614: Don’t Puke for the Show

32:26This is different. This is better than I thought. This is more immersive than I thought. This is more immersive than I thought maybe. But there is so much promise to that type of experience. Part of the reason why I think AR and VR are almost entirely different things, that's part of the reason why I'm largely down on the computing side of spatial computing as discussed previously. But I think the content experience side of it is very strong and has a good future if the proper investments in the content are made. And I hope they are because it really is. I would almost describe this video or the submarine one, I would almost describe them as amusement park rides.

33:14It is really something to experience. I would say the submarine one is closer to a real life play this one was closer to what I would assume a very strong hallucinogenic drug trip might be like having never tried hallucinogenic drugs I concur that this is how I expect it would feel yeah so it's a different style but it shows you like this is the kind of thing that is possible if somebody makes content really made for this so I hope more of that happens and you know it's good that Apple was able to push on an artist that is in with them already to make this happen. More, please. Because again, we still like...

33:56So useful to know in the chat, user Jared H said that apparently Lens Rentals now rents the Vision Pro. You can rent one for a week for a couple hundred bucks. You don't need to rent one for a week. I'd say you can rent a Vision Pro for three days and get a very good idea of everything it can do for you. The first day, you can go through all the content. And then the second day, you can actually like... You can sign in as yourself and put all your stuff in it and try out some apps and try to do some productivity, try the Mac mode. You can do all of that in a three-day rental, I think, pretty easily if you want to save some money.

34:27But eventually, if they step on the gas a little with the content, this could work. But we got to see them step on the gas. And we have to see the content get a little more refined in the techniques they use to avoid things like motion sickness. So I was looking at the – trying to find Lens Rentals link to put in the show notes. I don't think they've ever sponsored the show, but I haven't been a patron of theirs in a long time, but I have really, really liked their services in the years that I have used them several years ago. But anyways. Yeah, me too. Q &A for Apple Vision Pro, 256 gig. First item, why is the battery life so short?

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37:17So we got a lot of feedback and appreciation for John's tip, which I was aware of, but Marco was not, about, hey, if you're dragging something on macOS and you say, oh, just kidding, you can actually hit escape in order to cancel that drag. And I don't remember how I stumbled upon this, but I did. It's been something I do constantly. And Marco was one of the lucky 10 ,000 that didn't know that day, and now he knows, which is great. But we had some feedback about alternative methods to cancel drags. John, do you want to take us through this? Yep, everyone wanted to tell us the thing that I already knew, because it's also from classic macOS.

37:51You can also drag to the menu bar to cancel a drag, which is a big drag location. So you don't have to be very precious about it. Although I will say that I think it's possible to have like menu extras, like the little icons in the menu bar that do allow you to drag things to them. So don't drag it to one of those. You kind of just have to find a safe place in the menu bar. But anyway, that's another thing from classic macOS that was like an easy to hit drag destination that will let you cancel a drag um and yeah i don't know how many people still do that i still think escape is better because you don't have to drag all the way to your menu bar if you have a big screen or whatever or if you're near the bottom um but i'll give you one bonus tip here which i alluded to in the last episode if if you're like me and you like list view windows in the finder and you turn down the little disclosure triangles on the folders to show like a hierarchy of things in list view i love that feature i use it a lot uh if you ever want to drag something in the finder into the folder that is represented by that window without mistakenly dragging it into one of the disclosed subfolders you know what i mean you can try to like drag it and see if the finder is highlighting the the top folder or not highlighting one of the subfolders or whatever but the much easier thing that i still do to this day that i started doing in classic mac os is if you drag to the uh the header bar the one that says like name date modified size that bar on top of list view menu.

39:09If you drag your item onto that bar, it will always go into the window that is, the folder that is represented by that window and you will never mistakenly drag it into a subfolder. That one's a little bit more nuanced than hitting escape or dragging to the menu bar, but it is very useful if you don't, if you use list view windows and you don't want to be fidgety with them. Good deal. M4 versus M4 Pro, the Mac mini SSDs are a little bit interesting. So Thor Johansson writes, while I don't have access to two Mac minis to compare them. The behavior from all previous Apple Silicon Macs would suggest that the M4 Mac Mini 512 gigs is using two 256-gig chips, while the M4 Pro Mac Mini 512 gigs uses four 128-gig chips, and that the M4 Pro is also providing wider bandwidth to effectively utilize the extra chips.

39:56So the M4 Pro might have far greater read-write speeds than the non-Pro. Yeah, they're trying to figure out why would two SSDs that are the same size in the same, you know, Mac Mini, the only difference being the the the soc why would they be different speeds and apparently the apple has done this in the past i haven't seen a tear down to confirm this but it seems plausible like basically if you have an m4 mac mini and an m4 pro mac mini and they have the exact same size of ssd why should they be different speeds and the answer is the mac pro might just have twice as many chips on it and of course you can read and write those in parallel so it gives it a speed boost and yes the m4 pro may have slightly better bandwidth to the ssds as well so So that is the plausible and likely explanation.

40:35Quinn, friend of the show, Quinn Nelson, did a video with regard to the Mac Mini and Quinn tried to build a$600 PC to match the performance of the$600 Mac Mini. You got to read his quote. That's why I put it in there because I thought he did a good job of saying it in a zingy way. All right. Well, Quinn says the following, which I'm being told in my ear that I should read. Quinn says, I tried to build a$599 PC to match the performance of the$599 Mac Mini. Size and efficiency be damned. I could not do it. You cannot build a better PC for$600 using new parts, period. But the Mac Mini is only a good deal if you leave it as is.

41:12And there's a 10-15 minute video on it, which as with most, if not all of Quinn's videos, is very, very good and is worth your time. Yeah, so that middle sentence there. This is a moment in time worth noting. Here's Quinn saying, you cannot build a better PC for$600 using new parts. i don't think that's been true of mac versus pc for a long time and when it has happened it has been brief and fleeting because that's always the thing with max someone some tech nerd is going to say oh you use a mac i could build a better pc for that than that for half the price right that's always the thing and usually it's true usually you can build a faster more capable uh you know i wouldn't necessarily say better but spec wise you can build something that performs better that finishes work faster than the Mac, that plays games at higher frame rates, that has more storage, that has more RAM for less money than the Mac.

42:07That's just the order of the universe. And yet here we are in this brief moment in time where if you get the base Mac mini for$600, you literally cannot build yourself a computer at any size, any appearance. Now forget about trying to make a tiny little, you can make it as big as you want, as noisy as you want. Quinn even said, forget about Thunderbolt. I'm throwing that out the window too. none of those fancy mac buses that no one cares about just just a plain pc i don't care about the i o 600 can you make something that beats the mac mini in gpu and cpu and multi-code anything the answer is you cannot which is pretty amazing and shows how amazing apple silicon is but as quinn points out the second he emphasizes this with the same word in the video the second you touch any options on that mac mini configuration page you totally lose the price advantage goes touch anything add more ram and more storage like maybe not not add 10 gig ethernet but maybe even adding 10 gig ethernet blows it yeah the second you add anything to it and go up to a non-base model then the pc you can get something much cheaper and faster which is a shame but it is worth noting that for this brief moment in time there is a mac that is the best buy in terms of performance not in terms of aesthetics not in terms of size not in terms of power usage nothing and performance it's amazing what a day to be alive i mean and this just shows like a lot of times apple's base models are pretty good values compared to almost anything compared to their own products or other or other competitors products like the base models can be great values it just is usually not the case once you upgrade anything like that that is a very common failure mode because well also the base models like for this is the brief moment in time but like five years from now when it still comes with 16 gigs of ram and it starts to seem a little bit constrained because apple intelligence 2.0 or whatever can barely run in 16 gigs of ram like that's what the problem with the base models they're like they're a great buy when they've just recently been bumped in their specs but then they stagnate for years and years and years and they become a worse and worse buy because it's like the soc maybe is a good buy like the computer is a good buy but the storage and memory just get more and more anemic and eventually it stops being a good buy because you're like if you buy this you won't be able to fit your stuff on it because it's like a 16 gig iphone or whatever you know yeah and and part of i think part of apple's whole revenue and profit margin strategy is like they they are willing to eat into their margins a little bit when the product first launches and then they'll sit on those specs as long as possible so that yeah it's a really good competitive deal and they might they might get less margin for the first few months that something's out but then you know over the over time throughout the life cycle of that product when it's not getting updated, it becomes a worse and worse deal for us and a better and better deal for them.

44:55And so if you pay attention, you can get pretty decent deals when you do things like jump on something right after an update where some important spec has been updated well, like the RAM has here. So you can get better deals, but the availability of them goes in cycles with the product lifetimes. So speaking of good and bad deals, uh john it looked like you wanted to talk about storage pricing yeah i mean it's not the same topic we were just touching on with quinn you know as soon as you touch those options it becomes a bad deal and we've been harping on it but there was two good reddit posts that i thought were funny on that topic first one is what do you get for your money option a upgrade your mac mini to two terabytes of storage option b for the exact same amount of money you can get a playstation 5 Pro, which comes with two terabytes of storage and also$100 cash.

45:45And let me tell you, the two terabytes of storage that comes with the PlayStation, first of all, with the Mac Mini upgrade, you're only upgrading 1.1 and three quarters of a terabyte, right? Because it comes with 256 and you're upgrading to two terabytes. So you're adding 1.75 terabytes. You know what I mean? So you're not even buying a full two terabytes and that costs$800. For that same$800, you can get two terabytes of storage in the playstation 5 pro and playstation 5 has fairly strict requirements for the ssds you have to put in it the minimum spec is 5 500 megabytes per second read write for the playstation storage so this is not crappy like oh it's not the same storage as in the mac mini it's probably as fast or as faster than what you have in the mac mini of course you get an entire playstation 5 pro not playstation 5 the the playstation 5 pro the 700 one that just came out and then you get a hundred dollars cash back so uh yeah apple's prices make no sense uh maybe you can maybe you could buy a playstation 5 pro with two terabytes of storage and get the hundred dollar cash and well i guess you have to desolder the the chips and never mind um and by the way the playstation 5 pro does have an m.2 uh expansion port in it as well uh and then the second item this is uh also from reddit it is a fairly confusing chart that somebody made but it does show some interesting stuff here so it's showing apple versus market ssd prices and here i think they did a little bit of a cheat by not considering the quality and speed of ssd chips that apple uses versus like market prices because when people try to compare market prices like this is how much a terabyte costs well what terabyte a terabyte that gets how much read write speed you can buy a slow terabyte for less money than a fast terabyte but setting that aside what it's basically showing here is this is a chart from 2013 to 2025 and it shows uh storage prices going down over time which we've all experienced ssd storage prices since 2013 have gone down over time you can get more storage for less money it's a fairly sharp curve and then on the same graph there are a bunch of lines for apple's products and the and the the storage pricing associated with them starting with the 2011 mac mini uh which was 300 for 256 gigabytes or 1200 per terabyte and the apple product lines like marco was alluding to before are completely horizontal their price never goes down they just It's just a horizontal line on the graph.

48:04So the Mac mini was a terrible deal. And then came the 2014 Mac mini at$800 per terabyte. That is a horizontal line that extends from 2014 to 2024. Does not dip. The actual storage line is going down, down, down, down, down. The Mac mini line is just straight across, never changing. $800 per terabyte,$800 per terabyte for 10 years. For 10 years, they did not change the storage price. And now finally, the new, the M1 Mac Mini in 2020 is its own horizontal line at$400 per terabyte, still above the market prices. So, yeah, that's the Apple strategy. Introduce a thing at an expensive price and never change it, sometimes for a decade.

48:41While the entire pricing commodity parts environment around it changes radically, Apple is, you know, frozen in time with prices fixed in place as of the introduction of that computer. And presumably that will happen with the M4 one as well. It's just that right now that computer in terms of its capabilities is a good deal at the base model. But yeah, once you add any storage, you jump off of this market line and you go up into Apple Fantasyland and you just stay there forever. It's so frustrating because I'm so happy that we finally got the increased RAM. But it's just shining a gigantic, like, what is this, bat signal sized light on how egregious the storage pricing is.

49:21It's just, it's not good. but we can move slightly forward. Anonymous writes, the ridiculous RAM and SSD upgrade prices Apple charges look even worse when you notice that Apple only lets its retailers sell the lower end versions. Want to future proof your MacBook Pro by getting a two terabyte SSD? That's only available from Apple directly. So Apple keeps 100 % of those ridiculous upgrade charges, making their margins even higher compared to the versions that are also sold by third parties. I did not know that. This is something I didn't think about, but we all know the whole deal of Marco experiences this because he very often needs a computer in a hurry because he's marco um if you go to the apple store they have a certain a certain fixed number of like oh here like the fixed configs we have in stock and it's usually like the base one and then like a better one but if you were to go to like best buy or like any other random place they have a limited number of configurations and i didn't realize that they just don't have like the very upgraded configurations at all and so yeah it seems like apple is just saving the highest margin products only for its channels either ordering through apple's website or you know their store or whatever and then everyone else gets i guess the base model maybe one bump up i haven't i don't have expense extensive experience looking for uh max sold by companies other than apple but this is just another way that apple is making sure that they keep most of the fattest part of the margin curve here uh by the way this isn't entirely an absolute truth um there are like certain retailers that seem to have really good relationships with apple and maybe sell a bunch of stuff to high-end customers like bnh maybe Yes, I was going to say B &H is a good example.

50:52B &H usually has – so like even – when you go to Apple stores, there's always like whatever base configurations they have on the Apple website. Like there's usually like three per computer family or two. Used to be a good, better, best. Right. So whatever base configurations they have, every retailer that does any kind of volume will have those configurations. but usually like if you if you ask an apple store if you go to an apple store and say i need something today what else do you have that's higher than these they do stock other configurations usually but you know you not every configuration possible so it's like all right well if you want the you know the four terabyte ssd you might need to upgrade to 64 gigs of ram to get it that same day in that store or whatever like so but they do stock usually a couple of higher end configurations that are not listed on the website in Apple stores.

51:45Well, if you go to a retailer like Best Buy, usually they will have those, or Best Buy or B &A, usually they will have some of those in stock. And if they are running any kind of discount or special, oftentimes, you know, if they'll take like, you know, a hundred bucks off for some kind of sale they're running, oftentimes that will apply to those high end configurations also. So I have seen hiring configurations discounted by resellers before. It's not as common, and you can't get every configuration you want, but they do exist. All right. And then we got some news, I think, around the time we actually recorded last week.

52:23But allegedly, the M4 MacBook Pro just started quietly using Quantum Dot Display Tech, which I was not aware of. So reading from MacRumors, the M4 MacBook Pro models feature quantum dot display technology, according to display analyst Ross Young. Apple used a quantum dot film instead of a red KSF phosphor film, a change that provides more vibrant, accurate color results. And apparently, John, interrupt me whenever you're ready, but apparently quantum dot was a thing for a long time, and Apple was aware of it but refused to use it because there was an element in there, I forget which one now, that apparently is not easy to recycle or not easy to come by without you you know really do it getting it from really terrible places and so they said yeah no thanks but now you can do this quantum dot stuff without that whatever element it was and so they're like hell yeah let's do it i'm not sure if the environmental reason was the main motivation since apple seems very far behind in a lot of display stuff but uh just to clarify on the quantum dot thing so the we'll put a link uh in the notes to uh ross young's uh post about this and he's got a little spectrograph images showing the red, green, and blue wavelengths of light emitted by the subpixels in a display.

53:35These graphs are something that's very familiar if you watch a lot of TV reviews or any kind of monitor with RGB pixels. And you would think, you know, if you look real close on a monitor, it's got a little red subpixel, a little green subpixel, a little blue subpixel. Some TVs have white subpixels as well, but computer monitors don't. You would think that if you expose that to one of these spectrum analyzers, you'd see like a spike in the blue a spike in the green and a spike in the red uh but surprisingly especially on televisions you will see some very misshapen lumps with like kind of a plateau between blue and green and then one spike is higher than the other is and other spikes are wider you're like why are these so like unevenly distributed why isn't this just pure red pure green and pure blue um well the way uh non-quantum dot lcd displays work is they have a backlight that shines usually white light through a filter and the filter they have a red filter green filter and a blue filter and the filter blocks all the wavelengths that are not blue and the green one blocks all the red one blocks all the wavelengths that are not red it's like when you take one of those red like film things like 3d glasses but the red and the green they're little things that go over your eyes and they work by blocking wavelengths that are not red or green red or blue from getting to your eyes so the bottom line is they block light so you have to turn the back light up even higher because some of the light from that white backlight is being blocked.

54:52In fact, like a third of the light or whatever, depending on the spectrum of the white backlight, is being blocked by each subpixel. That's not good for brightness. The way quantum dots work, that's not actually how they work, but you can think about it as instead of blocking the wavelengths that are not red or green or blue, they take whatever light hits them and essentially change it into what light of the wavelength that is desired. Basically, the light hits the quantum dot, then the quantum dot emits light in a particular wavelength. so you don't lose as much light by blocking wavelengths i'll take your light whatever color it is and by the way most quantum dot displays have like a blue backlight because that is the highest energy and you can downgrade that to green and red right so they'll have a blue backlight and the blue black light will go straight through the blue pixel so no filter whatsoever there and then the blue black light will hit the green quantum dot and rather than blocking wavelength i mean there is no green wavelength there it'll it will change the wavelength of the light by emitting a green wavelength after it's being excited anyway that's what quantum dots do they eventually change the color of light in a more efficient manner so you can run the backlight lower so you can get higher brightness all that stuff and the macbook pros with the 1000 nit uh thing now i mean that's not that big of a deal because the old ones went up to 1600 nits anyway it's really just a software setting but i think the reason they unlock that with a software setting without the fear of them destroying battery life is because the quantum dot display lets them get 1000 nits on that display with a less bright backlight because the quantum dots are more efficient what this isn't is anything like oled oleds there are things such as a quantum dot oled which is what i have on my tv but oleds emit light in an entirely different way and are different technology and are much better than what apple is doing with the mini led but the rumor is the oled macbook pros will have to wait until late 2025 or 2026 so keep holding your breath for those but for now we get to enjoy brighter more vibrant more pure color with less energy on these new macbook pros yeah this is cool and i'm jealous so there we go so sometime in the last week or so a couple of weeks actually uh there was a bit of a kerfuffle about uh ios devices starting to just randomly reboot themselves and hear me out before you you know grab your pitchforks uh so this started on i guess the 9th of november with a report from the verge uh reading from there there's apparently a new ios 18 security feature that reboots iphones that haven't been unlocked in a few days, frustrating police by making it harder to break into suspects' phones.

57:13This apparently was all kicked off by a 404 Media post, which we will also link. Again, reading from The Verge. 404 Media, which first reported police warnings about the reboots on Thursday, writes that restarted iPhones enter a more secure, quote, before first unlock or BFU state. Now it seems Apple added inactivity reboot code in 18.1 that triggers iPhones to restart after they've been locked for four days. Which is kind of wild. So there's a demo video put up by Jiska Klassen, hopefully I'm pronouncing that somewhat right, who is a researcher at the Hasso Plattner Institute and one of the first security experts to spot this new feature.

57:51And their video demonstrating this shows that an iPhone left alone without being unlocked reboots itself after about 72 hours. And I watched this video. Of course, they accelerated most of it, so you don't have to sit there for 72 hours. It's going to be a long, long video. Right. It shows that almost exactly at 72 hours, sure enough, the thing reboots. and then uh the same jessica classin did a fascinating uh deep dive and reverse engineering into how this exact exactly works before i get there do we have any commentary so far do you want me to read this next there was a little bit of scaremongering when this came out it's like well first the police are complaining oh please it's going to make it harder to bring into criminals phones every kind of any kind of security feature law enforcement's like we don't like it we want back doors we all want to be able to hack things we want things to be you know because they need to find out things about criminals uh but as individuals who want to protect our privacy so this is like oh apple's doing this thing are they thwarting law enforcement or is this a bug or is it some there was also some rumors about like the phones are talking to each other in the evidence room and telling each other to reboot i love that that was very good that was the best i love the crazy crap cops come up with and they say it with the most with the utmost authority yeah or like it's when there was some other theories like it's when they're not on a network because in like in the evidence room, there's no Wi-Fi they can connect to or they can't get cellular or whatever.

59:07But anyway, yeah, this reverse engineering. It must be a conspiracy between the iPhones to lock us out. Yeah, so this reverse engineering does a good job of discovering exactly what it is. But I think the most interesting part about this that Casey's about to read is the background on why doing this. Why do this? What's the point? Like why, so what? Your phone reboots if no one touches it for 72 hours. How does that stop someone from breaking into your phone? I'm sorry to derail us just a little bit, but Tom H in the chat said they don't need to bring this to the Vision Pro because it already has another way to reboot long before 72 hours.

59:43I'm sorry, it was too good. I couldn't help myself. Again, Marco had it in his drawer for two weeks, not three days. Trust me, it won't last three days. Well, probably not. You can run that experiment. We'll see. So going back to Jessica Klassen, this is a bit of a long passage, but it is worth reading. Did you know that entering your passcode for the first time after your phone starts is something very different than entering it later to unlock your phone? When initially entering your passcode, this unlocks a key store in the Secure Enclave Processor, or SEP, that encrypts your data on an iPhone.

1:00:12The state before entering your passcode for the first time is also called before first unlock. Due to the encrypted user data, your iPhone behaves slightly differently to later unlocks. You'll see that Face ID and Touch ID won't work and that the passcode is required. But there's more subtle things you might notice. Since Wi-Fi passwords are encrypted, your iPhone won't connect to Wi-Fi networks. If your SIM is not PIN protected, your iPhone will still connect to cellular networks. That means technically you can still receive phone calls. Yet if you receive a phone call, even if that number is in your contacts, the contact name won't be shown as the contacts haven't been decrypted yet.

1:00:42Similarly, when you receive notifications about new messages, you'll see that you got messages, but you won't see any message previews. In the after first unlock state, or AFU, user data is decrypted. You can imagine this is like a key safe that is kept open while iOS is running. Even when you see a lock screen, certain keys remain available to the operating system. This way, you can stay connected to Wi-Fi networks and receive message notification previews even when your phone is locked. While it's more convenient, the AFU state is more susceptible to attacks. An attacker who can somehow bypass the lock screen can get access to the decrypted data on the iPhone.

1:01:14To bypass the lock screen, an attacker does not necessarily need to know the passcode. Security vulnerabilities within iOS can allow attackers to get code execution and extract from an iPhone even while it appears to be quote-unquote locked. so so just to summarize what they're describing here so we've all seen this like when you boot your phone for the first time you have to type in your passcode to unlock it and all these sort of side effects of like in the before unlock state that like yeah your phone's on and it's booted and if your sms doesn't have a ping you can receive sms messages but none of your data is accessible yet it's all i mean everything is encrypted what they call encrypted at rest on the phone like the bits on the disk are just scrambled garbage right they make no sense if you look at them they're they're encrypted you need the secret decryption key to decrypt them into something sensible when you boot your phone it hasn't decrypted any of that stuff yet it hasn't decrypted it and put it into memory until you unlock it right once you unlock it the keys to the kingdom are in the memory of the phone they've been retrieved from the secure enclave thanks to you entering your passcode it's got it's unlock the key safe that has the keys in them and now your phone's busy reading stuff it's reading your contacts it's putting them into memory it's reading your messages as they come and it's reading everything right in the running memory of your turned on phone is all your valuable information just sitting in memory somewhere right obviously it's hard to get to you'd have to crack into the phone and find a way to read memory which you usually can't do blah blah but it's there it's unencrypted in the memory chips like you can imagine if you could crack the thing open and somehow access the memory chips but you know like if you have physical access to the phones all sorts of weird stuff that you could do right it's very much like people think like when i lock my computer like when i turn the screen server on and it requires a password to get in like everything is secured but think of it more like just taking a very thin curtain and putting it over the front of all your secret stuff and if they can like tear a tiny hole in that curtain a breeze can blow that curtain aside or the curtain becomes a little transparent or the curtain crashes they do torture the analogy here and disappears.

1:03:13That was like one of the early security flaws in an early version of Mac OS X, the password dialog for when the screen set for locks your screen. If you just held down a key and just entered like a really long password just by repeating the letter A a thousand times, it would crash the screen lock application up and the curtain would go away. And guess what? There's all your stuff totally decrypted sitting right underneath the curtain. So the after first unlock state is all your stuff with a thin veneer curtain hiding in front of it that hopefully stops people but it's so easy to get around the curtain the before unlock state is everything is still entirely encrypted and it's of no use to anybody it is locked up it is fully it's almost like your phone is off right it's just encrypted at rest and so even though from our perspective so what's the difference i enter my passcode all the time i do face id isn't it just as locked when i lock my phone no it's totally different before unlock is way way way more secure than After Unlock.

1:04:09Yeah, I love that Apple takes iOS security so seriously, and it's so incredibly advanced and has all these different protections. But I also, I think even more than that, I love that they are constantly in motion and constantly tightening things down even further, and they actually would care. You know, Apple, you know, you all know what I think of Tim Cook. But when he does his shameless government cooperation. usually it's opportunistic ways that he can make sure that he keeps making a whole bunch of money as we're going to see him play very nice with Trump over the next few years. That's what happened last time.

1:04:51It's going to happen again this time. And you can be sure that anything that – if there's tariffs on goods from China, you're going to see that, oh, they just mysteriously don't apply to Apple. There's going to be a lot of that kind of stuff going on. He's going to play very nice with government and with the bag on top to make sure that Apple continues to make a whole bunch of money with its operations in China. However, Apple also does not like cooperating with law enforcement more than it has to legally. And they especially do not like things that try to get around their phone's privacy and security measures.

1:05:31So Apple is constantly closing loopholes, adding more protections, fighting against different hacks. And that's – whatever you think of whether law enforcement should be able to hack phones that somehow would only be used for good purposes, ha, ha, ha. Whatever you think about that, this type of security affects everybody. Like this is just Apple making sure that our phones are secure for everybody. and this is total overkill for most of us but I'd rather they err on the side of overkill when it comes to basic device security than underkill, whatever that word would be. I'm glad that they take these ridiculous measures.

1:06:13I'm glad that somewhere, one of these various hacks from Celebrite or whatever, one of these various hacks that these law enforcement agencies and foreign governments and other kind of bad actors, one of the exploits Apple realized hey you know what if we just make the phones reboot after three days of not being unlocked it'll erase this whole category of whatever from being used in practice I love that kind of stuff and I'm so glad that they keep fighting that fight it makes their products safer and more secure for all of us and by the way that's why when the police have a phone that they want to break into that's why they keep it plugged in because they don't want it to run out of battery and die and go into the before our first unlock state again they keep they want to keep all that stuff that's in memory all the decrypted data that's in memory they want to keep it there they want to keep it in the mode where it's all the goodies with a thin curtain in front of it just so they can figure out how to get around that curtain or get through it or whatever but once it reboots it just becomes a bucket of garbage data that they have very a very difficult time getting anything out of yeah and because and you know because a lot of times there's like processes like oh well like we have this phone keep it alive keep it booted keep it powered on until we can get i mean do they get warrants really probably not but it's more probably more like until we can get like the hack machine from celebrite or whatever to plug this thing into that you know maybe maybe like the entire agency and the entire state owns one and they have to like wait for it a few days like now it'll it'll put some pressure on their tactics that probably should be and maybe are illegal um like again it protects all of us and this is a good thing.

1:07:49Yeah, so a whole bunch of reverse engineering happened and then there were some takeaways and reading from Jessica's post. Turns out the inactivity reboot triggers exactly after three days or 72 hours. The iPhone would do so despite being connected to Wi-Fi. This confirms my suspicion that this feature had nothing to do with wireless connectivity. Law enforcement's conclusion that the reboot is due to phones wirelessly communicating with each other is implausible. The older iPhones before iOS 18 likely rebooted due to another reason, such as a software bug. Security-wise, this is a very powerful mitigation.

1:08:21An attacker must have kernel code execution to prevent an inactivity reboot. This means that a forensic analysis must be able to delay the reboot for the actual data extraction, but the initial exploit must be run within the first three days. Inactivity reboot will change the threat landscape for both thieves and forensic analysts, but asymmetrically so. While law enforcement is under more time pressure, it likely completely locks out criminals from accessing your data to get into your bank accounts and other valuable information stored on your iPhone. It's not just law enforcement that wants to break into your phone.

1:08:51If someone steals your iPhone, it is much less valuable to them if this thing is locked and they can't resell it. If they can somehow figure out an exploit to get into your phone in an unlocked state, they can harvest all your information, try to get your passwords, get access to your email account, reset your passwords, drain your bank account, all that good stuff, which is another reason if you're worried about your phone being stolen or taken or hacked into, don't just lock it. you can shut it down and put it into the before unlock state so yeah this is a this is a good feature uh and it's it's this is the type of thing that apple does without really announcing but it's just one more uh one more uh move in the cat and mouse game this is another reason if you care about this stuff at all it's always up the update to the latest os because uh the the cat in this case the hackers are always finding exploits but then apple closes them they find more than apple closes them and on and on and on and so if you have a phone that's like oh you're running you know the latest version of ios 17 well that has 25 known x points but the very latest version of ios 18 all 25 of those have been patched like and that's the game not that there's none out there there's always new ones being discovered but they are patched uh pretty quickly after they're discovered in the best case and any older phone running an older os probably has a laundry list of hacks that work on it whereas the newer you get the shorter that list of known hacks gets.

1:10:07And then, you know, then it's, you know, a clock on the thieves. They have three days, whether they keep your phone plugged in or not, they have three days to figure out how to get inside it and get your stuff. Also, I mean, you know, not to make this too dark, but I think this is important to think about because it's a realistic threat. Keep in mind the direction that the US government is going in. There's a lot of data that is on our phones that the government might start wanting to look at more. For instance, if you are in a state that has made abortion illegal, especially like the really hardcore ones, that like, you know, any form of abortion is illegal.

1:10:48Well, information like you've had a period or not, and what happened after you didn't have one, that information could get you thrown in jail or worse. And the way we're going politically in the US, we're going to have to really start taking a lot more of the data security stuff seriously and privacy data seriously. Because the government's going in some weird directions and it can get a lot worse. And I think what we see with some of these political directions that things are heading in, we're not that far from things getting a lot more threatening in areas like that. And so a lot of data is on our phones, a lot of data is in these services that we use in our phones a lot like we we need to start building the infrastructure if we don't already have it to be a lot more careful and a lot more guarded and a lot more private about this stuff and a lot more secure because you know you might think today you might you know be in a place or be a kind of person where you don't feel particularly at risk for you know government intrusion into your phone but that can change quickly and and i think we are in for some of those changes in those directions, unfortunately.

1:12:03So there's never a better time than now to start getting your security in order and reviewing some of these options and some of these practices and bulking things up where you can. And if you're in that paranoid mindset, keep in mind that in the US, at least the current precedent in law is that the police can force you to put your finger on Touch ID. They can force you to use Face ID, but they can't force you to enter your passcode. So if you care about that type of thing, another advantage would be for Unlock State because Because Face ID and Touch ID don't work in that state. And they cannot compel you to tell them your passcode.

1:12:36Yet. Brief question, which I don't expect you guys to know the answer to. You know how there's the trick of where on modern iPhones you hold the volume up button and the lock button for a few seconds. And that will disable Touch ID. Does that get you into the before first unlock? I mean, strictly speaking, it's got to be different. Yeah, that does lock out Touch ID and Face ID, but it does not get you into Before First Unlock. We are sponsored this episode by Uncommon Goods. Spark something uncommon this holiday season with just the right gift from Uncommon Goods. This busy holiday season is here, and Uncommon Goods makes it less stressful with incredible hand-picked gifts for everyone on your list on one spot.

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1:14:57let's do some ask atp and mr writes can you guys explain how an m4 ultra is expected to outperform or compete against an nvidia 4090 when an m4 is just a tiny chip with a small heat sink while a 4090 is a triple slot gpu weighs over a kilogram and consumes around 400 watts of power i know apple's good at making chips but surely we're missing something here yeah an nvidia 4090 which is, I think, their current top-end GPU. It is really big, really expensive. It's 400 watts of power, has a huge heatsink. And you're saying, comparing to this, you know, with these, M4 is just a tiny chip. Yeah, the M4 is a tiny chip.

1:15:34The M4 Ultra, which doesn't exist yet, but when it does exist, it will not be a tiny chip. It will also be a very big, very hot chip that requires a very big heatsink. Take a look at the M2 Ultra and the size of the heatsink that it has. Now, it's not 400 watts, but just just a level set here to try to compete with an NVIDIA 4090. It's going to take a chip that is substantially larger and hotter than the M4, the Mac Mini. It's going to have a big heat sink on it. It's going to cost a lot of money. But still, the question is, how can they even be in the ballpark? I did this calculation back before the M1 was coming out.

1:16:09um is it possible for apple to make an apple silicon chip with a quote-unquote integrated gpu as in a gpu that is on the soc on the die with all the cpus and everything that competes with the best video card that you can get best single video card that you can get and and the math that i did back then was based on the rumor of the jade 4c die the thing that would be like two ultras or four maxes put together the math on that worked out that would have been competitive with the best single gpu video card available at the time but apple never made that chip they only made the m1 ultra which was two m1 maxes stuck together they never made the quad with four of them and that's why no single apple silicon chip has ever competed with a single best top tier pc video card now why are we having this discussion again because apple's been doing so well with their gpu work that now when you look at the m4 pro and the m4 max and you start doing back of the envelope math you can be like all right well if they just made an ultra one of these if they took two m4 maxes and stuck them together which again we don't know i don't know if they're gonna do this i still haven't seen a die shot of the m4 max to see if it has the interposer but anyway assuming the m4 ultra has essentially twice the number of gpu cores as the m4 max that starts to plausibly be within shooting distance of nvidia 4090 but here's the other thing to consider the nvidia 4090 is i think the best uh gpu can get today it's an old card it's about to be replaced but but the nvidia 5 series it's kind of like when all the competitors were comparing their new like the qualcomm arm chip and everything and intel chips with the m3 just before the m4 came out yeah that's the time you want to do that comparison because when the nvidia 5000 series comes out they're going to be way faster and i think they will maintain that lead how can they be even in the ballpark i'm not sure what process nvidia is using at various times apple may have had a better process like three nanometer three nanometer versus five nanometer um the other thing is the nvidia chips have lots of specialized stuff in them for applications that apple does not care about like i don't know cryptocurrency stuff or like like AI model training, although Apple does care about that at this point or whatever.

1:18:27So I think that we're in this moment in time where you could fantasize about a non-existent M4 Ultra that's not going to come out until WWDC next year could plausibly be somewhere in the neighborhood of the NVIDIA 4090, which by the time the M4 Ultra is out will be last year's old news and will be replaced by better GPUs. That's what it comes down to. It's great that Apple is getting closer and their GPUs are really good and they are amazing performance per watt and like the whole rest of apple silicon but don't expect a single uh you know symbol single apple soc to trounce the best uh single pc gpu available if we can get in the ballpark that will be amazing but even that is going to be quite a challenge so when you get down to the lower ends like if you start doing the people did comparison tests like you can watch the quins video that we talked about before where he's like the m4 is not like a beefy gpu but it's pretty good for its size and power and when you try to compete on pricing you get like the cheapest nvidia gpu or like a really low-end pc gpu the m4 gpu holds its own against it amazingly and that is pretty amazing and remember the nvidia thing it's on its own separate card it's got its own separate memory that it has to power it's got all its own separate circuitry and now it's got to communicate to the cpu through the pci ebus and all that stuff right so there's lots of extra overhead that you don't have when the GPU is literally on the dive with the rest of this stuff.

1:19:53So there are advantages to that arrangement. Of course, the unified memory architecture is you don't have to have a separate set of RAM, right? But yeah, I too wish that Apple would at least try to compete with a single one of the PC video cards. When the M1 was coming out, I was saying, you know, the Mac Pro, you can put more than one of those video cards in it, and it'll be, you know, there's nothing that Apple could do to compete with that. and we were speculating if apple would produce apple silicon video cards and so far they haven't done that either so yeah i'm this is the question for my next mac am i going to try to get something with the big giant gpu speculatively so i can play the uh masterpiece edition of control a game that was introduced three years ago or whatever whenever i see an apple game announced i'm like oh it's cool these these uh vendors are porting their games to the mac and they're doing a good job on the ports and they have good performance then i look at the game it's like yeah i remember that game for a few years ago when it came out that's not really it's good that it's happening but that is not enough to turn the mac around as a gaming platform but anyway apple's gpus are really good and they're getting better uh but i don't think it's a fair comparison to compare the non-existent m4 ultra speculative non-existent m4 ultra to the nvidia 4090 that's about to be replaced a couple other things on that too you know when you're when you're comparing you know apple's highest end gpu configuration of an soc versus a dedicated pc gpu's highest end model there's a couple of factors that are also worth considering so number one apple's strategy of making these socs and making the larger ones you know when you go from m4 max to m4 ultra presumably they're going to do a similar strategy they've done with m1 and m2 ultra they skipped m3 where they just copy everything.

1:21:37You just get two Max's glued together. We don't know because we haven't seen if there's an interposer on the M4 Max yet. It's still up in the air. Right. Like that is how they did the M1 and M2 Ultras. So presumably that is likely to be one of the ways they might do this. It's probably the most likely way they might do this. So if they do, you know, keep in mind that as you try to scale up this design, you're also doubling a whole bunch of other stuff on that chip that is not just the GPU cores. If they were to make a higher-end configuration for GPU purposes specifically, and instead of having two M4 Maxes next to each other, if they just extended the M4 Max to have just a huge amount more GPU cores, but not doubling the neural engine, the CPU cores, the media engines, like all the other stuff that's on the die, they could fit way more GPU cores than they could by doubling the entire chip.

1:22:35So if they did that kind of thing, maybe that would be, like that would be closer to what the 4090 and those kind of GPUs are, because those are just GPUs. So like those are spending all of that die space and all of that wattage and all that power and all those terrible manufacturing yields, those are spending all those resources only for more GPU bandwidth and cores. Yeah, one of the reasons the rumor is that they might not be taking two M4 Maxes and sticking them together is because one of the downsides historical downsides of taking two maxes and sticking them together is that apple hasn't gotten linear scaling on doubling the gpu cores and presumably because of like essentially overhead of the interposer and and signaling across that barrier and cross communication so even though you double the number of gpu cores you don't get straight up doubling of the speed which is what you would expect for something like a gpu with massively parallel loads uh and it could be the that's the interconnect like they're too far apart from each other they have to communicate across the interposer it is impeding their ability to scale the way you'd want to so again no i don't know what they're actually going to do i haven't seen any rumors about it uh that's why i want to see the eyeshadow of the m4 max because if there's no interposer we know they're definitely not doing that yeah the other thing to consider is like when you're when you're looking at when you're comparing against the highest end version the highest end gpu for the current high-end family of nvidia whatever's you know the way these gpus work similar to how cpus work but i think to to an even amped up degree these days in this market is you know when you have like the the the low end and the mid-range configurations of the of these gpu families and they take much more reasonable balances of power and heat versus performance when you try to scale up performance of a computer chip.

1:24:25Normally you're just doing that like you have a certain family and you do it by either making more of those cores, you know, making the chip bigger or you ramp up the clock speed of those cores or both. When you ramp up clock speeds, the relationship between performance and heat is not linear. Heat goes up way faster than performance. So there's always like a sweet spot where like the mainstream GPUs, the mainstream chips those will be you know tuned in a certain sweet spot where like they're getting pretty good performance for a nice reasonable amount of of heat that they and efficiency that they can get all of apple's chips in this family all of the m series chips they stay in that envelope they don't push so the m4 ultra is in all likelihood probably not going to be cranked up to 400 watts they could if they wanted to design chips to do that they could design chips in that direction but they don't they keep these chips within like the the sweet spots of heat to performance but when nvidia releases gpus they have chips that are in those sweet spots but they also will sell you a high-end model that is way outside of that sweet spot where it might use you know four times the power of a lower-end model to get that extra five percent of performance right and maybe get twice the performance or something like not twice definitely not yeah yeah usually not yeah so like so it's but so when you compare it to one of those chips those chips are designed with completely different trade-offs in mind to achieve like the the whole point of the 4090 and the whatever 90 series gpus the whole point is just give us the most performance you possibly can power size and cost be damned right up to the point where the card crashes and then back it off a little right but Apple does not design their chips that way because they don't design their machines that way and especially talking about carbon neutrality that's the last thing they want and the only machine they have that could handle that is the Mac Pro because every other computer that they have is so tiny and has limited cooling or whatever so you can't put a 400 watt anything into any Mac except for the Mac Pro every other one will just melt the coolers aren't big enough when you look at what PC cases have to accommodate in order to have one of these GPUs in it it's ridiculous like and and there are markets for that but those are not markets apple cares at all like apple doesn't care about the super high-end gamer market uh you know that's going to buy these gpus obviously apple doesn't care about that market they i mean i could argue whether they should or not but they don't so you're comparing very different things when you're when you're comparing when you're trying to say apple should match their performance or should be in the ballpark of the performance of this super high-end nvidia pc gaming gpu like there's a lot of reasons why that's a very different kind of comparison yeah and that's why i like the the the m1 extreme that never came the four maxis together that one would have been in the ballpark now i think people are thinking maybe the m4 ultra will be in the ballpark of the 49 because we're at the end of an nvidia generation because of the rumors about the m4 ultra being so vague that people can just fantasize about well imagine if the m4 ultra had this number of cores and it's like i mean you You can just keep multiplying number of cores by, you know, number of, you know, floating point operations or whatever thing you're choosing to judge it by.

1:27:46But, yeah, like the hope is, again, for the Mac Pro that they will ship a chip that actually requires this case because they didn't do that before. They gave the same chip that works just fine in a Mac Studio, and that is entirely a waste of the massive cooling capacity of the Mac Pro. So we'll see how that goes probably next summer at WWDC. Keep hope alive, John. Keep hope alive. All right, Yannick Boyson writes, with Marco's recent switch from a NAS to a Mac Mini for his primary storage and my plans to do the same in the near future, I was wondering about file integrity in macOS. Is Marco worried about file integrity or bit rot on his external drives?

1:28:21While APFS is a modern file system, as discussed on previous episodes, it lacks any functionality when it comes to file integrity checking or scrubbing. These features are available in BTRFS or ButterFS on the Synology or ZFS. I've read a bit on the topic, but I'm still not clear how big of a problem this could be if at all, and if having redundancy or RAID and or backups changes anything in this equation. Apple seems to think that on internal SSDs and modern Macs, it isn't a big concern, though others have a different view, especially when it comes to possibly lower quality external hard drives or SSDs.

1:28:52And we will link to a post from 2016 from Adam H. Leventhal on APFS that talks about this. Yannick continues, so the second question is, in John's opinion, should Marco and I I'd be worried about this. And is a dedicated NAS still the best option as the primary personal storage? Or can it be demoted to backup duties only without any problems, even for storing data in the longterm? So Marco, you worried? No, I figured John would tell me when to be worried. Well, maybe that's right now. Well, so we've discussed this before, especially when APFS was coming out, these data integrity fixtures, the features that they're talking about, it's basically like, um, is any part of the file system or the computer checking, that the bits that were written to it are the ones that they're reading back.

1:29:37So if you write some bits to it and then wait two years and then read the bits back, is there any part of the system that says, hey, are these the bits that I wrote two years ago? Or have they changed since then? Or does it just say, here are the bits on the disk. Here you go. With no knowledge, you can't have any knowledge of like, have they changed since I wrote them there? Like, did one of those bits flip because the cosmic ray hit it or something? Or is there some bug somewhere? Like, that's data integrity. ZFS was a real pioneer. on this it um it was a file system and a whole you know the whole stack for zfs was uh designed with features that let it know when anything has gone wrong there's a bad driver there's a bad disk there's a cosmic ray there's a software problem any kind of thing that could go wrong in the entire stack between your storage device your computer your cpu you know bad memory casey anything like that zfs would catch it because zfs had checksums on all the data and so if anything changed uh it would say hey something about these bits is off it could correct small errors if you had redundant storage of the same data it could say okay well the data off disk one is bad but i have some of that same data on disk two and oh it looks like it's good on disk two and i'll write it back to disk one so now it's good in both places again that is data integrity um i like that feature uh and i really wished that apple's next generation file system wouldn't have it apfs does not have it um as part of the file system stack so and when apfs writes some data and then reads it back two years later it has no way to know if that data has changed out from under it has no way to know if the data uh was perfectly fine on the disk but then it hit a bad part of ram and then it was gave back to your program and it's all scrambled because it came through a bad piece of ram it has no way of knowing any of that because it doesn't do these things so there are third-party utilities to say okay if the faucet is not going to be do it do it for me is this something i can do can i like write a bunch of little checksum files in each directory that has checksums of all the files that are in that directory so when i read them later i'll also read the checksum file and sort of do the same thing that zfs is doing under the covers but manually with a bunch of files yeah you can do that and there's a bunch of utilities that do that why would you want to do this why do you care uh because in general if you have lots and lots of data stored somewhere you probably care about it like say your family photos your family photo library you don't want to go and read those photos five years from now and pull up your favorite photo and it starts rendering and halfway through the image it cuts off and then it's just gray or snow for the rest of the image because the jpeg is corrupted or something and how could that happen bit rot cosmic rays bugs bad memory bad disk like so many things could cause that to happen the detection of that happening is step one in fixing it so so obviously like if your data is going to go bad what you want is you want to know that it's bad and that's important for example when you're doing backups because if you don't know that it's bad and you're doing backups you've got a cloud backup you've got a local backup you've got the time machine you're doing backups everywhere if things are going bad you're just backing up the bad data to 17 different places and in fact maybe the good data was in your time machine backup but then you overrode it with the bad data and slowly it pushed off the good data off the end because you know you can only fit so much on your time machine disk before it pushes the old versions off the end and now you have the good data but you've since overwritten it with 17 new versions of the bad data because the file system and the operating system and everything have no way of knowing that they're taking bad data and pushing it to the cloud taking bad data and pushing it to your time machine backup they just think here's the data here it is they don't know if it's good or it's bad it's just this is what came back from the disk so here you go right that's why you want this detection and the second part of it is redundancy if you have both detection and redundancy it can detect when there's a problem and fix the problem and warn you about it so it can fix it with a redundant data and warn you about it right so this is a question about like raid and everything raid is not a backup strategy raid can help save you from disks going bad or not data going bad well there it'll maybe it'll know that there's a difference between the two things but it won't know which one is right depending on how which raid level you're using if you're using raid 5 with checksums versus raid 1 where it's just duplicating stuff um that can help a little bit but a file system that enforces this is what you really want i think butterfs um can do it for data and metadata separately but you really want it for both the metadata is what keeps track of where all your files are and then data is like keeps make sure the data is is good now as for whether margo should be worried probably not because there's not really much point in worrying about something you can't do anything about that's the bad part here like there's no i could get hit by a bus yeah like what like it's a shame that apple's storage stack doesn't have any data integrity features other than like you know the basics of like uh error correction in the ssds and redundant storage and stuff like that's all under the covers but like in the end it is not end-to-end like securely checking that your data is good and there's not much you can do about it practically speaking all the solutions that like write a bunch of checksum files or whatever they are cumbersome onerous don't work in all situations like they don't work with time machine really you'd be backing up the checksum files directly from the regular files i don't think you can be sure that they'd even be in sync with each other and you're just going to be adding more files that like that system is it's difficult to write a system like that reliably the third-party tools that do it can be good for targeted use like just this folder i want to be sure it's you know secure but like for things like your iCloud photo library you don't even really have good access to the i mean they're buried in there somewhere all in the originals folder and those all uuid type things but Like the photos app manages those files.

1:35:11If you try to put something on top of that, to tries to keep track of all the files in your photo library and then write checksums to them and correlate them, you're just going to get so many false positives from your system, not working right. That there's no, there's nothing I can recommend that you do. That's going to save you from this. I mean, one of the things is like, Oh, keep your data in motion, constantly be copying it from place to place to place. So that when something goes bad or rots, you'll have good copy somewhere. That's kind of the best we can do, but it's just a it's a race condition have you been moving your data around at the right time such that you didn't just spread the corruption everywhere right it's not going to be the case where it goes bad here and you're like oh but i got good copies here here and here a you won't even know it went bad and b by the time you do know it went bad the bad thing is probably in all your places so that argues for potentially doing what marco did once and i've done once which is like you know write things out to a blu-ray m disc and put it in a drawer if that happens to have the good copy of that data then nothing's ever going to change that data again it's not it's not going to get overwritten by subsequent backups right but if that has the bad data well then you know tough luck so the question is we should all not be we should all know that this is a possibility but unfortunately for us there's not really anything we can reasonably do as an end user to fix this which is why it's on apple to eventually get its button gear and do and fix this i was so happy they did apfs for years i've been hammering on them for like they need a modern file system apfs is a modern file system it's great i love it it's just not everything that it could have been for for some good reasons because a lot of these data integrity features hinder performance and take more memory and there's yada yada right but eventually if i live long enough and we're doing this podcast long enough i'm going to be hammering them to say you know what apple it's time for you to have a modern file system maybe if s was great back in 20 whatever but now it's 2040 something and it's time for you to have a file system with data integrity uh and we'll see yeah and again it's a shame that like btrfs has it zfs has it like there's existing things that do have it um and as for nasas as a you know as primary personal storage i wouldn't use any network attached storage as primary personal storage you should use directly attached internal or external ssds for your personal storage and use the nas more for backups um and for data integrity yeah if you can have a nas that uses a file system that has data integrity checking on it that can help you detect corruption and potentially correct it depending on which file system you can buy a nas that uses efs that has all these features on it you don't really care about the performance because it's just a big backup i would recommend that that's one of the advantages of having a nas is or just any kind of separate computer that's not an apple computer that is running a file system that has data integrity checking and using it to make backups keep in mind that if you carefully put your corrupted data there it will carefully preserve your corrupted data because that was the data that it was written it thinks that's the right data sorry so you have to be careful with your backups if you push the old backups off the end periodically you will always end up spreading your corruption everywhere before you find out that your favorite picture of your kid when they were two is half corrupted cool also make prints and print books because that's another that's another hedge against this you know if you lose all your data or your one favorite picture is corrupted but you printed five eight by tens and they're in frames on your walls even if they're like uv bleached it's still better than nothing thank you to our sponsors this week squarespace and uncommon goods thank you to our members who support us directly you can join us atp.fm slash join one of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.

1:38:51This week, Overtime, we're going to actually address the question, you know, earlier we were talking about Apple's prices and the storage upgrade prices and everything and in Overtime we're going to ask is complaining about Apple's prices actually useful? So, we'll get to that in Overtime. If you want to hear that, atp.fm slash join. Thanks everybody and we'll 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-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental

1:40:17I decided I needed another project. Many people know that I talked a couple of years ago about putting fiber in the houses and nothing like that. I still want to do that at some point. I'm still kicking that can over and over and over again. I needed something that is far more cost effective to work on and a far shorter stretch of time to complete it. the problem statement is as follows because i hate myself i'm a fan of the new york giants the new york giants uh is a is a football team a nfl football team an american football team their record is currently for the season two wins and eight losses it has not been a good football season but i've been a giants fan since i remember and although i'm not a super duper duper fan i generally prefer to be able to watch the Giants when I can.

1:41:08The way the NFL works is that typically there's only, you know, like three or four games that are happening concurrently, oftentimes maybe only one or two, typically played, you know, Sunday afternoons. And if you live in the region near where the football team is based, you will likely receive a broadcast of the game. if you are out of market like I am then it is pretty unlikely you will receive a broadcast of the game unless they're playing your local team so for me my local team is the Washington Commanders once known as the Washington Redskins which thankfully was finally changed because that's a very problematic name and so if the Giants play the Commanders which does happen then I will get the game but otherwise it's unusual for me to get the Giants game the easy the easy solution to this problem is the Marco solution, which is to throw piles of money at the problem and fix it.

1:42:06And you do that by subscribing not only to YouTube TV, which is not an insignificant cost, but also NFL Sunday ticket, which is hundreds and hundreds of dollars per season on top of the cost of YouTube TV. And I don't want to do that because I like the Giants. I don't like them that much. And I thought, there must be a way around this problem. There must be a way I can fix this with technology and a smaller application of money. So, so far, any questions and or theories about how I am attempting to solve this problem? I mean, I don't know anything about sports. The only thing I know is that people will do very ridiculous things to get their sports, but the most common solution is usually just to pay a bunch of money for them somehow.

1:42:57through some kind of cable or whatever subscription and uh ben thompson who is not allergic to spending money even he has to do a byzantine solution to this i believe so he lives in taiwan but he wants to see his local team in wisconsin so i believe he has a residence in wisconsin where he has a bunch of hardware running that hardware gets the game because it's in wisconsin and then he sends it over the internet to his home in taiwan where he sees it i think he uses a sling box or used to use a sling box so casey do you have a relative who lives in the new york metro area where the giants are local and you could put a box in their house that gets the game and then sends it to you is this going to be something where like you're like you're asking me to reach under my seat in a minute and i find like there's all of a sudden oh my god what's this what marco wants to be doing is is a nurse mating a piece of hardware that records football and sends it to Casey.

1:43:48So that might be the end of it. That's definitely going outdoors.

1:43:55Spoiler alert, that may be the end of this discussion, but that's not where it's going yet. So yes, let me, all snark and kidding aside, the remainder of this topic is probably going to sound like SpawnCon. It's not. This is hand to God, me trying to solve a problem for myself. And it just so happens that I'm going to use tools that I know and love in order to do it. But this is not sponsored. This is me just doing this because I want to. Wait, is SponCon something people say? Sadly, it is. That's disgusting. Sponsored content. That is not this. This is 100 % my own thoughts. Nobody's compensated me in any way, shape, or form.

1:44:33So I apologize if it comes across as love letters to anything because it's not, if they are love letters, because I really wrote them, so to speak. But anyways, so the solution to this problem is, yeah, taking a page out of Ben Thompson's playbook. So what Ben does now, as far as I'm aware, is he has one or perhaps more small PCs or perhaps Mac minis or something that are physically installed in one or more places around the country. And I think you're right, John, that Wisconsin, if I'm not mistaken, God, I hope I have that right, is the home base. And I believe he does have a residence there where he has a, like a NUC, and then you see, you know, a small, like effectively the PC equivalent of a Mac mini or something like it.

1:45:14And he has an HD home run. There's several flavors of HD home run, but all of them, the point is basically to convert a either cable TV feed or an antenna feed into something that's on the network. So it's kind of a bridge between either an antenna or cable to your network. and actually we pay for television service with Verizon Fios here in Richmond. And I have an HD Home Run, I forget the name of the model, an HD Home Run Prime. And we've talked about this in the past that I've put a cable card into. And that is as close as I come to a cable box. I have an HD Home Run with a cable card and I use an app called Channels, which I think sponsored once, maybe twice in the past.

1:45:56But hand to God, I genuinely love this app. And I'm actually personal friends with one of the people who wrote it, so I'm predisposed to like this app. But it's really an incredible app. And so what Channels does is it's a DVR, basically, that will slurp down all the stuff that the HD Home Run is sending it. And it will either record it or display it live. You can do Plex-style, like watch your TV from somewhere else. And this is the same software that Ben is using, as far as I'm aware. This is very much in the spirit of a Slingbox, but much more modern tech, top to bottom. So I have a friend that lives in southwestern Connecticut, and he is a, I would call him a network administrator by trade.

1:46:37He would probably bristle at that description, but he does this sort of thing for a living. And he has, you know, deeply over, over provisioned networking equipment at his house because this is what he does for a living. and so i bought a small intel nuck um i'll try to put some links in the show notes it's uh shoot i don't even remember what this thing's called but it was like 130 off amazon and it it is more than overkill for what i need it's a b-link n95 intel 12 12th 12th uh mini pc mini s uh so this is three and a half gigahertz, eight gigs of RAM, 256 gig SSD. And this is what I, it came with Windows on it.

1:47:23I immediately killed Windows, put Ubuntu on it, and then put channels on it. And so I have this, I have an HD Home Run Connect, which is one of the HD Home Runs that you can, that you can connect a antenna to. And I bought an over the air antenna. And I set all this up here in the house, and I've got it working so that, you know, the channels could see the HD Home Run. The HD Home Run could see local channels here in Richmond. Everything was working great. Thanks to some help from my friend John, who was, you know. I love that my solution is viewed as the throwing money at it problem. You're talking about, like, hundreds of dollars worth of hardware here.

1:48:01It was like 200 bucks all in. Have you heard about how he opens and closes his garage door? Yeah, well, there's that. Or not even open and close is how he can tell whether the garage door, which open and closes through a different mechanism, is in fact open or closed. Can confirm. So this is, I mean, as much as I'm getting a little grumbly, Marco, your point is fair. It's a one-time fee of roughly$200 as compared to paying like$400 every single season for NFL Sunday ticket. So the theory is I solved this problem once, and that's that. and I never have to worry about it again. That's always, you will never have to worry about it again, for sure.

1:48:42That's how computers work. Yep, exactly. It's only true of Lutron Caseta and everything else. Also not SpawnCon, but I should keep the timer running. When I got that thing and installed it in my house and put black tape over all the lights and threw it behind my TV, I've never touched it. Right. I'm telling you, it's incredible. So yeah, so I set all this up locally And then you have to do some kind of acrobatics to get the channels on the NUC, the little PC, to get the channel server there to basically broadcast to my primary channel server, which is running on my M1 Mac Mini here at the house, in order to get those two to communicate with each other.

1:49:22But the idea is that the stuff that's coming off the antenna would then just be additional, now I'm using an overloaded term, additional television channels that are available within the channels app. Hopefully that makes sense. So that all worked here when I was on my same network. But then of course, I need to be able to put this on somebody else's network. So enter former and recent sponsor Tailscale. They have paid me to say nice things about them, but not in this case. This is me just genuinely being excited about Tailscale. I got Tailscale set up. That all worked great. And so it all appears as though, you know, everything's on the same land, even though it really isn't.

1:49:59All's good. So I box everything up. I ship it to my friend Sean. It arrived today. And sometime shortly before I shipped everything, I think Sean had said to me, hey, have you looked at this? and he links me to, I think it's an FTC database that's like, here's the direct T or the digital TV over the air digital TV maps here in the States, DTV reception maps. And he says to me, I don't think I get a lot of over the air stuff. And if you look at this map, it's not good, Bob. So he says, this may not go the way you think it's going to go. And I said, nah, it's fine. If nothing else, it's a project and an academic exercise.

1:50:43So he gets all this stuff today. He gave me my own private little VLAN on top of his network because, again, this is the sort of thing he does for a living. And everything's set up. He plugs in my NUC and it boots up. It jumps right on my tail net. Everything's good to go. It connects and communicates with the HD Home Run. I'm able to use some slightly advanced features of tail scale that let me hop on to the HD Home Run, even though it doesn't have tail scale on it. And so I'm able to tell the HD Home Run, all right, go ahead and search for channels. And it does it. And it comes up with like eight of them.

1:51:22And then I go to start tuning in to these channels. and I see that one of them I think was ABC, but it won't actually play it because apparently the signal's too weak. I think one of them might have been NBC, but it won't actually play that because the signal's too weak. There's something that channels thought was Fox, but it's some weird foreign affairs channel, and that comes in great, baby, but that's useless for what I'm trying to accomplish. And if you are curious, this coming Sunday, the Giants are playing, I forget who, But they're playing a game that will be broadcast on CBS. I will give you one guess, gentlemen.

1:52:01What channel wasn't even offered as a weak possibility at Sean's house? CBS. So I don't know what I'm going to do. But this academic exercise, the infrastructure of it worked perfectly. Chef's kiss. Unfortunately, I need Sean to move. It might be cheaper to just buy a season of whatever on the whatever service. Oh, for sure. and it'll be cheaper once you factor in your time. Although this is a fun little hobby, but you're trying to get CBS over the air. Doesn't Sean get CBS not over the air in some capacity? Well, and so it's funny you bring that up because some of the things that we have been discussing up until the time we started recording were, you know, hey, Sean might decide to ditch his TiVos.

1:52:45Sean is younger than I am, but he has the spirit of an 80-year-old. And so he is still clinging to his TiVos, John. And he said, you know, maybe I will take, well, I think he has two of them. And he said, maybe I'll take the cable card out of one of those and put it in the HD home run, you know, the HD home run that accepts a cable card. And maybe he'll use channels for his own separate purposes, you know, cause he wants to, he was thinking about going down this path for his own reasons. And then I could, you know, my channel server could also find that same HD home run on the local network, you know, VLAN notwithstanding.

1:53:17And I could, I would only need one of the four tuners that it has available to it. And only on certain times on Sundays and maybe everyone would be happy. Unfortunately, Silicon Dust, who is the manufacturers of HD Home Run, stopped or seemed to have stopped making the HD Home Run that accepts a cable card. So you can only come up with them secondhand, which is mildly alarming. And cable companies aren't giving out cable cards anymore either. And as they break, they're probably not going to replace them. I was actually thinking of getting rid of one of my cable cards, but I haven't quite done it yet.

1:53:48But yeah, the writing's on the wall for cable card. But yeah, so one of the things we were talking about is if he can come up with his own, you know, HD Home Run Connect, which takes a cable card, you know, and maybe he'll do a channels installation of his own. And then I can just kind of occasionally borrow one of the tuners on his HD Home Run. another thing he was talking about is maybe if he could create like a secondary login on his cable provider just on their online systems and either I could use their app to potentially watch you know his cable from here which is actually made easier because of a different feature of TailScale where I can basically have my internet egress be through this NUC that's at his house so from a geographic perspective I'm entering the internet in Connecticut so that's a possibility That's not my preference.

1:54:35I'm trying to do this on the up and up. Well, as much as I can be because I shipped hardware to him. It's getting it over the air or that was the hope and so on and so forth. We're also going to look into TV Everywhere is a thing, which is kind of like sort of kind of spiritually like YouTube TV, but not at all YouTube TV where you can use your cable provider to get access to a bunch of channels. I don't know if his cable provider supports that, but maybe I could have log in or even have him log in on channels that's at his house. So I don't even need to see his credentials or whatever. And we might try that.

1:55:10But I will say, Marco, that I did, just for grins and gigs, look at what the reception would be like at the new place on Long Island. And I got to tell you, being very close to Manhattan means you got a lot of options, a lot of options. Although I don't think that CBS was one of them, if I recall correctly. Oh, really? But you do have quite a few options if you're to believe the FTC's little website thing. And so depending on how this works out with Sean, I might attempt to call in a favor. That's to be determined. Fair enough. We'll see. But I don't know. I thought if nothing else, it was a fun academic exercise in Little Baby Project to see could this be done.

1:55:50And I'm genuinely very pleased with the result from the perspective of, you know, I got everything set up here in the house. I had him basically plug a few things into the wall and plug in a couple of things to ethernet and everything just worked no problem in that respect the problem is I need him to move and I don't think he's going to be doing that but it was a fun little project if nothing else so maybe maybe he'll ship this stuff back to me maybe I'll ship it to you if you let me we'll argue about that another time but uh we'll see what happens there's there's other other alternatives and avenues to try although it's funny normally speaking of all your ridiculous tv-ness um And for many years, part of my Thanksgiving celebration was messaging Casey the morning of Thanksgiving saying, hey, my family is trying to figure out how to watch the parade.

1:56:34How do we do that? And a lot of times the answer was you would like give me access to your whatever TV bouncing situation you had. It was a sling box for many years. But you haven't asked in the last couple of years, if I recall correctly. Yeah, because what's happened in the meantime is that whatever network runs it just has an app that you run on Apple TV and they just broadcast it to it. So it's no longer necessary to use your crazy hacks for that. But thank you for all those years of serving us. Of course. It was that and the dog show, right, if I'm not mistaken? Yeah, yeah. It's the parade and then the dog show that follows it.

1:57:07I'm happy to be of service. Yeah, you might be repaying that to me in the future. We shall see. We shall see. Hopefully I'll find a different mechanism, but we shall see. I got a lot of room in the garage.