613: Dress for the Chip You Want

53:26Hardware was designed around App Intense, a system that lets AI precisely control applications and tasks, which is set to debut in the coming months. The product will be marketed as a way to control home appliances, chat with Siri, and hold intercom sessions via Apple's FaceTime software. It will also be loaded with Apple apps, including ones for web browsing, listening to news updates, and playing music. Users will be able to access their notes and calendar information, and the device can turn into a slideshow to display their photos. Apple's already planning a more expensive follow-up version, because of course they are, with a robotic limb that can move the screen around.

54:02The higher-end product could be priced at as much as$1 ,000, which if you follow Jason Snell's math, which is double whatever you think it will be, then it's$2 ,000. The display-only device will be far less than that and approaching the cost of competitors' products. And for reference, the Echo Show 8 is priced at$150, while the Echo Hub is$180. The Nest Hub Max costs$230. Apple has designed different attachments for the device, including ones that affix the screens onto walls. There will be bases with additional speakers that can be placed in the kitchen. We've got the Playdate dock all over again.

54:37On a nightstand or on a desk. The screen device, which runs a new operating system, code named Pebble, too soon, will include sensors to determine how close a person is. It will then automatically adjust its features depending on the distance. For example, if users are several feet away, it might show the temperature. As they approach, the interface can switch to a panel for adjusting the home thermostat. That's very clever. During development, Apple discussed launching an app store as part of the device, but it recently decided to exclude this feature, at least in the initial version. That sounds familiar.

55:07The product will be a standalone device, meaning it can operate almost entirely on its own, but it will require an iPhone for some tasks, including parts of the initial setup. Apple hopes it can sell multiple units of the device to consumers who will place them around the house and use them several times a day. So that is a product. That is a product that is less than, I guess let's just say less than$1 ,000 according to this rumor, because I don't know if it's going to be$200 or$150, but less than$1 ,000, no apps, no app store. It is an appliance in the sense of the HomePod, I guess. you don't buy apps for your home pods right that you just put them in your house they do a thing they hopefully are inexpensive and the thing that they're going to do is it's going to be a screen that lets you do home stuff and maybe look at some photos and maybe do facetime stuff uh and that is i think a pretty reasonable product lots of the rumors were so concentrating on that robot arm and thinking it's going to be like in your kitchen table in front of you and turning the screen around but it's like this is just people say oh it's like an ipad i hang my wall so up well first all ipads are super expensive and second ipads don't have software that lets them do the things that this thing is going to do this is really like like think of it as like apple's ecobee or something similar to that or i guess the echo show is kind of similar as well but like i like the idea that this doesn't have apps initially because it forces apple to say make this product useful with just the stuff that it comes with you should be able to fiddle with all your home stuff and see what the temperature is and adjust your thermostat and it's neat that you can also talk to it and have it do voice assistant stuff and it can show pictures of your family and i guess you could do facetime if you had it on the kitchen counter or something but really i just see this as being sold as like in a fancy house to control house stuff you'd have a couple of these hanging around and it would be nicer than a nest integrated into Apple's ecosystem system and it opens a good for a good to control of a good for a good for a good to control of a good for a good for a good for a good for a good for a good for a good for a good devices that connect to this but if this is not an app store play but is instead just a electronic product you buy from apple to solve a problem for a single price one time that at this point is actually kind of novel and refreshing which is maybe sad but i that's how i feel about this i'm like yeah a less than a thousand dollar thing that's not a full-blown ipad that i don't want to be a full-blown ipad that just does home stuff that does it in a nice way with a pleasant interface with no ads that never asked me if i want to reorder something i just ordered from Amazon, I give that a thumbs up.

57:52I have two major concerns about this kind of as presented. Number one, this is exactly the kind of product that Apple historically has kind of put out there and then neglected and then it dies. You know, I think the entire HomePod line you can look at and say, hmm, that's the predecessor to this. How's that going? If it kept working, though. like well that's a big if i kind of hope that my ecobee thermostat doesn't keep getting updated and doing weird stuff i just want to do exactly what it does now forever and not break well here's the problem though number two thing i'm worried about is this sounds like it depends a lot on home kit and home kit accessories and the market of home kit accessories and how good they are and how healthy that ecosystem is and that's not a great thing i would depend on you know i have a bunch of HomeKit stuff, it's a mixed bag.

58:50And over time, it does not seem like it's going in a great direction. It seems like, again, it seems like it's kind of one of those things that's been put out there, and then it just kind of sits around. And we see a story play out with HomeKit that we see a lot with Apple, which is they declare a certain standard. That standard ends up being more expensive or harder to implement than people making their own standards or other competing standards. And as a result, there's not much of an ecosystem there. It's a handful of partner brands and not much else. That's what we see with HomeKit. And HomeKit adds to it the other problem of Apple not caring that much about it.

59:27So the Apple Home app is kind of a mess. HomeKit itself is kind of spotty here and there. It's not nearly as reliable as dedicated systems like the Philips Hue systems or Lutron Caseta, where they kind of have their own protocols. Those are way more reliable. You don't see a lot of HomeKit products being released. You don't see that ecosystem really thriving. So whatever this product is, like Carmen's talking about, this square wall pad thing, whatever this is, controlling home devices should probably not be a major reason why people would buy this because I think that's going to be disappointing and probably neglected.

1:00:04Now, the other parts of this, you know, from a technical point of view, as soon as Apple released standby mode on the iPhone. We were all saying like, why isn't this just like an iPad that you can stick somewhere and it'd be like an appliance? You know, it seems like they made this system on the iPhone, which is like this whole environment where you're kind of running these blown up, but small information density widgets in kind of this like appliance-y kind of mode. that is indeed screaming out for like more products to expand what that does but even that, Apple put it out there and kind of didn't do anything with it after that they put it out and kind of walked away whistling like a cartoon character are they going to invest more in that?

1:00:54is it going to work better? is it going to have better capabilities? is it going to be a little bit easier to develop for? because standby is not super easy to develop for and then we're moving into the app intense system that this is allegedly based on which again that's part of apple intelligence i that's that's part of the plan for like the the next year part of apple intelligence where it will hopefully be able to index and then start operating uh on app and app intents that are app exposed but that first of all is an api that doesn't exist yet for an area of iOS, which is intense, that historically has been very limited, a little bit buggy, very hard to develop for.

1:01:35And now you're launching it allegedly, or developing or kind of relying on that ecosystem, which is difficult, buggy, and not well-supported, and largely non-existent so far. Integrating that with Apple Intelligence, which is not, you know, it's barely existing so far. that's in its very early days trying to build upon Siri which so far we're still waiting for it to get good it hasn't yet and a quick aside here I think it was a huge mistake to launch the Siri UI redesign with the colorful border around the screen before it is the Apple intelligence version of Siri that they should have paired those things together because what people see now is, oh, Siri's different.

1:02:24This is the update. Great. And then you ask to do something and it still sucks. And then you think Apple intelligence sucks. I think that was a terrible marketing move to split that off. The colorful border should indicate this is the new Apple intelligence Siri. And if that Siri isn't ready yet, we shouldn't be seeing that colorful border yet. Anyway, that's an aside. So going back to the square pad wall thing, it seems like this is a product. In this Mark German conception, which I'm sure is incomplete and missing a lot of the point and way less cool and missing some of the features. Fine. But in this version of it, what I'm hearing is here's a product that we're kind of not sure where this fits in a lot of people's homes, lives and budgets being built upon a bunch of kind of unreliable or often neglected parts of Apple's tech stack and business.

1:03:14I don't know. I'm a little wary of this product the way it's described so far. I kind of like it because the competitors are so terrible. Like, for example, when I was visiting my brother out in California, they wanted something in their house that could just show, like, their calendar, right? You know, their Google Calendar or whatever they were using. But it was, like, somewhere convenient in the house, like in the kitchen or on the wall or whatever, just so they can keep track of stuff. They don't have to, like, look on their phone or scroll or whatever because calendars are big you need to see lots of stuff that type of appliance a relatively inexpensive compared to like an ipad thing that can just show your calendar and like the weather and the time people buy those that do literally nothing else they don't have any apps they don't have any features they don't control any home stuff all they do is show their calendar it's not even interactive you can't even interact with it just shows your calendar and the events and the time and maybe the weather and it's like you know a hundred dollars and it's some weird android tablet and they buy it and they're happy with it like the fact that it doesn't uh have apps i think is key for this product i hope it never has apps because i just want it to be a inexpensive in apple land which probably means like two two hundred ninety nine dollars or whatever but still like a thing that's not an ipad a thing that is inexpensive compared to an ipad that just does a limited number of things and looks nice and doesn't have ads on it and doesn't constantly want you to buy things and you know isn't doing weird creepy stuff or whatever it has good security it's not not selling any of your information and it just does something boring right i think there's a market for something like that i've always wished apple would make one of these things because a lot of the third party ones you have questions of like is this just constantly going to be selling me things is it you know listening to hear what tv shows i'm watching and it's selling that information to some data broker or whatever apple is a company that i trust to do a simple thing that just shows the time and the weather shows the family calendar shows a slideshow of you know photos of my kids when it's idle right and if as a bonus it can also control my home kit enabled thermostat or something that's great right and you know setting aside how good home kit's going i don't have a lot of experience with home stuff but it seems like there is no with the exception of lutron which is like flawless and works perfectly but is not a sort of smart uh like smart app platform or anything i don't think they have anything equivalent to the the big thing with the screen with the assumption of sort of infrastructure stuff that's amazing everything that tries to do something nicer uh ends up being kind of like flaky or annoying or just sort of not up to apple standards so i think apple should have a product like this and yes they should also make the home kit stuff better and they need to deal with that and they need to actually use all the thread radios that are shipping over the devices by the way uh the mac mini also has a thread radio i don't we don't even mention it anymore but like apple everything apple sells has thread radios what is it good for what is it being used for who knows someday it will be super important but anyway, Apple does need to shore that up.

1:06:06But setting all that aside, just a little cheap screen that's not a hand-me-down iPad that comes with mounting hardware that you can stick somewhere in your house that looks nice and does a simple thing. I think that's a good product. I question why Apple, I'm a kind of, not question, I'm kind of amazed that Apple is building it because I currently don't see the services revenue angle. And it seems like everything Apple makes needs to have that angle. But this has no apps, no, you know, cut a percentage of developer stuff for it. presumably no subscription other than maybe iCloud they can integrate into that it's just a thing you buy that's nice that does something in your home and i long for products like that that are not junked up and i hope that's what this is if it's not what this is and they get all tied up with a robot arm thing and try to pitch this as the ultimate home kit console for a fantasy house that doesn't actually exist outside of apple's little model home where everything is controlled by home kitted and it all works yeah because you know in real life people have ring doorbells people have google security gamblers people have all sorts of different stuff and this thing is not going to help you like integrate that heterogeneous smart home and clarify it all and connect with home like that's not this product right but in that case i'm just like can you at least just show me a calendar and a clock in the weather and maybe i'll buy it like the bar is low is what i'm saying like the bar for stuff like this the bar is really low it's hard to find stuff like this that is actually nice yeah i don't know i've never had any of the screen-based assistance in my house.

1:07:35We did have the original very tall tubular Echo. We have a couple of Echo dots that we almost never use, to be honest. In fact, there's one in our primary bedroom that about the only time it ever gets used is for me to tell it to clear my notifications after a delivery from Amazon. Or occasionally Penny will go to sleep in her bed in the bedroom while we're downstairs watching tv and so i will do a drop in up to the bedroom to tell her to come downstairs and go pee uh before we go to bed we've got one of those dots too by the way and it is basically the amazon has delivered something light yep and i like it for that function i like that i can when it lights up let me know that there's a package and i mean i won mine for free in a work contest so i didn't even pay for it but it keeps working and when i tell it to clear notifications it does every time and when i do my little uh three voice assistant competitions from the uh the dining room table it participates gamely so we're well worth the zero dollars i paid for it go team uh but yeah i don't know i've never had like i said a screen-based one in my in my house or my life and i have some friends or we have some friends that are local and we'll be at their house from time to time and they have i don't even know the name of the device but it's a Amazon device that is a screen that looks roughly the size of a laptop screen.

1:08:57You ever take a little bit? And it seems to me like it's a rotating billboard of stuff that I am deeply uninterested in. Now, that very well could be that that's how they set it up. And maybe I would set it up differently and better or whatever the case may be. But based on that one experience, no thanks. That doesn't mean that this doesn't have a place in my life, particularly if it's done with a little more taste, which I assume Apple would. But knowing what little I know now, I don't feel like I have a need for it. But that's also the same thing I say about every freaking device that Apple ever makes.

1:09:29So here we are. Yeah, I mean, like you're I think your experience with, you know, seeing a lot of mediocrity in the Amazon products with screens that mirrors, I think, almost every report I've ever heard about them. And I even had the very first Echo Show that was the very first Echo with a screen. I actually bought one and returned it within like one day of having it. Because what we very quickly learned with the Echo Show series is that you can't trust Amazon with a screen. They just use it to promote stuff at you. You're literally paying them money to have them advertise and yell in your face.

1:10:05And that's not a great product experience for most people. You can turn off some of those things, but then they'll just add new ones and opt you in because that's a wonderful trick that for some reason is legal. So what we see is like we see the failure modes of these products. In Amazon's case, the failure mode is they just use it as an advertising channel to to spew ads at you in various forms, whether it's promoted news stories or direct actual just ads like whatever it is. They're spewing stuff at you that you don't want. in Apple's case, the failure mode will be unreliability and neglect.

1:10:41So we have to see, I think I will trust Apple for the most part, not absolutely, but for the most part, I trust Apple not to be as egregious as Amazon in spamming us with stuff we don't want. Now, when you walk into the room and there's a new Apple TV Plus show filling the entire screen, will know they've failed in this regard right hey how about a sports team score that i don't care about you know you can catch this right now on apple tv plus that is a user interface failure apple's not trying to sell us anything with those sports scores they're just scores they're just annoying us in ways that we could not figure out how to stop without extreme effort so that is not that's just bad ui in there but the apple tv plus shows i think is an example of them being like because they put them in the keynotes now it's like hey we while we've got your attention did Did you know there's a new TV show coming out on the service that we want you to subscribe to?

1:11:33Or, you know, you know, you can also see them in various ways. They have eroded the user experience on iOS over the over the years to do things like harass you with notifications and full screen takeovers and stuff for things like if you haven't bought Apple Music. If you aren't an Apple Music subscriber and you try to use the music app, good luck with that. If you don't buy Apple Care for your phone, you want to the settings app, good luck with that. they do advertise at us and they are getting more and more shameless about it. And so I would expect a product like this to not be immune to that.

1:12:07But I think it would be a vastly different level lower than what Amazon does with their Echo Show series. So anyway, we see this kind of product line. The problem with Google also has their own versions of this and I don't have any experience with them. John, your Google things don't have screens, right? No, I was just looking at the Nest Hub Max, which looks very much like what Apple is competing with. It's the more expensive one. It's like a little Android tablet on an angle on a little stand that probably does all the things that Android tablets do, but in a more limited homey version of it.

1:12:39That definitely just looks, I mean, Google's not going to be advertising to you as much as Amazon is, but it's like a Google ecosystem version of this. And I feel like that is probably Apple's target is the Nest Hub Max with its functionality, but it'll be in the Apple ecosystem as well. So if you just did want something to show you your Google Calendar, maybe the Nest Hub Max is the answer, but I haven't actually used it. So I don't know how annoying it is and how flexible it is. Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know anything about it. We'll see. I haven't really heard anything about people who use those.

1:13:06So I don't think there's a lot of them. But I would suspect that might suffer as many kind of, you know, side Google projects do probably from a lack of attention. But that's just speculation. And Google is a little bit more invested in the ad ecosystem than Apple is, let's say. Sure, sure. But I do think Amazon historically is the most egregious at spamming you through their Alexa products, through the Echo products, like with extra commentary that promotes some stuff you can do, with extra content, extra things showing up on your screen. So we know with the Amazon products how that fails. Apple just seems like if they're going to do this – again, we don't know much about this, obviously.

1:13:46But if they're going to do something like this, it seems like it rests on a lot of assumptions about subsystems that work better than they do, a lot of architecture and infrastructure that doesn't seem to exist yet or is barely being deployed in the form of Apple intelligence into a market of hardware that is not nearly as good as Apple purports it to be or wants it to be with HomeKit stuff. and relying on a market of software in the form of apps and AppIntense and things like that, where like, how do we know apps are even going to take advantage of AppIntense? How many apps are actually going to adopt this new API?

1:14:25How many apps are going to want to be controlled headlessly through Siri and Apple Intelligence without making you go into the app and see all the apps promos and stuff? So like, there's a lot of kind of faith going into this product from the way it's described here that I'm not sure I would have a lot of strong confidence in. So I don't know. This remains to be seen. I do see the market for a dashboard type of thing, but I don't know that that's this. But I guess we'll find out. Well, I mean, if the price is low enough, all your concerns really don't make that much of a difference because it's like, well, think of it this way.

1:15:02Do you currently have an old iPad that you use to listen to music in your kitchen? Well, this is a cheap version of an old iPad that you use to listen to music. if you subscribe to apple music and that's how you listen to music you already subscribe to it and you're currently using an old ipad in your kitchen this will probably have be it'll be cheaper than that ipad was when it was new it will come with that little speaker stand thingy which presumably will have better sound than your ipad speakers and it's designed for this it's got a little stand you don't have to prop it up on something or maybe it's even waterproof no it certainly won't be but you know you can dream right like and you can do facetime from it more easily because it'll have that you know center stage camera or whatever thing and maybe the robot like even if it does none of the things that you were just worried about you don't use any of that you literally use it as the the equivalent of those radios that used to be mounted to the underside of cabinets and kitchens you remember those it was like oh yeah fm radio like that's what this is for the modern area and it is 100 a straight up replacement for in apple households that are bought in on the apple ecosystem that old kid ipad that you have in the kitchen to look at recipes and listen to music right and that's like if it's if it's 299 nine there you go if it does nothing else its entire life except for those things when your old ipad breaks or some kid knocks it over or it finally dies or the battery swells or something your replacement is not to go look for a used ipad or try to take one of your kids all once your replacement is to buy this thing so like i said the bar is really low if this thing really is$199 or$299 it doesn't have to do everything under the sun all the dreams about app intense and siri eventually getting good and controlling your magic home kit house where everything works doesn't have to do any of that still it's worth the money if it actually is cheap now a thousand the thousand dollar one with the robot arm now maybe it needs to do something more useful and we'll see how that goes but all my hopes are pinned on this thing actually being inexpensive and doing the things that an old ipad is currently doing in people's kitchens i don't think it'll be inexpensive other than that i'm with you but i don't think it'll be inexpensive i i yeah pricing is one of the most difficult things to uh you know get rumors about because they can change that at any time but i mean this is ballparking it's saying the expensive one is a thousand and the other one is trying to match competitors that cost in the low hundreds so we shall see i mean i think it's it's very clear that the correct way to price it is to be competitive with your competitors or if you're going to do the apple thing and go up market a bit then you need to be in the in spitting distance of the competitors 299 is in spitting distance the most expensive one on this list was 230 so 299 is it's the expensive one i agree but i fear that the home HomePod people are going to get there and be like, well, we have all this sweet tech.

1:17:41Well, the speaker stand will also be$299. Right, exactly. But even whatever onboard speakers there are, not the Playdate dock, if you will, but the onboard speakers, you know the HomePod people are going to be like, you know, we have all this sweet-ass tech that we can just drop in there, lickety-split, and it's going to be great and also$1 ,000. But it'll be great and sound amazing in the kitchen. So I don't know. I'm hopeful that this is cool. I love the idea. What did he say? Something like when you're at a distance, it'll just show the temperature and very little else. And then as you approach, it like shows you controls for the HVAC.

1:18:19That's very slick. And that's the kind of affordances and design that we love from Apple, the thoughtfulness that we love from Apple. That's what every Nest and Echo B thermostat has done forever. Yeah, like every smart home thermostat does that. but presumably they have a larger higher resolution display and the standby mode and widget stuff they can do smarter things like my you know my ecobee does that as well but like that's why i have hopes for the price of this thing because my ecobee thing was not expensive and it has it i can do voice assistants with it it does apple's voice assistant uh it has the proximity sensor i mean granted all does is control my heating and cooling but it works with home kit it works with its own app and it was cheap and it continues to function and i'm perfectly happy with it as long as it keeps doing exactly what it's doing and that's my hopes for this product that it will that it will be like that which like i said is unusual for modern apple because everything seems to have a play or an angle or some kind of integration and this could just be a straight up useful electronic gadget that you can buy from apple that differentiates itself from its competitors by being higher quality and being less annoying with ads we'll see i'm certainly interested even though, like I said, I don't feel like I have a need for this in my life.

1:19:29And our kitchen doesn't exactly have an overabundance of space unless you're mounting it on the wall. And then if you're mounting it on the wall, then you got power to it unless you do the recharging dance, which Mark alluded to. Magnetic and stick to your fridge. Well, except our fridge is a stainless steel fridge that's mostly not magnetic or whatever the situation is where most of it isn't magnetic. I don't know. If it's cool enough, I will find a reason to buy it. It's for my work, you two. You see, it's for my work. but yeah I mean I'm interested for sure and I love the idea of Apple starting to get back into home stuff I mean as we've all lamented many times even though I really do like my Eero set up and they are past sponsor I would love to have Apple you know take a crack at this at home networking which I don't think they have any interest in to be clear but you know them starting to do stuff in the home it gives me a hope you know so you're saying there's a chance and we'll see what happens.

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1:22:40All right, you want to do some Ask ATP? We haven't done that in a few minutes, I feel like. we'll start with Andrew Slay or maybe Andrew Slay anyways this person writes we are all relieved that minimum RAM has been increased to 16 gigabytes across new Mac models but we know this is tied to Apple intelligence as a potential purchaser should I be concerned that half this RAM is quote unquote spoken for by AI and I will still need to upgrade further to get the 16 gigs to use myself or do I have the wrong mental model of how RAM works you know it's funny this is brought up because I can't speak for how it works for artificial intelligence stuff, and maybe one of you can clue me in on this, but I feel like the thing that gives me even more pause is the quote-unquote video RAM because that's also shared.

1:23:23You know, this seems to be, and interrupt me when you're ready if I'm speaking, you know, untruths, but I feel like we're sharing RAM between not only the system, not only Apple intelligence, but also, you know, video, the graphics card. And that is starting to get spread kind of thin. And that being said, I don't think it's really spoken for in the way that Andrew Slay is thinking of. So what's the reality here? I always think about the unified memory architecture where there's no dedicated VRAM. I always think of that when I hear people say that, well, you don't need more RAM on Apple Silicon because Apple Silicon uses less RAM than Intel for hand wave reasons.

1:24:01Right. It's like, no, you actually need more. yeah the source of that urban legend is essentially that the uh original apple silicon macs were amazing and their ssds were fast the cpu was fast and they could get away with swapping in ways that these older slower intel macs with older slower ssds and older slower ram could not and so people started to believe that apple silicon macs somehow need half the ram uh intel mac uh and it may be true that that apple silicon mac with half the ram could run circles around an intel mac but it's not because there was anything magical about apple silicon that said oh it doesn't need ram anymore you still need ram yeah just everything else was so much faster that you would you would overall probably still be faster oh you would absolutely be faster and it's what made people ran benchmarks are like how is this eight gigabyte m1 macbook air beating this 32 gig intel thing it's because the apple silicon is amazing the ssds are fast the ram was fast everything they were really good but it doesn't mean you don't need ram but anyway setting that aside uh i wouldn't worry about uh apple intelligence stealing all your ram first of all most of the apple intelligence things that apple has shipped and announced shouldn't be doing anything with your ram if you're not using them so if you're worried about ram at all don't fire up those llms and ask them to do a bunch of stuff for you and they are not going to be there like reserving 16 gigs for themselves which technically they could you know you can wire pages down or whatever but nothing that apple really does in their operating system would ever do something at that scale so do not worry about that it has more ram so that if it needs to it can use a whole bunch when called upon to do so but it will not be sitting there hogging half of your ram doing nothing right and second even when you are doing stuff presumably whatever you're doing with apple intelligence will be kind of like bursty oh i'm gonna do a thing now where i want you to generate an image for me or fix this writing and then you'll be done with that and then it will go away and hopefully apple have written these things in such a way that you get that ram goes back into the free pool and that's that process exits and is done doing whatever it was doing and now you're back to your you know working with your mac the way it is i and finally of all eight gigs is probably too little they doubled it they didn't just make it nine or ten so i think they have enough headroom that it's not like i mean remember that you're doing apple intelligence stuff on phones that their entire ram is eight gigs and you're worried that the apple intelligence alone is going to use eight gigs that's not going to happen right so i would not worry about this it's not the wrong mental model of how ram works i think it's just not the right um scale for thinking about how much ram apple intelligence is going to use and how long it's going to need it and when it's going to need it uh 16 gigs is good even with apple intelligence and like i said if you worry about it at all first of all i think i mean in the current operating system you can literally turn off apple intelligence as a toggle switch in settings i don't know that switch does but it makes me think that it's like look if you don't want any of this stuff you don't have to use it and presumably that would say ram but even with that toggle switch on if you don't call upon it to do anything if you don't ask it to revise your writing if you don't try to generate an image if you don't ask it a question it's not going to be taking up a lot of ram and you can convince yourself with that by booting any modern apple silicon mac that has apple intelligence and just boot into the finder and then pull up activity monitor and look how much ram is being used and compare it to like the previous version of the operating system without apple intelligence i don't think you're going to see a big difference uh henry stivenin writes what's blocking apple from upgrading the studio display with the kind of backlight tech that macbook pros have to enable hdr my understanding is that the studio display has constant backlight behind lcd and macbook pro has by zone variable backlight behind LCD.

1:27:44Apple clearly already has the firmware that knows how to drive the MacBook Pro LCD and backlight layer in combination to produce an HDR result. What's preventing Apple from putting a MacBook Pro style backlight and firmware in the studio display form factor at the studio display price point? I think you just answered your own question. Is the backlight plane hard to scale up despite TV scaling mini LED backlight to even larger sizes while staying less expensive than Pro Display XDR? Are the LCD layers substantially different in the two cases, and that's the hard slash expensive part to scale up.

1:28:14Surely Apple wants the entire lineup to do HDR eventually. Why isn't Apple there yet with the studio display? A quick aside, which just made me think about this. I went to the Apple store today just to look, and I succeeded in just looking. The new Mac Mini, freaking adorable, and very light, but freaking adorable. So cute. I kind of want one. But the MacBook Pros, I brought my M3 MacBook Pro and sat it next to the M4 MacBook Pro and cranked up the brightness in both. And granted, this is inside an Apple store, so everything's freaking, you know, it's like the sun is shining in there anyway. But it was noticeably different how much brighter the M4 MacBook Pro was.

1:28:55I wouldn't say it's night and day, but you can tell the difference. It just occurred to me just now, I didn't think to look in or ask if there was a nanotexture one, but just the brightness alone made me jealous. Jealous enough to spend thousands of dollars to replace my one-year-old one? Absolutely not. But jealous nevertheless. With regard to Henry's question, I think, John, you're probably best suited to answer, but I'm going to take a stab at it. I think it is expense in no small part. I think the technology is probably, to Henry's point, there. It's just, for whatever reason, and I don't know why, and maybe, John, you can fill me in, it's got to be really freaking expensive.

1:29:30Also, Apple seems to forget that they make displays because they haven't updated your beloved xdr in like 15 years in the studio display and you know since it's been since it's been released so somebody should remind them that the that these exist and maybe we'll get we'll get answers the answer to henry's question what's blocking apple from upgrading the studio display with the kind of backlight of the macbook pros nothing absolutely nothing there's nothing stopping them they could they could keep the price the same they wouldn't but they'd probably make it more expensive but no this tech exists they put it in their laptops they could put it there's it's easier to put it in a giant display like that because it's bigger and you have more room for all the stuff they could do it and it would probably be more expensive because it would be a better display and you know whatever but they absolutely could nothing is stopping them that's what's so frustrating they just haven't decided to update the displays yet when they do update them presumably they'll get all this stuff but right now kind of like the mouse and the keyboards we're just not updating them it's like nope it's just we sell the studio display we sell the xdr the price is the same as it's always been they do exactly what they always did someday maybe we'll update them uh if you are a long-time apple fan you know that they don't update their displays very often they just don't why don't they it's incredibly frustrating but they absolutely could there's not some super expensive difficult to do things you there's plenty of pc monitors that do all this stuff that are way cheaper than the studio display because they're pc monitors obviously when apple does it it'll be more expensive nothing is stopping them that's what's so frustrating and we're all just we're just out here waiting it's like well they'll update it someday and when they do we can buy it but in the meantime this is what they have to offer take it or leave it all right yep uh then ryan tierney writes your recent discussion on launchers made me wonder what is a power user hack you can't live without or customization which makes all other macs feel broken for me it is a multi-button mouse where i have assigned shortcuts for enter copy paste and command tab to move back to the last app.

1:31:24I have RSI, and so I try to minimize my use of the keyboard, and this lets me navigate through tasks with the mouse dramatically faster. And I was thinking about this. I'm sure that there are answers to this question, but I'm struggling to think of what they are. I am a big believer in hot corners. I've been trying to teach myself to use the gestures on the Magic Trackpad instead for much of the same things that I use hot corners for but old habits die hard also i'm an alfred uh you know die hard alfred person so i feel like a computer's broken without alfred and i guess rockets which i will probably forget to link in the show notes but it's a thing where you can uh basically type out the name of an emoji and it'll just insert wherever your cursor is um i that's about all i can think of i don't know uh marco what have you got in terms of power user hacks i got the ones that trip me up the most when I'm on someone else's computer.

1:32:15There's two. The second worst one is the lack of a clipboard manager because I will so often, like, you know, because I've been using LaunchBar's clipboard management for so many years now, so often I will treat the clipboard like a stack. If I need to copy and paste two different things into two different fields from one place to another, I will go to, you know, the first one, hit Command C. Then I'll go to the second one and hit Command C because that will stack them up in the clipboard manager. Then when I go to the destination, I'll paste the first one. Then I'll use the key to invoke the clipboard manager to go down one and paste the second one.

1:32:54Well, if you don't have a clipboard manager, it works until you go to the second one. And then you're just like, oh, wait, this is just broken. It's just gone. The thing you copied before, now it's literally just gone because the other one overrode it. So that is one thing that trips me up for sure. But the biggest thing by far that tripped me up almost immediately upon using any other computer, during the original Touch Bar era, when the escape key was in the Touch Bar, I remapped escape to be the caps lock key. So when I use a Mac, when I want to hit escape, I hit caps lock. You can do this.

1:33:36You don't need a third party app to do this. You can do this right in the keyboard. it's called the modifier keys section and settings now when I go to any other computer I constantly hit caps lock instead of hitting escape nothing trips me up faster than that and I suppose I could train myself back to the escape key I just haven't had a reason to yet and it's so much faster to have your pinky right there hitting that key than reaching up to the escape key it's much better if you don't have a good use for caps lock map it to something that you use a lot it's really nice until you use one on the computer but until that moment it's really nice and escape is a good one yeah speaking of remapping that kim i understand why you arrived at escape but i always kind of like the fact that escape is in the upper left because it's kind of like the escapiest place on the keyboard like at a corner you know what i mean um back when i was in uh college uh the uh i believe it was sun the sun branded keyboards that came with your sun computer uh had control where cap locks is just like it was literally that was the control key on the keyboard if you do anything with control a lot like unix or you're doing emac stuff setting aside the meta key just having control where cap locks is that was so convenient and so natural that i really got used to that for a while but you know then i stopped using sun computers and didn't bother remapping uh and a lot of people do to this day on max like marco said it's built into the operating system you can go to system settings and remap uh cap locks to be control and live my life from the 90s with sun keyboards that had a control key over there it's really nice it's much more comfortable than reaching the control key it's less important on max this is one of the things i love about max that i do not understand why people don't appreciate more i don't hear more people praising it um for people who are into unix uh mac uses a command and to a lesser extent option for its uh keyboard shortcuts copy is command c paste is command v the command is right The key is right next to the space bar.

1:35:32It's great. That leaves control essentially free for all the Unix stuff. So all of these people who are using Windows and like, oh, how do I copy in my terminal emulator without sending control C? We don't have to worry about that. It's such a clean separation. It's so beautiful. It's one of those things that you can't fix once it's broken, like in Windows. They have all these hacks about setting your settings so when you hit control C, it knows when it's copy versus it knows when it's sending sig into your thing. It's just such a hassle that we just don't have to deal with. then i love it right uh but anyway if you do use control a lot not having control way down in one of those escapey corners of the keyboard it's nice to have it on cap locks um that said i don't remap my keys i think part of it has to do with me using apple extended keyboard uh for a long time apple extended keyboard too um that cap locks key was the old style cap locks key that stuck down you'd go click and it would stick halfway down click it and pop up you can't really map that to control physically speaking it's not it's not going to work the way you want it too so i guess i got into that habit for a while as well my answers to this question of things that i can't live without marco got one of them i think probably clipboard manager is my number one because i do exactly the same thing and i've lost data that way like i've yeah copied something and then it's just like scrolled away or closed the tab or whatever and then i've copied something else and then i've gone to pace and realized oh that first thing i copy it's gone forever right i can't even use my classic mac ram snooper thing that i would run in panic they would scan through all of ram to find the thing that i had previously copied that saved my bacon many times memory protection makes that more difficult um that's probably my number one quicksilver is probably close number two i've talked about that in past episodes it's in a period of stability right now but like i said before spotlight is now good enough and fast enough that i can mostly get along without it i obviously all my stuff all my quicksilver stuff isn't there but using it just to launch stuff is reasonable my the apps that i make so i make a switch class in front and center those two apps are there because they make the mac work the way i want it to work i want the window layering to work like it did in classic mac os or when you click one window belonging to another application all the windows of that application come to the front instead of just the one that you clicked unless you modify or click on it and then just the one that you click comes to the front that's what i want when i'm on someone's mac that doesn't have that first of all chances are good if i'm on someone else's mac everything's freaking full screen anyway and it's some tiny little laptop and it's just madness right like even my son my the way my son uses a computer because like he didn't really use computers at all he was just an ipad kid until he got his laptop for like high school and college and because it's a tiny laptop screen he does everything full screen he uses spaces he three finger swipes between them that's how he uses a computer he finds it very efficient every time i have to do something on his computer i pull everything out of full screen so i can get any work done and see more than one window at a time and he thinks it's madness and i think what he's doing is madness and i try to tell him this is fine when you're on a 14 inch laptop but someday if you're lucky you'll have a really big screen and if you make all your maps full screen apps full screen it's inefficient but we'll see how that goes someday if you do all your homework and brush your teeth every day you'll have a big screen like me you can get a real monitor instead of looking at the world through this tiny porthole because he went from an ipad to a laptop that was similar size to the ipad screen you know what i mean so kind of makes sense but but yeah front and center and switch glass i literally wrote those apps not because they were going to make me tons of money and they absolutely did not but because i want them to be on my computer because i previously i was using drag thing for both those functions drag thing did a bunch of stuff more stuff as well but james thompson stopped making drag thing so i had to replace it uh and it's not like i can't live without those things and they're not really hacks because the front and center thing some people don't even want unless you're a real old school mac user although i still think it's useful uh even if you just run it in modern mode where it by default it works the normal way having a modifier click to pull the windows forward instead of having to go into the dock icon is actually kind of cool but anyway uh that is an invisible thing that runs in the background that i it's not that i can't live without it i wouldn't want to live without it on my mac if i'm on someone else's i know i'm on someone else's i can deal with it and then switch glass is even more narrow it's like why you have a list of running applications somewhere else on your screen that's what the doc is for there's your running applications why in the world would you do that well i've always wanted them to be in the upper right i wish i didn't have to use the doc at all i wish my app could do everything the doc does but apple does not provide apis for that especially for an app that's going to be in the mac app store so i have to run the doc and switch class but switch class lets me pick the order things are in just like kind of like the doc does but in a more regimented way and switch class let's me change its position and appearance and do all sorts of like it's redundant i get it's redundant but it's old habits die hard and i wouldn't want to use my mac without those things but when i go to someone else's computer i know they're not going to be there i understand how the computer works the other way it's not as it's not as sort of like like marco with the escape key or like both of us with the copy and paste that's the type of thing where you you don't think about it until you've fallen into the trap till you've hit the wrong key till you've lost data because you copy and paste it that doesn't happen with those two but i guess that's my answer is clipboard manager quicksilver and then the two apps that i wrote to make myself feel good on a mac all right thank you to our sponsors this week tailscale and delete me and thank you to our members who support us directly you can join us atp.fm slash join members get atp overtime a bonus topic every week among other things uh this week in atp overtime we're going to be talking about um A listener, Patrick, asked us, why do we hope the Vision Pro succeeds?

1:41:12We had mentioned that we hope it succeeds. Why do we hope it succeeds? That's going to be this week's overtime topic. Thank you for listening, everybody. You can join us at atb.fm.com if you want to hear that and many other benefits. And thank you. We will talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L

1:42:15I did finally set up my Mac Mini. so there the news broke over the last few days there's apparently this big Synology security problem that had like some zero day that everyone's like oh go update your Synologies really fast because there's some big zero day thing in one of their packages or something do you know anything about that Casey because when I saw that message I went and looked at my Synology and it said oh I'm all update because I have my thing set to run auto updates I'm assuming I'm fine? no you're not But so I've only dug into this the teeniest littlest bit. And if you are a owner of a Synology, please double check all of my math on this because I might be steering you wrong by accident.

1:43:11But with that caveat aside and disclaimer aside, my understanding is there was some sort of conference. I couldn't tell you what specifically it was, but there was some sort of conference that happened in the last week or two where some of the attendees announced or perhaps discovered some zero day exploits. I think one of them was real bad with regard to Synology Photos, which is not something I use. But there have been a couple others. I think one was with Synology Drive, which I swear by. This is how I use Dropbox without having Dropbox natively installed on literally anything that I own. And then I think that the DSM, their basic operating system, if you will, also had a vulnerability.

1:43:50And I think as we were sitting down to record, the DSM update might have been released. But the email that we all got was, hey, FYI, there's some bad stuff out there. We haven't fixed all of it yet. And in fact, I think when that email was sent, because I got it as well, none of them were fixed. And then I believe shortly, like within hours of that email, my Synology Drive software wanted to be updated. And allegedly, although I have not checked, there's, I think, a new DSM update waiting for me. And presumably you, if you wanted to grab it immediately. my understanding is it is pretty bad the security vulnerabilities but the good news is as far as we know they haven't really been in the wild but for a few days and I think that they were patched as quickly as can be reasonably expected so I guess my thing will hold off to it while I sleep my synology is not exposed to the internet so I'm not too worried about it fair enough anyways Marco you're starting to say you're setting up your beloved Mac mini basically over the last few years like when I moved to the beach we i had the old sonology um at the old house the old 1813 plus that was running forever um i had that you know hosting a bunch of stuff for me but i had mostly if you listeners from a long time ago will recall um i had gotten into i scuzzy for this purpose um because the problem i was trying to solve back then was i i had what was ending up being like you know 10 or 12 terabytes of archive storage i wanted backblaze to back it up and the only way to do that without like you know you can you can do backblaze b2 that's like their block storage where you just pay per gig that you use and it's way cheaper than s3 um so that is an option you can and you can back up a lot of data to be to backblaze b2 for not that much money and there's a built-in app on the synology to do exactly that but what i wanted was and i don't i don't even know if that option existed when i first started doing this but basically um instead you could if you had an iSCSI uh driver for the mac you could treat the Synology just as a giant iSCSI drive and have have like a mac mini or some other mac hosting the iSCSI driver for that and then backblaze would see it just as a as a connected drive to the mac and back it up with a regular backblaze plan for unlimited space so that if you had a lot of terabytes of data to backup that was way cheaper per month and honestly way better than trying to use you know b2 with some third-party backup solution so forever ago i i had this old mac mini this 2014 base model mac mini i had it since it was reasonably new and so around 2014 uh for various utility functions here and there i ran plex on it and stuff like that.

1:46:41And so I used that to basically host my archive storage. When I moved to the beach, I didn't want to bring that whole big setup and I wasn't sure how long I was going to be there. And so I still needed some archive storage and some local time machine server functionality. And so I got a tiny Synology, the 4-Bay

1:47:05DS420J, I think. It was something that ends in J and has four bays. It was a pretty low-end model. That Synology has been incredibly unreliable. It would just fall off the network sometimes. It would have to be rebooted frequently for access. It would just disappear. It was just really unreliable. And I couldn't really figure out why. And honestly, it's not my job to figure out why. My job is to do other things that make me money and stuff. And the last thing I would want to deal with is this, you know, flaky few hundred dollar Synology. Like that's, I don't have time for that. So I decided I'm going to, now that I'm not living at the beach anymore, I had in my office an ancient Synology full of like four terabyte hard drives sitting, taking up half my closet.

1:47:51And then this four bay ridiculous, like unreliable thing with some pretty good hard drives. You know, it's like these four, like 16 terabyte hard drives in them. so pretty good stuff so I decided you know what screw this I'm getting out of the Synology business and this was well timed with the security vulnerability but I decided you know if I'm only using this thing as a big dumb disk I'm not taking advantage of the other features of an entire NAS with its own app platform and packages and everything I'm not doing any of that stuff I'm just using it as a giant disk that I want to be backed up like I can do that with anything so that's why i ordered the most recent mac mini i was going to order a mac mini months ago but you know we we'd heard they were being updated so i figured all right i'll wait till the update um so now i have brand new mac mini that is almost the base model just with a 10 gig ethernet and the 512 update uh because i can't i can't buy 256 i just i can't let myself do it because i've i've i've done that and regretted it every time i have done that pretty soon maybe that won't fit the operating system so good call yeah exactly so anyway now i have that and i have decommissioned um and actually recycled both synologies because nobody wanted them for the record before anyone jumps on your back uh you had very graciously offered to ship either or both to me and the 1813 it is heavy that would have been very expensive to ship to me even if you had taken out all the drives, which I don't think you would have.

1:49:28It would have been over$100 to ship. Am I going to pay over$100 to ship you an 11-year-old Synology that you don't need? Exactly. That's not worth any shipping. So you did offer, which is very kind of you, and as much as I wanted to take you up on it, I couldn't find a reason for either of them. I've already got a secondary Synology deployed to my parents for backup purposes. I don't need more than one in the house. So before anyone jumps on You passed the friend code, the friend test, and you did offer. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Didn't offer them to me. You were in the same chat room.

1:50:03You didn't say anything. I know. I'm just saying that I wasn't offered them. I saved you from them. Yeah, that's probably true. I mean, I already have the exact one that you just got rid of. So, I mean, it's not good. Right, exactly. I need another one. But just FYI. Well, actually, if I had known that you had 16 terabyte hard drives in one of them, that's what I want. Well, no. Oh, that's true. I kept the hard drive. Well, I know. Those weren't offered to anybody. Right, because what I ordered instead was just a 4-Drive Thunderbolt disk enclosure from OWC, like one of their kind of mid-range ones.

1:50:33And so now I have disks that are directly plugged into the Mac Mini through that enclosure. I'm using just software RAID 1 with two pairs, you know, because macOS has built-in support for software RAID 0 and RAID 1. If you want to do fancier things like RAID 5, you got to, you know, use third-party stuff. But built into the Mac, you have RAID 0 and RAID 1. So I did two RAID 1 pairs, four disk bay thing, nice and easy. And it's running and it's backing up to Backblaze. It's almost done already. It's doing great. It's serving files to my network. I haven't enabled Time Machine Server yet. I got to go do that.

1:51:11But otherwise, it's nice. And by the way, for the record, I'm no longer using one of those little dummy HDMI dongles that you have to plug into its butt to make it boot before. The new ones don't need that anymore. Yeah, I didn't know that, but I can't remember who it was, but somebody had said recently that I believe any of the Apple Silicon Macs do not need them. Here again, check my math on that. I'm not 100 % sure, but that is what I believe to be the case. Yeah, and that was a little unknown to me at first because I had the M1 Mac Mini briefly serving a role like this at the beach. And that one did – I had problems getting that one to boot headless.

1:51:51But for some reason, I guess those were resolved since the M1 era. So the M4 one boots just fine and doesn't need a keyboard or a mouse or anything plugged in. It just boots up and it's nice and easy. Maybe it's a software improvement. Who knows? speaking of mac minis and booting and external storage kind of uh i meant to mention this when we were uh talking about the person's question about like how do i deal with a mac mini that doesn't have a lot of internal storage and i have external storage should i boot from the external drive as a way to sort of solve the problem of the bifurcation first we should have emphasized that that is if you want to do that and just forego the internal drive entirely and boot from it that solves a lot of the problems we were talking about with like apps that don't want their stuff to be on the boot drive because you just make the external one the boot drive but But second, I want to emphasize that Apple Silicon Macs cannot boot from external drives in the way that you think they can.

1:52:40As in, if the internal hard drive dies, you can't boot from an external one, which may not make any sense to you, because you're like, what do you mean? That's the whole point. I'm booting from the external drive. I don't care if the internal drive is torn out. It should be fine. But the way the security architecture works on all Apple Silicon Macs is they essentially always boot from the internal drive. They just stop during the boot process once they've booted a substantial amount. and they say, oh, you wanted to boot from that drive. Okay, I'll chuck you over there. And it does a bunch of stuff behind the scenes in a secure way, blah, blah, blah.

1:53:10It's a security feature. It's not Apple being mean. From your perspective, it just basically looks like, oh, I can boot from an external drive. But be aware that you are always relying on the internal storage functioning and having an operating system on it that works. So if your internal SSD goes bad, you can no longer boot that Mac that you thought you were, quote unquote, booting from an external drive. So please keep that in mind. Yeah. Anyway, that's my Mac mini story. So far, it's just working just fine. Like, it is just, it is, I installed it in my garage and the most exterior wall possible.

1:53:42Oh, there we go. Oh, gracious. So just mostly for John. Started in his garage. He punched a hole in the roof to let the rain fall through onto it. Well, it has to keep itself cool somehow. Yeah. So do you use, like, screen sharing to mess with it, if you're ever new to mess with it? Yeah, it's great. I have it open right now. When you do that, what does it do for the screen resolution, considering there's nothing attached to it um i believe it's 1080 hold on give me a moment i'll report back i mean i suppose you could go into it and then just go to display settings and change that and it will just remember that it's non-existent monitor should be 4k or whatever uh yeah 19 so right now it's 1080 by default but can i change it no go to display and by the way when you do screen sharing i'm assuming you just type command space scre and it just worked but keep in mind that the screen sharing app is not in the application folder or the utility folder are on mac os these days it's in i think it's in like system library core services or whatever which is annoying but i think that's where it is no usually i just i go in a finder sidebar i go to the network location it says it's on my mac mini right there and i just click the share screen button from that anyway there is i don't know actually it is in utility sorry i take that back i think it used to be in core services but now it is in application slash utility slash screen sharing app it's it's the same app that launches when you do the thing that margo just described or when you just do open URL, VNC, colon slide, or whatever.

1:55:01There's a million different ways to do it. Anyway, so you changed res. What does it do? So it turns out you can. I remember Paul Haddad actually had posted about this the other day as well, that if you do plug in one of those dummy HDMI adapters, that enables more resolutions, I believe, up to 4K. By default, it does 1080p, 1x, that's it. But it depends on what you're using this for. For my purposes of just administering a computer that's acting as a disk server mostly, that's totally fine. That's kind of weird, though. When they solve the problem of not needing the dongle, it's strange that they just didn't let you pick whatever the heck resolution you want.

1:55:37It's not like that thing will be breaking a sweat to just have a little bit larger, higher resolution display. But whatever. Hopefully, you never even need to do that screen sharing. It just sits there in your garage with water dripping onto it doing its job. Exactly. Freezing cold in the winter, hot in the summer. Your heat pump water heater. Stealing all of its heat. whatever it's doing. I don't know what's going on in your garage, but it's semi-outdoors. That should be the name of your electronics channel. Marco Arment, semi-outdoors. It teaches you how to take things that aren't meant to be outdoors and kind of sort of almost put them outdoors.

1:56:07In all fairness, that 13-year or 12-year-old or whatever, 11-year-old Synology operated in a garage for its entire life. And it was, not only was the Synology perfectly fine and 100 % reliable, I didn't even lose a single hard drive that entire time. Mine is still running right now. It's the last, well it's not the last one. It is the last one standing with the original hard drives. My 2013 more than 10 year old Synology, all the original drives that were put in there in 2013, every single one of them is spinning as we record this. Mine has been endorsed this whole life. So I guess Marco you provided an excellent home for spiders and other bugs for over a decade.

1:56:46That was nice of you. Whatever mice are living inside there whatever kingdom they've created for themselves it hasn't bothered the synology oh my uh remind me before we leave this topic behind what what mac mini did you get i think we covered this but one more time uh base model plus 10 gig ethernet and 512 so not a pro or anything like that's the m4 plane yeah i so i actually do intend to do some like overcast processing tests on this so i i have some ideas on maybe how to do transcripts with overcast and it's the fastest single core cpu in your house now it is honestly it really is um and i and i i'm not really near any upgrade cycles for my other macs like i my my macs right now are my m3 max macbook pro and my m2 macbook air and both of those are great and fine and i i don't think i'll be updating either one of them anytime very soon i i'm i'm probably going to do every two years on the macbook pro so that would be i do the m5 generation on that um and the macbook air kind of as needed let's just all savor marco saying the phrase upgrade cycle and applying it to himself let's just say that's a thing as if there's some kind of cycle that he adheres to for upgrades well for my main beefed up Mac.

1:58:08I actually do. So I had the M1 Max MacBook Pro. I skipped the M2 generation. I got the M3. You had the M1 MacBook Air first, right? Yes. But yeah, but when the Pros came out, I upgraded to the Pro and it was great. Then I got the M3. I skipped the M2, got the M3. Now I'm skipping the M4 and I'll probably get the M5. All right, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. And the MacBook Air, that's the portable one. That's the M2 right now. i maybe like if the m4 macbook airs come out and they have nanotexture that would be interesting because i i frequently use it on the train and it is very bright in the winter on the train so that i actually like i i am tempted by nanotexture but not tempted enough to replace the m2 yet are you tempted by the 500 nit macbook air screen i mean yeah that's not helping is it 600 now i forget i don't know but but the honestly the MacBook Air has been a pleasure to travel with like because that that m2 MacBook Air is so first of all it feels amazing it's so nice for my like you know light travel uses and and by light i just mean weight like i'm what i'm doing on the MacBook Air sometimes yeah it's just like you know email and facetime but a lot of times i'm doing overcast development on it and it's fine like it's not nearly as fast as the MacBook Pro but it's pretty good considering it's a two and a half pound allegedly low end model of computer like it's a fantastic computer