587: No Dots Are Going to Help Me

27:32Well done. We actually heard this from a number of people that apparently it is very common for people with corporate-owned PCs to put Apple stickers on their Dell's and HP's and stuff, that's incredible. You know if Steve Jobs were still around, if he saw that, that would be the reason we wouldn't get stickers anymore. He would take away the entire sticker program after seeing one Dell laptop with an Apple sticker on it. He'd be like, that's it. No more. We're done. Cut them off. Because they'd all be on slightly crooked and that would drive them insane. There would be multiple issues. You ever see anyone trying to place a non-symmetrical sticker, hell, even a symmetrical sticker in the dead center of the back of a laptop?

28:13It's much harder than you think. Wade Tragaskis writes with regard to the M4's next generation ML accelerators. The ML CPU extensions were AMX or Apple Matrix Extensions, I assume, starting with the M1. They're basically custom matrix instructions as kind of an extension of Neon, which is its own thing. They were never officially documented, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple rejects any apps for their app stores anyway, which use them directly. As far as I know, officially the only way to use them is through Apple frameworks. Yeah, so this is a pretty good guess at what those next-generation ML accelerators are.

28:48The keyword is next generation, which shows that they already had ML accelerators, but these are new ones. Neon is the ARM SIMD thing, single instruction, multiple data, where you take an instruction like add and you apply it to like 17 integers all packed together into a thing or whatever so that's the idea one instruction and then you have these really big registers that hold multiple smaller pieces of data uh modern cpus have all had them since the altivec and mmx days ages ago uh arm has them but apparently apple added these amx instructions which are ones that apple made up for its own socs uh and you know they're them not officially being part of arm and them not being exposed to the developer let's gives apple the flexibility to change those whenever it feels like because you know the only officially supported way to get at them is through apple framework so that seems to me probably what the next generation ml accelerators are which i mean you haven't really heard apple ever talk about in the m1 m2 or m3 their ml accelerators in the cpu but i guess they were there since the m1 max laves writes the geekbench core ml and e scores for the m4 ipad are only incrementally better than the M3, according to Tom's hardware.

29:59Quote, Apple's M3 was rated for 18 trillion operations per second at floating point 16. I'm assuming that's what FP stands for, floating point 16 precision. But the M4 is rated for 38 trillion operations per second, but with INT8. That means if equalized to INT8 precision, we're looking at a 5 % improvement in total operations, or excuse me, trillions of operations per second for the M4 over the M3. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of and couldn't remember the details of last time. Like, oh, that$38 trillion number, but the previous one was$18, but I think there was something about 16 versus 32-bit.

30:32No, it turned out it was 16 versus 8-bit. So anyway, same type of deal. There wasn't this huge leap from$18 to$38 trillion. It was a smaller leap combined with a different thing that they were measuring. So there you have it. And then finally, the M4 with one disabled performance core versus the M3 with no disabled performance cores. looking at mac rumors and reading from mac rumors assuming that the geekbench 6 listing is accurate the m4 with one disabled performance core is still around 13 faster than the m3 in multi-core performance and up to 35 faster than the m2 in the previous generation ipad pro yep this is what we guessed once we saw the single core geekbench scores for the m4 last time we're like oh maybe an m2 with all the performance scores will beat it but no the single core and the m4 is ridiculous And so, yeah, it can beat all of its predecessors with one performance core tied behind its back.

31:25Indeed. All right. So we obviously have a lot of iPad stuff to discuss, but we have something neat to discuss first. Apple, what is this, World Accessibility Day? I think that's today as we record or something along those lines. Forgive me if I've gotten the exact name wrong. But they have announced in honor of that new accessibility features, including eye tracking, music, haptics, and vocal shortcuts. So there were several of these that were announced today, and John has picked out a few. Now, John, I'm happy to read through this if you'd like, and you can chime in, or do you want to handle it?

31:56How would you like to proceed? You can do it. I'll just comment. All right. So let's start with eye tracking, which is coming to the iPad and the iPhone. Powered by artificial intelligence, eye tracking gives users a built-in option for navigating iPad and iPhone with just their eyes. Eye tracking uses the front-facing camera to set up and calibrate in seconds. And with on-device machine learning, all data used to set up and control this feature is kept securely on-device and isn't shared with Apple. Eye tracking works across iPadOS and iOS apps and doesn't require additional hardware or accessories.

32:24With eye tracking, users can navigate through the elements of an app and use dwell control to activate each element, accessing additional functions such as physical buttons, swipes, and other gestures solely with their eyes. Turns out the Vision Pro is feeding back into iOS. Yeah, like in a Vision Pro world, this reads as like, hmm, just really, really makes you think like, I know that like no additional hardware, this is an accessibility feature, yada yada. Like the context of this is just, you know, another alternate way to control your iPad or iOS device. but in a world where the vision pro exists you're like but this is like the main interface or pointing interface anyway in vision pro granted very different sensors very different you know it's a different thing but i read this and i'm like you know what i think it might be actually kind of neat to essentially have vision pro caliber eye tracking on an ipad when doing complicated stuff now i imagine that's not possible because there's not a thing strapped to my face you know like it's it's got to be using like the camera whatever it's using it's using sensors that are fewer in number farther away from my face not as expensive like all that stuff so it's probably not nearly as accurate as in the vision pro but i'm intrigued by the the idea of having my eyes as an additional input method on macs on ipads that just i i would like to see how that could work if that technology ever gets good enough to approach the quality that it exists in the vision Pro right now.

33:56That could be very, very interesting. Music Haptics makes songs more accessible. Music Haptics is a new way for users who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience music on iPhone with this accessibility feature turned on. The Taptic Engine in iPhone plays taps, textures and refined vibrations to the audio of the music. Super cool. This is why everyone should be in their seat in the sphere, Marco, so they can feel the vibrations. It is honestly, it's a way better experience when you're sitting down, if you can see. I mean, and to that end, again, I read this feature and yes, you understand the purpose of this, the accessibility purposes of this is clear i think maybe there is usefulness for everybody who it's you know is it kind of like a subwoofer in your pocket right like if this could be added to regular it'll probably kill your battery but i'm also intrigued to try this feature i mean yeah because like so the the way the haptic engine works it's basically a little subwoofer it is basically a speaker that just has a very very low uh frequency that it vibrates usually with you know, a very precise control of like, okay, we're going to make it move in and out, but boom now, you know, like that, that's one big movement of what is basically a speaker driver compared to, you know, what, what you would do for actually playing music.

35:04You'll be, you know, tons and tons of, you know, vibrations that are, you know, split second long. So the haptic engine, it, it can be used more dynamically to do all sorts of things. So I'm, I haven't, you know, felt this yet or tried this yet or haven't any details on it besides what's in the press release but that's probably how they're doing it like some kind of like special basically like a special bass version of the music maybe i don't know if they're filtering out certain low frequencies to just or maybe doing beat detection to like make the beats do like the big vibration moves in the motor but however they're doing it uh it's that's it is based on you know treating it like a big speaker basically probably and i'm really curious to see what that is of course the taptic engine is essentially designed not to move air though like they want the taptic engine itself to be quiet but as we know as we all know who have a phone oh the taptic engine is trying to be quiet it doesn't have like a speaker cone it's not moving air itself but it does vibrate the device and if that device itself is in contact with anything that can become a speaker cone very easily if you ever put your phone on top of like a tissue box and the vibration motor goes off it turns the whole tissue box into a speaker right uh you know so that there is there the tension between apple probably wants the taptic engine to make no noise on its own but it does actually have to shake the phone so that's that's why it kind of works as a uh you know anything can become a speaker if you shove a vibrator up to it oh my gosh all right we got to move on uh there are new features for a wide range of speech with vocal shortcuts iphone and ipad users can assign custom utterances that siri can understand to launch shortcuts and complete complex tasks.

36:44Listen for Atypical Speech, another new feature, gives users the option for enhancing speech recognition for a wider range of speech. Does that include Mario? I don't know. Listen for Atypical Speech uses on-device machine learning to recognize user speech patterns designed for users with acquired or progressive conditions that affect speech, such as cerebral palsy, amyotropic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, or stroke. These features provide a new level of customization and control you made the comment about mario but that's again you know this is great for accessibility for all the people who obviously need it but for everybody having it well first of all the voice shortcuts that that's just played for everybody like we all want to be able to say different things to our phones and have it do cool stuff and siri is pretty bad at that so this is just good for everybody and atypical speech we hear from people who for example speak english with a very thick accent, that Apple's devices are not great at understanding them.

37:40Even when it ostensibly has like a localization for like Scottish English or whatever. Atypical speech. Shots fired. Yeah, well, I'm saying like, this is not me saying, this is people, Scottish people say, I try to use my Apple devices and they don't understand what I'm saying. And you're just asking the questions, John. Yeah, anyway, calling it atypical is obviously a, you know, not the great terminology here, but all I'm saying is that I'm arguing in favor of, Apple's devices being better at understanding variations within the same language because we all have accents of some kind and some of our accents are thicker than others.

38:14And I really feel like, especially in America where we, you know, we have maybe not as many accents as the UK, but we have a larger place with more people who have each kind of accent. And some of those people may be having trouble talking to Apple devices. So this is all good. Apple also, I mean, I don't know if this, if this is what they're talking about here, but Apple's also very good typically compared to the rest of the industry at dealing with speech patterns like stutters or very slow speech or having like you know a lot of times like if you have a stutter and it takes you a while to get a sentence out a lot of other products will time out and they'll like you know try to answer your partial question or fail in some other weird way apple has historically been very good about that kind of thing so this is i don't know if that's included in what they're calling atypical speech here um but that's they they're already very good at that and so i'm guessing they're going to keep pushing in that direction and keep getting better there too yeah so it'll wait and make sure it gets your entire question out before it gives its totally wrong answer yeah exactly like i was gonna say like it's there's still a lot of other work to be done on the voice interaction with apple products i send these to merlin when i find them because he is haunted by the terribleness of syria and i had some good ones recently um these are just from people online uh i'm this is just a screenshot so it's showing the text that syri recognized so recognition is not a problem, right?

39:32Here's an example of the text. Turn off focus mode. That's the command to Siri. Can you guess the response? Of course you can't. Sorry, I can't do that. Great. That's great. I feel like I've tried this with CarPlay and it hasn't worked, I think, but I can't recall having tried it with just Siri on my phone. Not surprised it doesn't work though. Here's one more. How long does it take for Neptune to orbit the sun? Good question. Maybe Siri's going to send us to the web Or whatever Here's what Siri responded You can manage medications in the medications app What? My word This is pre-WWC We gotta get on all these cheap shots while we can I think we still will be able to after Nothing beats my 7Cs question Adam still jokes about that Oh my god I spent a while looking at the Neptune one to try to figure out How did it get medications?

40:22I can't figure it out Moving along vehicle motion cues can help reduce motion sickness with vehicle motion cues animated dots on the edges of the screen represent changes in vehicle motion to help reduce sensory conflict without interfering with the main content using sensors built into iphone and ipad vehicle motion cues recognizes when a user is in a moving vehicle and responds accordingly the feature can be set to show automatically on iphone or be turned on and off in control center and there's a little demo video that we will put in the show notes. I guess what this is indicating is what the car or vehicle is doing in terms of how it's affecting your body.

40:59So when you brake, there's dots that kind of float to the top of the screen. I don't know if there's a better way to paint this word picture. It looks like, you know, those JavaScripts you'd insert into your MySpace page that would make it snow on the page yeah it looks it looks like that um but considering the motion of the car and so if you're turning if the car is making a right turn you know the inertia of your body wants to shift to the left and so what it kind of shows those snowflake dots on your iphone screen kind of breezing to the left a little bit you know it's it's that kind of thing i and so i guess the idea is to you know to kind of guide your motion perception into not being confused and not thinking it's looking at a still screen when it's feeling motion and actually kind of showing hey look here's whoosh little snowflakes moving to the left um if that works that's a great feature i mean half half the people i know i think would use that feature if it works because lots of people have motion sickness when looking at screens in cars this is very relevant to my life not because I get motion sick but I do I get I get very motion sick this is relevant to my life this isn't relevant to my life because I would never look at a screen in a car that would be insanity I would get so sick I know this from experience no dots are going to help me and yeah and that's exactly what they're going for the idea is that they even say this in the paragraph that before this is like um one of the causes of motion sickness is your inner ear feels something that your eyes don't see reflected in front of them they expect when you you know inner ear feels you yanking to the left you better see stuff moving to the right you know what I mean like you but when there's a mismatch you get sick and it doesn't take much to get you know i can't read a book i can't look at a phone i can't do anything in a plane in a car in a boat nothing nothing nothing and that's no problem i just don't do that i know what i have to do i have to look out the front window i have to do all this stuff right but you know who doesn't know that or rather who knows that but their brain is not yet developed enough to uh do anything about it my children we go on long car trips they all look at their devices then they get motion sick and complain that they're motion sick and i say you know why you're motion sick because you're looking at your phone and so they've proven they will not stop looking at their phone they'll do it until they get sick and then they'll put their phone down and go oh i feel sick again and again and again because teenagers brains don't work right yet okay but this i maybe maybe i can persuade them to turn this on and i will let you know if it works i will let you know because they're certainly going to look at their phones like can you just put on these dots they might be like oh these dots are covering my screen i don't like it but like well if it works it will give them a way to be teenagers who make poor choices and be slightly more comfortable at the same time.

43:32Well, and it seems like it's designed for car use. And Apple already has like some, you know, what we now call AI, but what we previously call some ML algorithms to process the motion data from the phone's accelerometer and stuff into trying to detect whether you're in a car, whether you're riding a bike, whether you're walking. So as far as I can guess, it probably wouldn't be showing these dots all the time as you're just walking around in the world. Yeah, no, you can turn it on manually, but you can also set it to auto-detect when you're in a car, which I'm assuming you just use GPS or whatever.

44:01Yeah, or those ML algorithms for motion, which I think if it's that unintrusive to just leave it enabled and it would only show when you're in a car and only when the car is doing kind of inertia-generating movements, that could be something that people leave on all the time and be totally fine. I hope it works, because again, that's a big problem. My wife would use it, my Some would use it for the same reason John mentioned about your kids. Like, I think that would be a great feature if it works. Yeah, because people who don't get motion sick easily will insist that they don't get motion sick, period, which is not true for any human who has a functioning worker in a year and is conscious.

44:37Everyone gets motion sick eventually. But if you don't get motion sick easily, you think every time it happens to you is an anomaly. But it's not. If you're in a car and it's moving around a lot and you stare at your phone, you will eventually get motion sick. It's just a question of how long and how much movement it takes. and just people get surprised by it again and again and again. It's like, yeah, most of the time you're fine, but on the winding mountain road, you're not fine, so put the phone down. It's inevitable, apparently. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, and then finally, or at least finally that we're going to talk about, there are some accessibility features coming to Vision OS.

45:10Accessibility features coming to Vision OS will include system-wide live captions to help everyone, including users who are deaf or hard of hearing, to follow along with spoken dialogue in live conversations and in audio from apps, with live captions for FaceTime and Vision OS, more users can easily enjoy the unique experience of connecting and collaborating using their persona. So I think the implication here is that there'll be a little floating window that's just not translating, but showing what the people around you are saying or perhaps the app you're in the middle of using is saying to you.

45:44So you get like a live transcript of what's going on around you or perhaps even in your device. yeah i think by the time we have you know essentially apple vision pro caliber stuff in glasses hopefully the transcription quality will be such that this will be another killer app in addition to putting people's names over them just like if you're hard of hearing or just going out into an environment where it's challenging to hear like a restaurant or a busy bar or something and trying to talk to somebody being able to see the words that they're speaking in text floating below their mouth or in a little cartoon speech bubble as they say it using your glasses that just look like glasses that is a future we can all buy into because that's just i mean people love subtitles on their televisions for shows that they watch now in their own houses because their dogs bark too much or whatever having this out there in the real world is great not not so great that people are going to spend 3500 and put on a giant pair of ski goggles to do it but even in that context like i said for people who want to participate in meetings obviously there's accessibility angle if you can't actually hear them or have difficulty hearing them in the vision pro but even if you can hear them being able to see a hopefully accurate transcription of what they're seeing in text form is great.

46:50And then finally, our friend Shelly Brisbane over at Six Colors. Well, she guest posted over at Six Colors talking about all this. And Shelly is awesome and she is vision impaired. And so she has some personal experience with a lot of this stuff and has a really great take you can read over at Six Colors, which we will link in the show notes. Yeah. And there are more features than what we listed. We just picked like some of the interesting ones, but there's more stuff as well. And you mentioned that it's like World Accessibility Day or whatever. that explains why Apple does this announcement when they do.

47:19And I think that makes sense, but every time they do this, I'm like, it's kind of like when they give the science and technical awards before the real Oscars. You know what I mean? I don't know if Marco knows what that is. They have a separate award show for the less phonogenic nerdy people, and they get their Oscars then, and then the real Oscars that air on TV that have the good-looking celebrities, where they give Best Picture and Best Actor take place or whatever. and I always kind of feel like well why don't why aren't these accessibility features part of an event or a keynote or WWDC and the answer is because this is a world accessibility day so I give Apple a pass on it but it is some of this stuff is so cool and so interesting and so impactful on people's lives that I don't it feels like it should be just as important as whatever other features they're going to talk about in the new OS's at WWDC.

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50:07all right john do you want to talk about your purchase or do we want to just dive into the discourse i mean i'll just briefly on my purchase like i just literally got it today and took a long time to set it up because the thing is stupid i'll give my two second story on that but like i haven't actually used it much yet other than the setup process so i'll have more to say about it in the future but you know like the screen looks really good it's really thin it's nice i like it like it's so it's so similar to my previous one except that it's a little bit thinner it also feels like it's not as wide and and as tall i don't know if that's the case i have to put them on top of each other and see um but i look forward to using especially the little adjustable sand and the screen looks great the setup process like i don't know what the the problem i'm having bad setup luck but like you know can you bring your other ipad in here or whatever and i'm faced with that terrible screen that i never know the right thing to pick and i always pick the wrong thing it's like do you want to set up an iCloud it'll take 15 minutes but then your apps will slowly be loading forever or do you want to transfer from another device all your data will be there and it will take 40 minutes or something and i always pick other device because i just want all my stuff and then it takes hours and hours but anyway i picked other device and then it's like oh your system needs to be updated of course you know it doesn't tell me that until 15 steps into the setup process so i of course ran an os update and then it's like oh you know find the other device i'll transfer from the other device and it's like um log into your apple id and it's like your apple id is locked as i've talked about recently in rectifs my apple id is always locked uh do you want to unlock your apple id and i try to unlock my apple d and it says your ipad needs to be reset whatever starts all i want to do it i want to do this like six times i'm an old pro and i'm an old pro at unlocking my apple id and as i said in rectifs don't be fooled into thinking you have to reset your password because you don't but anyway it took me like five tries and each of the five tries was like the whole ipad needs to be reset and has to restart through the process and unlocking my apple id and doing all it's just what a headache like why is my apple id constantly locked it's been this way for years it's not just because of the recent like apple id thing that you've heard about it's been happening to me for years and years so that's why i'm i'm not scared by it and know how to deal with it but so frustrating and then it's 30 to 40 minute estimate for the data transfer is hilarious it took i think three and a half hours but anyway it's set up now all right so before we go any further uh quick a couple of quick points of clarification first of all when you say your apple id is locked that to me sounds like an american credit um like your credit what is it credit report or credit profile or whatever where you are choosing to lock it that is not what you're saying is that correct right so it's um the message you usually get is your apple id has been locked sometimes they'll say something like for security reasons but they never get into details what's the problem with someone trying to log in did we get the wrong password too many times is it because we think you're in a foreign country like they don't tell you it just says your apple id has been locked or your apple id has been locked for security reasons and you have to unlock it and to unlock it it makes you do things like enter the phone number of your trusted device get a text put in a number enter your apple id password use a trusted device to like there's like 17 different ways to unlock your apple id on every different device i've been through all of them 50 times sometimes some of them work sometimes some of them don't a lot of them eventually lead you to a screen where they want you to enter a new password you don't have to do that you can just hit cancel and try another route down the the twisted phone tree that is the unlocking of your Apple ID.

53:21And the bottom line is, when your Apple ID is locked, you can't do anything with your Apple ID. And Apple is the one locking it. They're basically saying, we're not sure you're you anymore on this device or whatever. So you need to prove to us that you are you and you own this Apple ID before we will let you use your Apple ID anymore. And this has been happening to me on and off for years and years and years, and I'm not the only one. And it's not a fun part of the Apple ID system, but it exists. All right. Well, the discourse is happening. And it seems like every year, this storm is getting a little bigger and a little louder.

53:59And this year, it's hit a bit of a crescendo, if you will. And I think John, but somebody put in the show notes, iPad Pro Dissatisfaction, as the name of this section. And I think that that's pretty accurate. And so in summary, I think all three of us can agree, and most people can agree, that the iPad Pro hardware has been, and especially now, is bananas. It is absolutely out of control good. It can be all things to all people from a hardware perspective. Yes, I'm sure you can pick here and there. Maybe it would be nice to have one more port. Maybe it'd be nice to have more battery life. But ultimately, without too much compromise, the iPad Pro hardware is as close to perfect as I think we can get in the year 2024.

54:46And by the way, Casey, since you love to do this to me, we should all just realize that the iPad Pro has the fastest single-core performance of any device Apple has ever sold. Has ever sold. Faster than all your MacBook Pros, your Mac Studio, your M2 Mac Pro, single-core performance on the ridiculously thin, fanless iPad for your single-core, non-parallelizable jobs. The iPad Pro is the king. yeah it it's bananas i mean i don't know how any other words you use to describe it it's it's just it's bananas uh so anyway so that is i think pretty much understood by everyone who has ever looked at an ipad that yes again we could nitpick here and there but by and large ipad pro hardware is currently solved you know maybe it'll over time i'm sure it'll be different and get better and so on but for right now it's been solved and well not so much solved as it has shown steady progression every time a new ipad comes out it's a little bit better than before and if you do that over the course of 14 years you get from the original ipad to what we have now it just keeps getting better in in hardware wise screen gets better and like we said last show it's mostly just a big screen now it's got the best screen apple has ever sold not the biggest but the best looking screen with the best specs or whatever it gets thinner it gets lighter the battery life has been held steady at what apple thinks is an acceptable amount of battery life and most people for the most part agree.

56:13The hardware advances the way we expect a technology product's hardware to advance. The one equivalent we might have of the hardware setting aside the port limitations is it is getting more expensive over time, which doesn't feel great. And that is more of a business complaint than a technological one. Yeah, yeah. However, with all that said, as amazing as this hardware is, and it is amazing, what about that software, though? and that's where everything takes a turn and i think it's hard it's hard to talk or for me anyway it's hard to talk about this because i have wants and needs for my computing platforms and they are not the same as john's they're not the same as marco's they're not the same as yours but there there are many like it but this one is mine that's a reference john and um and so So for me, there's a lot of times that I will have my iPad in hand and then I'll go, this would be so much faster if I just run up the stairs and use my Mac.

57:18And I don't remember if I said it publicly or privately. I don't remember if we were recording at the time, but it's happened enough that I confessed to Marco sometime recently, again, maybe privately, that I started wondering, should I have an iPad Air downstairs instead of an iPad? Or excuse me, not an iPad Air, a MacBook Air downstairs instead of an iPad. So then I would have a laptop on both floors, which immediately I chastised myself immediately for this, for a few reasons, which we can go into later if we really care. But suffice to say, the fact that I had that thought, I think is kind of indicative that something isn't really right.

58:00And so there's an argument, And I think Gruber did a really good job of presenting this argument that, look, you know, the constraints, the guardrails, the limits of iPadOS is a feature, not a bug. And I think unquestionably there are many people, probably in all of our lives, where they find it refreshing to have those guardrails, those limits, etc. etc. My mom, for example, and I don't pick on her, you know, because of any reason other than she is a real world example close to me that she is perfectly capable of using a Mac, but she prefers having an iPad because it's easier. It's simpler. It's harder to screw it up.

58:43And there are millions of people like that. And I don't, I don't want any of the three of us to lose sight of that because there's something to be, there's something to be said for those people. But I don't think any of the three of us are those people. And so for us, whenever I use an iPad for anything even remotely, quote unquote, serious, I feel like I'm walking through molasses. And it's frustrating. And I wish I had a native terminal. There are great terminal apps for iPad, but I wish I had a native terminal. I wish I had windowing the way I want to do windowing. I wish I had a clipboard manager.

59:20I wish the files app wasn't a pile of garbage. I wish so many things for iPadOS. And that doesn't mean that the iPad isn't good. It doesn't mean that it's worthless. It's just, it will always, for me, kind of sort of be a toy or be for looking rather than doing. And when you remember what John said just a minute ago, it's the fastest single core, you said, the fastest single core processor that Apple has ever made. It's got the new ones have the best screens Apple has ever made. It's the thinnest device Apple has ever made In so many ways It has cellular, Marco It has cellular And let me tell you It is freaking fantastic I have a cellular iPad It has service It is amazing All of those things make it so wonderful And so powerful And yet for so many professionals Not all, but a lot of us And granted the ones that are the kind To have a podcast or to write code For so many of us It's just a non-starter And that's crummy and I just wish that, maybe not for the iPad, maybe not for the iPad Air, but if you're going to call a device an iPad professional, and yes, I know the professional doesn't always mean, for a pro doesn't always mean professional.

1:00:35Pro oftentimes just means nice. The iPad, nice. But if you're going to call it the iPad Pro and if you're going to put this ridiculous bananas hardware in it, can you let us do more with it, please? And Jason has been banging the drum of let's allow macOS to be virtualized inside iPadOS. And he's not backpedaled, but kind of clarified a few times recently, look, I'm not saying that this is the best solution, but it would be a wonderful pressure release valve. And Steve Troughton Smith, which we'll probably talk more about him in a moment, has said the same thing. Like, this is not the perfect answer.

1:01:17This theory where you can virtualize Mac OS is not the perfect answer, but it's an answer. And it's an answer that doesn't require Apple to fundamentally rethink so much of iPad OS, which in the last 14 years, they seem to be very reluctant to do. And the times that they've done it, ahem, stage manager, have not been stellar. so that's kind of my summary and my own opinions about the the discourse that's going on right now um as the ipad lightest user of the three of us marco any comments from you and then john you can kind of bring us through full circle oh i have infinite comments but i'll try to keep it that's true i forgot with whom i'm speaking yeah that's kind of the reason we have podcasts um all right so it's it can be very difficult for discussions like this to be productive in such a way that that

1:02:34don't come down to like, tasks better or certain just everyday tasks better the reason these these discussions come up so when when you're trying to get it to be more pro-like well why one reason is apple releases a new product that has pro in the name and it costs a lot of money and has great hardware specs and so we're like wow i wish this product could work for me because it can be kind of off-putting if apple this company that you like makes a product that looks really cool and they're saying look how amazing this is and you really want the hardware but it doesn't work for you for your software needs at the same time lots of people use it just fine and so it's very difficult to discuss this without like inflaming somebody or inflaming some group and so i'm with that giant prefix you mentioned earlier the the difference between like a macbook and an ipad in certain contexts i would say for your own purpose personal purposes casey the idea of it sounding ridiculous to have a MacBook Air on the bottom floor of your house is not any more ridiculous than having an iPad on the bottom floor of your house because now they cost in the same price range.

1:03:41That's a really good point, actually. Oh, the iPad Pro does. The iPad spans all the way down to$350. That's part of the reason we're talking about this is we're talking about the ones that go up to$3 ,700. That's, yeah. And I'm not even talking about like the crazy high spec ones. I'm just saying like, if you want an iPad Pro with a keyboard, you're in MacBook Air territory. And it's a lot of the same hardware. One of the frustrating things is that if you're a Mac person, it's frustrating to look at the iPad Pro because the iPad Pro, for the same size and price class as a MacBook Air, has much of the same hardware, but some of it's way higher end, like the display.

1:04:18Way higher end on the iPad than on the similarly priced MacBook Air. I would also say that the cellular radio is a little bit better on the iPad than the MacBook Air. That's another thing, too. Like Apple has clearly shown at this point, it isn't that they haven't gotten to it yet. They have actively refused and continue to actively refuse to make cellular Macs. We are long past the point where they could have done it. They could have done it many times. We now know lots of things like, hey, it fits with Apple Silicon because they do it in iPads. It fits within this price envelope because they do it with iPads.

1:04:52It fits within the size category because they do it with iPads. It fits within this battery life because they do it with iPads. When you look at the hardware between an iPad Pro and a MacBook Air, it's so similar now that there is no good excuse for why Apple can't do cellular Macs. They are just choosing not to. They are refusing to do cellular Macs. And I don't know their reasons. I wish they would change their mind on that. I hope someday they do. But it can be frustrating then like as a Mac person to look at the iPad Pro and say, why can't we have those amazing screens? and an amazing feature like cellular, maybe even pencil support, on our Mac laptops.

1:05:33So there is also that angle of Mac people looking at the iPad and being a little bit frustrated. But the fundamental difference between these platforms, a Mac is a generalist. A Mac can be pretty good to very good at almost anything. You don't have to ask somebody for the most part, hey, can you get your work done on a Mac? If they can get their work done on a computer, it can probably be done on a Mac. In almost every case. Most people with most needs most of the time, they can do what they need to do with a Mac. If you are already in the Apple ecosystem, you can probably do almost everything you would need to do on a Mac.

1:06:12Except maybe anything you're requiring, like the Apple Pencil or something that's only available in an iOS app, for instance. But for the most part, Macs are the generalists. They can do pretty much anything. there is never a time if i am on a trip and i have with me my phone which i always have and a mac which i almost always have there is never a time and i'm like well whatever i want to do i can't get it done with these two devices i need to go i need to get an ipad to do this like that never happens whereas when i am using an ipad i frequently run into things oh i can't do it here i have this thing i have to do i got to do it on a mac or or maybe my phone usually it's my Mac.

1:06:53Or a couple quick notes here. Number one, it could be that you are capable of doing it on your iPad or perhaps your phone, but it would be way faster to do it on a Mac than just not even close to the difference in time it would take to do something on the iPad versus doing it on the Mac. And secondly, you said this earlier, but I just want to reiterate, There are people for whom the iPad is the best solution, and especially people who are like drawing with the Apple Pencil, for example. Again, you said this earlier. But I would venture, and I think this is what Marco was saying, there are considerably more people that can almost always get their work done on a Mac than those who are artists and illustrators and so on and so forth.

1:07:38if you look at like what the iPad is good for if you picture like a bar graph with each bar being like how good it is at a certain task how the Mac is good at different tasks the bar graph basically forms what looks like a very like like a rolling hills kind of thing like the Mac is like a rolling hills with bars that are just like it's pretty good at this pretty good at that it's kind of pretty good at everything something's really great at the iPad when you when you look at that that same like virtual graph of tasks it looks like skyscrapers in a city it's really good at certain things it's like great and zero great and zero like up down up like huge spikes that it's like it's really good at some things and other things it just cannot do it all or the barriers to do it are so ridiculous that only the most advanced dedicated users could do them and would take the time to do them.

1:08:31If you're on a Mac and you run into a snag with something, odds are you can probably get around it. First of all, odds are you'll run into fewer snags and you can probably get around it in some relatively straightforward way. On an iPad, if you run into a limitation or a snag, you are usually out of luck. You just can't. This thing that you want to do, it just won't happen. You can't. Sometimes you're at the whims of the developers of iPad apps, which are always an afterthought. Sometimes you're at the whims of iPadOS itself, which, hate to tell you, is also usually an afterthought to Apple. Because that's one of the other problems here.

1:09:10iPadOS gets relatively little attention from Apple. It is a relatively low priority. Believe me, as a Mac user, I can spot the signs of this. People always expect, like everyone's expecting that at WWDC this year, there's going to be some kind of massive new upgrade to iPadOS to take advantage of all this new hardware. I hate to break it to you, that's unlikely to happen. I would bet strongly against that. Here's what's probably going to happen this year at WBDC. We're going to hear all about a ton of new AI-based features and a ton of new improvements to iOS. Some of them are going to be only on the phone and not on the iPad.

1:09:48And the iPad might get them next year or the year after. What the iPad will get this year will be a couple of like, you know, a trickle of kind of token updates just to keep it going and give it a small section in the keynote. Because most of the attention has been focused probably on iOS for this year. If it is as big of an iOS update as we think it is. No one out there thinks this year that there's no rumors about a big overhaul of iPadOS to become more capable. That may happen. I'm just saying there aren't actually current rumors about this. I really don't think anyone is thinking that, especially since so many years of people wishing and hoping for that with no rumors and not getting it.

1:10:25I think this year, same deal. There are no rumors that I'm aware of that that is coming, and I think people are mostly in despair about it. Exactly. And this is the life of being an iPad power user. You want this thing to be better at what you need it to do because it is really amazing hardware, and it's let down by software, some of which is Apple's fault, some of which is not Apple's fault, like third-party stuff. One of the cases where I could very easily use an iPad is when I'm running the sound for my town meetings. It involves two laptops. One of them is at the mixing console hosting the Zoom call.

1:11:07The other one is on a table being the remote second host so I can kick people out if they come and spam it or whatever, that one has to not be playing any audio because it would just be echoing back into the room. On a Mac, you just hold the volume down button all the way and it goes down to zero and you proceed with your day. On an iPad, the Zoom app on iPad, as far as I know, as far as I could tell, will not let you set it to no volume. If you turn the volume all the way down on the Zoom app for iPad, it will turn it back up to the first notch. What? I didn't know that. And I cannot find any way to override that because there actually there is an iOS API to change the volume.

1:11:50It's been deprecated for like 12 years, but it's there and they're using it, I think. So you just can't have like unless I like plug in like a dummy headphone cable or something through the zero headphone ports it has. Right. If you just plug in the USB-C headphone adapter, even if there's no headphones, would that be enough? Maybe, but probably who knows? I probably have to plug in a cable or something. But like it just like there's little things like that. Whenever I use an iPad for anything other than like casual couch browsing and email, I run into something like that. Again, you run into a wall with an iPad and usually there is not much you can do about it.

1:12:28Like in that context, I want to turn the volume all the way down for the Zoom call. Well, too bad. Maybe if you if you get a hardware hack, like get a headphone dongle and plug in an empty wire, maybe. But what if I didn't what if I don't have one of those with me right now or I don't own one? And there's been so many problems with iPadOS. And so I think that there are so many frustrations with the iPad that a lot of people feel. But all the people out there who are using it every day just fine don't feel them. And so it can be hard to discuss them. And all those people who are using it just fine can so easily tell the people who want it to be different, hey, you're using the wrong tool.

1:13:03You should just use a Mac or whatever. And in the short term, that's generally true. True. That is the solution in the short term. If you are constantly battling the iPad to get your power user work done, you should probably be using a Mac. That is probably the better tool for the job in a lot of those cases. And the iPad is fine to continue to appeal to, you know, the cheaper iPads have a pretty broad base. And the really expensive iPads, I think, have pretty narrow appeals and pretty narrow markets. And it can stay this way forever. It probably will because Apple is not investing heavily in iPadOS.

1:13:39as far as we can tell from the outside. But if Apple wants to push the iPad market further, if Apple wants to improve iPad sales and increase this market size for the higher priced models, they're going to have to do something. But I don't see them doing it. Again, I think it's a low priority. And it can be frustrating every time new iPads come out. All of us people who are not quite satisfied or not able to do our jobs on the iPad, we're like all right hey apple by the way we would love to use this cool hardware you've made um can you just maybe give us feature or capability xyz and every couple years apple comes back and is like we made it faster i'm like okay thanks however that that doesn't really solve our problem as fast as it is it still can't do these basic features x y and z a couple years later apple goes back like now it's even faster like okay that's okay thanks but you know you're still not really changing anything else that could broaden this market or make me or somebody like me able to use this and apple's like okay we hear you thanks okay now this new model we come out with it's more pro than ever it's even faster like oh my god like plan so that's that's what's happening like every few years this is we go through the same cycle and we're going to keep the Mac continuing to get better.

1:15:06And for most people who are not able to do your work on an iPad, you're probably still not able to do your work on an iPad. You probably will never be able to do all of your work on an iPad with the current rate of improvement of iPadOS and change and everything. And so the right tool for your job is probably some other type of computer, most likely a Mac. It sucks that Apple won't make a Mac with a great OLED screen in that price and size range. It sucks that Apple won't make a Mac with cellular. It sucks that Apple won't make a Mac that is convertible to a tablet. It sucks that Apple won't make a Mac with pencil input.

1:15:38There's all these different things that Apple won't do because they view the iPad as the tool to do that. And for all of us whose work is impossible or very difficult on an iPad, it is kind of a slap in the face with all the cool hardware that the iPad line gets. But that's the reality of it. And for those of us who are that way, I strongly suggest buy a MacBook Air for the same money and about the same size and weight. buy a MacBook Air and use it wherever you use an iPad, it's going to be a lot better in a lot of those cases. Yeah, and just very quickly, you know, I think I'll speak for myself, and I think I'm speaking for Marco, that part of the reason we're begging to get better software on the iPad is because I love the physical iPad.

1:16:22I love the device. I feel like having something that is modular, which is a drum that Federico has been banging for a long time, having something that's modular that can be now the thinnest device Apple makes if you want it to be, or it can be extremely thin and have a keyboard, or it can be extremely thin and have, you know, just a cover around it like John has. The fact that it can be that flexible, the fact that it has cellular, the fact that it can do all these things, I feel like it is, the hardware is capable of being all things to all people if it wants to be. And I want it to be because I'm jealous of the people that can do everything they need on the iPad.

1:16:59I want to be able to do everything I can that I need on the iPad. I wish so desperately that I could. But right now, I just can't. And that's what sucks. Yeah. And the thing is, like, the iPad, it has to, you know, for those of us who we can't do everything on the iPad, then it has to justify itself to us somehow. Like, we want, we love this hardware. We want a reason. And we don't just want an iPad that runs macOS. We also want the benefits of iPadOS. That's the frustrating thing. The thing is, you have to justify the iPad purchase, and you have to justify carrying it around, and keeping it charged, and keeping it updated, and keeping it maintained, and getting the accessories for it.

1:17:41But for most people, again, you have a phone already, and you're probably going to have a Mac of some kind, like a Mac laptop already. and so it's very hard for the iPad to justify itself to be brought with you to be purchased in the first place and then to be brought with you when traveling or when going around because most things that you can do on an iPad you can also do on an iPhone and if you keep needing that Mac escape hatch to do things it's very easy to just fall back into I'm just going to bring an iPhone and a MacBook Air And again, like that's for most people, that is the better choice.

1:18:21In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with that. I love that combination. There's a reason it's so popular. It's a very, very good combination. But again, if Apple wants to broaden the market for high-end iPads, they're going to have to do a lot more than just make it faster. Yeah. And just very quickly, and John, you've been very patient and I appreciate it, but just very quickly, I also, and Marco kind of hinted at this or said this just a second ago, I I don't necessarily want Apple to just can iPadOS and give me 100 % of the time Mac OS and the iPad. That's why Jason's idea of virtualization I find so interesting and appealing because it gives me the escape hatch, the option of Mac OS.

1:19:01Again, I don't think that's the rightest answer. But if nothing else, it would give me the option to drop into Mac OS when necessary. But for general stuff, for most of the time that I'm on the iPad, I prefer iPadOS. I don't want iPadOS to be that different. You know, one of the things when Swift first came out was that they claimed at the time, I'm not so sure they achieved the mission, but they claimed at the time that it was very good at, oh, shoot, the name just flew out of me. Progressive disclosure. There you go. So, Swift should be simple to approach, even though I'm not so sure it is, but go with me on the theory.

1:19:37It's not. Right, but go with me on the theory, right? It should be simple to approach. And over time, as you want more and more out of Swift, it will return with more and more tools with which to accomplish those tasks. And that's what I want out of an iPad. For most of the time I'm using the iPad, I want iPadOS. I don't want all the cruft and complexity of macOS, except when I do or except when I don't have another choice. And that's when. And so I don't want anyone who's listening to this to come away from the conversation saying, oh, well, you know, Casey and Marco think that iPads suck and that only doofuses can use them.

1:20:12Far from it. That's exactly opposite from what we're saying. I love iPadOS and I love my iPad. I just wish I could do more with it. So, John, we've been talking a long time. You've been so very patient. Thank you again. What should we really be saying right now? What should we be thinking? when we talked about the uh ipad the hardware uh last episode we said is like obviously this is just a hardware announcement they're not announcing a new version of ipad os that'll come with wwdc we'll talk about it then so you may be wondering why we're talking about this topic now well this is before wwdc so whatever they're going to do at wwc and again there's no rumors that they're doing any kind of big overhaul but maybe they kept it secret who knows but anyway this is the time when people remain dissatisfied with the software story because they haven't given us the new software story for this year yet right and the reason it's kind of like seems to be louder each year is because i think marco's characterization of what uh you know pro people have been wanting the ipad is a little bit off what's been happening actually is people want to do more with their ipads and apple has been over the past many many years giving us a slow trickle of expanded capability.

1:21:22iPadOS, and before that iOS on the iPad, has had its capabilities expanded year after year after year after year, just enough to keep that glimmer of hope. Not enough to be really useful, but they're essentially leading us on. If they just never added any capabilities to the iPad software-wise, we would have given up. We wouldn't have been so angry. I think the anger comes from the fact that we see that they're making changes. They have added so much. Be able to use external drives file access all the pencil stuff like just the the stage manager multitasking it's not like they're doing nothing but they are not doing enough and to characterize that like not doing enough like i think vitici had a good article this year he said it's not an ipad pro review why ipad os still doesn't get the basics right vitici is a super duper ipad you know power user and has been for years and years right and he complains about the software situation all the time and this year he got to the point where like you know what i've been complaining about this in everything that i've written about the ipad for years and years and years but people can't be expected to go back through the whole history and gather up all this knowledge let me just summarize in a single article what i mean when i say that the ipad is falling down and here's the thing about that i think that uh those of us who want more capabilities out of the ipad understand at certainly at a surface level, why the people who enjoy the iPad and don't need any more capabilities do so.

1:22:48We understand, because again, as Casey said, it applies to us. We get it. We get the appeal of the iPad, the simplicity, the people who do not care, that don't want the iPad to do anymore. They're like, it's fine. I don't need any more software features. I like the iPad. We understand them. I think the reverse is not always true. And that's part of the conflict here. The reverse is the people who are happy with the software capabilities the ipad don't quite understand what is it that these people want they keep saying they want to be more pro and they want capabilities what the hell does that actually mean so i appreciate petici literally writing down it's his list but it is a good representative list and you can read through this and say this is what this is what those people mean so so that both camps can understand each other to marco's point so that it's not as contentious right and again i think the you know the people who want more capabilities we do understand the appeal of the people the vast majority of people who enjoy their ipads and don't need any more capabilities there needs to be understanding the other direction uh steve troughton smith also wrote a thing the ipad pro manifesto 2024 edition uh which he gives his list of capabilities that he would want out of it there's a lot of overlap between the lists if you read both these articles we'll link them in the show notes i think it will give you an idea of like what is it that these nerds are talking about why do they want their ipad to do something like they can't eat like they're like my ipad does everything that i already wanted to do and they don't even have like the fancy ipads and like if you don't like the expensive ipads just don't buy it it's not for you right um and as marco said the reason tech nerds in particular are always you know sort of always wanting the the ipads to do more is because we know we know from the hardware specs even before the macs had the same stuff we knew with from the hardware specs as the ipad got more and more powerful we're like you know what that's a powerful general purpose computer in there the hardware in there is getting to be laptop class now it is faster than many of apples laptops right and so we see that and we know you can do more with that os remember the you know ipad os is basically direct you know it's same it's i it's ios with rebadged or whatever see trouton smith points out that it's not even a separate project i think it's the same sort of os root of files and it just decides what to run you know it's not as separate as you might think it would be and the the eu has also decided that it's not as separate as you might think anyway um like it is derived from ios ios was originally an operating system meant to run on a phone with incredibly weak hardware no multitasking one app at a time no copy and paste like just incredibly limited and has grown over the years the phones have also gotten more powerful over the years but fundamentally it was an operating system designed around the limitations of the hardware and then we look at the modern ipad pro we say what limitations of the hardware what does an m4 base 16 gigabytes of ram one terabyte ssd amazing high resolution 13 inch screen what remind me again what the hardware limitations are on this device such that it has to have an entirely different model of like multitasking and process management and everything to fit within the hardware that is vastly more powerful than any laptop apra has ever made like Like tech nerds understand that.

1:25:52That's why we see like this could do more. The hardware is there. The limitations, the arguments for it weren't there. And so we wanted to do more. There's things we know we can't do that we need to do as part of our weird work that we do. And it's frustrating. And the fun conspiracy theories are like, oh, they don't want to do that because they'll eat into Mac sales or whatever. Like I don't think any of that is true, first of all, because Apple loves to eat into its own sales with the new product. It does it all the time. you know it wants you to buy the new thing and not the old thing and if anything if you wanted to subscribe to a conspiracy theory which i don't you should look at the mac and say why the heck is apple not allowing why why are they not making a touchscreen mac because the apple pencil like a convertible mac that you use the apple pencil with the apple pencil works perfectly good in mac os you don't even need to redesign the os like it's a precision pointing device and you could draw on it and you get a procreate on mac os because it runs ipad apps and like you know why are they not doing that because they don't want to cut into the ipad sales also not the reason but a fun conspiracy theory the real reason is apple just has decided this is this is how they've divided their product line they have the big no slide is uh is mac os and ipad os merging no whatever um we'll revisit that in a few years but anyway uh this is how they've divided things up and it's just not satisfactory for a certain class of people now having said all that and thinking about this like the reason another reason people are angry about this was the you know the whole ipad is you know the promise of the future of computing right this is this is going to be the in the post-PC era, we're all going to be using iPads.

1:27:21And it's, you know, this is what computers are going to be like in the future. They're not going to be like the Macs and the PCs of the days of yore. When Steve Jobs was still around, he introduced the iPad. It was so clear to me that essentially the iPad is what he wished the original Macintosh could have been if technology was magic and it existed back then. A real computer for the rest of us. And this is the thing I think most people forget about the iPad. It's true of our phones as well. But I think people realize it about the phones or maybe don't because they just take it for granted. But like the reason people love the iPads, Casey got at it before, is it's a computer that you can't screw up as easily.

1:27:54Like that's the thing that people love about the iPad versus a PC. Even people who know perfectly well how to use a PC, there are headaches involved using a Mac or a PC with that operating system and those capabilities that just don't exist on the iPad. It feels as safe as a phone. You can install software. There's not really much you can do to mess it up. It's very simple, right? That's why people love their iPads. Again, we understand that about it. here's there is though surprisingly a little bit of overlap between all the things that i've just discussed the future of computing why do people think that because it has a lot fewer problems and the capabilities a lot a lot of this you know techner discussion is like just make the ipad do more the hardware is capable you've got an operating system that does it virtualized mac os which i don't think is a good idea but anyway it's just like look if you if you don't want to figure it out apple here's a dumb solution that would work and they're right it is a dumb solution to work it whatever i don't think apple's going to do it and it's definitely not the best solution but it is a solution and we're all desperate out here right but you can't just say make the ipad more capable and think that it is going to preserve all of the things that make people love the ipad and made people think it's the future of computing all the problem freeness and i know like you know progressive disclosure if you don't care about it it won't be there it's like multitasking wasn't the beginning you can turn it off or if you never want to do these capabilities they won't bother you at all there is some truth to that and that is sort of apple's challenge how can you add capabilities without screwing up the ipad pro but to give just one example to show this is not as simple as you think it is last episode i was complaining about uh i was i was proxy complaining through letting steve trout and smith proxy complain through me uh like final cut pro they apple finally ported final cut pro and marco had a good point that i was going to make as well which is like apple's investment in the ipad is another big factor in this and their investment is not strong let's say how long did it take them to make final cut pro for the ipad a long time right anyway uh final cut pro it's a pro app if you're doing video work you can do it on your ipad amazing it's great you go to render a complicated project you switch out of final cut pro to do literally anything else on your ipad and it stops your render and someone wrote it and said are you sure because logic has an option that says run in background maybe they just didn't turn on the run in background option but no final cut pro does not have the run in background option uh i can guess why by the way it's probably so in i in ios typically you're not allowed to use the gpu if your app is not foregrounded logic would have no reason to use the gpu whereas obviously uh final cut does yeah gpu limitations with steve tron swith's uh option there whatever right so uh and you may be thinking see this is another example it's ipad os an os designed in a much more resource constrained environment has a policy that is no no longer fits with the hardware because if you get an m3 macbook pro with the same amount of ram as an ipad and it's got a slower soc you can run final cut pro on it and you can start that render on your on your macbook air and you can switch to safari and browse the well-bought renders you can do anything else on your computer and you'll be fine right and so tech nerds look at this and he's like they should just let you do that on ipad os to you know take off the training wheels stop get rid of these limitations allow applications with a special entitlement or whatever to run in the background and do the same thing that a macbook air could do right and in the end that is what we're asking for but the complexity is this if you allowed that to happen and you gave it to an ipad user maybe they're renting they've i don't know they're using final card pro but anyway a typical ipad user they start a render or whatever then they go back to springboard and look at that your render still running uh i don't know how you can tell that because the multitasking models and really show you what other apps are doing but anyway setting aside that you have a problem right then they launch a game and they try to play it and the frame rates are garbage because that game was designed in a world where when you run a game on an ipad it essentially gets to hog the gpu and it's at the ragged edge of what it's capable of and it gets 30 frames per second but only if it's got the full gpu and now the game is unplayable and and the kid's like my ipad is broken or the adult is like my ipad is broken what the hell is this game not work i'm getting garbage frame rates if you were on a mac and started a final cut pro render and then launched a game and it ran crappy you'd be like oh i'm as a mac user i understand that there's a limited pool of resources on my computer and if i do something complicated that requires the gpu and then i try to play a game of course the game's gonna have a lower frame rate but that's not how anyone thinks about the ipad which is part of why people love the ipad they don't have to think about mentally keeping track of resource utilization they don't have to think when i launch a game on the iPad.

1:32:22I got to make sure I'm not running out of the big stuff in the background. Otherwise, this game's going to have low frame rates. That's not how people think. They love not having to know that because frankly, most people don't know that. We know that. We understand how a computer works. We're computer nerds, right? People don't want to have to know that. They don't want to have to remember the rules. They don't want to have to have an intuition about what you can and can't do. They just want to be able to mindlessly do stuff on their iPad and have it all work the same way all the time. And the incredibly limited processing model on the iPad provides that experience to them.

1:32:52But it also makes it impossible to use the thing like we would use a computer with the same capabilities. So this is the problem in front of Apple. I'm not saying this is an impossibility. I'm saying this is the challenge. It's not as simple as just open up the floodgates or put a big switch in settings that says I can do pro stuff or whatever. It is actually a challenge for them to balance these two things to make the computer as ipad like as possible and as bulletproof as possible while still allowing you know the capabilities to be exploited lots of them are easy we don't have to do this problem like of just you know multiple audio tracks or whatever that's not going to tax the system so much you should just allow that but things like a final cut pro render is really at the ragged edge of like look if you allow that to run in the background this ipad is going to behave very differently for the users or you know even just like an iMovie render if you don't want to use final cut pro like in a fantasy world where there was a fancy version of iMovie you could do similar things right maybe there is i don't even know um this there is a tension there is a real functional expert user expectation tension between expanding capability and that's that's why pcs are the way they are like oh it's because their legacy and they're old no the thing the model under which they work the things we actually do the things they're able to do is because they give you enough rope to hang yourself and that's what we need we need enough rope to tie a complicated knot and hopefully not hang ourselves because we know how to manage the resources we know not to run a heavy job here and we know if we do this over here then that will slow down over there like we know all these things as you know experienced pc or mac users that ipad users do not want to know or even if they do know the relief of not having to think about them is what makes the ipad attractive um so yeah virtualizing mac os is like don't try to figure out all the hard problems just let us do this and you know it takes over the whole screen it takes over the whole device and it gets suspended when it's in the background or whatever but that's just really a terrible solution honestly they should just add touch and pen support to mac os and put cellular and apple laptops and have that be that but the ipad the plain old ipad can add capabilities and has been over the years it should just add them faster and better but eventually it will come up against this this tension between adding those capabilities without ruining the ipadness and that i think is another source of conflict because when when people who like the ipad for what it is hear us talking they think you're going to ruin my ipad and they're not 100 wrong they're only maybe like 80 like we don't want we don't want to ruin the ipad but it is It's possible to ruin the iPad by saying, it's like a Mac.

1:35:24You can do whatever you want because that puts them back into the world where they have to think about this stuff. And honestly, they don't want to think about it. And in general, it's why PCs and Macs are such a mystery to so many people. Like something isn't working and they don't know why. They don't want to have to diagnose it. They don't know how to figure out why. And this is the magic of the iPad. It never asked them to figure out why it's not working the way they expect. It never asked them to diagnose it. Not never, but like way less than a Mac or a PC. so i don't envy the task before apple but i do wish they would a put way more resources into it and b be a little bit less cautious because their their current rate of advancement the the anger boiling up about the software situation on the ipad is just it's getting untenable for apple uh one stat to throw out there from one of the press things it might have been one of these interviews that we just read from before uh i think jaws said this and so i'll take his word for the numbers um i don't know if you guys read this um what percentage of mac users do you think own an ipad a third i would say very low i'd say like something like five or ten percent maybe so jaw i believe it was jaws and so again this is directly from apple and i'm pretty sure he's not picking up these numbers off the hip he said more than half of mac users own an ipad what i would not have guessed that now now the reason we're thinking that is because we don't realize how few macs are sold he didn't say more than half of iphone users okay let's get a grip here He said more than half of Mac users, but still we as Mac users are thinking like, really?

1:36:48And I think part of that is because, again, all of us have uses in our lives or in our families for the iPad that are right in its sweet spot. That, you know, I'm watching video online for crying out loud. There are plenty of uses that are right in the sweet spot. So even the people who are complaining, those same people either have iPads or someone in their family has an iPad probably that it doesn't, they use it without requiring any of these complicated capabilities. They just use it right in that sweet spot for simple, low stress. So like we all are benefiting from that angle of the iPad. And I think that's why there are so many iPads out there because it's like we'll keep buying them again when the old one breaks or whatever because we do use it in that way.

1:37:32but the tech nerd in us still says yeah but the really good ones that hardware should be able to do more and it annoys us and especially if you buy them and you keep hoping this ls update will be the one or you keep trying to find a way to do your work or apple finally puts out a new app and you try it but there's one little limitation that's bothering you or whatever like they're they're not denying us everything they're they're just giving us just enough to keep leading us on and we keep following them through it all and in the meantime we are all benefiting from all the things the ipad is good at that attach rate to use your terms from before margo the attach rate of like i don't i wouldn't say it's attached to the mac but anyway yeah more than half a mac users owning an ipad that is very surprising to me and there was another thing that showed a chart of some third-party thing saying like the average age of ipads when they're replaced and as you can imagine they're they're older than you might think because ipads last a long time and until someone sits on them or until the battery gets really bad or until they're really slow and buggy we just use them until they're dead and then you get another one because we've got to have an ipad in the house because person XYZ uses it to watch TV or browse the web on the couch or whatever.

1:38:36That role is secure, but the hardware is so good, Apple should find a way to allow it to do more without destroying what's good about it. I think it's possible, and I think Apple is trying to do it. They're just doing it way too slowly and probably with not enough resources. All right, let's do a couple of quick ask ATPs, or hopefully anyway. Rumi Ahmed writes, with the new M4 and its updated display drivers, is there a possibility now that the base chip can support two external displays with the laptop lid open natively? I don't think so, but I'm honestly not sure. John, what's the answer here?

1:39:12So there's been a lot of stories about the new display driver, which Apple talked about in the event. And by talked about, I mean, they said we have a new display driver. They didn't give any technical details and people are speculating, as we speculated on the last episode. Is that because of dual-layer display? Is there some controlling on the SoC level to drive the two layer display? Or is there a driver chip between that handles that? And that's not what this is about. Apple hasn't told us. But the bottom line is there is a new display driver. So if you want to, again, have that glimmer of hope that maybe the M4 has better external display to support than the M3 and M2 and M1, now's the time to nurture that hope until we get an M4 based laptop and we find out what the real story is.

1:39:51But right now, Apple is not telling us. If someone inside Apple would like to tell us why the updated display driver was needed, is it for the tandem OLED? Is it unrelated to the tandem OLED? Can it drive more displays? These are answers I want to know, but right now we don't know. But there is hope. So nurture that hope while you still can. Mike Runciman writes, Why do you think there's so much discussion around the CPU power and costs for iPads, but not around the iPhone? The cost of an iPhone Pro can reach that of a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, but no one asks the question, What are people doing with all that power in their phones?

1:40:20or people don't make statements like, the power of the iPhone is really held back by iOS. My main computer is an M2 iPad Pro, and I use it for everything from basic email, web browsing, and social media, to editing photos, and even editing videos in Final Cut and LumaFusion for a time. I appreciate that Apple continues to upgrade these devices, and I'd hate for Apple to think they're good enough and let the iPad line languish. This is an interesting question, and on the surface, I want to dismiss it out of hand, but Mike's not wrong. So what gives? well i mean as as we said before like the i don't think anyone is arguing that the the hardware is good enough they shouldn't keep improving it we love the hardware we want them to keep improving this is what we expect is the model the model for hardware products every year make them better right so no one is arguing for that the question about uh why are we making these uh statements about the ipad and not the phone we discussed earlier that soon the phones will come with the same base ram as the all the low end max or whatever uh the answer is actually pretty simple it's because it's small and fits in your pocket like that sounds dumb right because like oh what what does the screen size matter but it really really does like attaching a keyboard to your phone a hardware keyboard and a trackpad not really practical doing tons of things at once and doing complicated stuff on your phone the screen is just a little bit too small to do lots of complicated stuff for right now we're frustrated because we can't do complicated stuff on the ipad and we think the power is there uh we think that because the power is there and the screen is there and the input devices are there like it's like it's basically a laptop when you attach all that stuff to it right and even when you don't you have all that screen area and how is that different the phone even if the phone literally had an m4 with 16 gigs of ram in it it's still a phone it's too small we don't want it to have a keyboard we don't want to attach a full-size keyboard to it you can't do so much on the screen right so that just goes to show it's not like there's just like hardware burning a hole in our mental pocket.

1:42:11We're like, Oh, we've got an M4. We've got to be able to do this amazing stuff. It's because the whole device looks so much like this whole other device we have, the MacBook Air, that we know we can do it there. We didn't, wouldn't want to edit our Final Cut Pro project on even the biggest iPhone with no keyboard attached, right? Even if the phone worked with a pencil, even if the phone had external hardware keyboard, it's like, what are you doing? That's not, it's not, the screen is too small. It's a handheld device, right? that's the answer that's why it doesn't mean we don't want the phones to keep getting more powerful we do because they can do amazing stuff and with the ai stuff the amount of ram they need is probably going to increase like but but it's it's literally the the fact of the hardware if the phone did not have a screen on it and we all wore little glasses and our phone projected an image onto it or whatever then we'd be asking the same questions about the phone maybe because a lot of those limitations would be taken away so that's the reason like the physical form factor we are we are creatures with sense organs and hands and arms and the size of things is important how we hold them how we use them how we do input with the keyboard like that is all not incidental you don't just look at it and say it's got this cpu with this much ram as much power therefore should be able to do this thing the input and output devices define the products and we ask it about the ipad probe is the input and output devices are big enough and powerful enough to do all the things that we want and not true on the phone.

1:43:31I think there's also, there's a big mismatch, as we've been discussing this episode, between what iPad hardware is capable of just, you know, you know, sheer spec-wise and, you know, speed and memory and bandwidth-wise, like, what the hardware is capable of versus what the OS will let you do with it. There's a pretty big disconnect there. It is actually very difficult to use the power that the iPad has because of the inherent limitations of what they will allow you to do or just how people are choosing to use them. Whereas on a phone, first of all, phones have way fewer resources than iPads, like way fewer CPU cores, way smaller processors, way less GPU power, way less RAM.

1:44:17So phones are a much smaller power envelope, much smaller space envelope. Even if that wasn't true, though, by the way, even if they had, like I said, a 16 gigs of RAM and an M4, what they wouldn't have is a big battery. like they're you know if you put an m4 there's a reason they don't have an m4 but if you put that in there they have the same number of cpu cores and everything or whatever the size of the device dictates that it cannot have as big a battery as the ipad because it's literally not as big and that also limits what you can do with it exactly and so in our phones like they have you know the smaller smaller processors fewer resources um but then what people are actually doing with their phones oftentimes is really using a lot of the phone's capacity.

1:45:00Think about just the massive amount of computation required just taking pictures. When people take pictures with their phones, like the amount of processing the phone is doing both live viewing of the viewfinder and then to actually take and process the photo, it's a huge amount of computation. And that gets ramped up every year as the phone hardware goes up in capability. so phones actually are being i think more like their resources are being utilized to a greater degree than the average ipad in just the way people are actually using them and on on device ai is just going to crank that up exactly and and i think that's going to be used a lot more on phones on ipads frankly because that's you know people use their phones in different ways in different contexts and i think phones are going to have a way more of that and even if we look already phones are already using a large amount of the resources that they have whereas ipads as john was saying like ipads are given laptop resources and have laptop price tags so it can be very frustrating when you can't do all the things you want to do on a laptop on an ipad and it feels kind of wasteful to have like you know if you have a recent ipad pro and a recent MacBook Air, they probably have the same processor or roughly the same processor, you know, a similar processor.

1:46:22They probably have similar amounts of RAM, maybe similar storage. And so you're looking like, all right, I have this aluminum slab that can do these things. And I have this other aluminum slab over here that is extremely similar, that can do a very different set of things. They're made by the same company. They run a lot of the same software. why can't they just both do the same things it's it's a more frustrating um you know it's more frustrating situation like when you have these two very similar products that have limitations that seem i wouldn't say arbitrary but that seem forced beyond their need the phone is actually like the hardware for the phone is well suited to the tasks that people ask the phone to do and it's well suited to the phone's physical realities and the price reality of a phone.

1:47:11Whereas iPad versus MacBook, those statements don't apply. Everything is less fitting for its purpose and the iPad is just like dying for more ways to use this amazing hardware and the software just won't let us use it. You mentioned the price stuff though, by the way. I think you can price the most expensive iPhone up into MacBook Air territory, but that doesn't change the physical reality of the device. It's a small device with a small screen and a small battery. and so it's excluded whereas with the ipad pro to macbook air comparison same size screen similar size keyboard similar weight similar dimensions in general the ipad tends to be more expensive if you expect them out to be the same uh some people find that frustrating but you know the ipad also turns into a tablet and can be you know and can use the apple pencil and has a better screen and has a faster cb like you're paying for the flexibility that flexibility that you get you don't get that with the macbook air again these are decisions apple's made in their product lines You can imagine a touchscreen MacBook Air-sized device that is essentially a current M4 iPad Pro with everything fused together running macOS, right?

1:48:13But that you could take the screen off. Apple has patents on that. Like, thus far, they haven't done that. Made a convertible touchscreen pencil-equipped Mac. I think they 100 % should do that. They haven't done it yet. But setting that aside, like, that's separate from the issue of the iPad, right? And if they did that, you could say, well, this takes the pressure off the iPad. Now that we've got touchscreen pencil-capable cellular Mac laptops, we don't have to worry about the iPad. it can just stay the same as it always has. And I still think that's not true because I think there is room for iPadOS capabilities to grow without it becoming the disaster that it is the general purpose PC or Mac.

1:48:47And I say that, you know, humorously, I don't think it's a disaster, but it's more difficult. And Apple, because Apple has been walking that path and so far they haven't screwed up the iPad, but they're being so cautious about it. And they haven't made a touchscreen Mac with pencil support and cellular. so we're currently in the age of dissatisfaction about iPad software capabilities within the nerd community Thank you to our sponsor this week, Delete Me Thank you to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm join. One of the big benefits of membership is you get to hear ATP Overtime a special bonus topic that we do after each episode now.

1:49:23This week's bonus topic in ATP Overtime is Meta wants to be the Microsoft of headsets they are kind of trying to get MetaHorizonOS to run on other hardware. So we're going to talk about that in ATP Overtime right now after the show. So thank you so much to our members. You can join if you want to hear it, ATP.fm slash join. And we'll talk to you next week.

1:49:50Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Accidental. It was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm. And if you're into Mastodon, 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-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-U-S-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. So I'm sure all of us are probably the IT support for our immediate family slash extended family.

1:50:57Entire town. Yeah, exactly. I feel for my immediate families for sure. And also for my children. Despite what my parents said when, you know, we got all these computers in the house and they immediately became mine. And I'm the only person who understood how to use them. I'm the only person who could fix them. I decided what we got. I said, someday you'll have a kid and they'll do the same thing that you're doing to me and running rings around you and making you feel dumb for not knowing how to use your technology devices. And let me tell you, that did not happen. My kids do not care about computers because they hate them for granted, right?

1:51:30They don't know how to do anything. They don't know how to troubleshoot technology. And my son's a CS major. He's a very good student. I was going to say, I thought he was a CS major. He is. He just doesn't care about computers. Yeah, those are different things. He's like, you can be a CS major and not care about the workings and dealings of computers. And certainly not the debugging of problems. So anyway, this is an older story. He's back home now for the summer, but he was off at school. And he's got an M2 MacBook Air that we got him for college. He's had it since it was released. I did get that one, an educational discount.

1:52:01And I set it up for him when he was at home, and he's been using it at school. And every once in a while, he has some sort of problem where he needs my help setting it up, and I remote desktop into it and help him out or whatever. All right, slow down. how do you how do you orchestrate remote desktop in uh apple messages has a little feature cleverly hidden in their terrible interface somewhere like you hit the little i in a circle next to a person's name and there's a little menu comes up or something it says ask to share screen um yeah that'll do it uh and that works consistently because i haven't tried this in a long time but it does work uh i mean part i usually blame the inconsistency on his weird school network or something like it disconnects the audio disconnects we keep getting disconnected but eventually it works right um and it's easy for him to do because he has messages and it's easy anyway towards the end of this year uh you know right right around the times he was doing like finals and final projects he's like my computer is not working uh like the finder is crashing like just every time i try to do anything the finder just freezes and i get a beach ball or whatever and i was like all right so i'm gonna take a look at this um and i'm what my diagnosis fairly quickly was that I had, I mean, I had made a mistake.

1:53:08I had failed him by not setting him up for success. When I originally set up his, I think, it wasn't even this laptop. It was the one before this laptop. When I originally set up his, like, homework laptop when he was in high school, because he had a laptop in high school as well. I think it was an M1 MacBook Air back then. I set him and my daughter up with a thing that I do not use myself and that I don't, that my wife doesn't use, which is iCloud, iCloud Drive Documents and Desktop sync oh no oh no because my kids had they had like nothing they did all they ever used was chrome but they did occasionally throw things on their desktop and they didn't want their things to be backed up and they didn't want to be in the time machine vortex or whatever and they're like we don't have any files so i'm like what are all those things on your desktop and like but yeah but those don't count like well would you be sad if they went anyway i set them up with this and this turned out to be a good thing because many times it saved their butt because they don't pay attention to stuff or whatever and they they had such light need there's like you know they chuck they put things on their desktop because they don't know anything else that exists occasionally they'd put something in a documents folder it all synced to icloud it was a piddling amount of data and i just didn't back up their macs because they were either using chrome or you know not using chrome whatever using a web browser as far your chrome to do their school stuff which is all through the web through google thing that's why i'm thinking of chrome right or they were doing occasional random stuff locally and putting files in their desktop well my son went off to college in this freshman year went okay sophomore year he was getting into more heavy cs courses and eventually we got to the place that you know the reason that i don't use it the reason i recommend people do not use it the reason i don't let my wife use it is because i have no faith in icloud drive's ability to sync files it's the reason i still use dropbox for all its weirdness i know how it works it's understandable and for the most part it does what it's supposed to icloud drive none of those things is true about it's just it's so bad i hate it so much uh and it was fine for light needs but eventually what happened you know when i've gone as computer diagnosed it you know uh top process was you know file provider d using 100 of the cpu finder locking up nothing works just totally hosed and frozen and it was like how am i going to get him out of this remotely so i i did some heroics remotely to try to get it into a state where he could uh deal with stuff again basically i had to turn off uh icloud drive which you're like oh at least you can just turn it off and it cures everything turning it off also doesn't work of course because once it's totally hosed you can't you can't turn it off and it's like oh updating things and it'll hang for and it's like he's got stuff to do he's got finals like i don't and i'm remote and like i eventually essentially successfully turned it off after like manually copying the files because he has a local account um my wife's uh mac studio where the files are also synced and it wasn't hosed and so i copied them up into his google drive i zipped them and copied to his google drive that's managed to turn off iCloud Drive by booting into single user mode and a bunch like I did some heroics and I got him out of the situation and I said look your computer is essentially hosed but I've saved all your stuff put these zip files back on your desktop you can unzip them iCloud Drive is disabled just get through these next two weeks when you come home I'll wipe your computer which is what I did he came along I wiped the computer I started all over or whatever and I got into a same situation still in the end I talked to him about this I said do you still want uh you know iCloud drive syncing documents on desktop or whatever totally why not dad i mean so here's the thing this is this is the kicker in the story and maybe only casey will know the answer to this but this is this is not 100 sure but i'm this is my leading theory what caused this to happen well how did why did it work freshman year but eventually it fell over sophomore year what was you know what was the straw that broke this camel's back why did we exceed the meager limits of iCloud drive I would assume too much storage was used.

1:56:51Like iCloud has eclipsed its two terabyte plan or whatever. That's a good guess. We were creeping up on it and I did buy more storage. This is part of my heroic debugging. We were at like 90 % and so I did buy another like two terabytes or whatever. But 90%, I don't think that was the problem. Like 10 % of two terabytes is still enough room to grow. I'm guessing there was like one problematic file that like would not sync and just silently broke the whole thing. you know i would do lsof to try to see which if it's hitting a problematic file all the all the usual debugging stuff to try to figure out if it's stuck on something or whatever no no it's something it's it's two words but it's actually it's two words joined by an underscore uh ds store no i'm not sure why you're looking at me i'm not mad but i'm not clear why you're looking at me to answer this which means it's something obvious that i'm not thinking of and again i don't 100 percent no this is for the cause but i'm going to say 60 70 80 percent node modules does that name ring a bell oh that's why he was doing a lot of courses this year that were done in node and anybody who's ever used node if you especially if you have multiple products over the place if there's a node modules directory the number of files that are in that directory it's astronomical economical and if that those files are because you're a kid and don't know on the desktop file provider d was like i can't even i'm just i give up this is too many files changing too often too fast and of course the project the project they were doing had like some they were doing using yarn instead of npm for god knows what reason and they had like a yarn command set up for like yarn fix, yarn fix dev, which was like reset the world and delete everything because otherwise the thing wouldn't work after you change certain things.

1:58:39And I'm like, this is not the way to run a software project. If you don't understand what this is doing, like this should not be necessary. But the bottom line is they were like nuking and paving constantly during their dev process and refilling the node modules directory and doing all sorts of stuff. File provider D is not up to that task. So the only reason I'm relaying the story is just to tell you, hey, if you hear me saying that I don't have faith in iCloud Drive and that you shouldn't use it, this is exactly why. it's fine if you have a small number of files but if you know what the node modules directory is never use icloud drive never it can't handle that volume of files it can't handle that many changes it's bad don't use it use dropbox use maestrel use literally anything else because when icloud drive goes bad you like i said you can't even turn it off easily that that that hurts how are you doing like were you talking him through the you know reboot into safe mode dance and all that jazz or were you actually able to do that somehow i was like hold down the power button just hold it down and he's like i i am but it just it just reboot like it was in some like weird boot loop thing where it wouldn't even let him get to the boot options menu it was just it was you know this is again hard to diagnose remotely i haven't had him facetiming holding his phone up to look at the screen like you know oh that's never good it was really badly hosed and in fact when this was when all was said and done and he brought it home there were also as far as i can tell essentially unreparable file system errors in APFS.

2:00:01How is that even possible? I just nuked the whole thing. FSCK would find the errors and say it was like repairing them, but then you'd find the same errors in the second run. I don't think they were the cause of the problem because once I had turned off iCloud Drive, everything was fine. Like there was no more problems, right? But yeah, I just nuked the whole thing. Just wiped everything on it. Started over from scratch. And he didn't lose any data because I had all of his files on the Mac Studio with iCloud Drive Sync. then i just copied them i made him a local folder in his home directory i said anything that has the word node in it put in a local folder that will not sync so his desktop is still syncing and i told him don't put stuff on the desktop but you can put like a pdf or word document whatever but any coding you're doing don't put it there put everything local so we'll see how this goes next year but yeah iCloud Drive still not good in summary who'd have thunk it wow that's a journey you know i i don't i don't know if we need to include this in the release version of the show but something i have wondered for myself is would it make sense to have my dad install tail scale on his computer, either have me do it with my own credentials and have his machine basically be a node in my tail net, or alternatively have him install his own node in his own tail net and then share that node with me so that if I need to remote desktop into his computer, it is way easier.

2:01:34Now, that's not necessary in my case because I have my backup hosting Synology in his basement. And I've set that up such that I can crawl through Tailscale onto his network, and I could log into his machine. And again, I would never do this without permission, but I could log into his machine basically at a moment's notice, and it would be fine. But I wonder if it would make sense if you were willing to do all this, which it sounds like you probably aren't, but if you were willing to do all this, if it would make sense to have Alex and you get on a Tailnet or something like that. that's just one more thing to debug no way like that's the beauty of messages is that it's built in right and i know i know if there's any problem with it but it's like there is weird school network the weird school wi-fi and firewall rules they have the last thing i want to debug is another layer on top of that which is oh tail scale how is that like yeah that's why i recommend the messages thing it is like the it is the base level if you have two macs and you need to help each other with them use the messages thing as your first option because it eliminates all third party software all third party network is obviously all first party and if that works ever even if it's intermittently use that i mean i get what you're saying i have no real argument for it but just something to think about because tail scale is pretty reliable and is very good at poking holes through firewalls like that's kind of one of their things i know but like university networks are like it's like an adversarial situation university networks aggressively are attacking what college students want to do with their computers like my take of an example my son can't torrent his uh you know manga things at uh from school because they like they stop all of that you're like oh tail scale we'll get around it or whatever wouldn't surprise me if the smart it people at university are also looking for and trying to detect and shut down tail scale stuff so it's a hostile environment over there Thank you.