647: You Get One Exclamation Point

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38:34All right, there was a rumor that broke a few days ago. Apple is planning, this is reading from Mac Rumors, Apple is planning to launch a low-cost MacBook powered by an iPhone chip, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. In an article published on X, Kuo explained that the device will feature a 13-inch display and the A18 Pro chip, making it the first Mac powered by an iPhone chip. The A18 Pro chip debuted in the iPhone 16 Pro last year. The more affordable MacBook could come in silver, blue, pink, and yellow finishes. The new MacBook is expected to enter mass production late in the fourth quarter of 2025 or early in the first quarter of 2026.

39:12Apple's hoping that it will drive MacBook purchases and account for 20 to 28 % of sales next year. Additionally, a different post on MacRumors. MacRumors has spotted evidence of such a device in back-end code related to Apple Intelligence last summer and subsequently confirmed its use of the A18 Pro chip. The machine features the identifier Mac 17 ,1. So we'll talk about this rumor in more detail in a second, but the headline here, I believe this is straight from MacRumors, also from the story. Yeah, it's straight from Ming-Chi Kuo. Low cost is the adjective modifier on this MacBook. Apple is planning to launch a low-cost MacBook.

39:48and the only thing we know about this other than the size of the screen which is the same as the current 13 inch macbook air um and some colors is that it comes with a phone chip how much cheaper do you think the a18 pro is than the m4 hmm not that much i can't imagine i mean i i think it's cheap i agree that it's probably cheaper not the least of which is because they make a bazillion of them because it's a phone chip and it is physically smaller so just by going by the math of like dye area like the bigger you make the chip the more expensive it is it makes sense to me that it would be cheaper but i don't especially on low-end devices i don't think the soc is usually the most expensive component in the machine and the prices involved here especially since apple isn't paying somebody else's profit margins other than tsmcs on these chips like i'm thinking like maybe like 50 bucks 30 bucks less expensive like do you think that's the ballpark yeah i'm guessing it is i'm guessing the price difference is less than a hundred dollars yeah and so this rumor is that it's a low-cost macbook now you you know we'll get to what marco has here in a second you save money in lots of different places but i haven't seen anyone really mention this is like wow a low cost you know a cheaper computer would be a great idea and you could use a phone chip in it and that would make it cheaper and this is great i'm like okay but if that was the only difference if it's the m4 macbook air with the m4 swapped out for the a18 pro i'm thinking best case scenario this is a hundred dollar cheaper computer which is not nothing because the thing is a thousand dollars so if you have one for nine hundred dollars like that's good but is that enough to justify this thing's existence or does this replace the m4 macbook air well i think the the even if it is only 50 or 100 dollars different cost to apple when you multiply that a million times two million times five million times that adds up real quick and so i don't think you're wrong but it wouldn't surprise me if they wanted to go after what seems to be a not very large delta just because on the scale in which they operate that can make a huge difference yeah so that leads to to marco's idea for a game here what could be removed or limited to make this cheaper than a macbook air other than obviously the a18 pro versus the m4 so let's just let's just take that as a given because all the rumors seem to agree that that's that's the deal with this including mac rumors finding a thing that seemed to identify that chip number so we've swapped out the m4 for the a18 pro how else do you get money out of this machine let's let's do round robin and everyone and you gotta pick like a giraffe like until we run out of things that we can think of yeah because i i have a list here of like remove the keyboard some of them are pretty crazy and and you know just for context all right the macbook air currently starts at a thousand dollars oh isn't like a 900 for education or something yes something like that and then there's the walmart m1 macbook air still for sale for 650 yeah also for reference the cheapest ipad they sell is$350 and it has a$250 keyboard option.

42:58So combined, if you want the cheapest iPad with their keyboard and trackpad that go with it, it's$600. And what chip does that one come with? That's the A17, I believe. So the base model iPad currently for sale does not run Apple Intelligence. The iPad mini has the 17 Pro, so it can, but that's more expensive. So just the cheapest iPad they make, And I think you can look at some of the things they do with that cheap iPad to get that iPad down to 350 without the keyboard. And I think we're looking at a similar likely product here. Now, obviously, a laptop requires a keyboard and a trackpad. So I'm guessing I'm guessing this laptop includes, you know, the rumor already says a 13 inch screen.

43:45So a 13 inch screen, keyboard and trackpad. Now, the details on those can matter. So who'd like to go first? i'll go first and this is the thing that i hope they don't do i seriously hope they don't do but you can't rule it out uh remove ram um at the apple to eight gigs apple just bumped all of its max 16 gigs and we celebrated how can apple screw that up you know how oh our new low cost model and of course because it's the lowest cost model only comes with eight gigs i really hope they don't do that but that would save them at least five dollars yeah and look when you're trying to hit a low price because you know like you know you look at the maybe they're trying to replace the walmart macbook air like and to with like a a newer product that can actually run apple intelligence and that they can you know keep making new models of over time um but still so like if they're trying to come in around you know 650 600 700 range they're gonna have to cut a decent amount of stuff because here's the one thing they will never cut is margin you know that Apple will never cut margin.

44:46So they're going to make the same margins they're making on that$1 ,000 MacBook Air. So how do they get there? How do they shave off like a third of the price? Well, one of you goes. I did RAM. What's the next one? Casey? What about the fidelity of the display? And I don't just mean going non-retina. Could that get worse? No, I'm serious. Like not even just non-retina, but what if the backlight gets worse and weaker? It only does R and G, not B. Hey, that's it. You got it. Savings of one third. No, like a crummier backlight or, again, maybe non-retina. I would be stunned if they went non-retina, but it is a possibility.

45:25Well, you have to pick one. I wouldn't go with non-retina, but a cheaper screen. Yeah. And I'm specifically thinking about, like, you know, one of the things they tout in the MacBook Pros is, oh, it's 11 billion nits. Well, what if this is three nits, so to speak, you know? well the current macbook air screen and the m1 macbook air screen are also already worse this could be you know one thing to consider is that that cheap ipad lacks p3 wide color and an ar coating anti-reflective coating yeah when you get down to these low-end screens it's difficult to like but yeah cheaper screen is yeah is reasonable but i think i think the way they would do that would not be resolution because resolution is not that expensive these days like i think it would be no display p3 but should probably save them on some you know calibration also um and you know some certain like you know chip support so no p3 and then you know different codings or enclosure so maybe it doesn't have the ar coding because again like that's what they did to make that cheap ipad screen well the thing about screens and a cheaper screen is that given the age of like let's just say again the m1 macbook here given the age of that machine at a certain point or even just the m4 one like the cost of the the screen that's in the m4 macbook air is going down all the time because it is so old and just like so far away from the cutting edge it's kind of like i don't know this shows a name for this parts curve but like we've joked about it many times in the past but it's a real thing something that's like older technology gets cheaper and cheaper as it's supplanted by newer technologies but then all of a sudden it starts getting more expensive again because it's so old that nobody wants it and people stop making it and i do wonder if apple walks that line with their screens that like yeah they get cheap because the the machine they sell doesn't get cheaper and cheaper over time but the parts that go into it do and so i do wonder if when the a18 pro macbook whatever comes out it might have a better screen than the m1 macbook air simply because you can't buy screens that are as bad as the macbook air anymore and it will still be cheaper just like casey saying it will actually be a cheaper screen than the m1 macbook air screen was when that machine was introduced but now a cheaper screen actually ends up better so that i could see them saving costs there marco what's your what's your pick all right my my i have a lot of others but my first pick is you got to think like in addition to using the low-end ipad as inspiration for some of these changes you also got to think how do they keep people who just want the cheapest macbook who from buying this instead of like they want to preserve macbook air sales too no ssd so how do they most importantly how do they keep businesses from buying this one they want businesses to keep buying the airs and the pros so my number one pick is no external monitor support and also think about it the a18 pro probably doesn't support external monitors it might but yeah that's that's a good call you know i'd just be part of the uh if it's just part of the soc then they kind of get that for free and it's not really a cost savings but yeah i'm not i'm not sure that would save them that much money i don't know if it would save the money but i could see them doing it on in software because the 18 pro absolutely does support an external monitor because you can do that with your phone right i mean i'm almost sure i've done this yeah i think so oh i'm pretty darn sure you can and so i don't think that that would be a savings but i do agree with you they would absolutely i could see them doing this as a feature gate just to get people to upgrade like you had said yeah because they they want no businesses to buy this computer they want businesses to keep buying the airs and the pros all right john i mean i don't this is kind of in the same spirit as what you were saying with your thing uh but use an existing like use the m1 case design like i'm assuming the m1 case design is cheaper than the m41 but like use a case design they've been doing for so long that it's just incredibly cheap for them to do that they have all the machines to do it uh you know so no new case design and it would also differentiate it from the m5 macbook air because it would literally still be the wedge shape like that older thing so yeah use use uh the m1 case design and you think they would do that instead of making a new cheap case oh yeah but it's like mate there's no such there's no such thing as that when it comes to cheap like a new cheaper to make case yeah it may be cheaper to make but the cost of of developing that new thing it would take a while to recoup that the tim cook way is take some existing thing that we've already been making for i mean that's part of the reason the walmart one still uses the wedges like like we already we already know how to make that case we've mastered it we have the machines for it uh and presumably it is cheaper to make them the newest and latest and greatest case so yeah i think they would just keep using that one well what if like you know their their cases of all in in you know the last for a decade or more they've all been unibody case designs um where you basically have like you know big blocks of aluminum and you have these machines that like carve out sections of it um a cheaper way to make metal cases is to have them be in different like flat sheets that are like screwed together or something what if like if they're actually designing a case from scratch to be inexpensive i would think that maybe that might have some significant savings of going like a multi-part case i think i know what you're talking about because they used to make that before the original macbook air came out yeah i think that's actually more expensive to manufacture due to the fastening issue like i really do feel like the m1 macbook air case given how slim it is and how long they've been making it may actually be the cheaper option cheaper in terms of repairs even cheaper in terms of manufacturability for all the parts don't have to be aligned and connected and precision made it's just one top and one but you know what i mean like you know there's there are pieces to it but there's so there's far fewer pieces and far fewer fasteners so i i do wonder if that would actually be a cost savings and i think honestly i think they would never do that they've been they've had unibody again since the original macbook era i don't think they're ever going back until there's a new materials breakthrough and they start making them out of like transparent aluminum or graphite or something all right casey what's next back on the chopping block here we go uh may this might be silly but it's one of the first things that jumps to mind is what about crappier radios crappier bluetooth radios older bluetooth radios older wi-fi radios they already do that for all their computers yeah yeah you know what i mean but you know where where the macbook pro the newest macbook pro maybe has wi-fi seven i don't even know if that's true anymore i can't keep up but it doesn't yeah i think we're still on 6e although funny you mentioned this casey the base model ipad does not have wi-fi 6e it has wi-fi six there you go and so you know could you go even older would that be an advantage i don't know but you know some sort of crippled bluetooth radio uh wi-fi radio something along those lines where it's just not a modern chip it's sufficient but not stellar all right my next pick the ports one usbc port and a headphone jack and that's it casey will love it oh stop it so no thunderbolt support no magsafe no hdmi because again we have no external monitor support in my theory here so one usbc port and a headphone jack just like the old macbook yeah actually uh jumping slightly ahead here stephen hackett wrote about this and he uh was musing about the possibility of an a18 pro and a mac and he says the immediate downside to the a18 pro is that it only supports usb 3 at 10 gigabits per second not thunderbolt that would make any mac with an a18 at its heart only capable of usb c and that's fine that's just that's what they used to do with their long computers all the time anyway i think then there yeah i think i mean yeah having one port is crappy but having no thunderbolt i think is a given and so the a18 is not a limiting factor there um mine i expected i thought you're gonna steal this from me is a pretty easy one smaller battery smaller batteries cost less money yeah i was about to say the same thing you're stealing all mine y 'all think of the ipad the ipad has a smaller battery um and the i mean the phone certainly has a smaller battery like can't how small a battery can you get away with and still have accessible battery life because for every amount that you make that battery smaller first of all it makes the laptop lighter but second of all it makes it cheaper because smaller batteries cost less money yeah that's pretty good all right casey i'm out of any of the ones that i brainstormed when we started the game, but I think, did we already talk about a teeny tiny SSD?

53:27Did somebody know we did not? I said, remove the SSD. I think a teeny tiny SSD to find that as you will, I think, you know, 128 gigs or something like that. I don't even know what the, we're just making the world's most terrible computer here. Cause this is what happens if your job is to remove costs, you can remove costs. And this is like, we're rapidly getting to the point now where we would not recommend this computer. I think we may have passed the point where we were not recommended. Oh, and actually come to think of But a corollary to what I just said is whether or not the SSD is smaller in terms of capacity, what about making it considerably slower?

53:59You know, where SSDs are still lightning fast, even crappy SSDs by and large are lightning fast. It might cost them more money to get a slower SSD. That's fair. But, I mean, again, I'm just brainstorming. What if it's either smaller or slower? And that low-end iPad does start with a 128 gig model. um and so yeah like and i did i looked for for instance though like as a point of comparison like what are the cheapest pc laptops like in this price range like you know in like the 600 ish dollar price range what do you get on a pc laptop these days and you get 16 and 512 like that's that's a pretty pretty universal across the board yeah i know yes apple lives in a different universe that's the other thing about this cheap laptop i know we're like talking about in the context of the walmart one which i think has no configuration options but like can you imagine than making a low cost macbook like it's like you said with the minis the lower cost of apple makes a mac you'll double the price when you try to add ram to it if that's even an option like if there are any options to configure the ram or the ssd and this thing is cheaper than any existing mac you will literally double you almost double it on on the mac mini you said it's like a 600 computer add ram it adds 400 to a 600 thing so if there was a 400 mac mini adding any amount of additional ram that apple offers you would double the price of this so it's they're they're getting real close there with their obsession with uh you know ridiculous margins i mean so one idea i had is what if they don't offer any options except color i was you too keep stealing all my ideas that's the nature of the nature of a draft yeah that's that was what i was gonna say no options but like the colors are in the rumor but you're saying no options except for color yeah like no no storage no ram option just like here here is the macbook that's what it is uh that and you know that's it's you can pick you know yellow or blue or whatever and that's it yeah i mean again i think maybe the m1 walmart one is already like that is that the case um i believe yeah you can't pick storage i don't think on it it's just like there's one configuration and you pick color that's it all right well i'm glad you didn't pick my one because this last legitimate one that i could think of uh no charger in the box oh that's a good one that's a real good one you're thinking like tim cook now what can we remove no box some assembly required it just comes shrink wrapped loose here it's just wrapped in a piece of paper it's biodegradable that's amazing yeah but no no charger they've been ripping that out of our products like everyone's got like it'll charge with any phone charger like no charger in the box all right one i got a couple other miscellaneous ones and then a big one um so my miscellaneous ones are um if you look at the keyboard and trackpad the base ipad that that 250 keyboard folio that it has it advertises is first of all non-backlit keyboard i think that's a given this thing will not have a backlit keyboard i also it says there in the in the in the um you know the keyboard folio thing for the ipad they call the trackpad a quote click anywhere trackpad but if you do the tech compare with other ipad stuff it it does not list it as saying haptic feedback so like i'm thinking it's actually not a taptic engine trackpad but they have somehow engineered the mechanics that you can push anywhere and the whole thing does indeed click down i don't know actually i've never used this keyboard fully so i don't know that but that's how that's how it reads in the tech specs so i'm guessing non-backlit keyboard and a non-force tux trackpad yeah i think that makes sense sounds terrible it does sound kind of terrible but it makes sense all right what are your other ones Only two speakers.

57:30The MacBook Air has four with no spatial audio support. I think that's probably somewhat of a given. And now the big one. The piece de resistance. I said they probably really don't want businesses to buy these. what if it only runs app store apps? i don't think they'll do that i don't think so either and i don't think that honestly i don't think that would actually make it any cheaper and honestly businesses might like that more they'll only run after apps and they love distributing stuff from their own enterprise app stores you know what i mean like that solves problems for businesses maybe all right so if they did all this first of all i think ibook has got to be the name like that would be such a great name right yeah whenever you try to think of something obvious and good regarding naming it's probably not what apple will do so yes ibook has come up a lot people have fondness for the name uh it would make sense lots of things make sense yeah especially when it comes to naming i mean i remember when apple made the ibook store that was not a store that sold laptop computers no so yeah we'll see what they do with that i mean i think you know they one of their past not so great naming things uh required us to give a name to the macbook adorable because what was his actual name macbook that didn't catch on the computer didn't catch on and the name didn't catch on so all right slow down no the computer did sort of catch on that's the problem well so that that's part of the dream of this one is like oh it could be really thin like that one but like if if they're going to reuse the m1 case so much for that dream you know what i mean i don't know we'll see if i guess they could reuse that really thin case if that if they still have the like the machining tools and everything for making that but yeah it just like people are attaching their hopes and dreams this they're like oh thinner lighter uh cheaper uh lower power like that's great and they just start envisioning the macbook one or the macbook adorable as we used to call it because the thing we described is actually kind of like that like that was so old that the screen probably is worse right and uh i did have a backlit keyboard i think casey yes i'm pretty i'm pretty darn sure but that wasn't like that wasn't a walmart special machine it was actually you know it was priced about what you would think it would be priced at it wasn't like the cheapest no it was priced quite a bit more than what you would think well you would think because it was so slim and you know it's like this the thinnest computer ever made like it was a breakthrough at the time from apple it was it was outside the realm of normalcy in apple's product lines whereas i feel like this one will be well within the realm of normalcy in apple's product line to hit a cheaper price point so the final question what do we think that if they if they do this like you know this like really decontented laptop what do we think that price point is i think they'll just sell it for exactly the same price as they're selling the m1 macbook air so 650 ish yeah i think that's i mean regardless of how much it costs to make i think that's what they'll sell it for like it will slot into that and honestly as the years go on 650 is worth less now than it was when the m1 macbook air was first introduced so yeah i think they'll hold the line maybe maybe 599 you know if we're lucky but i feel like that it's going to replace that computer yeah i i think i would go again like the the base ipad plus its keyboard and trackpad case is 600 the walmart macbook air is 650 the real macbook air is a thousand i think it should be around 600 but it will be like 750 like i think they're not i think they're not going to go as far down as the as we all want them to because they never do and i think it's going to be closer to the macbook air's price than we feel that it should be.

1:01:04I think that what they end up doing is they basically replace the Walmart one and say, sorry, Walmart, you're cut off. And this is the new quote unquote Walmart, you know, MacBook or MacBook, iBook, MacBook Air, whatever they call it. And then they're getting all of the proceeds from it rather than Walmart taking a little cut. And I think 650 bucks or very, very close to. so here's here's my other angle on this the rumor of this computer and the idea of this computer so uh we'll link to jason snell's uh graphs in six colors about uh the speed of the a18 pro and how it compares to the m1 the summary is that the a18 pro is 46 percent faster than the m1 in single core tasks and pretty much the same in multi-core but single core is all that really matters for just like sort of day-to-day tasks or whatever and this highlights the interesting fact on this which is one of my hobby horses that I'm always bouncing on on this show.

1:02:02Usually I'm talking about it in the realm of media catching up to the limits of human perception, which audio has and video is always racing towards. As computational power becomes cheaper and as it increases the maximum computational power available for a given number of watts increases over time, it starts to race past the needs for doing some basic stuff long ago computing power raced past the point where if you want to type words into a document it can be handled it used to be that you needed a good computer to do that to like one word star or whatever on dos like you need you need you couldn't buy a bargain basement one you needed a computer that could keep your whole document in memory and maybe one that could have proportional fonts so you need even a bigger fancier computer like a mac which costs so much money uh but now uh you know a little kid's toy that comes in a cereal box could has more computing power than the early pcs like typing we have passed by web browsing is a surprisingly complex and computationally intensive thing and seemingly only getting more so as web apps become more complex but i think an a18 pro has no problem browsing the web or doing spreadsheet stuff or anything like you're doing word processing like that level of computation is now satisfied by essentially phone chips we do it on our phone people use their phones as their main computers they do incredibly complicated things on their phone you basically run photoshop on your phone your phone has so much more computing power than whole swaths of computers that we use as the highest of the high end thing so as this continues to happen like the things people regular people need to use their computer for like going to a web page using a couple of simple apps and doing word processing only become easier and easier to accomplish so it makes perfect sense to me for phone chips to make their ways to the mac because i don't know the right word for this but like the available computing power is now more than sufficient to do the things that most people need to do with their computers i'm not saying it couldn't be faster people do occasionally have to wait for their computers in particular storage speed and stuff like that so that it will continue to get better over time but this machine makes so much sense to me not just as a way to save money but recognizing that most people don't need this much power out of their macs that the baseline power especially with the advent of apple silicon is so massive that it's like an m1 is actually overkill for a lot of people.

1:04:36And this is actually faster that 46 % faster than an M1 in the ways that counts, which brings me to my other idea about this computer, which the rumors don't support, but I think would be valid is what this wasn't a low cost machine. What if instead, this was just the bottom of the MacBook Air range, but they didn't take every ounce of cost out of it. And instead, just added it as essentially the get way more battery life option, it would have the same size battery as like the m5 and m6 macbook air in the same case with all the same features the same screen like everything the macbook air gets this gets the only difference is hey do you not need an m5 for what you do with your macbook air get the one with the a20 whatever processor 18 pro in it same size battery but boy you'll get even more battery life and no it's not that much cheaper but like instead of thinking this is like oh this is the way we're gonna get cost out of it think of it as just a different trade-off between computational power and battery life essentially um i could see that being a perfectly valid product it's not what's rumored here to be clear but i think the day may come when we see that as an option because if the if apple keeps doing the whole thing where it's like m something and then m something pro m something max and something ultra whatever the m something i feel like already with the m4 is more power than like a student needs to use web apps and word processing and spreadsheets for their college stuff like it's overkill if you could get something that is less powerful but also uses less battery power yeah that would be great and so i i hope uh that either either they they stop doing the m m4 m pro like they add something below that and i don't think obviously the answer isn't just do m4 and then m5 m5 pro and 5 max or whatever something like you know using a phone chip maybe they've got the unified design maybe they unify the naming between the a chips and the m chips and just have a line of chips that they use throughout their products and somehow name them in a sensible way where it's a scale up from the smallest and least powerful to the biggest and most expensive and they just are and most powerful and just distribute that across their line of products without this artificial bifurcation between both the a series are for ipads and phones and the m series are for max unless it's for a vision pro but also some ipads have m's you see what i'm getting out there so that's not today but that's just something i'm thinking about that a time may come when the m5 m6 or m7 is too powerful has it's what the power of it is wasted on a macbook air and you can make that a better computer for people by putting in a quote-unquote phone chip and giving it way more battery life hmm this has got me thinking of a of a dark possibility here what if this is not really that much cheaper like you were saying what if this is basically the new macbook air maybe it goes from a thousand to nine hundred dollars and they just push the price of the air up because here's the thing if you look right now you know in the current lineup they sell the air m4 for a thousand dollars you know there's like you know disabled cores probably but like there's thousand dollars then they sell the pro the 14 inch pro with the same chip the m4 but with some macbook pro niceties you know the screen the speakers everything sixteen hundred dollars that's the cheapest pro with the same chip the screen is so much more expensive than a computer though it is true but it's not six hundred dollars more expensive like and there's other changes too but like so the macbook air to the macbook pro with the same m4 chip is a six hundred dollar difference although again there's probably a binning thing yeah there's a binning thing going on um with without binning it's a 400 difference so i wonder if this is really just a way for them to close that gap and apple never closes gaps by making things cheaper i'm guessing maybe maybe the the cheap laptop is really only 900 and then they push the air up to like 1200 yeah we'll see like it's kind of a shame that these rumors seem so concretely set on the a18 pro because that chip does not have a unified name like they've unified the name of their os's but their chips are still weirdly bifurcated between a and m's and one r and a c for a different thing and speaking of the h's yeah yeah that's right speaking of c lima lum asks do you think the new phone app in tahoe might mean cellular functionality will be coming to max and i would say putting an a18 pro into a mac also makes people think that lots of things make people think about perhaps cellular being in Macs.

1:09:08Honestly, there is so much in common between Mac and phone hardware and has been since the advent of Apple Silicon that there is nothing new that they do, including adding the phone app or making their own C1 chip or putting a literal phone chip inside a Mac that to me makes it any more or less likely because it has been so far over the edge of a thing they should obviously, obviously do for so long. Nothing else needs to change. Nothing else needs to happen. It's like, previously I didn't think it would or should happen but now that they put the phone app in Tano they're definitely going to do it Apple you need to do it no matter what there's so much the scales are like a million pounds on one side and a feather on the other and we're all just sitting where their arms are going well where is it?

1:09:51I will remind everyone every iPad since the very first iPad including all of the cheap models of the lowest end models of iPad every single one has had a cellular option since day one including the ones with an m chip in the marco surprisingly yes including the ones i didn't think anything with an m chip could do cellular that's impossible all this mac hardware is in all the ipad pros now and yet or maybe it's the way around but still like all this all this ipad it's all in macs now and yet we still don't know like yeah it is not a hardware consideration and it i'm guessing realistically it never has been like the reason we don't have cellular macs you know whatever their reasons are it's not hardware or software yeah or services at this point because yeah so i i don't think the phone app makes it any more likely i think that is just a continuing thing where they take apps that previously were on the phone and bring them to the mac and the phone app is just one more of them great i like it it's a good thing it doesn't make me think that cellular on the mac is any more likely than it should have been before because i feel like the likeliness is already pressing up to 80 90 and holding steady there that was a fun game uh i i have no idea what the heck is going to happen but that was a fun game i appreciate it honestly this is i i think this is a very fun rumor like i love thinking about the idea of like well why did they take this other combination of hardware and make you know make an even smaller or lower end mac with it like that's interesting to me or with way more battery power cheaper gets people excited more battery power gets people excited i'm excited about the whole the whole concept of computing power surpassing the needs of very common applications and i think that's just about to happen to web browsing which is pretty amazing yep i agree 100 a couple other quick thoughts um i was on upgrade excuse not upgrade uh clockwise this week we briefly talked about this and let me tell you if this portends if this is if this is leading to a reincarnation of the macbook adorable holy mother i'm so in because if you remember the macbook adorable leaving aside the fact that it only had one port which kind of sucked um one of the worst parts about it was that the processor was just dog slow even on a good day that process processor was dog slow and the idea of having something that was that thin and that light but not utterly crippled by a crappy intel cpu oh man does that sound good oh and also no uh no butterfly keyboard um sorry trigger warning marco but no butterfly keyboard uh that sounds incredible uh so i mean i don't expect that's what's going to happen but man that would get me really really interested so proud of your pronunciation of dog casey yeah i would i would love to see that because like ever since apple silicon like we've been saying like wow we can't wait for them to make you know a good version of the 12 inch macbook with this with this news you know tech that they have and they haven't like you know the the m2 and forward MacBook Air is great.

1:12:53And, you know, like with its newer case design and everything, it is super slim, super light. But it's still not the same portability class as the ancient 11-inch MacBook Air or the 12-inch MacBook. Like, it's still significantly larger and heavier, you know, for the modern day. Like, the 12-inch MacBook was, I believe, 2 pounds. Right? Like 2.0? Or like, close to 2.0? Uh, what was it? I think it was, yeah, around 2 pounds. Something like that. Yeah, and I think we're currently at 2.4 something for the 13-inch Air. Yeah, I don't know. So we're still bigger and heavier. We still don't have that magical airplane tray table computer that we used to have.

1:13:31I know the rumor says the 13-inch screen, so it sounds like if that kind of computer is coming, this probably isn't it. But this does show maybe a path they can get there. Like if they decided for whatever reason that they can't do it with the full suite of M chip series features, although they do it in the 11 inch iPad Pro and the 11 inch iPad Air. So I don't know why they couldn't do it, but like a proper, you know, 11 or 12 inch laptop that's actually, you know, Mac OS and not just an 11 inch iPad, I think would be so cool. in that two pound range. I really hope they make that. I haven't given up hope yet.

1:14:13I don't know if this is it, as I said, but I haven't given up hope yet. Just to be clear, based on the game before, the price I was giving was for the price of the A18-based laptop computer that Apple would put out if it's going to be a low-cost model. It is not the price of what I think after we removed everything in our game the thing would cost, because I don't think Apple would remove all the things that we listed. We really gutted this thing to the point where it's a bad product. real-time follow-up the weight of the MacBook adorable 2.03 pounds or insensible units just a shade less than a kilogram oh and Jason wants us to point out the tariffs may throw a monkey wrench into this whole thing what else is new oh and by the way the and the 13 inch MacBook Air is 2.7 pounds oh wow 2.7 versus 2.0 is a big difference yeah it really really so like we are not in that same class with the new MacBook Air it the new MacBook Air is a wonderful machine in lots of ways but we are not in that same class we were sponsored this episode by delete me right now the headlines are chock full of data breaches and regulatory rollbacks making us all vulnerable but you can do something about it delete me is here to make it easy quick and safe to remove your personal data online delete me knows your privacy is worth protecting so here's what they do they go to hundreds of data broker websites and they opt you out and file takedowns on your behalf so that the data brokers have to remove your data from their databases.

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1:16:56using it for a backup, is Thunderbolt more reliable than USB 4? I don't have any strong answers for this. With a Mac mini or something stationary, I suppose there's no reason you couldn't do something like this. But I don't know, if it were me, I would try my darndest to find a storage solution that's internal that works both from a cost and space perspective. But I'd get why you wouldn't want to do that for sure. As I think the one of us who's probably using, has used and probably still is using the most external storage because i'm only using desktops and it's convenient to use for desktops i will give a casey style intervention here and say if you are using external storage connected to your mac and it's randomly unmounting itself that is not a way to live you need to stop and either figure out how to fix it or get rid of that hardware i know too many people who say like oh this happens all the time it's not a big deal it just you'll plug it in and remount it or it'll come back in a second that's not acceptable for storage that you plan on using like it just you can't have that and the reason people live with that is because the problem that neil was getting at here is it's not actually that easy to find reliable inexpensive external storage like it's it used to be easier when it was much more common for people to do that but most these days most people get by with what's inside their computers so it becomes this narrower and narrower market and if you go on like amazon or new egg or whatever you can find tons of really really cheap external storage from name brands that is nevertheless incredibly unreliable and flaky um and so everyone always wants to know what's the good one what's the one that i should buy and then you point out some thunderbolt enclosure and like yeah no seriously i'm not paying that much for that thing and it's like so to answer the other question is thunderbolt more reliable than usb4 usually but that may be because the thunderbolt stuff costs seven times as much and just just the cost difference means they're using more reliable components all around and the companies that make them cater to customers who demand more reliability like it's not just that you get what you pay for it's like it's if you don't need thunderbolt you would you would like to not pay for it but every time i try to and i have so many external enclosures here i try to find like an enclosure to fit like an ssd or back in the day a spinning drive or whatever i always felt like i was rolling the dice that if any of these external you know devices whether they come with a mechanism inside them or whether it's a shell that i plug something into if they have any kind of reliability things or it's like randomly unmounting that's the end of that thing in my life like i stop you but you can't you can't have it you will corrupt your data best case you'll just lose some data worst case you'll corrupt the thing and you know i didn't lose some data like oh something didn't get written completely worst case you'll corrupt the entire thing so if you're ever in that situation and the drive keeps unmounting you need to fix that asap treated as a five alarm fire uh and i wish i had better advice on how to find something reliable but the only i mean the best you can do is more expensive ones tend to be more reliable in my experience thunderbolt things both enclosures and drives tend to be more reliable they cost so much more money but i you know it's painful but i do it like for example my my one terabyte external drive that i currently have um tahoe on is a thunderbolt drive which makes no sense because like i don't even know what the speeds the internal storage can do it's so old but it's just it's just so much more reliable for me than uh than my other usb based things that i have um but yeah don't like and and if it is reliable yeah you can use it for backup it's fine like there's especially if it's on a desktop computer it's always plugged in it's always powered up especially if it's bus powered because then it's meant to run on the bus don't put it through 17 hubs like directly connected if you can or make sure you know like if it is reliable by all means use it as backup it'll be fine if it's not reliable you need to stop using it yeah definitely um i have i use a bunch of external drives for things like time machine and um occasionally like an archive drive here and there it obviously is harder to make reliable when you are constantly moving the drives um you know so like in the in the context of like a laptop it's a lot harder to make that reliable over time.

1:21:05Because the cable will keep bending back and forth, and maybe you might slowly wiggle it out of the port, the port might loosen. There's all sorts of stuff like that. But in the context of a desktop where it's just sitting around, I have found, for the most part, you're fine getting any modern USB thing, and it's fine. Now, I have found there is basically no correlation between the reliability of USB devices and their price, or their brand name for that matter i have some rock solid usb hubs and cables and drive enclosures or external drives external ssds i have some rock solid ones that are just like no name brands and i've bought some great ones from like you know like there were like some some high-end brands uh or like you know well-respected names in the business that were unreliable pieces of crap and the main reason behind a lot of this is like when you're making like a drive enclosure or a usb hub or something, there's only so many actual controller chips that are manufactured that will power something like that.

1:22:07So almost any brand that you get is going to be using the same one of a very small number of controller chips as every other brand is using. So I have found that sometimes you just luck out and you get a really good one. Sometimes you get a bad one. Like John, I think if it starts randomly unmounting, it is done. You got to replace it. That will never get better for that one. but again i've had i've had most most of the ones i've had are just fine and they last you know effectively forever and by the way on the chip thing one of the things you can do if you do want to try to research this is certain chip sets get a reputation for reliability or unreliability and if you can just look at the fleet of no-name brands or the fleet of name brands and find someplace that will list oh this one has this chip in it the all these have this chip and all these have that chip like even if there's only three possible chips that are being sold on the market maybe one of those is the chip you don't want and the two other ones are good you can find that information out it's annoying it's hard to find because the manufacturers probably aren't going to tell you but someone on youtube will have cracked the thing open and said oh this cheap enclosure uses the good chip and this cheap enclosure uses the bad chip they're exactly the same price you wouldn't know this unless you found the review like that's why it just feels like rolling dice sometimes because you don't know like it's not even that a cost difference between these cheap controllers just sometimes there's good ones and bad ones or sometimes there's controllers that like mac os likes and has a good driver for and ones where mac os has a credit controller like it's not even always the drive's fault so that's one thing you can do if you really want to dig into it yeah um one other thing about thunderbolt though uh thunderbolt is a higher end spec it has more requirements a long time ago at some media briefing i was talking to greg josh about i believe i was complaining about usbc back in like you know the bad old days of the MacBook Pros with the touch bars and everything.

1:23:51And one thing that Jaws said has stuck with me. He said like, Thunderbolt hubs and Thunderbolt devices are held to a way higher standard than USB devices, because every Thunderbolt device has to be certified and it goes through a more rigorous process than most USB devices do. Now, again, that was many years ago. I don't know to what degree that is still true, but I have so far, like in my computing life i've had so i've had some flaky usb devices i've never had a flaky thunderbolt device they've all been rock solid now there are downsides in addition to them costing usually at least three times as much as the usb equivalent um they also you know they tend to you know use more power that you know there's there's almost nothing that's thunderbolt bus powered like it's you know you're looking at external you know external power supplies much of the time usually thunderbolt chips are bigger and hotter.

1:24:48So the Thunderbolt, even something as simple as a drive enclosure, that's going to have a big hot Thunderbolt bridge chip in it, probably. And so that whole thing is going to be hotter and maybe it'll need a fan, or at least it'll just be sitting there melting your desk. By the way, my one terabyte external Thunderbolts drive is bus-powered. It does not have a fan. It does get hot. Yeah, because they get hot. Anyway, so Thunderbolt stuff, it is better, but it is also so much more expensive that for most people and most needs it's not worth it i find thunderbolt is best for hubs like if you want to like have like a port expander that you're plugging your laptop into with one cable and you want a bunch of ports that are going to be reliable thunderbolt's great for that for just like a an external ssd my needs don't need external ssds to be massively fast i'm mostly using them again in like a time machine or an archive context so i just need my ssds my external ssds to be large in capacity um you know i need like the four terabyte the eight terabyte and like so space is more important and then performance so i just go usb on those and it's been fine thunderbolt would have been even more expensive than they already were and it's just not worth it for me but again for hubs definitely worth it and my uh my backup drive like my eight terabyte ssd is connected with sata oh my god because it's internal but like somewhere in there is some crappy ancient old chip that is translating whatever that ssd is so it can speak sata to the internal sata bus on my mac which is not a thing that most people have to worry about but like that drives home the point that for things like backup drives or like clone drives or time machine drives um if you want them to be ssds uh don't worry so much about the bus speed because it's just running in the background at low priority tasks and slowly siphoning bits over.

1:26:35And the main advantage to it being SSD is the fact that it doesn't make noise. Yeah, the actual like protocol maximum speed for drives doesn't really matter to almost anyone, almost any of the time. So yeah, get the USB one, it'll be fine. You know, it's funny, you were talking about Thunderbolt hubs just earlier today, the CalDigit TS5 Plus is in stock enough that they're letting you order them from Caldigit directly. And so I've placed my order for my$500 Thunderbolt hub. It costs as much as your computer if you have a Mac mini. Yeah, seriously. But I'm excited to have it. So I have an M3 Mac, so I don't have Thunderbolt 5.

1:27:18I don't have Thunderbolt 5. But as far as I can tell, this should still work. It just won't be as quick. And I'm very excited to have an onboard 10 gigabit Ethernet port because the one on the TS4 that I have is 2.5 gig. and honest to goodness maybe this is a not a placebo but maybe i'm convincing myself of something that really isn't true but i feel like when i'm moving video files like onto or off of the synology it is noticeably quicker i mean it's two and a half times quicker to do that with the existing thunderbolt 4 now that i have hardware my ubiquity hardware that supports you know faster than gigabit ethernet and so i can only imagine how amazing it's going to be to have 10 gigabit ethernet because i already put a daughter board i think we talked about this put a daughter board in the sonology to have a 10 gigabit ethernet port in that and then now in a few weeks when the ships i'll have 10 gigabit ethernet on my desk and i am very very excited all right patrick harms writes i remember marco talking about block storage or i scuzzy for something similar he experiment or something similar he experimented experimented with to increase the internal storage on his Mac.

1:28:23What I want to achieve is reliable protected storage on a NAS, Unraid, or True NAS that can be used most efficiently by the Mac, single user only, for storing the photo library or bigger files. The connection, speaking of, is 10 gigabit Ethernet between both devices. I found this post on Reddit describing a workaround with a mounted disk image on an SMB share. Any advice? So what I used iSCSI for was to get around a limitation of Backblaze or a feature of Backblaze. So Backblaze, the online cloud backup that they've been a sponsor before, they're still my preferred cloud backup provider. And Backblaze will back up at no additional charge any external drives that are connected to the Mac.

1:29:05I had gotten this huge Synology NAS a million years ago with everybody else on the show. and I was looking for a way to like, let me have cloud storage of, I think it was something like, eight or 12 terabytes of archive data without having that be directly connected to my computer in the form of an external drive. I wanted the NAS to be doing that. And so I did and I went through two. So iSCSI is not natively supported by macOS. You have to buy an iSCSI initiator software. I went through two of them. I believe the last one was the Ato Extend SAN family. I think that's still the only one that works.

1:29:43I could be wrong. This is terrible Mac software. Like the iSCSI initiating process is horrendous. And what you get is what you expect it to be. Like it behaves like a disk directly connected. However, the NAS can't see it. because what you're doing is you're having the Mac have its own file system, its own block storage abstraction. So all those files that are on that giant share being hosted by the NAS, the NAS doesn't see it as files. The NAS sees it as a volume of a format it doesn't understand. Oh, I don't think I knew that. That's fascinating. So basically it removes a lot of the reason to have a NAS because its applications can't really interact with the contents of that drive.

1:30:33So it's fairly limiting. Again, the software on the Mac is terrible. It did work, and Backblaze did happily back it up as though it was an external drive. But I feel like pretty much any other solution would be better. So in this case, having some kind of mounted disk image on what's otherwise just a regular file share, that's probably not going to be as fast for the Mac. like there might be more overhead in terms of shuffling those blocks back and forth and like into the disk image but that's probably the better approach i disagree with that i think that would be uh much worse because i think uh any mac application that sees your iSCSI initiated nas storage thing as just a volume like it's that's going to work the way it expects because you formatted it and at the time probably hfs plus or whatever it was like it's just treating it like a drive and it works like a drive and it you know any any kind of thing that's like oh you need to have you boot it off your internal drive for apple intelligence or photo libraries can only be on a volume of this type or whatever it's straightforward now you can make a disk image format in any format you want but it's not like it's it's a disk image there's all sorts of stuff going on behind the scenes to make that work that especially when it comes to things like file locking and the uh atomicity atomicness whatever the word is of operations in the file system all that can potentially change when dealing with um disc images so i would absolutely recommend against taking a disc image putting it on a nas and mounting that disc image on your mac and then putting your photo library on it like the that stack of things is a not a good idea if you're not putting your photo library on it you just want to have a disc image on your nas and put files in it that should work but it's an incredibly inefficient use of your nas um you know as you break down the layers it's like look just just mount your nas and use it as a network attached storage and unless you have some other need like i want backblaze to back this up or i want to put my photo library on it and in either of those cases you really have to look at what you're aiming for if it's just a bunch of archive data and you want to get it backed up as part of your low one price thing backblaze iSCSI is probably the only solution but if you want to put your photo library on it i would absolutely not put a disk image on your nas and mount it even if it appears to work it's just it's too many layers it's too slow and i don't know if that's even a supported configuration for apple photos and i wonder if apple would even know because they would be asking you well what disk image format did you use did you use a sparse bundle did you use a read write disk image did you use the new asif whatever that format was that we talked about on the past show like and then how is it mounted and what are the samba options on the serving side and on the client side and what version of mac os you were doing too many questions for something as important as a photo library.

1:33:17Then finally for today, Matt Jorgensen writes, my son recently graduated with a degree in computer science. What do you recommend for new graduates looking for their first job? Well, first of all, congratulations. Second of all, I would say, and I think we've talked about this several times in the past, but it's one of those things we should do periodically, like John talks about. If you can get them involved in some sort of open source, I think that that's very healthy. Either that could be open sourcing their own thing. it could be participating in bug fixes or features in some other open source project.

1:33:48That especially I think would be great because that teaches you a lot about working with other people, working with other people's code and so on and so forth. So I think the, the first thing I would look at is getting involved in some sort of open source and trying to make a name for yourself within a project, you know, be, be more than just an anonymous lurker in some project and see if that can help. My advice is probably more general and not like a, as specific as Casey's was, uh, if you have, if you're just graduated with a computer science degree and you have any interest whatsoever in being involved in any kind of like startup or, you know, leading edge technology or like be one of a few number of people in a small company with a lot of responsibility.

1:34:36Now is the time to do it when you're young. If you don't have any interest in that, don't do it. Like don't do it just because you think it's what people do, But if you're like, oh, I always wanted to be like one of five programmers working on a project or something. I always wanted to be involved in a startup or whatever. Assuming your son graduated with a degree and is like, you know, young, like in the mid 20s or whatever, the expected age someone graduates with that degree. Now is the time to do it because it will only get harder to do that. And also having a job like that early in your career where you are one of a small number of people will force you to learn how to do a whole bunch of stuff.

1:35:14And that will make you a much more valuable employee when you get tired of the startup world or when you want to go in a company that's not going to go under. Later, you will have so much more real world experience and knowledge than people who went to work for IBM right out of school. to throw IBM under the bus, but like went to work for some big company. So when you go for a big company, you do learn things on the job, but it's a much more stable environment where what's expected of you. You're not, you don't go in there and it's like, now you have 17 jobs and you got to do all these things.

1:35:44You got to learn them all now. They're going to, it's going to be more sustainably paced, let's say, but you will learn less. It will take you longer or your, your, your skills will be more narrow because there's 75 ,000 other people who do their own specialized jobs. This is not to say that like do startups when you're young, because that's the time to burn you out. You shouldn't have burnout even when you're young. But what I am saying is if you're in a company with a small number of people, it can still be a healthy work environment. And also you will still be required to learn how to do way more jobs because there's just not enough people.

1:36:13So someone's got to figure out how to administer this Linux machine. Congratulations, you're the sysadmin now. Someone's got to learn this new API, this new language. Congratulations, it's you and one other person. Like you will learn so much and you will be battle tested. And when your company inevitably goes under, because that's what happens to most startups. When you apply for that job, let's say at Apple or Google or whatever, you should look a lot better than the other candidates because you will actually literally know how to do more stuff. Also, just money-wise, a pretty good career strategy is go work in the startup scene and get as many shares of as many companies as you can because over time, some of those will end up being worth money.

1:36:58Not all of them. Maybe not even most of them. Or in my case, none of them. The way venture capital works is VCs make a whole bunch of very risky bets, and they tend to come out ahead because a few of them pay off big. You can do that as an employee getting shares along the way. You're playing your own version of that game. So if you work for a startup, the smaller and earlier the startup, the more shares that you will get and the more they will be worth over time as a percentage of the entire company. then secondly once you are in the startup scene in your city or in your part of the industry when one startup dissolves you tend to get picked up by other ones or it tends to be easier for you to stay in that community because startup founders and their investors all talk to each other and so they know like oh hey this this startup just just collapsed over there but oh they had a really good CTO.

1:37:56I'm going to try to hire them or whatever. There's this whole network that you get by being in the startup scene that people in your city will know you. And so even if a particular job ends up going under or not working out that well, usually it's easier for you to get more because you are in that social clique, really. Obviously, it depends what city you are in, what region, what part of the industry are you in. That all matters. But it's like swimming to the professions. It's very much based on who you know and what your track record is. And the startup scene is small, and they talk a lot, and their investors talk a lot.

1:38:37It worked out well for me, but a lot of that was luck, obviously. But I didn't just have shares in Tumblr. I had shares in a few different things, and not all of them worked. Some of them I lost money. Most of them I came out ahead. Or at least it was like a push. So, make a lot of bets. And I know a lot of people who have done this. Work for startups. See how much little slices of equity you can get. And I'm not saying don't also work for a salary. Everyone there is getting a salary. That's what the investor's money is for. So get your salary and also get as many shares as you can. Place a lot of bets on those tables, so to speak.

1:39:19And chances are one of them will pay off eventually or more than one and you know that that's a nice way to get you know a lot of you know bonus money and that's very much a a good path when you are young because like john was saying like you know you have you can take more risks when you're young startup founders also tend to be young and there is insane ageism in this industry uh so by the time you're in your 40s startups won't hire you anyway that's terrible but it's the reality uh it shouldn't be that way but it is that way. So while you're young, go play that game, collect your shares and see what happens later in life as a result.

1:39:56You can always go work for the big tech companies later. But the startups are very much a young person's game. And then finally, I would say for you to stand out when looking at employers or when having employers look at you, one way to do that is to be in their boys club. So, you know, if you are also like a Stanford graduate or whatever, I don't know, I was not any of those things, so I couldn't play that game. The version of the game I played was I cared a lot and I could program. Now, I don't mean I was a great programmer. I wasn't, and I'm still not. I meant I could program, period. You'd be surprised if you haven't seen the applicant pool for a programming job out there.

1:40:44And if you haven't interviewed programming job candidates, you may be surprised how relatively few of them both care and can program. Now, over time, this has gotten better. There's more qualified programmers now than there used to be. And you're entering right now what's probably a pretty crappy job market because there were all these tech layoffs recently. And so there's a lot of unemployed programmers right now who do know how to program. That's temporary. You know, that will change. when you are applying for jobs if you show that you care and if you can demonstrate it doesn't have to be anything like massively impressive.

1:41:20If you can just point to any code you have written whether it's like here's a GitHub project for a simple app I made you will stand out from that. And again it doesn't have to be anything incredibly impressive or complicated. Just if you can point to a GitHub repo that you made and say I completed an app that does a simple thing I guarantee you almost none of the competing candidates for that job will be able to point to any code they wrote that works. That kind of thing makes you stand out more than you think. And if you go into the interview and you show that you care, that you're into programming and that you are interested in this company, do some research about the company you're going into and figure out what's important to them.

1:42:04And you can show them like, hey, this problem that it looks like you're working on, this sounds really cool. and here are some thoughts I might have on it. Show that and you'll be fine. I feel like, Marco, you're overestimating the expected return on working for lots of companies in terms of equity because I think the answer is it's basically zero. It rounds very quickly to zero because the odds are so low and you'd have to have so many different jobs to try to increase those odds. And having a lot of jobs is itself exhausting. I mean, even if only just dealing with the 401ks that you have to roll over into each other and dealing with that hassle.

1:42:39I can tell you that all the companies that I had equity in in my startup years netted me either losses or zero dollars. The only company that gave me any equity that was ever worth anything was my very last job before I quit to do this podcast. And that was a job that I got when I was in my 40s for a very established, very big non-startup company. And my equity wasn't worth that much, but it was worth more than zero or more than negative. So I think that's the expected experience. It's not saying you shouldn't do it, like by all means do it, but like it can be exhausting to try to like, I got to put lots of bets down because then you're just having a lot of jobs.

1:43:12And on the flip side of this, on a non-startup side, that's why I preface this by saying if you're interested in this, if you're not interested in that world and don't want to be in it at all and just want to get a good established job, you can do that and it's fine. And like I would actually recommend that to a lot of people. It's what I hope my children do. I hope they don't go into the startup world. I hope they get a job with a big established company. but if you do that my advice to someone like applying to apple or amazon or google or something is what your goal should be when getting that job especially if you're just out of school is you need to learn how to be a worker essentially learn how to be an employee learn how to be on a team you're going to be learning how to to interact with people and work as a team to accomplish a goal and this sounds dumb and you think you did it all you have we had group projects in school it's exactly the same thing.

1:43:57It's not. That's the main skill that you should concentrate on learning. I know you're thinking about all, you know, what kind of programming things we'll need to know to get past the interview. And that's all true and everything. And like, what am I going to do in my job or whatever? But the main thing you're going to do in your job was guarantee for the first five to 10 years is learn how to be an employee, learn how to be a coworker, learn to work in a team, learn how to be successful in that environment. Success defined as learning how to accomplish the goals set before you as a team, which sounds so dumb and simple, but it is literally the hardest thing.

1:44:29And they don't teach you that in college and they don't teach you that in high school, really. They try to give you good projects. They try to have that one course about teaching you that like agile methodology or something. That's not what the, it's not it, right? It is a social skill that is integral to being successful in big companies with lots of people working as a team and a startup. You can get away with being, you know, just a renegade lone wolf and doing your own thing and having 50 jobs and everything's all crazy anyway and whatever. That's the environment where you can get away with that.

1:44:57That's the environment where you can, you know, flourish without those skills. But you go work for a big company, no one wants that person there. They need someone who can work as a team together on, you know, on goals that are agreed upon. Like, it's a totally different environment. And as you get older, you're not going to want to work in those chaotic startup type things. You're going to want to work for one of those wealthy companies that can afford to give you a good salary and good vacation and good benefits and a stable job and everything. And those companies require you to be a good employee and worker.

1:45:30And again, in all these cases, this is the main thing I'm going to hammer home to all my children. Once they get up into the real job market, do not let the job exploit you. Don't let it burn you out. There's all sorts of things you have to be wary of to be because your employer is not there to take care of you or to love you or to make sure your life is great. So you have to be on lookout for this all the time. But also you have to learn how to be a worker in these big companies. And so So, I mean, the ideal thing is if you really, really want to do startups, do them when you're young and then transition over.

1:45:55But when you make that transition over to the big companies, you're still going to have to learn all that stuff about how to work as a team, how to work together, how to work in a more professional environment. And I've seen a lot of people have very long careers and really struggle with either with that transition to a big company or maybe they start off in big companies and just never learned how to work with people and they don't succeed as much. So there you go. That's a new computer science graduate employee advice 2025. One more rebuttal of John's being down on on getting a bunch of bets.

1:46:27When I say place a bunch of bets, I'm not saying change jobs every six months. I'm saying change jobs every few years, like the way most people in tech do. That's not enough bets then. Well, I mean, to change the odds from zero. Well, but also it matters, obviously, what bets you take. you can't necessarily know ahead of time what will pay off but you can be in areas that are more or less likely to pay off typically um you know the way it has gone for the last you know 30 years in tech is if you want a higher chance of building you know meaningful wealth from stock shares and stuff in early companies the earlier you're in the company the better the bigger role you have, the better, obviously.

1:47:09But also, what area of the industry the company is in and what phase that's in in its maturity matters a lot. You want to be in a part of the industry that is young and experiencing a whole bunch of growth and change and flux. So, you know, obviously, when I started with Tumblr in 2006, that was consumer web apps. That was very much still a big thing then. Later on, iPhone apps, mobile apps have come in. Now, that area is AI. if you want to maximize your odds try to get into an ai startup that's where all the action is if you're listening to this for some reason five or ten years from now that answer might be different and you know you've got to look around like where is the action in the industry right now what is like new and growing and changing and lots of flux go there and get some bets placed on that table and your odds are not not too bad that like you know but one of those could work out pretty well instead of zero the point zero zero zero zero one i think you'd be surprised and again and you know place a few bets and see what happens and the whole time get salaries anyway and uh and you know they're you know then you aren't you know you aren't out any money you know so to speak but it it's not a bad strategy and again like those people will all then promote you to the other startups in that community so you know if you if you show that you're a great programmer or even just a good worker who does their job and is not causing problems for people, two or three years from now, you're looking for a job and your old boss might be a good referral to tell some new company that they're friends with, like, oh, yeah, I know this person.

1:48:43They're a really good programmer. That works in big companies too, by the way. That's just the general advice when you have any kind of job is your next job will probably come from somebody you knew at your first job or like one or two degrees separated. So even if you go work for a big company right out of school. It's another reason to learn how to be a good worker is because some person that you work with is going to be at some new company. And that's the way to get your foot in the door there. You decide you don't like this company. You want to go to a different one. You get laid off, whatever.

1:49:06You're looking for another job. You need that leg up. It's who you know. And it's what they think of you. If they know you but hated your guts, probably not going to hire you. Yeah, maybe don't ask them for a reference. All right. Also, authority is taken, not given. All right. Thank you very much for listening, everybody. Our sponsors this episode were Squarespace and Delete Me. And you can, of course, sponsor us directly by becoming a member. Thank you to our members as well. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in Overtime, we're going to be talking about Apple's newest app store changes for the EU.

1:49:40If these are even still the current ones by the time this episode is released in a few days, we'll find out. You can hear us talk about that in Overtime and many other member perks by joining us at 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 because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

1:50:32So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long. So on a past episode, Casey mentioned that he had finally succumbed to our nagging and started paying for YouTube so that his family won't see ads on YouTube, which is the thing that both Marco and I recommended as a no brainer thing that you should do because kids watch so much YouTube and we don't want our kids to see ads. and let's stop that from happening by paying a small amount of money per month it's well worth it to protect your children from ads casey has already exposed his children to too many ads so he's better better now than a better late than never but then during some conversation that you had like a master and i heard you say that you were you mentioned on the show you're like oh i started paying for like youtube light or something i don't know what the name of the product so i'm like well whatever he found the whatever thing that he could pay for that was uh gave him what wanted and nothing else but someone was someone saying like how do you get your maybe your kids are still seeing ads maybe that's why declan didn't mention to you that he that he thanks you for getting rid of ads because he's still seeing ads because the thing you paid for is not a family plan but only allows one person one account to not see ads and your answer to this person was oh i just let declan use my account in youtube is this all correct so far yeah yeah yeah i'm here to tell you not to do that.

1:52:07Okay, why not? I mean, lots of reasons. First of all, you're being cheap, but let's set that aside. Yes. Second of all, your son is logged into your Google account right now. Well, no, this is only on the shared Apple TV, but yes, I mean, strictly speaking, that is correct. That's not good. He can read your Gmail. He can delete your Google account. He can read everything in your Google Drive. He can't accomplish any of that on the shared Apple TV. Can't accomplish? Kids are very clever. Second of all, setting all of that aside, do you want your son's videos and your video history mingling with each other?

1:52:44I have long since given up on that. And the recommendations affecting each other? Oh yeah, my recommendations are trash. I can tell you that pretty soon, Declan's not going to want you to see what he's looking at. Well, that's also fair. And then I'll have a different problem. And then I'll probably have to spring for the family plan. But for now, I didn't want to pay for it at all, but it became unbearable. So I wanted to pay for the crappiest, cheapest thing I could to get away with it. And that's YouTube Premium Lite, which is eight bucks a month. And it gives you, you know, an ad-free experience with a couple of asterisks.

1:53:16I will say that if you read, because somebody else that reached out on Maston was like, or maybe it was email and said, hey, does this actually work? Because if you read their documentation about YouTube Premium Lite, It sounds as though you're getting one fewer ad as opposed to no ads. And I think the real brass tacks of it is that for watching music videos or music things, I believe I still do get subjected to ads. But for pretty much anything else, I don't. Or at least that seems to be what's going on. First of all, you need to pay for the better one. And second of all, you need to not let your son be logged into your Google account is the keys to everything.

1:53:51How long do you think it'll be before he figures out exactly how much power he has now that he can get like password reset emails to your account? Like this is this is just I'm not saying he's a bad person. I'm saying kids and eventually teenagers. This is an irresistible amount of power that you have given him. And it's a bad idea. I guess. Also, he doesn't want all of your videos in his browsing history and recommendations. Yeah, he's not going to want that pretty soon either. I mean, yeah, that time will come, but it's not here yet. And so I'll cross the bridge when I get there. Don't let your kids log into your Google account.

1:54:22Like it's your main account for all of like your stuff. Like it's because it logged into YouTube means logged into Gmail, which logs into Google drive being logged. He could be in our show notes right now and deleting everything. That is true. Well, that's true. Asterisk again, the only mechanism he has to do this is the Apple TV. And there's only, but so much damage he can do on the Apple TV. You have, you seen, you, you already haven't you detail how kids get past all the, Marco has kids get past all the thing on the Chromebooks. kids will find a way life will find a way casey they're like the dinosaurs in jurassic park you cannot give them this access i i understood the reference god damn it uh no i i i understand what you're saying also consider though that you are all in on google stuff and i am pretty much all out i do have a gmail account that i don't use isn't that where your casey list stuff is all no no remember i'm on fastmail baby oh right you have some protection but still it just it's this is not a good idea pay the extra seven dollars a month like give your whole family ad free youtube on their own accounts but there are no other accounts but mine at the moment there will come a time there will be there rapidly will be declan should probably already have one someone asked about this like oh they don't let you have a google account unless you're x years old or whatever if you have to lie about their age to give them account you probably should but i think they're a kid account and if you can tell the truth about their age do so and then eventually their kid accounts will transition to adult accounts yeah my uh my son recently turned 23 free according to google because he he uh he has a like because yeah we had the same idea like when we first i got the youtube premium thing for the family you know years ago and i created the account for him with his actual birthday and actual age and then it's like oh he can't do anything on youtube because he's below 13 and so now he's actually legally above 13 but for for all those intervening years, if I wanted him to have an ad for YouTube experience, I had to create a second child who didn't exist, who was above 13, and have him log into that account.

1:56:20It was a mess, but I'm sure everybody does that. Yeah, I mean, I'm not necessarily arguing with anything that you're saying, but I think the priorities that both your families have, I suspect my family will get there, but we aren't there today. And when we get there, I'll reevaluate, but for now, No, it's fine. So when he's watching YouTube on his iPad, he's seeing ads. He doesn't have an iPad. Well, he doesn't have any kind of computing device. He doesn't have a phone. He doesn't have an iPad. He has. Currently, he has, I forget which one it is, but he has an old hand-me-down iPhone from me that doesn't have any service.

1:56:54So it only works where there's Wi-Fi, which for him basically means it only works in the house. And he doesn't watch YouTube on that. It's not installed on that. No, that day will come very soon. Oh, I'm sure it will. Again, I'm not trying to say that you're wrong or that this isn't my future, but it's just not something that happens now. And honestly, our house today, again, I know this will change. I absolutely understand this will change. But today, I have a handful of channels I watch on YouTube, but not many, and that's about it. I don't ever typically just let the algorithm wash over me.

1:57:28I don't watch very much YouTube. Declan will occasionally put on PrestonPlays which is a Minecraft YouTuber that he absolutely adores Oh yeah we had a big Preston phase over here I mean he seems fairly innocuous Yeah it was fine I mean I don't know but suffice to say that he'll dual screen playing Minecraft on the Switch as he's watching Preston sort of in the background and also sometimes watching whatever Michaela is doing on her fire tablet thing. But right now, Aaron never watches YouTube pretty much ever. So again, it's not a priority for us today. I cannot stress enough because I can hear the feedback emails flooding in.

1:58:11I understand this is my future. I get that. But it's not my present. Well, don't make this like the glass of water repositioning episode. I understand what you're saying. It was a warning that was not relevant at the time, but became relevant. So very, very similar.