610: More Values in the Darkness

25:57But what you can't do is if part of the sensor was blown out with 100 % white from a bright light or the sun or a reflection being in the frame or near the frame, you can't recover any detail from a totally white, blown out area. That's just like the sensor having all the little buckets of photons were all just full in that area. You can't recover any more detail because it was just full. and so my my strategy has always been expose the the picture during capture from shooting raw expose the picture to be able to capture the bright areas in the correct detail and exposure like the brightest so if there's like a you know a sun or reflective water whatever expose that that's correctly exposed even if it makes the rest of the picture too dark because then in post-processing i can bring up the dark areas but i can't recover that highlight i think you did the exact same slightly wrong description as you did in the last episode i guess what you just well that's what i do but i said i think photographers call this exposed to the right and it turns out exposed to the right means almost the opposite of that not not quite but but yeah but like what you yeah also we should read this feedback from sam doran who i think summed it up pretty well the term exposing to the right comes from moving the histogram to the right as in overexposing an image pause for a second and say what the histogram is most fancy cameras have thing where they'll show you a histogram histogram is just a graph that shows like how many values at level one how many values level two how many values level three and it makes like a little mountainous little graph that's your histogram right and what they're showing in this histogram on cameras is uh different brightness levels with the left side of the histogram being black and the right side being white and all the values that are in between in terms of brightness if you're looking at like a luminance histogram right and what i'm going to say moving the histogram to the right it's saying the shape of the little mountain range made by the histogram you're trying to make the big peak, the big lumpy mountain be more to the right of the image.

27:52The right is bright, the left is dark, right? So it's always going to be some kind of like lumpy type of thing or whatever. But if there's one big lump or mound of where most of the luminance data is in the image, exposed to the right is saying, move that lump to the right. Don't leave a bunch of space to the right on the histogram of like level 10, 11, 12. These are made of values. 13, 14, like, oh, those just have very low values on them. The hump is in the middle. You don't want the hump in the middle you want to shift the hump of the right because continue casey when shooting raw exposing one-third or two-thirds brighter is the best way to maximize the data captured by the sensor for later processing you can recover quite a bit of seemingly lost highlight detail in a raw image only when shooting jpeg do you want to expose for the highlights as marco described to avoid completely losing data and sam had some more information on this that i wasn't able to pin down to the point where i can uh you wanted to like put it in the show word for word but like the idea is that uh when you're when you're exposing to the right the more brightness you can get the more data there is available to you like you don't want to waste part of it's basically the way i would describe it is your camera whatever your settings are captures a certain range of luminance value some certain range of light right if you put the big lump in the middle when you're shooting raw you're kind of wasting the stuff to the right because you're not capturing any data there with raw you can shove that lump over not off the edge because off the edge of what marco's talking about oh now you've blown out your highlight now things that are pure white but shove the lump over to the right to allow you to use the rest of the range to get more uh values in the darkness and that's that's the exposing to the right the the right is that lump in the histogram do we want to discuss color spaces all right when shooting raw this is sam continuing when shooting raw the color space is determined when exporting from the raw processor adobe rgb is a good choice when exporting edited raw images to other formats when while the in-camera color space only matters for jpeg images it should be set to adobe rgb for when you do use jpeg straight from the camera it's a much bigger color space the images look better as a result that's what i was asking marco last time what color spaces are you using not realizing that it doesn't matter when you're talking about raw because color space only comes into effect when you take that raw sensor data and you say okay now i'm going to stick this into something like a jpeg or an image or whatever we choose the color space because the the raw is really just the values from the sensor and more or less its raw form after whatever it's called, debayering or whatever that thing is, where they process the sensors into a bunch of RGB values.

30:14Although I feel like, and I can't substantiate this right now, but I feel like a lot of people said that Adobe RGB was not the right choice. Oh, read the next item. Okay, maybe that's where I got it from. Leo Natan writes with regard to camera color space settings. Color space selection in cameras is applicable only for JPEGs. So far we agree. Raw files do not contain any color space. They are just 12 or 14 or 14 bit or more, readouts from the sensor. Raw processors take these bits and convert them to a color space. When saving a JPEG, never use Adobe RGB, there we go, as it is a massive gamut, completely unsuitable for 8-bit JPEGs.

30:46You will see a lot of color banding. In my Nikon DSLR days, I got bit by Adobe RGB, making a lot of shots unusable. It's the most noticeable, or excuse me, it is most noticeable on smooth gradients, such as skies, but also architecture. Even P3 hits the upper bounds of 8 bits. With today's tech, there really is no point shooting in limited JPEG. Modern Sonys can even shoot 10-bit heek. But RAW is always preferred for portability. So I, you know, like I said, my cameras are set to Adobe RGB, and I'm shooting in JPEG and RAW to two separate cards. But I mostly just deal with the JPEGs. And the idea behind this, what Leo was talking about, is like number of bits per sample.

31:27How many bits do you take per sample in this thing? Obviously, if you have eight bits you can only have values from 0 to 255 if you have 12 or 14 bits you can get many more values right so if you're taking a picture of something like a sky gradient or whatever uh within a you know one inch strip of the thing or whatever or within some strip of the sky you might have uh in the thing off the sensor you might have five different colors blue slightly darker blue slightly darker blue like five different blues right that's in a 12-bit space because you've got a room you've got a room for however many values 12 bits is like as you know thousands and thousands of different colors you can fit in there right but when you write it to a jpeg they have to take all those thousands of different colors and compress them down to fit in eight bits and that's only 256 you know levels for the r the g and the b right um and in an eight bit thing those five different blues might map down to a single blue so what was previously a strip that had five different colors like a smooth gradient that same strip now has one color because you compress it down to eight bit and that is the the danger of possibly seeing banding where you You know, instead of a smooth gradient where every single line is just a slightly different color blue than the previous one.

32:30Now you see blue number one for half an inch, blue number two for half an inch. And that's that's banding where you can see these distinct bands of color. I have to say, I've been shooting Adobe RGB for years and years on all my Sony cameras, and I have never, ever, ever seen this. Right. But it is technically a danger for the reason that I just described. Maybe I'm not shooting enough big gradient skies. Maybe I don't know, like maybe they aren't 8-bit JPEGs on all these cameras. we'll put a link in the show notes to an article by daniel lon about srgb versus adobe rgb versus photo rgb that says here are all the different situations where you might want to use srgb here's where you might want to use adobe rgb here's when you might want to use pro photo rgb right so i think that provides a reasonably balanced view of like the different scenarios where you want one each one the reason i'm personally using adobe rgb this was when i was first playing with this setting i took the same exact picture in adobe rgb and srgb it was just a picture of like something in my house that was red and i brought the pictures back to my computer and i blind ab tested them to see if i could tell which one of these is adobe rgb and which one is srgb and holy cow you could tell yeah again taking picture of a red thing in the house maybe that's not representative but the adobe rgb one was much more red and closer to what i saw with my eyes when looking at it so i'm like well that's it i'm doing with adobe rgb and it makes sense adobe rgb covers more of the color space than srgb does but i wondered like is that something you can even see and my answer was yes i could tell the difference in a blind test of which was which and i liked the adobe rgb one better so be aware that when saving adobe rgb to jpeg and you have smooth gradients maybe banding is an issue but i personally haven't seen it and i'm sticking with adobe rgb all right and then leo continues for hdr always shoot raw lightroom takes all the bits of information when you enable the hdr toggle applies an appropriate tone curve automatically suddenly everything that seemed overexposed shows details for exporting always use 16-bit jpeg xl or 10-bit avif then josh harris writes thanks for the great discussion on editing photos what should i do with display settings like true tone night shift and brightness while editing i always try to turn color shifting off and increase brightness but i'm not sure what the best setting is for the most true to life result or whether the system adjusts for this already i mean i guess turn it all off if you can but what a pain well so here's the thing what these features do first of all night shift is the thing that makes it look like someone peed on your screen at night i would suggest turning that off it makes everything warmer on your screen at night time to try to like reduce the amount of blue light you're being faced with and make you feel nice and cozy right lots of people like that feature but if you're editing photos i would strongly suggest to disable night shifts because that is intentionally changing the color balance of your screen in a way that you will notice like that's the whole point it's supposed to look warmer to you so don't do that if you want to get an idea of what your colors look like.

35:12True Tone is Apple's feature where the hardware has a sensor on it that senses the ambient light in the room and how warm that is. And then based on what that sensor sees, it adjusts the image to try to essentially match the white balance of the room. So if you're in a room with very warm lighting, it's not going to leave the monitor the same because the monitor will look really, the whites will look very blue compared to the ambient light that is much warmer in the room. instead they will warm the monitor up to match the color temperature of the ambient light i personally leave true tone on which is not the quote-unquote pro thing to do pros should be working in a completely dark room with their monitor perfectly calibrated by hardware to be exactly at a d65 white point like i'm not doing that i leave true tone on and the reason i leave true tone on is because i know i'm in a room with a bunch of lights that do not have the quote-unquote the right color temperature and i want my display to adjust itself so that it matches the color temperature in the room so the adjustments i make quote unquote look right to me in this room in this lighting so when i see them in a different room in different lighting they'll still look right i don't know if that's foolish but i don't really care because that's just what i do with my pictures and they look good to me and i print them in books and look good in the books and when i see them in the books i don't think to myself wow that looks way different than it did in my monitor instead i think wow that looks exactly like it did in my monitor so i say night shift off true tone on Yeah, I would say the same thing.

36:35The reality is that when you are editing, what you want is a neutral view. However, your eyes and your brain perform some degree of auto white balance all the time in the world. So what you want is something that appears to be very neutral to you at the time. Night shift, the monitor peeing one, that's the more severe effect. And it is customizable, but people typically use it if they want a stronger effect. Night shift is too much of an adjustment. And it makes it difficult for you to know what you're missing by not seeing it because it's filtering out too much of the blue end of the spectrum.

37:20So your eyes can't auto white balance to it nearly as well. So you will make mistakes. Like you will do things in that mode that when you later see them like the next day in regular lighting, you might think, oh, that's not what I meant to do or that isn't how I meant for that to look. True Tone, which is the much more subtle white balance shifting thing of the monitor, is a much weaker effect, a much smaller effect, and therefore it tends to keep it within the range of what your eye automatically does throughout the day and in different lighting conditions. I'm not sure if it's weaker because if you put, if you bathed it in super duper warm light, I think it would adjust it.

37:57Like what it's trying to do is make it look white to you. In this room, this sheet of paper, it's actually very yellow because the light is yellow. And if you have very, very yellow lights, that sheet of paper is objectively yellow. But to your eyes, that sheet of paper still looks white because you know it's white and your brain adjusts for it or whatever. And what True Tone is trying to do is say, hey, when you hold that piece of paper in the ambient light of the room up to your monitor, I want the white of that paper to match the white on the screen. And to do that, it makes your screen yellowish to match the yellowish paper.

38:24The paper is yellowish because your yellowish light in the room is bouncing off the paper and going to your eyes. your monitor is yellowish because the os is making it produce yellow by mixing the red and the green sub pixels right and so that's the goal of true tone and it's subtle if your lighting is subtly warm or subtly cool i bet it's not subtle if your lighting is not subtly warm or cool indeed john do you want to talk about cropping please yeah this is something that came up and we've talked about on past episodes of photo editing um but we didn't mention it last time because in the ask atp question it was very much we were all very much focused on like what do you do when you're editing photos in terms of like exposure and all the fancy controls in lightroom and photos or whatever uh but it's worth reiterating because a lot of people brought it up and we talked about in the past cropping is the very first thing i do with every single photo that i edit and it's not an exciting form of editing because you're like oh i'm just changing the rectangle that defines the edges of the picture who cares i mean maybe gets a little more exciting with the advent of ai background extensions and stuff but either way cropping is the first thing that I do and every photo that I edit I crop like I can't remember the last time I added a photo and said you know what I don't need to change it at all um part of taking pictures and learning from the editing experience is knowing oh if I had left if I had you know left a little bit more margin around the edges I could frame this the way I wanted it's better to like have a little bit of extra background as long as you've got enough pixels of resolution it's better to have a little bit more extra background than it is to be missing that background because AI background extensions aside it still is kind of difficult to expand the image where you want it but you can always crop in a little bit and what are you doing when you're cropping you're trying to compose the picture you're trying to compose it when you take it too but it's often more important to get the shot get the moment when the person is smiling get the bird flapping its wings or whatever and then worry about the cropping later versus i'm not going to take the picture until it's perfectly composed in my viewfinder because then you'll miss the shot a lot of the time so i always try to leave a little bit extra and the very first thing i do is crop and i'm cropping to try to make a nice composition or try to make the composition i was trying to get in the camera but the camera was tilted or you know and this i guess this is involved in cropping too like straighten the horizon line and stuff if you want to um or i didn't quite get it framed the way i wanted but i have enough of the background that i can crop it so that is enough if you do no editing except for cropping you will get better at taking pictures your pictures will look quote unquote look better.

40:45You're like, I didn't do anything to it. All I did was change the edge. They will look better. You don't realize how much of a good picture is choosing the crop, choosing the composition until you've done that to a few of your pictures. And suddenly the exact same picture, you haven't done anything to it. All you've done is define the crop. Suddenly it looks a lot better. Once you sort of get on that train, it's hard not to notice it. So yeah, cropping, it's an important part of editing and you should definitely do it. And I would suggest making it one of the first things that you do. With regard to parallelization for file compression and decompression, Mihai Paparita writes, the compression speed and parallelism discussion of the most recent ATP reminded me of CigarJawsXIP unzip utility.

41:24Though it only focuses on decompression, it shows how much faster than archive utility you can be. This is relevant because Xcode is zipped using this, I guess, like secure XIP zip thing, and it takes for freaking ever to unzip it by default. And so this is a open source and third-party utility to make that faster. I think we've talked about this exact utility on the show in the past, but it should be noted that one of the things it does to speed itself up is not do the verification of everything. That's not the only thing it does to speed itself up. So it's worth looking. You can look at the source code and see it just uses, you know, Swift concurrency to try to do it in more parallel chunks.

42:01And you can totally peg all your CPU cores if you want to do this. But if you care about the checksumming, either don't use this tool or do a full checksum on the finished binary somehow and make sure it is what you expect indeed and then cigar jaw wrote in or well wrote on a thread that we were a part of that's and said if you just use finder to make a zip it uses some single threaded code by default i don't actually remember if you may if you can make a zip in parallel but i'm pretty sure even if you can lib archive whatever finder uses doesn't do that however apple has a proprietary format that essentially makes a big tar of your files and then splits it into chunks to compress those in parallel if your use case is i have a chunkier file please make it small and you're okay with using a special apple format and also probably giving up a few percent in size you should give it a try there's a developer there if you're a developer there's an api which is the apple archive api there's also an aa tool bundled with mac os that can create and manipulate apple archive files yeah i didn't even try this but uh i wonder what kind of file extension is it just dot aa but But anyway, yeah, if you're just staying within an Apple platform and you want to, you know, if you really want to compress something quickly, you want to try doing parallel, try the AA tool.

43:10All right. Dan Pierce wrote in with regard to the phones and schools overtime discussion from episode 607. Dan writes, my school had two main rules. This photo is in my yearbook. And you see, I guess, the staff of the high school. And this looks like in the gymnasium. they're on bleachers and in the back in huge letters it reads as follows no hats no walkman that's all we're talking about this in the overtime we're saying how like you know trying to get kids to pay attention in classes has always been a challenge and i mentioned the walkman as a technology that was around when i was a kid and how kids had them and if you put them on in class you would surely be sternly lectured that you shouldn't be listening to you're walking while you're in class i didn't think about hats but when i was a kid that was also a thing that i think i said mostly blocked out hats and gum chewing for things that that adults were really obsessed with not happening in schools but yeah this is this is the bleacher it looks like the bleachers in a gymnasium the back wall uh behind the bleachers is you know that cinder block painted cinder block wall that all high schools had and literally painted hand painted like stenciled letters on the wall they're like two feet high all caps no hats no walk around because the scourge of hats will destroy our children if we let it.

44:25We are sponsored this week by Click. Supercharge your Sonos system with Click for Sonos, the lightning-fast Sonos app for all Apple devices. So Click gives you native speed, native apps, across iOS, macOS, watchOS, and visionOS. So first of all, it is specialized in being very, very fast. It is way faster than the stock app in my experience of just opening up, being ready to go. and also click for sonos gives you all the apple platform features that you might want especially if you listen to this show so of course things like widgets live activities control center support and all the latest ios 18 stuff they already supported so apple watch live activities tinted app icons tinted widgets controls and control center like all that stuff they're already there on click right now and of course it's you know like sonos it allows you to have great support for multi-room audio, super fast to manage multiple room group playback.

45:19It's great for audio files. If you listen to lossless or Dolby Atmos audio on your Sonos, it supports that fully unless you unlock that full potential. And it is just as usual for Sonos, it's one universal app for Apple Music, Spotify, Plex, Tidal TuneIn, and your Sonos library. But Click gives you great control, not only in their own app, which again is super fast, but also you can manage your Sonos system from your Apple Watch or your Vision OS headset. It's amazing what you can do with Click for Sonos. And all this is done with privacy in mind. Your listening habits stay yours. They don't track or collect any unnecessary data.

45:54So why settle for less when you can click? You can get, as a listener of this show, all premium features for just five bucks a year at click.dance.atp. They spell it without a K on the end. So it's C-L-I-C.dance. I love this T-L-D. clic.dance.atp for just all premium features there for just five bucks a year if you go to that link. click.dance clic.dance.atp Ready to revolutionize your Sonos experience? Upgrade your Sonos control today with Click. Thank you so much to Click for Sonos for sponsoring our show.

46:32Okay, so there's been a lot of rumors recently about the iPhone SE4 and we wanted to talk about a few of them But we also wanted to mention, or John wanted to mention something with regard to our iPhone product mix that we discussed in the overtime from episode 609. So, John, what's up? Yeah, what we were talking about in that overtime was like, what should be the iPhones that Apple sells? Like, what variety should there be? Is the lineup as it is now correct? Should they make a small phone? Should they make, you know, other kinds of weird phones? And we had this whole discussion. and i thought it was interesting as an aside to the iphone se rumors that we're about to get to that none of us even mentioned the iphone se in that whole discussion because we were like the iphone lineup you know the the iphones iphone 16 iphone 16 pro iphone 16 pro max maybe there'll be a slim maybe there'll be an ultra but not once mentioned the iphone se so neglected is this previous year's model with a new name or whatever but the iphone se exists um and somewhat related to this uh the uh the the iphone mini a17 parentheses a17 pro which is what apple calls the new iphone mini um is connected to the iphone 17 uh rumors uh these are actual rumors as opposed to like just wish casting about that we talked about in the the overtime where uh max tech was talking about iPhone Air, iPhone Ultra, or whatever, just like this would make a nice set of names.

47:59These, I think, are actual rumors. And the rumor being that the iPhone 17 lineup will drop the numbers and instead be iPhone parentheses A19, iPhone parentheses A19 Pro. And so the names would be iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone Max, iPhone, whatever they are, iPhone suffix, right? Without the number, like the number wouldn't go up and the way we would distinguish them is the same way we distinguish for example ipads this happened ages ago i think we even talked about on the show when the quote-unquote new ipad came out were we running atp when that happened i don't even know but they dropped the numbers that said ipads aren't going to have numbers this is just the new ipad and we're like how are we going to tell you had an ipad and now this year there's another thing called ipad but it's a different product how are we going to distinguish them and the answer was parentheses you know second generation third generation over the same thing with macs all these mac minis you're telling me they're all called mac mini how do i tell which mac mini i have do they have years in them do whatever and the answer is that some phrase in parentheses after it that tells you what it is sometimes it's a year sometimes it's in the past it's been like you know dual you you know macbook pro parentheses dual usb like all sorts of stuff but the rumor the rumor is that this would be kind of like the iphone se right the iphone se 4 all right versus is iPhone SE parentheses A16 or something like that.

49:18I'm not entirely sure that the parentheses stuff version of Apple naming is any better than just calling an iPhone 17. In many ways, it's worse. But it is interesting that the iPhones have stubbornly stuck with these numbers. I remember years ago, people were like, well, surely when they get to 10 or 11 or 12, they're going to stop because iPhone 17 sounds so dumb or iPhone 16, whatever number they everyone was saying sounded so dumb. We've already been there and done that and sold that phone and we all survived, right? but the fact is the macs the ipads and lots of other apple products don't have numbers in the official product names but the iphone still does so are we all looking at a future where every product including the iphone se and all the ipads and all the iphones has some weird thing in parentheses after it are we just going to keep making that number go up until we're an iphone 137 well i mean so certainly the the sequential numbering model name system has it diminishing value over time it the numbers start to get weird like you know the higher like does anybody want like the iphone 37 like it's just we're already there people we used to have this discussion and people would say does anyone want the iphone 15 that's ridiculous right and i do think that we are in that in that range of like it's starting it's going to start to get weird if it hasn't already like we're certainly in that range and so i think you know you look at apple's other product lines and it makes sense.

50:36Everyone's fine. Which MacBook Pro do I have? I don't know what year it came out. I know it has the M3, whatever, the M3 Ultra. Did it come out last year? Did it come out the year before? I forget. What are the official Apple names of the, I haven't even looked. What are actually the official names of the MacBook Pros these days? I think it's just MacBook Pro, like, you know, late 2020 or whatever. I think. I mean, I'm sure there's exceptions here and there, like for some disambiguations, But like in the other product lines, no one like what is the current iPad Pro? What is it called? Who knows?

51:11You know, I know it came out this year. Is it called the iPad Pro 2024? Is it called the iPad Pro with M4 chip? Who knows? It doesn't really matter that much. And I think with with the iPhones, I think it mattered a lot more back when the iPhones were, first of all, being upgraded a lot more often than people tend to do now. and when they were changing more frequently than they tend to be changed now. You look at the current iPhone industrial design, and it looks very similar for the last, what, five years? It's been a while now. So the iPhone is in a maturing stage of its life. The iteration is slowing down in terms of the physical design changes.

51:55It's kind of stabilizing. and so I think it makes sense to start treating it more like other products that have reached similar levels of maturity like macbook pros and ipads and you know you look around like there's a reason why most of these devices don't just get sequential numbers it is kind of confusing the numbers do get a little big and weird after a while and it stops mattering so much like you know to some degree I wonder if apple I don't know to what degree they would want to do this but i wonder if also they like if you have say you know right now if you have like the iphone 12 do you know how old that is you know if it was just like you know the iphone parentheses 2019 like maybe that would feel older to you or maybe it would feel you know maybe you don't want the iphone 12 to feel as old as it does when you know the iphone 16 is out who knows but anyway i I think there's multiple reasons to look at getting rid of these numbers and refer to it in other ways.

52:55I think mostly because... They're getting rid of these numbers, but they're kind of replacing them with another number because the A-series processors and the M-series processors, guess what, have numbers on them. And the A's are already up to 17, 18, right? So iPhone Pro, parentheses, A18 Pro, it's just move the 18 out of the... And it's been a frustration of developers and other people who have to deal with these things that the numbers are not synced up between the os version oh god the processor version and the phone version right it would be nice if they got synced up but i'm looking at apple's compare page for the macbook pros and it says macbook pro 14 inch parentheses m3 but they seem to be liking the processors in the parentheses which is fine like sometimes there are years these aren't i don't know these are the official like uh actual apple product names or the tech specs but i'm just saying what's in the compare page but the thing they're putting in parentheses is the processor and all their processors have numbers in them i mean it is an improvement in tractability in that like if you don't care about that part you're just like i got an ipad pro i got a macbook pro or maybe i got a 14 inch or 15 inch macbook pro like but you don't care what the processor is and someone might ask you in the same way you're like i got i got a new iphone or i got a new ipad which one did you get well do you care about the processor then you can list it but if you don't you're not distracted by it um i mean i i do see i see a trend towards unifying under this scheme is this scheme better than the existing scheme well there is something to be said for consistency across apple's product lines if they can ever even ever so briefly attain that before they go off in another direction that would be cool um but it's interesting to think about in the context of the uh the the iphone suffix right because the iphone will be left with no suffix just like the ipad is but all the other iphones have something se pro pro max which has two suffixes isn't great maybe if there's an ultra maybe there's a slim or an air or whatever um i know that's something to look forward for next year and the 17 the iphone 17 which i guess we can't call the iphone 17 if they go with the naming scheme supposedly is actually going to change the form factor and you know just like the iphone 10 slash x did change the form factor and briefly go into a letter-based naming system for the top end phone before we return to numbers so as always with all things naming it is not entirely chaos in the apple world but there's a little bit of spice thrown in all right so what are the rumors for the iphone se4 uh first of all and this is from nine to five mac the se4 is expected to be based on the iphone 14 design but with a single rear camera 48 megapixels same sensor as the iphone 15 a 6.1 inch oled display with an iphone 14 sized notch and usbc it is not expected to have a camera control uh it is not expect or it is unlikely to have an action button and people are saying it might even have that long rumored apple 5g modem you never know it could happen uh this would mean no millimeter wave which would make me very sad and well not that i'm buying an essay but that's neither here nor there uh it would have 5g wi-fi and bluetooth on the single chip and it is expected to launch in the spring maybe possibly yeah we've talked about this 5g modem for ages it's kind of interesting that you were saying like oh they probably don't want to roll out their very first uh cellular modem on a really important product line so you put it on the se so if you really messed up damage is minimal and it also looks like uh the modem won't even have millimeter wave so it's not even suitable for the pro phones assuming apple wants to continue having millimeter wave and by the way the iFixit teardowns of the uh like the current 16 pro and stuff show that apple went to some length to find a new place on the phone to put the millimeter wave stuff because the camera control is kind of where the millimeter wave antenna used to be and now it's like threaded through to the top of the phone and everything so it seems like apple is still on board with millimeter wave at least in the u.s uh but yeah apple's first 5g modem not supporting in all isn't interesting i don't actually know if in our current phones obviously they have qualcomm so their modems i don't know if they have separate like a separate broadcom chip or something for wi-fi and bluetooth and if so apple combining 5g wi-fi and bluetooth all into a single chip would be an upgrade but if not it's just a you know apple trying to get away from qualcomm to stop paying them money because they don't like them and that every bit of profit that qualcomm gets is a bit of profit that apple doesn't get so they want to own and control the core technologies blah blah blah ergo buy intel's cell modem business and get yourself your own 5g modem it's just taking a long time and fingers crossed so they don't screw it up very true the new se looks good though like so this is everyone saying like finally the se will be modernized like it's not doesn't have the dynamic island but it's it's all screen like it's all it's the current modern design it's easier to repair a single camera on the back is actually kind of fun like one good camera for the cheap phone instead of having multiple ones it saves space presumably makes more room for a bigger battery as long as it's a good camera makes it makes the phone look interesting and cute just having one little camera on it kind of like a throwback although obviously the camera is way bigger than it used to be i think the iphone se 4 which will probably be the iphone se parentheses a 16 i don't even know what they said the soc is supposed to be on this but it looks like a good year for the se unless the thing you liked about the se was it being smaller because guess what it's going to be the same size as the iphone 14 apparently indeed and speaking of things that are forthcoming do we want to briefly talk about the theoretical apple october event and maybe some new macs coming will there be an event uh well yeah the i think the the alleged October or early November release of Apple products.

58:28There you go. Who knows what form that release will take, or even if it will happen, although it sure does seem like it's probably about to happen. But in some form, whether it's press releases or some kind of announcements, who knows? But there are a lot of very, very loud and persistent rumors that we are about to see, most likely a new Mac Mini, new MacBook Pros, and possibly an iMac and possibly USB-C peripherals for like keyboard and mouse updates. We'll see about that. Yeah, that's interesting. The iMac rumor, it is in the crop of Macs that are due to be updated with M4 chips. And there's kind of a separate rumor of like, there's a version two of Apple's current crop of magic peripherals, the keyboards, the mouse.

59:16And the rumor is vague enough to say, okay well a new version of the keyboard and mouse is that just like take the existing keyboard and mouse and get rid of lightning and put usbc because that would be welcome everyone wants it right or is it like have they actually revised these products where the keyboard and the mouse are different i find that hard to believe but you know the rumors are so vague and so new that who knows but the the final rumor is new imax m4 they still with lightning peripherals but there will also be a usbc variance of the mouse and keyboard they just don't come with the imac which which would be the most awful thing ever unless maybe if they're new or something like i don't know but anyway yeah the i mean i'm it would be nice if they updated this peripherals not to to be usbc but i don't think anyone with the imac is dying to do it because like honestly look if the if you plugged in your i guess you know people don't plug in their keyboards in imax they probably just use a blue so i'm just saying like if it comes with lightning already that's you can just harpoon your little turtle with the lightning connector that comes with your imac and you're all set but i guess most people probably use their keyboards and bluetooth mode so i don't know but anyway they should definitely upgrade to usbc and it would be nice if they did that in this event but it's interesting that here we are by the time you're listening to this these could have already been announced and we still don't know if they're going to get rid of lightning on the peripherals or if they're just going to keep them the same and swap out the cpu i am so very ready to excise what small amount of lightning exists in my life out of my life and so even though honestly it is not at all burdensome to have a keyboard and mouse that charge via lightning.

1:00:49Well, I should say trackpad. It is burdensome to harpoon the turtle, as you said. But for the trackpad and the keyboard, it is not burdensome to have lightning. I just have a lightning cable draped off the back of my beloved Calgigit TS4. And occasionally I plug them in when they need to be charged. But that being said, it's one of those things that's just like, ugh, gross. You know, kind of just lightning just gives me the ick now. You know, I just want to be done with it and so i would very very much like if it would be possible to get these peripherals even if they're not really refreshed like you were saying just these exact peripherals but with usbc please and thank you and the other things that rumored obviously we've talked about the smaller mac mini in past episodes that's the rumor it'll be redesigned for the first time in i think 14 years or something that the case will be much smaller than it was yeah i don't i don't need a new mac mini in my life i have one i have an m1 mac mini that i had gotten refurbished if I remember correctly, and that's what runs Plex and channels and not too much else, to be completely honest with you.

1:01:47I have zero need to replace that Mac Mini, but if there's like a little puck-looking thing, oh man, that's going to be tempting. It's really going to be tempting. Yeah, and it's supposed to have a lot of ports on it. I actually do have an intended Mac Mini in mind. I'm trying... So, okay. You're going to put it outside on the deck. No, basically, my last experience with a modern Synology was not good. It's basically dead already. Like, I only bought it, I think, two years ago, and it is not going well. Well, you should have kept it inside. Well, it was in a utility closet that is – it was in a conditioned utility area.

1:02:30So it wasn't, like, fully inside, but it's basically inside. But anyway, I want something for archival storage that can back up to Backblaze straightforwardly with the regular Backblaze, not like the pay-per-gig one. And I have external SSDs that are huge and great. I have all these giant hard disks that are ready to go sitting around. So I think what I want to do really is just get the Mac Mini and Velcro, one of these little Samsung SSDs to it, and maybe down the road have a hard drive enclosure that it connects to. But for the most part, I just want a Mac Mini to be my archive server in my house and get rid of this broken synology.

1:03:12Yeah, hopefully the pricing won't be too ridiculous. but yeah i think a lot of people will be tempted by the the shrink on these because they're going to be good machines and i think the rumor is m4 and possibly m4 pro that's the other thing about this announcement we know what the m4 is it's already in a bunch of macs m4 pro and m4 max haven't really been super solid rumors about what exactly they contain we think we know like oh the pro will be better than the m4 the max will be better still like there's been lots of pro and maxes and all the previous m series but and the m3 is apple changed it up a little bit and the pro was different than it was in the m1 pro and the m2 pro right and so we really don't know what they're going to do with the m4 pro and m4 max at this point uh except to say that uh yeah the macbook pros it presumably there'll be m4 m4 pro and m4 max based macbook pros as well and so we'll find out how much gpu how many cores what are the clock speeds like what is the cooling like uh you know these are all n3e processors uh presumably uh and so this should be exciting we've waited a while like the m4 debuted in the ipad of all things and then came to a bunch of the macs now it's going to be coming to even more macs but we're finally getting to like the i'm going to say the good chips because the m4 is a good chip but like the more powerful chips the the beefier chips nothing big and fancy like anything ultra sized or mac pro all those rumors are pushed way out into next year the mac studio in fact the latest rumors of the mac studio which might have been scheduled for spring next year is now looking more like it might be pushed more towards june and at that point they might as well just save it for wwc uh and the mac pro same thing if you're lucky gets announced to wwc and ships in much later in the year so uh no don't have any expectations that you're going to see anything beyond an m4 max ship but you know because these things tend not to leak for all we know they've decided to stop naming them pro and max maybe there's only one of them and that has a different suffix who knows but yeah our money's on m4 m4 pro and m4 max uh and those and the rumors are that these machines will be the same the iMac will look the same the macro pros will look the same the Mac mini is the only one that's going to look different uh so yeah just a bunch of laptops with the same ports and the same design and the same everything more or less except swap out the m3 for a better m4 uh insert suffix here that all sounds great and that's another reason why a press release may be reasonable uh have they ever done a press release for a new form factor for a mac i don't know it seems like something that would have to be potentially rare but not inconceivable so honestly i don't know if there's going to be an event the rumors are as we record this that next week whatever's going to happen will happen so tune in next week i mean if they were going to do a press release for an entirely new industrial design product it would be the mac mini because it's such a half-assed product for the most part Or the iPhone SE.

1:05:55Yeah, or the iPhone SE, exactly. I think both of those would be very likely to be press release only. I'm sure they would have briefings for a handful of press people, but that's not going to justify an event. And that's why I kind of think there is no event here. I think this is all press release products because none of these are the big kind of splash that Apple likes to make with events. They tend not to have events these days that don't have some kind of like really exciting novel thing and i don't think a new mac mini does it no matter how good it is because it's just the mac mini i don't the iphone se does it because again it's just the iphone se these are not high profile high excitement level products these are specialized things for certain markets doing certain things that apple does not really draw a lot of attention to so i and and new and you know a new chip in the iMac that otherwise probably looks the same.

1:06:47I can't see that changing. That's going to be also a nice update, but who cares? You care if you're in the market to buy an iMac, but no one else will care. And then finally, for the potential upgrade to USB-C keyboards and mice,

1:07:07I hope this is wrong. I really do. I cannot see them changing anything else about them. I bet the dumb magic mouse that i love so much but the dumb magic mouse i bet it still charges on the bottom you still flip it over like a turtle i bet the you know everything else about the keyboards and the trackpad i bet they're all exactly the same it just switches to usbc and makes no other changes i hope i'm wrong but i bet that's what it is yeah no that's that's the smart money because that's just it just makes sense i mean they they did it to an entire product forget about like peripherals they did the airpods max right the whole product that's the only thing that it got they've done that they did it with the airpods cases hey first we had the case it was lightning now it's the same case but it's got a usbc on it uh apple's not super into revising its monitors or its keyboard and mouse peripherals on any kind of reasonable schedule so watch for that and i would have to think again this type of these rumors with obscure products not as much stuff leaks because people just aren't as interested in leaking it so if apple did have all new peripherals it's conceivable that we would know nothing about it a week out but it's you know i would expect to hear something about uh revised products yeah if they if they like this is the best case scenario they just revise and have usbc and they come with the iMac it's like yeah that's what we wanted uh if you're waiting around for apple to make like a new ergonomic keyboard that makes marco happy or a new mouse that's much higher that makes me happy like don't hold your breath not a chance their their uh their design philosophy on those peripherals has been the same for a really long time um and similarly for the macbook pros again no rumors about case design changes or whatever there is there are rumors about the next genera essentially the next generation of apple of the macbook pro laptops potentially getting slimmer which we kind of just went through this whole big thing of like the johnny i philosophy of everything uniform not enough ports too thin blah blah to the much more sort of like rectilinear blocky utilitarian sd uh card slot sporting hd port sporting uh macbook pros they were like hallelujah like the magic is back they finally made more good laptops we were all how many years has it been we've just been riding this high but eventually they will have to redesign them and the rumor is they're going to redesign them to be thinner which is fine but now comes the real test of like hey that correction they made on the mac or pro line where they gave us the ports back and put in more battery life and did a little bit of you know function over form by saying let's just make it rectangular because that leaves more room for battery the test comes when it's time to make the new revision do they go back to their old ways do they say you know we could make it really skinny if we got rid of that hdmi port or we got rid of the sd card or whatever right i keep thinking back to like the macbook air like the 2011 generation of macbook air that are we look the macbook air used to have an sd card slot folks right macbook air it wasn't like a pro only feature somehow on the thinnest lightest laptop they made they found room for an sd card slot whereas now it's like i don't know 16 inch macbook pro i'm not sure we can fit an sd card slot in there so you know that's again that's not this year that's rumors are maybe next year or the year after so watch for that that will be a good uh test uh but yeah and in the meantime like i agree this could be a press release uh thing despite the mac mini uh being a big deal you know you know it would make for a uh a mac event that they would want to actually have have an inverse and event would be if they announce perhaps the world's fastest personal computer or something impressive like that but alas that is not what they're announced john let me tell you right now if for some reason we got an invite to go and because you refuse to leave your house for any reason whatsoever you didn't go and then they release the mac pro you are fired from the show sir i would go i mean it would be a wwc announcement i'm going to wwc if i get an invite next year what if they do it in a week you never know i don't think they're going to do this again the rumors are that the both the mac studio and the and the Mac Pro are potentially announceable around June of next year.

1:11:02I mean, the Mac Pro probably wouldn't be ready, but that doesn't stop them. They'll announce it and ship it three months later. Who cares, right? But yeah, no, I'm there. I'm at WWDC. That's my event. Don't forget about me, Apple. Yeah, well, don't forget about any of us, but still. I don't know. I'm just really amused at the thought of putting, breathing life into the Mac Mini, you know, and I just think that would be really fun. And everything else, like, I don't feel like i'm in the market for a new macbook pro uh i don't want a mac studio that's not feeling a need i have however i will say just i think it was earlier today maybe it was yesterday somehow i got thinking about y 'all's monitors and how the xdr is like it's is it 10 it's not 10 years old it's like five years old now though isn't it how old is that six five 2019 right i mean to put things in perspective michaela is in in first grade right now and she is six and a half years old like that thing came out what when she was one and now she's in first grade like that the xdr is old and the studio display ain't much better price hasn't changed but you know with inflation it actually is cheaper now well that is true but it's still a very very old monitor and i don't know i would like to see i would like to see the monitors refreshed and i think mike had mentioned um uh promotion on an external monitor i think that would be really neat is it a need i have no but would i love it heck yeah i would i mean honestly i kind of i'd be a little hesitant about them updating it because the monitor they made in the meantime the studio display has a lot of weird little problems with its software oh it's fine it's fine it had a little bit of a rough entry but it's fine that that's i feel like that is that is the test that's what everyone's afraid of is like oh are they gonna put like an a19 in the monitor and it's gonna be flaky like the studio was until they get all the firmware updates like should a little mini version of ios be running on an iphone chip inside your monitor or should it be more like the xdr which was in the the days when apple was willing to use whatever weird chips they have inside this thing to do like to the the you know image processing and run the usb hub and whatever it's like uh apple just decided like why are we paying for these chips from all these different manufacturers to do this stuff and dealing with this weird firmware why don't we just put an a series chip in there and put our own os on it and the answer was because you're not very good at that and yeah the mac studio was a little bit flaky but my wife's got a mac studio it's right behind me and whatever flakiness there was in the beginning she has had no complaints on it and it has never done anything weird i still that said i still fear the possible uh flakiness of an a series powered xdr replacement because this xdr has just worked like a dumb peripheral which is exactly what you wanted to do like i don't even want to know there's anything computer inside it especially since this thing does not have a power button which apple is still obsessed with right so if there was something wrong with it power cycling it would be a pain but thankfully i've pretty much never had to do that um so i think my uh you know i'm happy with max dr the way it is talk about if you're waiting for a mouse keyboard like i said or monitors to be revised don't hold your breath there's been rumors of new monitors for for max for years and years but it seems like maybe those projects are started internally and then scrubbed and started again and then scrubbed and started again and then scrubbed and they just go around and around until one of them actually escapes the company and lets you buy it.

1:14:13And that hasn't happened for a while. Yeah. For the record, I did have to power cycle my studio display, not irregularly when I first got it. And I think it's been at least a year since I've had to do that. Possibly more. I cannot remember the last time I've needed to do it. And, you know, I have this array of the studio display in the center and the, and the bequeathed LG 5k from Marco on one side and one that I had bought secondhand on the other. and I maintain that while the LG Ultra Fine is fine, the studio display is noticeably better and it does have weirdness and the camera is just trash.

1:14:48It is straight trash. The camera is real bad. But other than that, it's actually a pretty darn nice screen and I would love to get, you know, studio display two to put in the center and, you know, downgrade the current studio display to either my left or right side and, you know, and just move everything down a notch, which actually brings me to a mostly unrelated point so i have the the most recent apple tv in the living room i have the one generation back in the bedroom and then i use the two generation back one so this is you know several years old now um as the like tailgate apple tv or if i if we're traveling somewhere for a long time we'll bring that apple tv um i feel like the eldest apple tv is getting real long in the tooth at this point and i would love to have another instance where I filter everything down a notch.

1:15:37So I would also love to, and I don't think there's any rumors about this, but I'd love to see a new Apple TV as well. There are rumors about it, but like the Apple TV is kind of reaching the point, kind of reaching a fork in the road. Because as far as I'm aware, there aren't really many television viewing-based standards and technology that Apple TV does not yet support that it would be useful for it to support. People might say 8K and, you know, the ps5 pro supposedly supports 8k but so does the ps5 technically anyway if if there's a use case for 8k potentially next generation consoles might be the use case but they've said that before um but other than that it's like there's that quick thing about uh media switching without as long a blackout thing stuff like that there's not a lot of stuff that you say i would i need some more hardware on this apple tv to do video watching then there's gaming which of course you need unlimited power forever and ever does apple want to turn the apple tv into more of a gaming thing or make their own controller are they going to ship it are they going to upgrade like that's the kind of the decision point because their apple is kind of close to saying for the purposes of watching video content there's no reason for the apple tv to get any more powerful for the purposes of playing games there's infinity reason for the apple tv to get more powerful which way do we go with this product i'm with casey whenever a new apple tv comes out i buy it just blindly for the same reason he does because i just rotate them through my thing and historically there has been a benefit especially when they went 4k and they got a little bit faster or whatever and i do occasionally play games on apple tv although let me just take an aside to complain uh my son was home from school for break and wanted to play journey i'm like great that's out for apple tv guess what is it out for apple tv anymore it was briefly out for apple tv i think maybe if i have a false memory of it or whatever but it definitely is not out for apple tv now you can play it on the ipad you can play it on ios uh you can play it on lots of different platforms so that you cannot play out on Apple TV.

1:17:30I think it used to be an Apple Arcade and maybe it was like a time-limited thing, but it's super annoying when that happens. So anyway, it'll be interesting to see if the next Apple TV comes out. Like there's no point if you just watch streaming TV to say like we need an even faster SOC here so you can play and pause television. Like I would love for them to make that more reliable and better because it's still flakier than my like TiVo from 2002 or whatever year I was using it, which is sad considering it has like a bazillion times the power of that TiVo, right? obviously it's looking at 4k content of sd but still even accounting for that like so i'm not saying the apple tv is as good as it can get it should get much better but i'm not sure if hardware increasing the level of hardware is has any point for anything other than gaming and so maybe that's why they're dragging their feet on this there are rumors about a new apple tv coming out it supposedly does have a better soc and more ram and apple intelligence capability and all that you know all the stuff but i don't i don't remember what the dates associated with that are and i'm I'm sure Apple's not in a hurry, but it is interesting to think about this lull in the Apple TV where until we get 8K everywhere, even if we do get 8K everywhere, like by that point, the Apple TV caliber SoC should be able to handle 8K fine.

1:18:39And it's like, you know, is this is this basically is this a gaming box or is it not? And if it's a gaming box, why doesn't it come with a controller? And that is the decision Apple is probably going to have to make because there will be many years of time where the Apple TV is completely adequate for all video functions. and then the question is why would anyone ever buy another one of these things yeah i mean no argument it's crummy but i get it they could also improve their remote because even though they made it better than it was it's still like great oh stop it's perfectly good it's fine yeah i agree it's fine it's better than fine you grumps i use it i use it all the time and every time i use it i just think about how much better it could be it's not it's not killing me it's not but i'm just like well what do you need to change i really we don't have the time for this but here we go what what do you need to change like the so that like the the d-pad essentially up down left right right and the swipey thing in the middle i know you can disable the swipey thing in the middle but enabling allows you to swipe through things faster but disabling it allows you to use the ring more easily but i feel like the ring is just not as not as secure to me as an actual d-pad i still have to think about the north south east west of it because it is one continuous ring and i still have to kind of think about not touching the touchpad but i want to keep the touchpad enabled because I do swipe sometimes.

1:19:48So that's unsatisfactory. And the whole size of it, it's bigger than it was in terms of thickness, right? But it's still not really filling the negative space of my hand in the way that I want it to. I still feel like it's still a little bit small. There's advantages to being small. It looks elegant. It's good for people with small hands. But for my hands, it still feels a little bit small, a little bit fidgety. And it's nothing like, you know, it talks about the TiVo remote, but just any other kind of like more normal size remote with bigger, beefier, more distinct buttons that I can use with less mental effort.

1:20:21It's not like I'm killing myself using the remote. I use the Apple TV remote all the time. It's basically the main remote I use for our television. Still feel like it could be better. And it runs against everything that Apple wants to do because they want it to be small and elegant or whatever. And they're like, here's our concession to ergonomics. This is the new one. And we all celebrate it because it was so much better than the old one. But there's still farther to go if they want to improve this thing. And I wish they would. I understand what you're saying. But for me, while I would love it if it wasn't the same shape as an original Nintendo controller, you know, just a squared off rectangle, basically.

1:20:53It's carved on the bottom. Well, fair. But that being said, I don't think I want it to be very much bigger. I can understand ditching the rectangle shape, but I don't think I need it to be much bigger, nor do I want it to be much bigger. I like that it's a small little thing that my kids can use just as easily as I can. I think in that sense, for me, the size of it is fine. but i concur that the shape could be a little more ergonomic definitely and even the tivo peanut grow got smaller over the years like it didn't stay the same size it's a question of striking that balance but i feel like the thickness maybe is more important than the length and width just sort of like you know because it's not like it's like how do you grip it is it kind of like the apple mouse some people love it because it's so low profile because of the way they use the mouse but other people don't use the mouse that way and they find the very low profile mouse to be like against everything they want out of a mouse so i feel like maybe the remote is the same way but either way the the circular d-pad with the touch thing in the middle i feel like is such a weird compromise between the different functions and i always find it it's i find it difficult to very quickly go left left right down down to the thing that i want and even just having to make the mental choice of like should i try to get there with the swipey pad versus should i try to get there with like the digital d-pad even just making that choice is a little bit of more cognitive load and again i know you can disable it but like i in some parts of the ui are so much better with the ability to swipe but other parts aren't and i don't just feel like obviously it's so much simpler in the tivo world but there's no swipey pad and it's just up down left right and you would just mindlessly go up down left right because there was no other option there were the choice and the buttons were big and beefy and easy to find even when they were still in a ring i felt like they were easier to find because you weren't worried about accidentally swiping when you're in across the middle and it responded faster to you i don't know like it's it's not a video game it's just a bunch of menus it's not a big deal it's a much bigger deal that the stupid streaming apps forget where i was in this in the thing and start playing the episode i saw last night that is a much bigger deal that's a software bug and not a hardware issue but we're talking about the hardware now so uh yoke and marsh marshall writes it feels like recently more and more places i deal with want to copy or want a copy of or to scan my driver's license Like the doctor's office for my child wants me to upload a photo of both sides to their app, or the school wants an email with a photo of it.

1:23:07I've become much more careful about giving identity data out to places I do not have control over. Obviously, social security number is a different level, but let's just talk about driver's licenses. How do you all handle this? I mean, do we have a choice in most cases? I just cough it up. Well, actually, so that's the way I handle this is if it's something that I don't think really necessarily needs it, I try to just not give it and see what happens. So for instance, like that's big Marco energy. Yeah. Well, you know, for instance, like we changed dentists when we moved. And so, you know, and the new dentist wants basically every single thing about us.

1:23:42Driver's licenses, social security numbers, all that stuff. And I'm like, why? Like, what do they need that to like submit to the dental insurance that I don't have? Like, you know, maybe they can just get away without it. And, you know, are they just asking for it so that they can try to chase me down if I don't pay a bill? because I can just pay when I have the cleaning. So, you know, a lot of these things, a lot of times people ask for stuff because it's routine or it's quote standard or we might need it or whatever. And when it comes to your personal information, you can take the extra two seconds to be like, what if I just don't give it?

1:24:23Do you really need it? It's like, you know, when the grocery store asks you for your phone number, they're doing it because they want to do crap with your data. and you can choose at that moment whether to give it to them or not. Don't assume that a place that seems more official than a grocery store for some reason, like your dentist or whatever, why do they deserve your data? There might be a reason why they absolutely need it, but they also might not fully need it. And so you reserve the right to say, can I just not do this? Can I not give you my driver's license? Can I not give you this information you're asking for?

1:24:58What happens if I don't? Can we proceed without it? Like you can ask those kind of questions. And I strongly encourage you to do that more often because the more I have done that, the more often the answer is, okay, fine. All the time, it's just fine. Like, you know, another example, this is not quite the same thing, but my current health insurance plan never mailed me a card. So I don't have a health insurance card. I haven't had one for like two years. So when I go to a new doctor or whatever, they always ask, you know, upload a scan of your card. And I don't have it. I have the number, like I have my policy number.

1:25:32And so I've done things like take a screenshot of the 1Password screen showing my policy number, like literally in a screenshot of 1Password on my phone and said, will this work? Or here's the number. Is that all you need? And so far in every single case, even when they're like, no, we need the card. And I'll just say, well, I don't have one. Here's the number. Try it. and every single time I've been able to get the care I need, it has always just been fine. So again, push back a little. If a place that doesn't need your driver's license is asking you for your driver's license, try saying no. Try saying, can we proceed without it?

1:26:13Do you really need it? I would rather not share it. Or you can make up some BS like, my job requires me to keep a certain degree of confidentiality. Whatever you need to say, don't be a jerk about it, but try to push back and actually ask like do you really need it or are you just asking because a lot of times they don't really need it i was going to use the grocery store example too because in my local grocery stores that i go to for many years they were like do you have a phone number with us do you blah blah can you know do you have a phone number can you give us a phone number or whatever and i would just say no no no no they they've changed recently to not asking that question which i think is wise but instead having a system uh they have you know whatever their rewards program thing that of course has an iOS app and all this other BS that everybody makes you do to gamify their shopping, right?

1:26:58But the bottom line is you do get money off your food if you play this game. And so the motivation is, hey, do you want a few bucks off your groceries? And the way they do is they don't ask you for your phone number anymore. But on the stupid little patty thing that they have there, you type in your phone number to essentially get your discount to say, oh, now we know who you are. Now we will register your groceries in the app and give you the discount that you're entitled to for doing rewards blah blah blah right whole foods has the uh the amazon well i don't think it's amazon but anyway the whole foods has the thing where you get the diamond shaped qr code thing in their app and you scan it in the thing god knows what's on that qr code that they're scanning it's probably all your information anyway right uh and i forget if i said this but recently i changed my action button to launch the whole foods app because you can never find your code because i realized the main time that i'm trying to do something under time pressure on my phone and i find it frustrating is unlocking it and launching the whole foods app so i can scan it so that's what my action button does now because i'm using the camera control for the camera action button launches the whole foods app which is terrible i don't even want i don't even shop at whole foods that often right i was gonna ask how often are you freaking whole foods i mean it's it's within walking distance so if you need something last minute you just walk to the whole foods but i don't actually do my grocery shopping there i do it at star market which is a local chain that is probably owned by whoever the hell owns all the chains in this area now who got that shaw's bought them recently where it recently means like 10 years ago but anyway uh yeah star market has the app they don't ask you your phone number but if you want your discount they have nothing for you to scan as far as i'm aware you got to type your so i'm typing my telephone number into the keypad rather than giving it to them which i guess is better than reading out into the air but anyway it's ridiculous um for the driver's license thing i think one of the reasons you see a lot more of this happening is twofold one there are more online account thingies these days that give you some way to prove you are who you are to give some kind of backstop for account recovery and they essentially just need you some proof of identity and they have you scan your driver's license or your passport or some other thing obviously only do that if you think the value of being able to recover your account through proving who you are is worth the loss of privacy of giving these people your thing.

1:29:11How much do you trust the company? Do you really care about this account? Like, usually this is an optional type thing, but that that's part of the same family of activities of like, they just need you to prove who you are, but you're not there. A lot of times, if you're there in person, if they just need your driver's license for you to prove your identity, you don't have to scan it or give it to them. You can just show it to them. and maybe you can see if they're typing down your driver's license number, or do they just want to say, yes, a human being has now seen, and like a bouncer at a bar, looked at your ID and decided, I think this is a real ID.

1:29:45You are Joe Schmo. You have a state-issued identification. Thumbs up. And then they never scan it, and hopefully they never write anything down about it. You're just showing it to them and then putting it back into your wallet. So that is another kind of middle ground. But, yeah, like Marco said, you can just say no and see what the consequences are. most of the time they just need the information i think i don't know this for a fact but i think a lot of the reasons health care providers in particular want you to scan both sides of your card is because they're so sick of trying to navigate the world of getting people to give them the correct information from either side of the card and they're just like if we just get scanned we'll figure out where it is oh it's this number but not this suffix but don't worry about your group number but we need this id and but like just scan the cards like i feel like it's just a like you know avoiding a customer service issue and so in that case if you wanted to skirt around that it's like do you just need my member number because i'll just give you that it's this and i don't even have like marco i don't even have a card but if that's what you need and very often like credit card numbers they can look at the member number for whatever your insurance is and know whether you've omitted the right number of characters from the beginning or whether you've tacked on a group number or whatever like they can figure it out so that's that's pretty much what i do as well although i have to say that for my driver's license and stuff like that i just assume everyone can get that information anyway my social security number is a lot higher security than that.

1:31:00I have to say, I don't think anyone has asked for my social security number in a situation where I don't think they should need it, but driver's license I'm a little bit more cavalier with because whatever. But yeah, push back and see what happens. This totally sets aside the question of whether these things actually are keeping you secure or not. Whether you can keep these things reasonably secret, what happens when they do get out there. This sets all that aside. Whether someone can just buy a database of all this information anyway right now for$100 or something. Yeah, exactly. Most of that does not matter.

1:31:31I would also say two things. While you were talking, I tried to decode my Whole Foods QR code. And it decodes into a base64 and then what appears to be a custom binary blob that begins with AMZ, so Amazon, and then some binary data that I don't immediately understand. so there's a lot actually in there I assume there's some kind of expiring signature thing because it's one of those things that they cycle it every few seconds and if you try to take a screenshot it yells at you it actually says for my security screenshots are not allowed like oh really that's for my security you can take a picture with another phone but anyway yeah so who knows what's in there but also in grocery stores with loyalty things so I actually do use the Whole Foods one because between that and using Amazon's Prime Visa card, I actually get a decent amount off of Whole Foods prices.

1:32:22And by the way, I think we've complained about this before, but like, Jesus, when I pay with an Amazon card, don't make me scan the code. You already know who I am. I know. What is that? Like, it's an Amazon card in an Amazon store, and I still have to bind my action button to scan the stupid QR. You already know who I am. Just give me the discount. Honestly, the Whole Foods, you get a discount on like 3 % of their products. It's very frustrating. yeah anyway but at other stores like you know we have like you know a non-whole foods just chain grocery store here of course every grocery store has loyalty things but the cashier asks do you have a whatever card and every and i don't and every time i say sorry i don't and if and if you're just nice sorry i don't have one 90 of the time the cashier are like oh i'll put one in for you don't worry and then you know they put in their cards they get the rewards or whatever well you have nicer cashiers than we do the cashiers here are trained to say oh do you want one yeah here they're here they're a lot more they're a lot more uh i think a lot less aggressive with the sales pitch they they just want to keep moving and so that yeah i'll put one in for you sure i'm like great thank you i every time thank you so much and then you know they get their points i get the discount and i didn't have to have all the tracking yeah the pro move there is oh i left it in the car or i forgot it at home which is a little bit of a white lie but then they want you to type in your telephone number oh we can look it up by your phone number no fair Yeah, it's much better to just say, sorry, I don't have one.

1:33:40Because most of the time, they're not going to want to stop the flow of customers to try to explain to you why you should have one. No, they just put one in for you. Beep, and then it's done. They move on. All right. Caleb asks, my parents are both in their late 60s and occasionally have issues with password management and getting devices set up. I've considered proposing pulling them into my Apple family plan and setting up legacy contacts. Do you have any advice or suggestions, or do you manage any account or technology for your parents? This has been a little bit of an issue for me. I don't have any good answers, but my parents are getting older, and I think that I am starting to approach the time where I really need to get this stuff squared away before one or both of them loses their cognition.

1:34:22I can't think of the word I'm looking for. Maybe I'm losing it. But anyways, the point is that I need to have this conversation with them, and I haven't yet, and I know that this is coming. Marco, I know you had grandparents that passed a couple of years back. I don't know if you have any thoughts about this for your parents. And then, John, your parents are still kicking. Let's end with John, please. So, Marco, let's start with you. Yeah. So, yeah, back when my grandparents were still around, everything, you know, the tools were all different. I'm fortunate enough not to have to deal with this yet with the next generation down, like, you know, the our parents' generation.

1:34:58But, you know, certainly it's coming up. I'm thankful all these new tools are here now. You know, I'm thankful that we have things like legacy contacts, that all of the family plans in the Apple and other similar environments have gotten a lot better, a lot more full featured. We have things like remote control diagnostics, like, you know, remote screen sharing, like that kind of stuff is getting better all the time and getting, you know, without going too insecure or too controlling. because what you have to balance, and this is so tricky with so much of aging and caring for and living with or being with elderly relatives, is there's a tricky balance that you have to walk between letting them be independent and have their own lives versus you being available to help them.

1:35:47And that's just different with everybody, and that can change over time. As somebody gets older, they might be either okay with you taking more control or they actually might want you to take more control. But that's going to depend. So what you do with your particular situation, you've got to just be constantly reevaluating that and adapting to what your actual needs are. So it might require something like you can remote into their stuff whenever they need help. It might be something like that. or they might not want you to have that level of access yet. It might be more like, you know, maybe you keep a copy of their password and they can call you if they forget them.

1:36:28You know, it could be as simple as that. But again, it all depends and it's always an evolving situation. So kind of just, you know, keep an open mind to what you might have to do. Be willing to change things. Be willing to make it easy on them. And, you know, don't assume that any one solution that you come up with will last forever. John? So my parents, they are thinking about one of the things that's saving me from having to deal with a lot of this is the fact that neither one of them really maintains any sort of digital collection of stuff. Like they're just they just never like they have their own photo libraries and their sync to iCloud photos, but they're just sparse, disorganized and just not important.

1:37:18to them really right like what for example when my parents make their like calendar for the year we all make like calendars on like shutterfly or whatever like we put on our fridges and have pictures of family photos or whatever most of the photos in that calendar are photos that i take that i send them to put in the calendar or they get sent from my other siblings to them like they're not taking pictures they're not collecting pictures they have pictures of they go on vacations and they take pictures but very few and who knows if they ever look at them and so the real question is for like legacy contacts and dealing with their digital stuff or whatever what happens if they die and no one has access to their stuff the answer is they have no stuff they're just like what do they have they have accounts on systems that i don't care about like no one's going to care about after they die what their login was to their local like newspaper website because who cares right so they've got all their usenames and passwords and by the way on that front i try to herd my parents towards the sort of happy path apple default things or whatever but in practice uh you know my dad is somewhat willing to do them my mother insists on having a document with all her passwords in it and there's nothing you can do about that and fine like if that system works for her then that's what works for her and but like honestly i was like well what if you lose access to that document if she's dead like i don't need those passwords like nobody needs those passwords like i'm not worried about losing all this it's really just more of like i feel like my job is more or less just like facilitating their ability to do what they want to do with their computers and what they want to do with their computers is not the same as what i want to do and in my particular case also does not leave any sort of digital assets that i have to worry about now that said i did make them all set up legacy contacts and set me like i did all the apple things like because why not why not do that like they don't even like because when they when we visit with each other inevitably i well it used to be they would be better about doing them now they're like i don't want to bring my laptop on the plane it's so heavy they just want to bring their ipad and their phone right and their laptops are not heavy but anyway uh like they used to bring all their tech products and part of us meeting was like here john here's all the tech products and they would my mom would make a list in notes and say here's all the problems i'm having with my computers and we just go through them one at a time i can't get this to work why does this thing do this i want to do this i want to do that or whatever and we always just go through all those and i fix all their computer problems and i let them go back and do what they want to do uh but trying to sort of impose like oh everyone needs to use one password or we all need to be in the same apple family or like if they're up for that if your relatives are up for that fine but mine aren't and honestly i wouldn't want them included to my apple family because that's just a complication that i don't need to deal with personally we should really just keep those things separate uh but yeah i help them with what they need help with and i make sure that they're able to live their life and do their computer stuff uh and i think you know my parents are kind of even like this where their belongings they're already trying to like give away their old you know photo albums of us as kids like physical photo albums of us as kids because they don't even want to deal with those anymore right uh so they're pretty good about dispersing their stuff and honestly i would be shocked if they had more than like 10 000 photos in their libraries and how many of those are actually good is even probably even smaller now i think those are valuable photos because they go on vacations with themselves like we don't have those pictures sometimes they send them to us like oh we're on vacation here we are in florida look at us on this speech or whatever right uh and presumably they have some of those but they're just not big picture takers and they don't collect them and they don't they don't really do anything with them so if i lose access to all that which i won't because i'm their legacy contact but if i did it wouldn't be that big of a deal so yeah i think marco was getting at the heart of it which is like you got to figure out like what these people actually need from you not what you think they should be doing with computers and that really clarifies your role in all this randall miller writes i I shut down my new MacBook Pro occasionally, but it restarts when I touch any key on the keyboard.

1:41:02Why on earth would Apple do this and leave no way to turn this quote-unquote feature off? I mostly agree with this. I find it frustrating as well. I particularly find this frustrating when I go to clean my keyboard, which usually involves, you know, mashing down on the buttons from time to time. And I find that very frustrating. Now, there is a tool, which one of you, I presume, John, has put in the show notes, called keyboard clean tool that fixes the keyboard cleaning problem but i don't have any solutions for the touch anything to turn the computer on problem yeah that's the tricky bit and there's many apps that do this they basically like disable the keyboard until you do some really complicated thing that you're unlikely to do by accident i don't know if the one we're putting in the show notes is like the quote-unquote good one it is just the one that i found that seemed vaguely reputable but there's a million of these apps right but you do need one sometimes if you want to clean the keyboard without fear of accidentally doing something bad to your computer it's not like you're worried about waking it up or the screen turning on you're worried that like you're going to accidentally hit a keyboard command that's going to like delete something or like you know you basically just want to say i want all key presses to just go nowhere for a while because i'm going to clean my keyboard and that's separate from the turning off thing but that's relevant because you're like oh i'll solve this problem i don't need a special app i'll just shut down my mac and that used to work until many many years ago i forget when they said guess what touching anything on the surface of this laptop will make it boot from a typically quote-unquote off state you shut down not sleep you shut down your portable macintosh computer and then what makes it turn on it used to be there was a power button but then they kind of got rid of that then it was a touch id button they said you know what it should wake up if you touch anything and now shutting your computer down to clean the keyboard very carefully uh no longer works because of this i find it frustrating too i believe there probably is some firmware i was going to say open firmware whatever the hell whatever the hell the the firmware that uh the arm based max use to turn this off but it's not sort of a user visible you know feature that you could find in a gui somewhere as far as i know so i kind of understand why apple did this because searching for the power button on max has been a bit of a silly game for many years uh and it seems seems silly to tech nerds who are like i don't remember when the power button was on the keyboard and i loved it or whatever but if you don't know where it is like people just wanted to open up their laptop and if it's turned off they just want to mash it with their meaty paws and have it turn on so this is the right thing to do 99 of the time except that one percent of the time when you want to clean the keyboard when it's incredibly frustrating so i don't know the solution maybe there should be a gui to toggle this off in system setting somewhere that nobody can find but yeah in the meantime maybe check out one of the keyboard cleaning apps thanks to our sponsor this week click for sonos and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join.

1:43:45One of the member perks is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week, overtime will be looking at some of the discussions recently about what is a photo? You know, comparing the different phone and camera vendors definitions like what is a photo? How does it relate to things like AI edits? It's kind of an interesting meaty topic. So that's going to be our overtime topic this week. What is a photo? Thank you so much, everybody. You can join to here at ATV.FM slash join. And we will talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Accidental.

1:44:26Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, 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-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. I see John's Quicksilver update. like is this quicksilver like the launcher from a thousand years ago quicksilver sure is oh my god what happened it's been in the notes for a while uh i started using quicksilver ages ago as my launcher thing i use it in a very limited way i've talked about on the show i mostly just use it to launch apps and do a few other things i've had it for years and years uh and you know i know there's a million other launchers i own a million other launchers as well but i just like quicksilver does what i want and i'm good with that i like how it looks i like how it works i like everything about it i'm so used to it i don't need to do anything fancier than it does everything's fine uh but quicksilver being a very old app whose original developer moved on to do other things has had a bumpy road in recent the past five years or so maybe uh there i think someone else picked up the project but there's not a lot of people developing and maintaining it and when it works that's fine but when it starts getting flaky it's like well it's open source maybe i could try to fix it myself i can never get the freaking thing to build because of some obscure xcode error that i can't figure out and it's objective c so i'm like oh i don't want to do that you file a bug but then you feel bad because it's just one guy trying to maintain the thing in his spare time and you're like maybe i should just try another launcher so i just go through all the other launchers that i already own buy the latest alfred power pack make sure i have the latest version of all the things try raycast all these new fancy things and it was like you know i can get by with some of these but i kind of miss quicksilver and then the quicksilver dev will like come back from vacation and make a change and quicksilver will start working again and just i just feel like i'm kind of stuck here because i i'm just so used to quicksilver and i just wanted to continue to work the way it has always worked uh but the the things i'm getting hung up and so some of the problems i've been having with it is sometimes they were just playing crash and that's one of the worst things it can do because it's a faceless i run it in faceless mode there's no dock icon there's no menu bar icon is just faceless it's just part of my mac and there's nothing worse than hitting command space and having nothing happen because i have a spotlight bound to command option space so having a launcher and hitting command space and starting to type and nothing happening well a that typing is now going into whatever the hell you were in like a messages window it's like whatever the beginning of what you're going to type and b it just makes your computer feel like it's broken right it's just like just it's like it's like getting on an escalator that doesn't move right my computer is not doing what it's supposed to do and then it's like hung in the background or it's like it's crashing you need to relaunch it and how would i relaunch it command space q u oh no that doesn't work it's a chicken egg like i don't know how many times i've done that to try to relaunch quicksilver it's just madness right um sometimes it hangs and there's other thing that it was doing that i actually filed the bug on was like it would launch but if you look at the quicksilver catalog which is like the list of things you wanted to index that are searchable i have a very limited catalog with a bunch of custom items in it and i like type command space and start typing something and it wouldn't autocomplete to the thing that i know is there and i'd go look in the catalog and it would be like yeah look in this folder and scan all the files and it would say zero items scan i'm like what do you mean zero items so i hit the little refresh circle button and it would scan it and say 100 items well why didn't you scan them when you boot it up it's like oh do you have it set to manually scan to automatically scan to scan every hour you know like i tried all these different things but the bottom line was it was just not scanning my catalog you'd you log in you'd you know you'd boot your computer log in and quick server would be running but half the catalog would not be scanned for no errors logged anywhere it was just like oh i can't like i can't use it like this like oh either it's crash and it's not running at all or when it's running i hit command space and start typing stuff and it doesn't find the things that i said so i'm like this is this is too much i can't it's not doing the job that it needed to do so for i spent a while using alfred and i sort of hammered alfred into shape to try to make it more like quicksilver it's not exactly like it in in ways that are in pointless ways just like aesthetics like i like the big i use like the quicksilver bezel um bezel classic i think whatever it is it was the original appearance of quicksilver and they they changed it years and years ago and i complained and i said hey why don't you just leave the old appearance in too you have seven different appearances but you deleted the original appearance just leave them all in so we can pick our appearance and they brought back the one and they called it classic or whatever that's the one that i used it's got really big icons when you type command space and start typing something it cycles through the matching icon like as you type as it refines it it just basically it just shows you the top hit and configurably you can make it after a delay show you the second and third and fourth hits or you can make it only when you hit the down arrow show you the second third hits but the bottom line is when i'm typing i just want to see one very large icon right in front of me that is cycling as i type things and if i want to i have it set so if i want to see the third and fourth the second third and fourth options i use the down arrow alfred doesn't work like that alfred has a configurable amount of stuff that it's going to show you but it doesn't it can't just show you the one item and the icon is smaller and if you do make it show you only like the one item and then you don't have the option to show the other ones like it's just it's not the same right but you know hey it works so i was using alfred for a long time but like i said the the the quicksilver developer came back and he fixed some bug in something and then quicksilver wasn't crashing anymore and by the way quicksilver was only crashing on my computer but not on my wife's computer but she has a different catalog set than i do and she but for a while it was freezing on her computer and she was complaining about quicksilver and i'm like i'm gonna have to take her off quicksilver maybe i'll put her onto spotlight and just it's made me think about like how such a small part of my computing life can throw everything else into chaos right it's kind of like if like the right button on your mouse only works sometimes it's not it's not a big deal but it's like oh that's a big deal often it didn't realize how often you're doing that like there's a quick workaround just click it again or something right and then you know the workaround of quicksilver like launch it with spotlight or whatever but it's just been a mess anyway right now i'm running quicksilver again and it's no longer crashing and no longer freezing it's scanning my catalog so fingers crossed but i'm not going to write myself a quicksilver replacement and like i said i can't even get quicksilver to build due to things that are above my pay grade and xcode causing it just not to build or maybe it will build but it won't let me attach a debugger because i wanted to like catch where the crash was or whatever and like ldb gives me some error and i want to attach to it um but anyway that's that's all i just wanted to complain about quicksilver which has been such a fixture in my computing life and i'm sure everyone's going to send me all their alternatives i like i said i probably already own all of them um and some of them are really good and some of them are really cool and some of them you know tons of them do things that new quick server couldn't even dream of but i'm just so used to quick server i just wish it would like continue to work the way it used to work and i would be happy with it i don't need any new features i don't need anything i just need it to stay the same as it is forever but unfortunately that's not the way computers work no i mean you're you are going to get all those responses from everybody saying why don't you switch to you know launcher x there's there's so many of them now they're very good you know and i under like i did switch away from quick silver.

1:52:15But I understand why you don't want to because these launchers become such a part of how you interact with the computer. Your comparison to the right mouse button is not that bad because it is like a basic input mechanism. It is, you know, like changing to a different launcher, I think it's kind of like changing your keyboard. It's like, you know, you can get one that works pretty similarly. There's going to be a lot of differences in some of the details. But it's, you know and it is a fundamental way that you interact with your mac it's like changing your shell which is another thing that i've been resisting doing since 1993 because i still use an ancient shell and i've complained about this uh a couple times online if you do anything with unix stuff they're like oh and sure just copy and paste this and it will do what you want and it's always for bash or these days you'll see it's for bash or fish there's just so much open source software that just assumes so of course everybody uses bash or fish or zsh that's those are the only shells right like no that's not my shell and all shells are not the same and i can't copy and paste that because it won't work in my shell so yeah changing launchers like change like changing shells in that oh i could change shells real easily but now i gotta take everything that i built up since 1993 in my shell which is tcsh which is ancient and nobody should use it do not use the shell but anyway i would have to take all that stuff and reproduce it in my new shell and it's exactly the same with quicksilver although it's a smaller number of things so you want to use Alfred?

1:53:38Can I essentially port all the things that I was doing in Quicksilver and have them be the same keyboard shortcut? So it just looks different, but works the same. And the answer is yes, I could do that and did do that after some pain, but in the end, it didn't quite look the same. And it's like, well, what do you care? It looks slightly different. It's fine. Like who cares? I'm like, I just kind of like the way Quicksilver works. So yeah, Alfred is my fallback. I have Alfred set up to do pretty much everything Quicksilver, not everything, everything that I care about the quicksilver does there's some other stuff like i think quicksilver does large text a little bit differently and some other slight differences in searching and tabbing and type like there's still differences but i can get by with alfred that is my choice my personal choice for replacement but the time spent sort of porting your world from one thing to another very much reminded me of what it will be like someday when i'm forced to port my world from tcsh to another a shell yeah because like it's you know similar to a shell if you mostly just use one of these launchers on its you know for its like surface level feature of launching apps quickly like that's that is what it does on the surface you can do the same thing with spotlight a little bit less quickly but you know it for the most part it's like you can use this on the surface and launches apps quickly and if that's all you do i have to say spotlight is really good these days it is much better than it used to be every time i'm on like a default mac and i use spotlight i'm like like spotlight is honestly one of my contenders for a quicksilver replacement is just use spotlight it's not as configurable as any of those cool launchers and everything which is bad but it's still pretty quick um and you know like consider that yeah it is an option the problem is like so if you if all you do is that surface level stuff then you can switch freely between these options and you won't notice that much difference but again like a shell good analogy The problem is once you get into any more advanced features than that, then it becomes this kind of like muscle memory lock in of like, you know, it becomes very disruptive.

1:55:38Like this is why. So my shell of choice or my launcher of choice is LaunchBar. And I actually, for the most part, I am a very. shallow, basic user of all these launchers features. I don't do the second level do this, then do this, then do this I don't do any of that, I mostly use it as a launcher and occasionally as an emoji search but it's basically like a launcher Do you open files or folders with it? Almost never a couple big hits, like Dropbox, I'll open that but for the most part, no I'm doing very basic things with these launchers however in LaunchBar LaunchBar has by far my favorite multiple clipboard manager interface and it's not because it's like the best in the world you know i i don't know i haven't used every clipboard manager it's because it fits me really well and i have incredible muscle memory for it and any mac that does not have clipboard management done the way i think it should be done like in launch bar um it feels broken to me like i get that feeling from that and so even though i'm only using a fairly shallow amount of the features in this launcher that many other launchers could do just fine, I am 100 % tied to LaunchBar the same way you are to Quicksilver because the clipboard management is just in my hands.

1:56:59I can't... Yes, I could learn a different system if I really had to, but the amount of friction required when I don't have the way LaunchBar does it, any change in that introduces so much friction. It's almost like changing keyboard layouts. It's like, yeah, I can type on some other non-US English keyboard layout, but I'm going to make a lot of mistakes and I'm going to be slower for a little bit and it's going to be frustrating if I don't need to be doing that. So that's how this is. It's like changing keyboard layouts. It's like, yeah, you can get by, but why get by with a change and get used to it if you don't have to?

1:57:37Yeah, I'm kind of dreading, well, not dreading, like we've been saying for years, Apple needs to add multiple clipboard support to all their OSs. Oh my God. Disabled by default, but available because it is such like once you know every nerd in the world has gone to multiple clipboards for like a decade now right but and it is a nerd feature but it's at this point i feel like it kind of like the second mouse button it's like it's so important every os needs to have second mouse button support built in and also multiple clipboard support built in you can disable it by default so not to confuse people but it's got to be there but the danger for people like us is okay but we all got our favorite third party clipboard managers that we've been using for a decade now the question is do i keep using my third party one or do i switch to the system one switching to the system one is like oh it's one fewer thing i have to worry about installing or whatever but it surely will work differently than whatever third party one we're using and we've got all our muscle lonely problem it's not like apple's going to make it infinitely configurable so apple please add multiple clipboard support to every single os you make uh but please also do not disable the ability for us to use our third party ones you probably need some accessibility permission that requires 17 dialogues and you have to for the record uh nobody asked but i have been using alfred forever i've tried most of the other ones and aesthetically i don't have any problem with them off the top of my head um but they think differently than i do and so because of that it's just a non-starter for me uh what's the one that everyone is obsessed with lately raycast or something like that yeah raycast is one of the fancy uh new launchers yeah i mean i i tried it briefly again it just does not think the way i think it doesn't mean it's bad i'm not saying it's bad at all i'm not saying that launch bar is bad or quicksilver is bad uh it's just that none of these things click with the way i i like to get things done and so because of that i've been on alfred forever i've had the power packs you know all the time that's always been what i've used and i have no particular reason to leave anytime soon yeah it really is to think about the shell thing because it's like just to give one example one of the things i use quicksilver for is mounting volumes uh because the finder sucks so bad that mounting them through the finder is like pulling teeth but if i can hit command space and type two letters and it returned it's so much faster uh when you change shells one of the things you have to quote unquote port is oh i probably built up many aliases that i use in my shell and the aliases themselves are fine it's just something you type in a different thing happens but if you have complicated aliases porting those aliases to a new shell at minimum requires you learning the syntax to declare an alias in the shell if it's different than yours but you might also have to quote things differently to capture arguments or the second argument here or whatever or which things need to be escaped with double backslash versus single back like stuff like that makes me think about what i had to do with alfred to do the simple thing which alfred is 100 capable of but how long did it take me to figure out how to make alfred mount a volume a password protected volume in response to a keyboard sequence and it took me an embarrassingly long time uh so yeah like that I mean, again, I'm saved by the fact that I don't do much with Quicksilver, so I didn't have to port too many things.

2:00:44But if I had to port all my aliases, and honestly, I don't even like other shells that much either. But anyway, just do not use TC. Don't let your children use TCSH. Let them use Bash or Fish or ZSH or something more modern. But it seems like at this point I'm just going to die using TCSH.