, they would be the most perfect concert earplugs. They are so close now, and they're already better than the entire category. But it was a little annoying that they were trying to be smart in ways that they were kind of being defeated by the music.

59:06Like sometimes it would do weird things to the vocal range. Like you don't want that. Or like if I moved my head, like if I looked left or right, now they're getting different levels because they're not on access with the speakers each anymore. So like, you know, if I turn my head to the left, well then my right ear is closer to the speakers now. And so it would lower the right ear more. Like if, so it would do weird things like that because it was trying to be too smart. What they need is a dumb reduction mode. Like just act like earplugs, bring everything down by a certain fixed amount and leave it there until the setting changes.

59:42With that change, I think you could see these used in a lot more places. Battery life was great. There was no problem making it through the entire show, which I was I was kind of curious if they would because the fish shows like three hours long. But they did. They made it through just fine. Again, comfort was great. Didn't notice them. what i would also like is is maybe a more discreet look uh maybe like a black wrap or just if they ever make them in black or some other like more discreet color so you kind of you kind of stand out if you're wearing airpods at a concert like people see those white things in your ears like it's very obvious where you know earplugs usually are not bright white they're usually black or skin color to try to blend in um so that would be nice too but overall these are by far my favorite concert earplugs if you can call them that again i don't know if physically they are providing that level of protection.

1:00:33But just anecdotally, if I go to a concert and I'm not wearing earplugs, you know, my ears ring and are sore or hurt afterwards. After this, after wearing these for almost an entire concert, my ears felt totally fine afterwards, as if I hadn't just been to a very loud concert. They seem to have worked, physically speaking. And certainly on the audio front, they worked exceptionally well compared to everything else out there. Yes, it still didn't sound exactly right because it was trying to be smart, and it would vary a lot as I moved around and stuff or as the music changed. So again, I would love that kind of dumb reduction mode, just like a fixed uniform reduction.

1:01:16That would be amazing. Whatever form that takes, that would bring AirPods Pro to even more use cases. But other than that, they're already very, very good for this purpose. So again, I'm not a doctor. I don't know if this is providing the kind of protection that actual earplugs provide. And certainly, there's a level of decibel protection that earplugs do, and this is not going to provide massive protection for everyday use. If you're operating a jackhammer at a construction site, you're going to want something that's actually made for that purpose. But for occasional concert going, AirPods Pro worked the best of all the concert earplugs I've ever tried.

1:01:54they sell different tips for the airpods you can buy third-party ones i think that would probably affect the sound the passive sound blocking ability tremendously because the apple ones are just that flimsy little thin membrane right and they have other ones that are like made of thick dense foam that i have to think blocks more sound than the stock ones the sound blocking amount i think is controlled more by the transparency algorithm and you know if you say attenuate loud sounds, you don't get to set what threshold is considered as loud. Like above what threshold do you attenuate? That's not a setting.

1:02:26So I think that like there's more to do in software, really, because if they're actually doing, you know, full attenuation and noise canceling, they're pretty powerful. They can they can achieve quite a lot. I mean, you know, typical concert earplugs, you might you might be getting like eight to 12 decibels of reduction, maybe 16 at the most. Like you're not getting a ton of reduction unless you really make the sound really bad like the ones the really that you know the higher reduction ones the higher you go the worse things sound uh because of the non-uniform suppression of things like it becomes basically the more you suppress the more bass heavy everything becomes the more muffled you lose a lot more treble you don't lose as much bass so everything just becomes muffled um but anyway they're so close to being amazing for this purpose they're already great for it they're so close to being amazing they just need that setting jp in the chat room uh apparently is in live entertainment and it has suggested a company called CodaRoom, and they have custom high-fidelity earplugs, which apparently attenuate 9, 15, or 25 decibels.

1:03:26But interestingly and importantly, they actually have a graph that shows exactly the frequency response and attenuation across all of these different frequencies. So it looks pretty flat to my eyes, but I am well outside my comfort zone. Well, okay, so first of all, these are like ideal cases. Second of all, notice how this graph, the highest frequency on it is 8 ,000 hertz. And all of the bars drop precipitously right as they approach that, which suggests to me, you know, just for reference, like, you know, human hearing goes up to, at the best, about 20 ,000 hertz. And, you know, for most adults, you're probably in the teens somewhere, like, you know, 15 ,000 hertz, maybe 16.

1:04:07So for these to drop off heavily at 8 ,000 means they're going to have the same problem everything else has, which is basically there's a lot of bass, there's no trouble. Thank you. I hear you. All right. Our favorite topic from the last year or so has come back around and become relevant again. Rewind.ai. This is the thing, the lifestreams. We need a, I don't know, not a vibraslap, obviously, but we need some sort of dumb musical instrument for that. But anyways, lifestreams are something that Rewind.ai is basically trying to do. But the problem is you can't have a lifestream of all of your life when you're running software.

1:04:42Because in order to have a lifestream of things that happen outside of software, you would need hardware. So, John, what is the pendant? This is interesting because Lifestreams, when I first brought up on the show, I was remembering a computer user interface that lets you organize everything you've done on the computer as a stream of events from the present to the past that you could fly through and see. What did I do yesterday, a week ago, two weeks ago? Anyway. But Lifestreams is also that same term was used for the hardware approach of what about when I'm just walking around during the day and I want to keep track of everything that happened to me during the day?

1:05:16and they have all sorts of people at MIT and other schools over the decades that are like, I'm just going to wear a camera for an entire year. I'm going to record audio everywhere that I go. So Rewind.ai is making a hardware product that they're calling the Rewind Pendant, which looks like a little tiny cylinder that goes on a little lanyard around your neck. So you wear this little necklace with a little tiny cylinder. It looks kind of like a microphone. And it records everything that it hears and transcribes it and encrypts it and lets you search it. So the rewind.ai software product that we talked about in the past was the thing that runs on your Mac and records everything that happens on your screen, including text, OCRing text out of Windows and stuff like that and recording audio and make compiling it and making it so you can search it.

1:05:58This extends that to audio whenever you're wearing this pendant. i don't think this product is out yet it's on pre-order now for 60 bucks but this shows kind of uh where we are in the technology stack where this type of thing of uh gathering audio basically having a cheap battery-powered microphone and then being able to process that audio into something useful through transcription right and some smarts using uh these you know machine learning we used to call it but now i guess everything's ai uh these language models that we've trained to be able to understand uh whatever language this thing is going to support and then it just becomes text and then you can smush that text down really easily and make it searchable and do all the things right this pendant i feel like is a natural extension of the rewind company's whole deal which is over the course of your life you encounter things you say things things are said to you you see things and stuff like that uh but you might forget it and you want to say what was what did that person say to me yesterday or what did what happened in that meeting or where did i see that web page and that's why i've always wanted life streams and this company is trying to bring it to you as you can imagine as we discussed with the computer screen recording thing the privacy implications of this are mind-blowing because uh when you know as always technology is ahead of both our culture and our laws uh because all of a sudden it is possible technologically to record everything that happens around you and transcribe it and start and do a lot of stuff but that's not something that people expect to be happening and so like what's the deal with that uh you know if i wear this and it records everybody around me is that against the law am i going to get in trouble am i going to get beat up uh what the rewind company of course is trying to do the best it can to say well we don't know what the deal with this is either culturally or legally so we're trying to make it as you know do it as carefully as possible where it's opt-in you have to get an agreement a verbal agreement that the thing hears although obviously if you can hear your agreement it's already listening to you but anyway just don't think about it too much um and then only only when it's opt-in will you record things and it will record it'll summarize them again with the magic of ai slash machine learning it will summarize it and not say verbatim and obviously this is you know once they've done all that to me it's probably inadmissible in court and everything but like this is the path we're traveling here and the analogy that i thought of was like the advent of photography uh before there was photography the idea of someone capturing an image of you anywhere was just like what are they gonna do sit down and sketch me on a piece of paper it's like i'll just run away before they finish the drawing it's fine um they're certainly not going to paint me in full color but what if i told you i could capture an image of you instantly how will society deal with this and it took just i don't know i don't know if it's centuries decades decades for us to get laws on the book that say where and when is it legal for you to take a picture of somebody else without their consent and every country and every municipality and everything has different laws but as a society we've come up with a semi-reasonable set of things that deal with that i think once again technology has outrun uh the law with the advent of the quote-unquote camera phone because now it's not like it was when these laws were written when it's like oh you know paparazzi photographers that were worried about or people with a camera or whatever now everybody has a camera with them all the time and so you see conflict of like the police not wanting themselves to be recorded because now the police are constantly being recorded because everyone's got a phone and they push back against that and uh you know or like imagine if we got camera technology that allowed our phones to have like a 500x optical zoom with good quality if that technology ever arrived there's a whole new set of things like well technically i was following the laws because you're in public and i'm here and i'm there like luckily the paparazzi laws have helped a little bit with that because paparazzi are motivated to use these really long lenses so i'm sure there's at least in california there's probably laws in the books about that but the advance of technology allowing us to do things that we never worried about before requires us to think about these issues and probably make laws related to them but here's rewind out there uh pushing the envelope because we all see the utility in this like if you describe this we all say this would be great i would love to be able to basically have an outboard memory have the computers keep track of stuff for me it's like having in an ideal case a personal assistant with you at all times so you can just ask them like you know what you see on these politicians where they have the person who's always behind them like a gary on beep but competent um we can just ask them anything who is this who am i talking to what did they say yesterday where are we going blah blah people want that but they would like it to be magic and automatic for them with tiny devices they carry with them uh but you can't have that without also having everybody recording everything all the time everywhere.

1:10:40And yeah, I'm not sure how we're going to square that because a lot of the utility of this type of thing comes from the ubiquity. When it's you on your own computer, you can choose the level of ubiquity, the rewind software, you can just not run it. So that's fine. But if you do run it, you can control which applications they can see you can control when it's on when it's off, you know, it's confined to the little world of you, your computer and your computer's microphone and camera. So if you're, you know, leave the house you know your computer is not following you and recording you you know but the pendant is around your neck and now we need a whole set of rules for this um so i think probably the technology with this thing and the jankiness of the transcription everything is going to be limiting but i think uh this is because it is starting to be possible this is something that other companies will pursue and i will say personally i think it's something they should pursue because the benefits are tremendous but of course the downsides are also tremendous so i hope that as we travel this road i mean it's it's hard for me to be uh be hopeful at least in our country about our ability to make new laws that uh correctly uh constrain technology without stifling it um or without leaving it completely unconstrained due to regulatory capture or whatever like we have all the badness and not the goodness there but i feel like eventually the planet earth as a society will construct social norms and laws surrounding this process so that we can get some of the benefit without all of the terrible downsides we can hope when i when i first saw this this pendant thing breeze through the news and yeah it isn't out yet and it's not even out soon i think it seems like they're they're kind of just starting to develop it now um but when i saw it breeze through i had the same thoughts as everyone else like Yeah, this sounds like it would be massively privacy invading for all the people around you all of the time.

1:12:29You know, strangers walking by could have one of these at any time. You don't know. But it does kind of make sense that it's kind of like photo capture. There is a difference in degree that if this thing is always recording in the background. Now, yes, I know. I watched the video of the guy saying, like, here's how we're going to do privacy features on this maybe. and they're just ideas. They're not actually done and created and tested and working. And frankly, I think the, as John said about the utility comes from Ubiquity, the features that they mentioned are like, oh, we'll have it just be opt-in.

1:13:07Only people who opted in to be recorded will have their voices recorded. First of all, I don't buy a firm in if that would work very well. But second of all, that makes it way less useful. And so if that is actually an option to be turned off, most people will just turn it off you know the reality is like i would love to have a perfect memory and what what got me very for a split second interested in this thing is when somebody was like wow wouldn't it be nice to remember the person's name that they introduced themselves to you five minutes ago in the conversation they quickly said their name you have since forgotten it and you're like god what what was this person's name again they they told me a few minutes ago and i i just it slipped my mind i forgot i would love that that would be in that would be amazing that would be life-changing for me that's the that's the goal of the uh ar glasses that we always talk about what's the killer app for the ar glasses names that float over people's heads and you combine that with a ubiquitous recording it's like well how would it know the name to float over their head well if they told it to you earlier then it knows it because it can associate it with the face that spoke the words that said my name is blah blah blah and then i can transcribe it and stick it over the thing like it it all will work out like with you know and speaking of glasses what is the company that did was it uh snapchat that did the glasses with cameras in them they're recording all the time right doesn't facebook still make those yeah i think that like so his thing like the technology is getting there for this type of thing rewind i think i'm taking more seriously just because they've they've proven the utility with the thing that runs on your mac essentially like it has utility and it works and it's not you know it's not trying to record video all the time and everything right um it's just audio so it's lower bandwidth and it can transcribe but but the video approach like people could canon again these mit things from the 80s where someone's like i'm gonna wear a video camera on my head uh you know for an entire year in the 80s and it was ridiculous looking but now you can get a very tiny camera that people might not even be able to see that's recording video all the time through like a little tiny tether that's going down to like uh you know ssd that's in your pocket or whatever like we have the technology to do this already but it's not socially acceptable to your point marco if you if you start every conversation with do you mind if i record you people wouldn't want to talk to you real fast i'd be like that's the guy who always asks if you can opt into recording and people be like what no like we're not we're not ready for that we're also not ready for you for uh by the way you never know who's secretly recording you because that a that's probably not legal in lots of places and b people don't want that to happen they don't want to know that it happened after the fact and if you say oh yeah no i told i record everybody all the time because i turned off the opt-in feature again people aren't going to want to talk to you yeah and and there's so many differences when When you're talking about this kind of feature or this kind of product, it's very different to say I'm going to carry something in my pocket that makes it easy for me to record stuff when I want to versus I'm going to be wearing something that is always recording everything without my input.

1:15:56Those are very, very different things. There's obviously, as John said, cameras got smaller and easier and better and more ubiquitous. And so that changed the photo and video angle pretty significantly over the last few decades. But ambient recording of everything around you and all the people around you without you having to choose to record it and also to be physically looking like you're recording it, that becomes a very, very different thing. You know, there's going to be a lot of, you know, just like the regular Rewind product for the regular desktop capture thing, there's going to be a lot of unintended capture or unwanted capture.

1:16:37And that's going to cause a lot of problems, both privacy-wise, legally. Like, it's going to be a mess. I mean, it's like all the tubes in our house, like the Amazon Echoes and all the other things that are always listening. because again that's how they can hear you say hey dingus they're always listening and those little recordings and then like you know law enforcement of course gets wind of this and they're like can we uh you know subpoena the surreptitious recordings from people's accidental activations of their amazon and like if if these things sold to anybody you know law enforcement would be like everybody who was in that area at the time was wearing one of these pendants we're going to subpoena all your recordings and subpoena all your transcripts and like you know law enforcement and will always take advantage of every possible like the ring doorbell cameras right the whole the whole just those are all police cameras yeah so this is going to happen and we have to you know come up with laws and norms around this that don't allow things to swing wildly in one direction or the other free-for-all recording everything is terrible the ability of law enforcement to get a recording of everything everywhere is terrible just ask people in the uk i suppose um because my my understanding is that they have a much more ubiquitous video recording of public spaces there than we have here uh but again utility the utility for actually catching criminals criminals is there it's good it exists right it's you know abuse of it is bad but you know appropriate use of it kind of like everything else like telephone conversations video recording we have all sorts of laws about what is and isn't admissible as evidence and what law enforcement can and can't do for technologies that have been around for a long time but suddenly when you throw something like this like oh we went from nobody having cameras on their front door to a huge number of people having cameras in their front door faster than we could gather laws around this or faster than we could gather social norms around should i buy this device should i join the neighborhood watch thing where we all share all our front door recordings with the police or should i not do that uh you know so it's just I do feel like the technology is definitely way out ahead of how we can handle it.

1:18:44But, you know, there's no the alternative isn't like, well, we'll just stop this technology because that's never going to happen. Right. The advantages of making cameras smaller and making lower power things and doing AI powered transcription, those advantages are too good to ignore. We we should pursue that because it makes things better for everybody. we just have to worry about the downsides and deal with them uh rather than saying okay well i'm just going to pretend we're not going to progress because we are and i think we should yeah you wear one of these things to your job you're getting fired like there's no no there's no way your job is going to make you wear one of these for compliance reasons and they're going to check the transcripts every day and they're going to see if you're leaking secrets you kidding the workplace loves this crap recording they already there we talked about this with rewind.ai that workplaces there's already a breed of enterprise software that records everything you do on your screen and sees if you're like goofing off or playing solitaire if you're not moving the mouse enough or if you're not being productive like they're gonna love this they're not gonna let you bring in your own but they're gonna make you wear one that they have and that is again a situation where i think social norms need to come in with like yeah since you're not legally required to work for this company you can just quit if you don't like it but if everybody company company does it that's kind of crappy so we kind of have to have pushback from labor as they call it to say here's what isn't isn't okay as a society to allow you know the workplace to demand of us like you know working more than 40 hours a day without overtime pay not getting weekends off all the things that the labor movement has given us uh it needs to give us some more things as uh you know as our boss uh starts finding new interesting technology to try to make uh more money for them but more misery for everyone else oh my god that's terrifying but correct For what it's worth, in the explanatory video that Rewind put up, they said in two days they got over 3 ,100 pre-orders.

1:20:34They also made mention, I think, John, you said this a minute ago, they said that they've had a couple of theories about how they can make the privacy safe. First of all, they'll be parsing everything they hear, and they can do speaker detection, you know, as in who is speaking. And they can figure out, oh, this person said, yes, you can record me. And then, oh, we're good to go, which is both clever and creepy. But the other thing they said was, hey, look, what if we only store summaries rather than verbatim conversations? Because then it's just like having a really, really, really good note taker around you always.

1:21:05Here again, I see what they're going for. It does make sense. A little creepy, but I do get it. And I thought those were at least semi-reasonable approaches to try to ensure some modicum of privacy and safety. Oh, man. It's just, first of all, I think those are very optimistic, you know, that they would be able to do that reliably. And again, like, if that was optional, nobody would enable that option. Like, the option of, oh, only store this minimal amount or only record people who said it, nobody would enable that option if that was optional. And even then, like, you know, the summaries, like, real conversations are, you know, messy and organic and all over the place.

1:21:50first of all you assume it can hear you well enough to have accurate transcriptions and to hear everything um which that's that's a big assumption right now but you know whatever assuming gets better that it can it can actually capture everything you know i mean there's first of all there's going to be you know you know it's going to be like you know do you think she liked me and then you know she was just being nice like it like people are going to use it for like you know dumb stuff but if you're only storing the summary what if the summary is wrong then you will have this now incorrect record of the conversation that you think is a record of the conversation.

1:22:26Like, you think, well, this is what was recorded, and this is the summary of what was recorded. Like, you think that's correct, and you treat it as fact, or you treat it as reliable, you treat it as correct. What if it's not correct? Even a little bit off, what if it missed some nuance? You know, like, there are just so many things where, like, I don't think that option is a very good option of, like, oh, we'll just store summaries. No, that's that's not a great option for for a 60 device too like we've all had the experience with our thousand dollar phone where we say hey dingus remind me to blah blah blah and then later in the day we look at reminders and it says some word salad like what the hell was this because it transcribed it wrong that's one sentence there's one literal sentence that it's trying to say verbatim and it does it so badly that you get a thing that's so far off that you're trying to like sound it out like what did it think it hurt because it's a challenging environment like you're on the go the pendant is around your neck right uh so forget about summary straight transcription is hard enough uh yeah obviously this will get better with time but that's part of the challenge and i do wonder if our use of uh all of our assistance on our phones will culturally prepare us for the idea that yeah it's probably not going to be accurate even as it gets better and better and better over the years the sort of built-in cultural distrust of like Like, oh, sometimes it messes up.

1:23:42Sometimes autocomplete types bogus things. Sometimes speech to text gets it wrong in challenging environments. So it's not entirely trustworthy. I think it would take many generations of, you know, near 100 % accuracy for us to culturally believe it. So we can thank the poor performance of our, you know, voice assistants now for training generations of people not to trust this. and this whole topic by the way uh lets me pull out this uh the uh title of the philip k dick story which i already used in one of my hypercritical posts from way back but it is endlessly applicable uh and my uh i posted hypercritical was about remastered games where they'll take an old video game but like sell you a new version where all the graphics have been redone for the current generation so it's the same game and the same mechanics but it's it's you know it's high definition it's a new texture pack it's even better geometry different lighting and the title of the Philip K.

1:24:37Dick story is We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. That should be the tagline for this Rewind.ai company. We can remember it for you wholesale. We are brought to you this episode by Collide. If you work in security or IT and your company uses Okta, this message is for you. Have you noticed that for the past few years, the majority of data breaches and hacks you read about have something in common? It's employees. Hackers absolutely love exploiting vulnerable employee devices and credentials. But it doesn't have to be this way. Imagine a world where only secure devices can access your cloud apps.

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1:25:50Collide, K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash ATP. Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.

1:26:00All right, you want to do some Ask ATP? Let's do it. let's start with buckaroo Ponsai. Ponsai? Ponsai? Ponsai? Ponsai. It's Ponsai, but it's supposed to be like a buckaroo Bonsai, the movie. Is it Ponsai Beach or Ponsai Beach? Air high five, Marko. We were pronouncing that wrong even when we thought we were doing it right. Who knows? Anyway, Buckaroo P writes, what is so much better about Apple's chip designs besides tailoring to their own needs and monopsony access to smaller process nodes? They must have some design principle or innovation that stops Samsung and Qualcomm from catching up. right?

1:26:33I mean, I think, John, you're probably best equipped to answer this. But I think to me, the number one thing that Apple does incredibly well is their chips are fast, but they're also incredibly power efficient, which is not something that's easy to do, be both fast and power efficient. But what's your answer? Well, so here's the thing with Apple's lead on chips. It is shrinking. It still exists, but it is shrinking. And what gave them that lead in the end is two things one is what they're saying like exclusive because they have the most money they they can pay for the access to the best fabrication process and at various times in the past having access to the best fabrication process has been a huge advantage it remains to be seen if having exclusive access to three nanometers from tsmc is going to be a huge advantage we still have question marks about that based on the phone chips that we've seen but in the past definitely when apple had a better process than their competitors that made a big difference but the second one is the boring answer to most technology questions.

1:27:32It's people. Apple bought a PA semi, which had a bunch of people in it who were good at designing chips. Chips aren't designed by robots or computers. They're designed by people. If you have the best people, you get the best chips. Apple bought that advantage by buying a company filled with really smart people and then giving them lots of money and hiring new smart people to make their own line of chips. And that's worked out really well for them. We'll put a link in the show notes too. a lot of those people have since left Apple and formed their new company called Nuvia, which was then acquired by Qualcomm.

1:28:05And now Qualcomm is using its Nuvia acquisition, which presumably has a bunch of good people, to help Qualcomm's chips be better. That's part of the reason the gap is narrowing. It all comes down to people. Who has the best chip designers? The people who know the most about chips with the most experience who can make these chips. and on top of that finally a somewhat distant third is of course apple can make chips that are exactly tailored to what they want qualcomm can also make chips exactly tailored to what they want but they are serving many customers they don't have their own phones that they make so it's more difficult to them um and that that is super important for like bringing that last couple percent out because apple can just especially for the phone because let's be honest like that when they're making the chip for the phone they're like we're going to make exactly the chip that we want but when it comes time to make the chips for the mac they're like okay here's the guts we have from the phone thing here's what we have to do to make it good on the mac what else can we add but it's not like they're making the cores specifically tailored to the mac at this point so you know the that advantage of making everything perfectly custom for what apple wants it to be used for tails off a little bit as evidence in the worst case scenario obviously by the mac pro where apple has not made a chip that's exactly what they need for the mac pro they just absolutely have it intel didn't make it for them in the zeons because the zeons had a bunch of crap that apple didn't want and weren't made the way apple wanted them to and now that apple makes its own chips apple is also going oh now i see a way until never made the chip that we wanted because we would be only customers for it and we don't sell a lot of these computers um but yeah uh the advantage is people uh and that advantage only lasts as long as those people last uh either those people you know those people can retire or in the case of many of the good people who worked on apple silicon a lot of them have uh went off to start a new company that got acquired by apple's competitor which is not good for them but hey new people are coming out of school every day and getting hired on and that's that's the competition in the tech sector especially in this area where having a small number like a few hundred of the really best smartest uh most experienced people with the best ideas can have a huge effect because chip design is like look if you get that right that has ripple effects that go throughout your entire product line uh kind of like you know product design having a johnny ive or whatever has such an outsized advantage versus like someone who's just like i'm really good at writing software and i wrote a really good version of this application that ships with every computer it's probably not going to have as big an effect as the people who do the chips or the general product design but uh that's what it comes down to uh apple chips are people all right alfred flynn writes do you all separate your personal data such as photos from the rest of mac os like by putting it on a separate partition or even an external drive.

1:30:43As a developer myself, many developer tools have almost unrestricted access to the file system. I want to keep personal data on the same drive as macOS for convenience, but the risks of accidentally installing a bad dependency or the authors of a dependency going rogue have been giving me pause. I used to do this way back in the day on Windows computers. This is something I picked up from my dad. He would use the C drive, John, just hush. He would use the C drive for the OS and things like that. And I think he would make a partition D for like data if memory serves and then like e would be no you got to skip d because the cd-rom drive oh maybe you're right it's been so long but yeah you're probably right but you know what i'm saying it was something along those lines and you're reserving a and b for your floppy drives of course exactly exactly that's a little that's a little uh a little little place for let's have some unity between the uh the poor windows slobs and the beautiful mac users um we've talked about this in the past uh why is command shift three screenshot well it's because command shift one and two are eject floppy drive one and ejects floppy drive two why is the hard drive c on windows that's because a and b are the two floppy drives so the idea of of having two floppy drives and giving them like the good drive letters or the good keyboard shortcuts is still with us to this day that's why command shift three is still command shift three they never change it even though we no longer have two floppy drives by the way for whatever it's worth i one of the first things to do in setting up a new mac is i remap command shift three to command shift one because it's easier yeah oh i see windows is still like the hard drive still defaults to c and like windows 11 doesn't it so they haven't gotten past that either you have to save room for your floppy drives and your brand new pcs yeah exactly i know you don't want me to harp on that but drive letters come on people anyway i used to do this back in the window day windows days for me uh but i haven't done it since and now i don't do anything like this with mac os uh john you talked a lot last time.

1:32:31Marco, what is your approach? And then we'll get to John. Like you, I used to do it in my Windows days. And the reason why was because being a Windows Power user, formatting and reinstalling the OS is a fairly common operation. I would do that about maybe once a year or so. And it was much easier to know that if my user data is on this other partition, then I can format the C partition without worrying that I'm going to lose stuff. So that was pretty much what I did and why I did it back then. As soon as I went to Mac, first of all, I started out on laptops where I didn't have multiple drives, and it didn't make a lot of sense to have multiple partitions, and so I just never understood how to have it on the Mac.

1:33:10And I found it's mostly not a problem. I mean, for Alfred's, not the software, for the right ear of this question, for Alfred's purpose here of developer tools having overstated access, I don't really have that issue because most of my development is in Xcode, and I also hardly ever install any kind of third-party stuff. I hardly ever install third-party developer tools or libraries or things like that. And Xcode is actually, modern Xcode stuff is pretty well sandboxed. Even if you get Swift packages and you have build steps as part of a Swift package, those have very little access to anything.

1:33:48Everything is sandboxed and all of that. And so it's actually fairly safe. But my general approach to my Mac security is I will let the OS sandbox and protect things to whatever degree. Certain things require full disk access. Things like backup tools, which we'll get to soon. I will allow those as needed, but only for stuff that really makes sense. I'm not pasting terminal commands into terminal and letting things go nuts. I don't really have that kind of security concern of that. If something ever did go rogue, that's what I have backups for. John? Practically speaking, trying to keep things in separate buckets is annoying and the mac operating system does not want you to do it in earlier days of the mac os 10 there was sort of built-in support carried over from the next step days of much better support for keeping things in separate bins having your user directories on a different drive than your operating system like actually a different physical drive not just like a different partition having network home directories there was a whole thing of like your home directory would be on your ipod do you remember that you connected with uh with firewire oh yeah so but as as time has gone on those features have either slowly departed the mac operating system or become so buggy as to be useless or inadvisable so the the path of least resistance is to put everything on the same drive now practically speaking in terms of security alfred says as a developer myself many developer tools have unrestricted access to the file system if that means like full disk access i don't actually know the answer to this but does full disk disk access provide you provide programs that have it with full access to all mounted drives or is that the separate access and external drive permission oh i don't know i'm not sure but but anyway multiple partitions of the same drive i think full disk access definitely does give you and if you have an internal drive if you're one of the few people who has a computer that has multiple internal drives and can run mac os i think full disk access would probably access that too um i still think the annoyance of trying to put things in separate buckets is not worth the hassle it's not worth the bugs it's not worth the hassle it's not worth the management of space oh i filled up this bucket but that bucket has plenty of space left on and i have to try to rebalance i would not advise doing it i don't personally do it even though i do have multiple drives most of them are just backups of the one big one my ideal scenario is kind of like the the one biggest monitor i can get i want the one biggest boot drive i can get that has all my stuff on it and then everything else is ancillary i've got a nas i've got some spare drives or whatever but i just want everything to be in all in one place you could if you really wanted to with the magic of apfs divide up your boot drive into a series of partitions that all stare at the same storage so you don't have to worry about one bucket filling up because they're all just fighting all the time over the same pool of storage but then it's still you have a bunch of different things mounted and a bunch of different paths and it's just for me it's too cumbersome use folders don't don't don't use partitions don't use drives if you need to organize your stuff for you folders.

1:36:50And in terms of protecting things security wise, I don't think it's worth trying to protect things. And it may be useless anyway, if the full disk access permission gives things access to every disk. And finally, Joseph Zoller writes, I've been a Mac user for work and personal uses for the last 30 years, but have been using an iPad exclusively for non-work stuff for the last year. As a parent of young children, I manage a large library of photos on the iPad and realize that other than Apple Photos Sync and iOS backups to iCloud or Apple, I don't have a hard drive or a third-party cloud backup of the family's precious memories.

1:37:23Is there an easy or approved way to create an export or backup of all my photos in my iOS or iPadOS library? You've talked extensively about your own workflows on the Mac, but curious about a solution for the iPad. Oof, I got nothing. I guess you could also use Google Photos, and I think it'll do all the importing to Google Photos from what's on the iPad as well, I say with no certainty whatsoever, but I don't have any good answers on this one. I mean, the problem is, I don't think there is a good answer for this one. This is one of the major downsides of an iOS-only lifestyle, which I think is very relevant because a lot of people, they might not be iPad only, but a lot of people are iPhone only or iPhone primary, or for a lot of people, the iPhone is their only Apple device.

1:38:10And so a lot of people have this issue of like all of their photos hopefully they have the iCloud backup of their photos um which that that alone is a huge thing especially that the dumb five gigs thing but all of their photos are in this system they don't have any of their backups it's it's entirely this system that is very very common and for millions of people and and i think this you know part of the problem here is on the mac you have you you have tools like backblaze or time machine or cloners and things that like you you have other options for backups many of which are very very good and on ios you just don't have that access apps can't do it they like and and the good thing is as i was saying earlier like with the lack of like a of an iCloud backup for mac the good thing is that apple's backup is very good and that's great and that's what most people do most of the time but what if it doesn't work for you you know what if you what if you get locked out of your apple id well you What if somehow that goes wrong for you?

1:39:13That system breaks for you? That's a problem. What if you get Matt Honand? If somebody logs in, uses Remote Find My to delete all your stuff off all your devices, and then changes your Apple ID password. What if one of these people who we were just talking a few months ago, what Joanna Stern broke in the Wall Street Journal about how there's a scam of people looking at your passcode in a bar and then taking your phone, taking your passcode, changing your Apple ID password, locking you out of everything. If that happens and your only backup system is this system, that's a bit of a problem, to put it mildly.

1:39:48And so I think it's very nice that the mass market has this option for easy, mostly automatic, mostly everyone has this available to them. Backup of the most important stuff that is captured or stored on an iPhone or iPad. that's great but if you want more protection and i i would suggest anybody nerdy enough to listen to the show should probably want that um i would strongly suggest getting something else in place and unfortunately i think if you're if you're ios only i don't think that's possible by the way all of this presumably will also apply to vision os because vision os seems very very much based on ipad os and ios so it seems like it's going to work the same way so what i would suggest doing is get some kind of cheap used Mac, put it in a closet with a bunch of water on top of it, have it just sitting there with your user account logged in and with photos there, downloading originals, get enough storage that you can fit your entire photo library on it with originals, and then run Backblaze on that.

1:40:54Get a Mac somehow and run Backblaze on it. That's a good fail-safe backup because if this stuff is that important to you, it's worth it. This doesn't need to be a good or recent Mac. It just needs to run a recent OS. So it can be like somebody's used Mac Mini, some old iMac, whatever you have the space for, the budget for. It doesn't have to be good, but that is the best solution here. And I wish there were better options, but there aren't. Two things on this topic. One, based on what we discussed before about the cultural adjusting to changes in technology, I feel like we've kind of gotten to the point now where it is culturally the norm to use the cloud backup provided by your device and to accept anything that happens to you as just like you know it's a tragedy but sometimes that happens like it's rare it's probably not going to happen to you and if it does happen it's just like it's like getting struck by lightning oh it's a bummer but it's rare enough that like that they're just doing that they're just relying on apple's iCloud backups relying on google photos or whatever that's what everybody does no one's ever going to blame you for just doing that and we as tech nerds know the weaknesses of it but if tragedy befalls you and you lose all your family photos there'll be a story about you in the local newspaper and everyone will be sad for you but it's just one of those things that happens and tech nerds don't find that acceptable so we want another solution that's why joseph is writing in and we're trying to find solutions and the second point is access to those better solutions uh on the apple platforms it shows how much apple continues to lean on the Mac because the Mac can do so many things that all the other platforms can't.

1:42:37Apple keeps making new platforms and none of them have the flexibility for even third parties to provide solutions like this. Like iCloud backup is for your iPhone. Are there a lot of third party things that can back up and restore your entire phone? No, there are not. But there are third party things that can back up and mostly restore your entire Mac because the Mac is a more open platform. It's one of the things I always fear with the Mac going away. We're basically saying, I can't backup my iPad. I want a second backup of my iPad. What can we do? Can I download an app for my iPad that solves this problem?

1:43:09Probably not well. I mean, there's no reason technically you shouldn't be able to. USB-C, iPad, plug it in, SSD, have it backup all your things to it or whatever. But Apple's not interested in pursuing that. Whereas the Mac already does it. Even with Apple's own software, now you've got a local copy of your photos. And now you've got a second cloud backup of your photos. and if someone compromises your Apple ID, guess what? You can still log into your Mac and if your house burns down, guess what? Your photo is still in Backblazer. You are taking your digital life into your own hands and providing a better solution.

1:43:37And so even though society will never blame you for like, oh, I lost all my family photos. Isn't that a sad story? I read it in the local paper. No one says those people should feel ashamed because everybody just uses, you're lucky if people use the cloud back. Half people might not turn that on and they're not even using because they don't want to pay for iCloud storage, right? That is the cultural norm, but I think it is unacceptable for things like photos. Again, people's houses burst down or Merlin's photos were in his garage and they got waterlogged and he lost all his old photos. Like it happens.

1:44:02But there are things, especially with digital stuff, there are things we can do to prevent it that are way easier than trying to carefully preserve a bunch of physical photo albums. And, you know, if you live somewhere where there's flooding or like your house burns down or something, we can do better with digital stuff. And Apple is trying to do better. I feel like iCloud backup is better than physical photo albums for resilience against tragedy. but we can do better still for the people who want to take that extra step having to buy a mac because none of apple's other platforms including like you said marco vision os can do anything to help you here i think is a failure and i think uh you know if i had to to steer the direction of all apple's platforms i would definitely be steering them all towards the idea of let's keep all the advantages that you've found while also trying to open up these systems to have more functionality, but see every discussion of iPadOS for the past five years.

1:44:55Five? More than that. Even iPadOS and iOS, I would love Time Machine for those platforms, even if Apple did it, and even if it's only internal to the device. We just said we wanted iCloud backup for the Mac, but also, can we get the thing that the Mac has for everybody else? Yeah, I mean, look, especially, I can't tell you the number of times that my kid, especially when he was younger, mostly when he was younger would like accidentally delete something he had made in a game like a level or a map or something he would like accidentally delete something and just be crushed because there is no undo there's no recovery and like on a computer on a mac i could just get his get the files off time machine for that app or whatever and stick them back in place and it would be fine on ios you mostly can't do that like there you know there are those tools you can like plug it in and use like phone view or whatever like those tools you can plug it in and deal with their directories directly and attempt that, which I actually have done for Minecraft before a long time ago for this reason.

1:45:52And it did work, but it doesn't work for everything. And like, there's no way on the device to say, you know what? I really messed up my data in AppX. Please kick me back an hour to what it was an hour ago. Like, you can't do that. That would be an amazing feature. And I can see there's certain reasons why they might want to do it. I mean, I think a lot of apps assume a certain level of security of their own data directories that that would possibly violate. But the user benefits would be so great in situations like that. I think that's something they should seriously look into, honestly. But yeah, those options just don't exist on iOS.

1:46:30They've simplified them all away. And largely, the lack of that complexity is what makes those platforms so great in a lot of ways to a lot of people. but the downside is again, just like everything else about iPadOS when you hit a wall there is no going around it you just can't, whereas on a Mac or on a PC, or even on Android usually, whatever wall you hit there's usually a way around it and you just don't have that on iOS on iPadOS, and probably not on VisionOS either. Anyway, thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful Collide, and Clean Email and thanks to our members who support us directly You can join us at atp.fm slash join, and we will talk to you next week.

1:47:36the 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-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. So related to what we were just talking about, about data backup, I have a little bit of a mini topic here that will fit perfectly in the post show. In our topic list, in my grab bag of possible tech topics, one of the entries there is an optical disc journey. John, when I sent you my box of crap most recently, what was in it again?

1:48:37It's a bunch of writable Blu-ray discs that are good for a thousand years. Or was it a hundred years? I don't know. It was some ridiculous. It's a thousand because they're M-disc for millennial disc, I guess. Oh, my word. I sent you a little USB Blu-ray drive and a small spindle of Blu-ray recordable M discs. And the reason I sent this to you, so the appeal of this, the reason I bought it is because I thought, you know, it wouldn't hurt to have like a really good offline cold backup for really important stuff like my photos, like my family photos. I have all these online stuff. I have Backblaze.

1:49:17I have Time Machine. We have iCloud Photos, of course. And those are all great, but those are all online. And if somebody really wanted to mess with my online life, they could possibly break into all those things. They're all online. They could delete those accounts. They could, you know, whatever. Or I could. Maybe I messed something up really badly and all that stuff. So anyway, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to have some kind of like cold storage, some kind of, you know, long term cold storage backup for the most important, not everything on my computer, but the most important stuff, photos, documents, that kind of stuff.

1:49:51The problem with optical disks, there's been two major problems with using them over time for this. Number one, they're just not big enough. Like they don't store enough data for any kind of modern data needs. You know, you would need a ton of them for for most people's modern libraries. And number two, recordable optical disks, until the MDISC style was made, recordable optical disks used organic dyes. And what that would mean is that they would break down over time. Like if you have old recorded CDRs or DVDRs, chances are if they're pretty old, they might not read anymore. Because they have probably degraded to the point where they will no longer read the data.

1:50:32Optical disks were not great for long-term storage. And other stuff like flash cards, like SD cards, are actually not that bad for long-term storage. They're not that good, but they're not that bad. They keep the data for a surprisingly long time. They're very durable. They're very small and data-dense in terms of how much you can fit in the amount of physical space. And they're inexpensive and easily accessible, easily readable. So SD cards are actually not that bad. Obviously, there's more obscure things like tape, magnetic tape and stuff like that. You know, that's, I don't know anything about tape, really.

1:51:07Chisel all your photos into a stone tablet. They'll probably keep for a few thousand years if you're lucky. Yeah, right. But anyway, so there's all these different, you know, options. Hard drives are actually not terrible either. One thing that concerns me about hard drives is that if you, you know, record stuff on a hard drive and then just put it in a cabinet for 10, 20, 30 years, like when you plug that back in, is it going to actually work like that's a lot of mechanical needs in there that i think over a long term the the odds of that just spinning up and working right after a number of years of it just sitting around being idle i don't know if i would trust a hard drive in that case forget the series of dongles that you would need to connect that hard drive you're you'd have to get like a sata to this to that to firewire to thunderbolt to optical to magic wireless you know yeah the longer you wait the less likely you are even to have a device that can connect that hard drive Yeah, and that applies, by the way, to almost any long-term computer storage solution.

1:52:04That problem exists of how do you read it in the future? What hardware is required to read it? And is that even still available? And can it connect to modern things? That does become a bit of a problem. Anyway, the M disk came out. And the M disk is basically a new technique and type of layer on optical disks. rather than using organic dye and i don't forgive me i don't know the fine details of this but rather than using organic dye it uses some kind of like etchable material that like physically etches the pattern into the layer so that it's much more like a pressed disc and it's it doesn't degrade over time at least not anywhere near what what organic ones do so they they've been tested and and they they seem to be tested to last at least a hundred years under most tests and and And obviously it's hard to simulate this over long spans, but they seem to be holding up to their claims of durability.

1:52:59So I bought that drive and those disks with a plan of doing this kind of big backup for my photos. And it just never happened. The biggest reason why is that when you have to back up your roughly terabyte photo library to 25 gig BDX or BDR discs, Blu-ray recordable discs, that takes a lot of discs and a lot of juggling of stuff and a lot of time. And the project just never came together for me. I mean, I bought that years ago. well more recently the blu-ray recordable market for the two people who were using it is actually advancing fairly nicely or has advanced fairly nicely that blu-ray discs originally stored 25 gigs for single layer or 50 gigs for dual layer and i don't think dual layer recordable discs were widely available at first i could be wrong um but so for the most we're looking at 25 gigs well in the intervening year since i last look they've made bdxl discs which use even more layers somehow i have no idea how and they can fit 100 gigs per disc and they make them in the mdisc formulation that's still you know 10 discs for my photo library but 10 is a lot better than 40 so maybe i should try this they're fairly inexpensive like the drives are about a hundred bucks that can do this and the reason i sent you that drive john is that that drive can't do this also that drive is like micro usb or it might have even been mini usb so i was like you know screw that noise so i got a nice usbc pioneer slot loading drive that does all the formats it's bus powered so there's no dumb power adapter bus powered by usbc usb3 speeds etc and and i got a bunch of these bdxl uh m discs from verbatim they they run a if you buy you buy them in like you know five or ten or twenty packs they run something i think something like five bucks per disc which again is not that cheap you know when they're only 100 gigs it's not that isn't actually super cheap but five bucks for 100 gigs of like fairly strong long-term storage i consider that to be not that bad especially considering like i'm not storing terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of data here i'm storing like a couple of terabytes total maybe you know so i bought myself a new uh bdxl burning setup and i i've been using i i've gotten through my entire photo library and half of my fish collection because i figure that's worth backing up too of course it's only 200 gigs so it's only two days i feel like you have a pretty good distributed backup of your fish collection to all the other fish fans in the entire world well yeah but like i you know i at some point the band's not going to be existing anymore and they're probably going to shut down their live streaming service at some point that sells all these downloads and everything.

1:55:54So, I mean, I know, I know it's inexpensive, but I definitely would not be spending my time swapping just to back up something that is accessible through hundreds of other people on the internet. Your family photos. Yes. Fish. Maybe not. Well, anyway, I got this awesome little Pioneer drive. It is truly USB-C bus powered. Now, one issue I ran into is that it's, it takes some effort to try to get Apple photos to export the originals in roughly exactly 100 gigabyte chunks. Because ideally what you want is you want to say, all right, disk one, disk two, disk three, this disk covers this date range, this disk covers this date range.

1:56:29And photos are great. Photos make this easy because you don't have to worry about incremental backups over time. You know that if this disk contains all your photos from 2018, you know you're not going to add more all of a sudden. So this is actually a really easy process to do with photos. And I should clarify, the mdiscs as far as i know they're not ever rewritable it's only right once um which is probably for the best rewritable stuff always sucked uh it was interesting choice to do export on modified originals like i can see where you got to that but it's like hey a backup why don't i back up the original but if like me i guess you're not like me but if like me you have put significant amount of time into editing your photos i would also want a backup of all my edited versions you know what i mean like maximum quality jpegs of all the edits plus all the on modified originals which does significantly add to the size but uh yeah my i was wondering how you're doing this and my approach when i was thinking about it would be i would do export on modified originals and also export uh the actual photos that had maximum quality jpegs to an external drive as files on disk and and then i would write a little script that would divide them up into folder size to be you know under a terabyte each or whatever that's probably what i should have done uh that's not what i did yeah because i can imagine being in photos like where did I leave off and I'm dragging things into albums and it's like, ugh, I don't want to do that.

1:57:46That's probably what I'm going to do because I, so I did my entire library. I did not yet do Tiff's library and I don't have access to her computer all the time. Like, she's using it. So, and I should, I'll get to how long this takes in a minute. So, she's using her computer. So, like, I was thinking, like, how am I going to do this with hers? And I was thinking maybe that's a good idea. Maybe I'll, like, you know, I'll plug in, like, you know, an SSD that's big enough, just export all of her originals as one giant folder and then write that script to break up into the 100 gig chunks anyway so how i did this was i i made a smart album with a with a date captured range for each disc bdxl1 bdxl2 etc uh and each one i wrote you know i labeled the discs with like the date rings i covered the problem is to actually make this 100 gigs from that perspective or from that workflow, you can't, as far as I could tell, Apple Photos app, there's not an easy way to tell what is the size of the modified originals of this album.

1:58:45fortunately there's another app called power photos this is a third party app that reads your apple photos library and can do stuff with it and one of the things it does is if you click on a smart album it'll tell you in the sidebar how big it is oh that's cool the problem is it's not super accurate like i i guess when you actually export originals it's it's exporting something in some kind of format sometimes that it ends up being larger than power photos thought it would be so sometimes i have to like check power photos do the export see oh it's actually 107 gigs now and then go back, cut a month off the date range, do it again.

1:59:23So there's probably a better way to do this. Like I said, put them on disk and write a script. Yeah, I think your way... Be a programmer. Don't be there slumming it with these photo editing apps. Yeah, that's probably the right approach. And I should clarify too, because APFS does not make a copy of the data if it doesn't need to make a copy of the data, when you export unmodified originals on the same drive, on your main SSD probably, when you do that you don't need like a terabyte of space extra because it's already on the disk so it's just basically creating a whole bunch of pointers to the original files in the photo library so that's one thing i didn't realize when i first started i thought the reason i would have to do it this way was because i didn't have a terabyte free and it turns out no it they don't when you export things they don't take up any space so with the caveat that there is a an api to do that and if you are using some other program that doesn't use the the correct or expected apple apis for efficiently copying things in apfs you could end up not getting a clone everything from apple should do it the finder does it i guess photos does it too but i would test it first before assuming just every program that you run on apfs this does this the file system has the capability but not every program will take advantage of that capability yeah especially like if you if you're using shell scripts and using like cp or rsync i think by default those don't do it i i think that apple's built in yeah i think apple's built in cp might do it by default again you can test this yourself but uh those things change but yeah just it's worth testing but yes that's one of the magical abilities of apfs i take advantage of it all the time because my disk would be massively full if i couldn't do this yeah so anyway so i've burned uh 12 discs so far i think one of them was bad and i was kind of curious like like when i'm burning this i'm like should i take it easy on the computer like remember buffer under runs remember that with cd-rom like don't touch the computer it's burning a disc yeah like i was actually worried like should i like is this a concern i should have with modern disk burning you should open 300 windows right yeah it's like like should i like should i like not run xcode because it's kind of heavy should i not like play music because it makes the desk vibrate slightly like i don't know i am a little bit iffy about xcode i do i have to confess i do quit xcode sometimes like before i podcast just like if something's gonna wait you quit things yeah it's hard to believe but yeah no because not because i need the ram but i'm like you know what xcode does all sorts of weird stuff and the most thing related to that actually is i've been getting a bunch of errors in my web browser today that said er network changed in chrome if you've seen that one uh and i'm pretty sure it was docker i don't use chrome i'm pretty sure it was docker because docker runs this thing with you know Docker, of course, does also networking shenanigans.

2:02:04I'll let you know tomorrow. But I've been doing development on the ATP CMS with my Docker image. That means that I'm constantly running Docker, which means that Chrome occasionally gives you this network change error. It may be something else. I don't know. It might be the HTTP2 denial of service attack affecting Google properties. But more on this in future episodes. Yeah. Anyway, so I still don't really know the tolerance of what you can do on your computer while it's burning and not mess up the disk. the one that was bad when i put so these are officially like 4x speed and of course the x's don't mean the same thing as x's for like dvds and cds they're all different actually the discs say 6x speed but when you put them in finder says 4x speed maximum okay whatever um and by the way and burning disc support is still built into finder like this is like you don't need a separate app to burn the discs you insert the blank disc and finder just gives you a thing in the favorite sidebar in Finder Windows called Untitled BD.

2:02:59And you just drag stuff to it. It has the little nuclear icon that all burn disks have had forever. You drag stuff to it. When you're ready, you go there and you hit burn. It's great. It works just fine. And it burns and then does a read-verify pass so it actually reads the data back to make sure it actually wrote correctly. So it's great. Anyway, the bad disk, instead of saying 4x, it said 2x. Like Finder would only do it at 2x. I thought, that's kind of odd. so I ejected it and I put it back in and the second time it read 4x as usual. So I think there might have just been something funky about that disc.

2:03:33So anyway the other thing about this process is that 4x in practice now I tried looking up what these speeds mean on Wikipedia and Wikipedia says it should be a 96 minute time to burn a whole 100 gig disc at that speed. It actually takes me 128 minutes and then another 100 or so minutes to verify so it actually takes about four hours to burn and verify read a full 100 gig blu-ray disc now that's that's not i mean look so the reality is like what i would do is i would just you know for every night for a week i would just right before i was going to go to bed and put in a blank disc i already had the folders all prepared of like what went on each disc so all right put in the next one drag it over hit burn go to bed yeah wake up in the morning it's ready what are you using to burn them by the way did i miss what you said finder just finder yeah it's then what's the talk about functionality it's been sitting in finder for ages uh that i would have a lot not a lot of faith in but hey if it's working for you if it didn't do the read verify pass i would have a lot less faith in it but i'm very glad it does that uh but yeah so it it works it works just fine and it's a little bit slow but i am actually very happy i had this option because now you know so now i have these these two small boxes of blu-ray discs and they're well protected i got the jewel cases for each one like so like instead of a spindle like they're all in jewel cases so i got i now have this this small set of blu-ray discs that i can like put in you know a fire safe box or a safe deposit box or something or you know just some kind of safe storage somewhere like i can actually have my my family photos and i know that if everything goes wrong in my digital life, I still have this backup.

2:05:24And so I'm going to do a few. I'm going to do important documents. I'm going to do my source code here and there. But for the most part, this is long-term archival stuff because they're write-once disks. But it actually is, I think, a useful option to know about. This is not for everyone. And it's even barely for nerds. but if for some reason this might be interesting to you it's an option worth knowing about that you can get 100 gigs per disc on a disc that lasts basically your entire lifetime fairly easily like that's pretty cool it's not again this is not a common need but for stuff like family photos i think it's i think it's a pretty cool option