653: Warning Stories

52:14Those are two very, one is 100 % supported, used by millions of people every day. And the other one is a thing that might work if you figure out how to hack it. I take your point, Marco, but I think John's right that this is a false equivalence. But it's certainly, as we've said many times in this program, I think there's something to the theory that if this is something Apple people do, then it will work. see for the, you know, the classic example of, oh, Maps has always been great in Silicon Valley. What are you talking about? It's always been great. Whereas Maps, you know, on the East Coast was not great for a long time.

52:48And I think this is another example, or I think this very well could be another example where who at Apple doesn't have a Mac per person in their lives, much less their households. And one of you said this earlier, you know, it's not a concern that they have, and thus it's not something that they tested. I mean, this is still a piss poor experience for you, John, and I feel awful for you. But ultimately, I think this very well could be a lack of dog food. Yeah, I mean, it is a less commonly used feature than the other case, which is not to do this. But it's just so supported and has been for so long.

53:21And there's really no excuse for this. And really, the other pushback I have on this whole feature is what I want to tell the people, like talking about product sense and product design, don't design a warranty system called you know apple care one that is confined to a single apple account like it doesn't make any sense except for as like they've decided they could it's right there in the name john it only supports max with one user account on them they couldn't afford to do it because like if families were allowed to they would lose too much money but again that's one of the reasons even though i'm sometimes an early adopter sometimes not one of the reasons i jumped on board with this is that the come on was very compelling which is like hey save 18 a month i'm like yes please like it was going to save me money uh and technically it still is saving me some amount of money although no longer 18 dollars um although it might be close because the mac studio is a pretty expensive computer putting expensive uh hardware on apple care one saves you more money than putting cheap hardware on and putting really cheap hardware loses you money but anyway um it's just a no it's an ill-conceived thing it's a poorly conceived product this is the wrong product offering that by the way also doesn't work but you know even if it did work it would still be the wrong design choice for this they should adjust it so they still make money uh but allow it to be used across families like that's that's the no-brainer thing and it should never like save yourself from work apple don't have any mechanism whatsoever to try to figure out if a device should be yanked off just don't do it you don't have that for regular apple care it's tied to the serial number so long as someone pays the bills that serial number is covered that's all you should care about apple all right let's do some topics and there's some breaking news from I think it was last week that the blood oxygen sensor for Apple Watches sold in the U.S.

55:00recently is sort of back. So reading from Apple's newsroom post, Apple will introduce a redesigned blood oxygen feature for some Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users through an iPhone and Apple Watch software update coming what was later today, which was august 14th this update was enabled by a recent u.s customs ruling uh so jumping to gruber's reaction what this workaround does is process and display the blood oxygen sensor data on your watches paired iphone rather than on the watch itself that apparently is what the new u.s customs ruling holds does not violate massimo's patent no processing of the sensor data on the watch and no display of the results on the watch then reading from victoria's song of the verge this redesign only covers Apple Watches sold after January 17, 2024.

55:47Once the ITC import ban took full effect, it doesn't impact models sold before that date or watches sold outside the US, all of which still have the original blood oxygen feature. You can tell if you have a covered model by checking if the serial number ends with a LW slash A. To get the redesigned feature, people with the Series 9, 10, and Ultra 2 watches will have to update their devices to WatchOS 11.6.1 and their iPhones to iOS 18.6.1. Coming back to gruber after the ios 18.6.1 and watch os 11.6.1 software updates the iphone and apple watch need to download an over-the-air asset to enable the redesigned blood oxygen feature this apparently may take up to 24 hours until the asset downloads until the asset download happens the blood oxygen app on your apple watch will say the blood oxygen app is no longer available to jump start the download users can open the health app on their phone and the ecg app on their apple watch just opening the ecg app is enough to trigger the asset download needed by the blood oxygen app what a weird way this has gone like we've been talking about this patent fight and then we said like well looks like they can't get around and apple should just settle but uh somehow quote they're they've been giving this out of like well if you do this thing in this way technically it won't violate the patents and i think the patents expire in like 2028 or something so now it just seems like apple's gonna wait it out because yeah the way of doing it like okay well you can do stuff on your watch but you can't look at the results except on your phone and the phone is technically the thing doing the analyzing i mean that's the reason number a million why patents are dumb uh like it's it's this is all a an unfortunate situation but it's an unfortunate situation that apple has been very typically uh very typical of them stubborn about by saying we'll just we're just gonna not not remove the feature like what we will we you think we won't remove a feature from the apple watch for people in the u.s we'll do it but we're not paying you any money mossimos we hate you so much and so now they found a way around it possibly because of their bribery of our terrible government who knows uh either way this is i guess it's better for people who bought the watch and hadn't had the feature now they have the feature in a not so great version and by 2028 this will all be behind us but this is a strange ending to uh a long-running saga with apple and their watches yeah apple is very cheap and very patient so i am not surprised to see this this kind of very stubborn oh god yes yeah so yeah i mean it's it's an interesting fix or workaround i guess yeah i mean honestly if apple had never gotten this fix and just had not been able to the the future i think they still would have waited it out like it seems like that just at this point they were resigned like we're just we're gonna wait till 2028 and the fact that they got this out however they got it is like oh bonus actually we can give it back to our customers but even if they didn't they had shown that like we're just never gonna pay you we're never gonna settle like we're just gonna wait yeah it's weird but i mean i guess i guess at least apple got what they wanted i feel bad for the massimo people assuming that there's more to this like gruber's post at one point basically all but said that he thinks they're patent trolls and i i don't know one way the other but i feel bad for them if they're more than patent trolls but if they are patent trolls then screw them well i mean like here's the thing like i i disagree with the entire concept of patents as we've discussed in the past um but but apple has to operate within the system which has patents uh and so that's the choice before them massimo is not entitled to the money from apple to license this patent if apple doesn't want to license it they sued they won massimo's reward is apple's not allowed to do this in the u.s you won and i must what did massimo do with that did they take advantage of it by deploying their own products they made money from like that's not apple's problem to do right whatever so like i think it's terrible but it is the system that we have and so this is one way that can turn out where uh there's no there's no licensing there's no like it's just one party waits out the other and yeah sometimes people sometimes these companies just don't get along and i don't i don't think like whether or not massimo is a patent troll They certainly didn't reap any massive reward from winning this case against Apple.

59:50I think I saw some report about how much money Massimo has spent on this lawsuit, and it's like hundreds of millions of dollars. I do wonder if that was the correct choice for them. There's another terrible thing about our system that even if you have a patent in our stupid system and it's valid and you successfully deploy it against a big company like Apple, doing so will cost you hundreds of millions of dollars and you may get nothing out of it anyway except for the satisfaction of defeating Apple in court. I will say, too, I don't think they're a patent troll at all. The idea of a patent troll is not a company that sues over patent infringement.

1:00:23Patent trolls do that, but not all companies that do that are patent trolls. A patent troll is a company that doesn't actually really make anything, that basically buys up patents for the sole purpose of suing. And usually it's like historically the way that term has been used, it's like really obvious, usually software patents. Because software patents are even more dysfunctional than other kinds of patents, which is really impressive because I think, like John, I think the entire patent system is incredibly dysfunctional. And it is my opinion that no patents should exist. Yes, I'm also even including prescription drug patents.

1:00:59I don't think any patent should exist because I think the net harm they do to the world is much greater than the net benefit they bring to the world. And the entire patent system is based upon a fallacy that ignores things like principles of simultaneous invention. Or it's kind of based on this fantasy that we have these individual inventors in a garage somewhere. And that's not really the truth at all for almost any patents. Anyway, Massimo is a product company. They're really big in healthcare. They have a lot of presence in healthcare stuff. And so this was not a patent troll. This was a legitimate patent lawsuit.

1:01:36And I think if the patent system is deemed to need to exist, this was probably a valid case to bring. apple was bullying them around and saying no we're just not going to pay you and apple is ultimately going to come out ahead because it doesn't you know apple had more leverage you know they they didn't need this feature on the apple watch and now they found a workaround that will probably hold until the patent expires but this is not a victory of apple over you know a patent troll this is apple bullying another company because they didn't want to pay like this actually if you look at like apple's behavior here it's awful like apple is definitely the bad guy in this story no question all it took was one gold trinket and a little bit of glass yeah i don't know if the uh the details of the case because as you noted margot a lot of these things apple may feel that like that they didn't even know massimo existed and they just happened to come up with a similar idea because it's obvious like so many patents are and the fact they lost the case may like they may feel essentially justified in saying we didn't take an idea that uh should have been licensed you know they just beat us to the punch with patenting it because apple patents everything as well but i don't know enough of the details to know that but yeah i think people call it think it's a patent troll because even though massimo does make things they don't make like a direct apple watch competitor and sort of the simplified view is like well if apple watch can't have this feature then where is your apple watch equivalent of this feature and that's just not masamo's business and their business is lower volume and again the amount of money they've spent on this case is like like it doesn't seem like they like the victory for them is basically a legal a legal concept but like it hasn't been uh a boon to their business because they spent all this money on the case it hasn't increased the sales of the things that they have they just have this feeling of righteousness i guess that they won a case but you know in the end like so much things in our legal system if you're if the person you're suing has more money than you and is never going to do the thing you want, which is to license your patent with a bunch of that money, then what did you gain, right?

1:03:40Like, you stopped this feature from shipping on Apple Watches. You won the case for a time anyway, but you didn't get any additional revenue from licensing the patent, and you spent a huge amount of money for a company that size to win the case. All right. So there is a rumor first posted at Macworld that apparently there might be a M5 MacBook Pro with cellular being tested. So Felipe Esposito at Macworld writes, Internal Apple code seen by Macworld now reveals that the company has indeed been testing an unreleased MacBook Pro model with an M5 Pro chip and Apple's first 5G modem. The code, which also revealed the existence of a new Mac Pro with an M4 Ultra chip, which nobody cares about, right, John?

1:04:25Now confirms that the company is at least experimenting with the idea of a MacBook with cellular connectivity. this mac laptop found in the code is powered by the m5 pro chip codenamed t6050 which indicates the upcoming generation of macbook pro the same code suggests that this could be the first mac ever to include a centauri chip which is the codename for apple's 5g modem also known as the c1 which was introduced earlier this year with the iphone 16e oh my gracious please make this so i can give you all of my money all right so let's just set expectations accordingly I don't know if this kind of indication is a sign that Apple is preparing this as a launchable product or that this is just like something that they had to build in software support so that they could start engineering testing to have cellular support in a MacBook at all.

1:05:15Earlier rumors from, I believe, about six months ago had suggested that they weren't going to consider cellular until the second generation cellular modem and the, I believe, the OLED redesign of the MacBook Pro, which I don't think is slated for another year and a half or two. That's the M6 is the OLED one. Correct. So I don't think this necessarily contradicts that. uh i so this could just be like they made this this configuration supportable by the software so that they could test it internally um so that that's kind of like i'm trying to get my hopes up too much because i've i've wanted this for so long um but it is either way it is very promising that like this seems to be something they are they are starting to work on uh like there there is a lot more smoke behind this fire than uh than i think we had originally seen so that's great i cannot wait for this and even though i just bought this m4 14x macbook pro i would gladly replace it with another one if it had cellular because it is just such a difference like in in terms of practicality usefulness although that being said i the timing of this is fantastic ever since i updated to the tahoe betas on that laptop it's a lot better at automatically connecting to tethering than it ever has been oh interesting i like for the last like few weeks i've noticed i don't need to go to the menu and select my phone anymore and it doesn't prompt me anymore it just connects to my phone when it can't find wi-fi which is pretty awesome now my phone is still draining its battery the whole time and heating up like crazy and you know like it's i would still rather it be built into the macbook but they made tethering it's at least it's working now like the somebody pointed out months ago when we last talked about this that there was like there was that setting somewhere in network settings of like automatically connected tethering and i remember i tried it and it just didn't work like it just kept prompting me anyway and it just never actually worked and i talked about it on the show but in tahoe it seems to be working and so maybe this is like a hdmi cec unicorn kind of thing like maybe i'm just like lucky and you know knock on all the wood i can find like hopefully this stays this way because it is a lot nicer and it again it's not the same as having a built-in but it gives you a glimpse of what it is like to have it built in because it is closer to that than than it not auto connecting uh and it's glorious so i really i hope i hope that it continues to work well on my existing laptop until they make one with it built-in.

1:08:01But when they do make one with a built-in, it will be better. So that's what I was about to ask. If you could guarantee, you know, if I could wave a magic wand and I could guarantee that tethering would connect every single time without fail, do you think you would still want a MacBook Pro with a cellular chip in it? It makes it a lot less urgent. So another thing I've noticed, back again, six months ago, whenever it was we talked about this last, One thing I complained about on the show was that if, say, you were on a train and it went through a tunnel, you lose your signal. If the tethered phone lost its cell connection and was offline previously, it would cancel the tethering session on the Mac and it would never reconnect automatically.

1:08:46So you would go through your tunnel, phone would drop the connection, the Mac would drop the connection to the phone, and then it wouldn't tell you this and it wouldn't reconnect. So, you know, five minutes later, you'd be back out in the world, your phone would have a connection, but your Mac would still be disconnected from the phone. That seems to have also been fixed. When the phone loses the cell connection to the network, it no longer drops the tethering session with the Mac. So they've done something, they've changed something, and they've made it a lot less crappy. Maybe they've been in there doing a lot of code related to cellular on macOS.

1:09:20Yeah, maybe. I will say tethering in the Tahoe beta has worked better for me than it ever has. So it does actually remove some of that urgent, oh, gotta have it, you know, nature of my desire for MacBooks with tethering, however, or with cellular rather. However, again, like once I can buy one with it built in, I'm going to. That's not a question. It's just a matter of, you know, between now and then, which is probably at least six months to a year away at least possibly longer it's less painful now that's awesome i'm happy to hear that some uh meta commentary on this felipe esposito or felipe esposito at macworld he's had a bunch of stories that are they read kind of like mac rumor stories where there's like you know apple code seen by macworld like macworld didn't used to sort of be on the rumors beat occasionally maybe they would report on something at someone else but this is a sort of direct reporting from mac world about rumor stuff so i keep seeing that name with a lot of this stuff i don't know if mac world is branching out into the rumors world because that get that stuff gets a lot of traffic but just keep an eye on that um and on the mac pro thing like this is these are old existing rumors like this is not any new news like look you gotta introduce the machine apple like we could just sit here i'm waiting all year for to see what they're gonna do with the mac pro the rumor is essentially like there's no ultra fusion on the m4 so if there's an emperor ultra it's not two of any other m4 6 chips stuck together it's its own chip yeah yeah like what like this rumors have been around for ages and ages but they need to ship a thing so i'm like i'm not really i'm just waiting like i need to see what they will actually release not more rumors and part numbers about this is the exact right part number that should be for an m4 ultra but of course apple has directly said that the m4 is never meant to have ultra fusion and yeah like so i'm just waiting i'm we're waiting but put out a new mac pro and we'll see what it's like so i'm not getting too worked up about but i'm glad it looks like uh we're getting closer to cellular max so i would definitely choose that over tethering even if tethering worked perfectly every time yeah all right the a19 pro chip could be coming to a studio display too reading now from mac rumors yesterday signs of the second generation studio display with the codename j427 were spotted in apple code now it has emerged that the device will contain the as yet unreleased a19 pro chip rumors suggest that the next generation studio display will come out in early 2026 when we're also expecting new Macs.

1:11:42Little is known about the new studio display, but it could feature mini LED backlighting for improved brightness, contrast, and color. If it didn't, I would be disappointed because it would just be the same as the current one, but this is a hilarious rumor because the rumor for the low-cost Apple laptop that we talked about all those shows ago is that it would have an A18 Pro, and so the monitor would have a more powerful SoC than the low-cost laptop that you connect to. Now, granted, the monitor presumably wouldn't have like a 512 gig SSD in it and it doesn't have all the ports or whatever like i get it it's not quite the same thing but like the current studio display has what an a13 in it or something and we always thought that was weird but it's like well apple's got a bunch of those chips laying around might as well use it and then that thing was buggy and had all sorts of problems so but maybe they work that out um but yeah that's what a world we live in where the monitor which god i hope that i mean the rumor is like oh it might be mini led like if it's not why even bother like if it's like if you don't improve like they're always so cautious it might actually be better than the current one oh you think after six years or whatever it's been there would they would be better than the one every place i would hope so there's like a million things they could do to make it better uh but anyway having an a19 from like can you offload stuff that like maybe that'll need it'll be like a smart monitor where like the samsung ones like with no mac attached to it it can still do stuff like like with the addition of an ssd how is that not like an imac like it's no you're not wrong 19 pro in it you're just like can i just kind of stick some storage here with a thunderbolt i know it's not it's quite the same because again of all the security and the boot up process like i get it but it's just what a world that we live in and obviously this would probably be way more expensive than a low-cost laptop so it's not although the screen would be substantially larger as well but this is just one of the most absurd situations i have ever heard and it's you know because we we talk so much about the apple silicon chips but as we occasionally note when we talk about these things they are pretty much never the most expensive component in any of these systems mac pro possibly accepted depending on what apple does like the screen is the most expensive component i imagine in the the studio display the screen is often one of the most expensive components and these socs as amazing as they are they're fairly small and they're not they're not that expensive in the grand scheme of things like retail price if they were selling like the mac pro chip maybe it would be thousands and thousands of dollars but like to manufacture it you can kind of know like how much does this cost it's like well uh here's what tsmc's cost for its highest uh you know for their highest process whatever whatever process apple is using here's how much it costs per like you know area of the die and here's how much their weird assembly thing is where they fuse the parts together and put the ram on it or whatever like you can calculate it like what the cost is plus tsmc's margin and it doesn't come out to be more expensive than the screen in many cases um but it's so central to the device like it makes it what it is it's how fast it can do the stuff you want it to do it determines the capabilities and yeah we'll get this monitor uh with a more powerful soc than apple's low-cost laptop again both rumored but i'm watching for that that's bananas uh i don't know i'm curious to see what they do with monitor story because obviously y 'all's xdrs are positively ancient i mean what was that like 2020 or something like that 2019 was 2019 so i have a 2019 mac pro that i bought with the xdr when it was new that's why they're the why gets why i can't put apple care one of them because they're all too old but i'll tell you what the xdr it is incredibly solid no i know i know again everyone's problems they have the studio displays up front like i haven't heard about them recently i assume they may be they got they got most of the stuff worked out so but it is still weird that you have to do basically a software update on your monitor i mean i guess there's firmware updates for the xdr too but it's just like yeah it's it's a different world where you're running a full apple os versus whatever weird firmware that the xdr is running yeah like the xdr is great i mean it is a little long in the tooth and like there are certain parts of it that i would love to see updated obviously like number one screen well yeah like number one would be like you know maybe um get rid of those dim edges on the outside and maybe more dimming zones and maybe 120 hertz like i think those would be like my top three um but those are the ones you got them yeah but like the and of course you know can it not be five thousand dollars plus a sanford another thousand like nope sorry yeah now you're asking too much yeah like it's it is a great monitor in all other respects and for it being six years old and still being amazing and still having almost no peer like we talked a little bit about like there's some recent ones just coming out now from other companies that that you know match the resolution and some of the specs but but not apple's design sense obviously because no and certainly not matching apple's hardware but yeah it is it is unique in that way and you pay for it but but like being a thing that has a pretty okay screen in it even all things considered and with you know an exquisitely designed horrendously expensive apple matching case yeah like it is a very good product like there's it doesn't leave me wanting much um and in fact selfishly i kind of i'm kind of waiting you know i'm like well i kind of want to get my my six thousand dollars worth out of this i don't want it to be replaced too soon yeah to be clear if and when i buy a new computer i'm not buying the monitor i'm using this computer until i use this monitor until it dies because i'm i'm perfectly satisfied with it it does everything i needed to do its flaws accepted i'm i would love uh you know to not have the vignetting around the edge to have 120 hertz and to have more dimming zones and yada yada but like i don't need any of that to do what i'm doing so i'm i'm using this computer until it dies from the vertical red line that has been haunting underscore yep uh no i i i don't know if there was if there were to be a studio display to because i have no self-control i'd probably get one but if you recall my setup right now is a lg5k on my left lg5k on my right and studio display dead center and the difference between the two or the three i guess i should say you would think that it would be minor but oh no even on visa mounts where that awful stand from the studio display is irrelevant the display quality is very very very different it's quite a bit different and so i would love a studio display too i think but depending on how hilariously expensive it is i may or may not end up getting one i mean i feel like they should be able to match the close to the current price of the studio display because that a19 is not going to add that much to the price uh i mean maybe it would like be inflation adjusted similar to what it is because you can get a mini led backlit 120 20 hertz screen for enough money to fit comfortably within the ridiculous margins of the studio display so i hope the price doesn't get inflated by too much maybe let's just say just the apple standard oh it costs 100 more than it used to and i think you would still end up buying one and i think you'd be happy with it yeah why aren't they going oled yet is it is it not ready at those sizes i mean it's been a while right there are rumors of that sometimes but oled the oled burn issue is still a thing there are i mean i'm looking at them from my playstation 5 that you can get a a 27 inch 4k uh qd oled or tandem oled uh gaming monitor that has high refresh that you know they're great right but burn-in is still a thing and especially for like desktop things with lots of windows on it like uh what is it a monitors on box has been doing like a year-long test on like a i think it's an alien where qd oled 27 inch 4k thing using windows on it just like a regular computer it's got a little bit of burning you can detect it uh it's not a problem with mini led so i wonder if apple is a little shy about that i mean obviously they're going to go with the with the macbook pros in the m6 generation so maybe that'll be the test bed but um i don't think there are any 32 inch 6k oleds from anybody anywhere ever uh but for 4k and i'm not sure about 5k but right now you can get 4k and 1440 uh oleds that are amazing i you know apple tends not to be an early adopter in display tech so i think we really have to wait for the current refresh and then wait another seven years or whatever the normal apple time is and by then hopefully the issues will have been worked out because you know again like our phones are all it's like why is burning not a problem on our phones i think we've talked about this before it's just like the screens aren't on as much the the power is lower the brightness is lower for less time but for like for desktops that are uh you know just showing static stuff for a long period of time and are on a lot it's an issue like one of the one of the clever features that asus recently added is essentially a proximity sensor to their monitor so when you get up and walk away it turns the monitor off and it's just a hardware thing that has nothing to do with the os it's just a monitor hardware feature that's to save that's to save burn-in it's a smart feature and uh yeah apple would probably have to look into something like that uh if they ever went OLED on their big monitors with current tech.

1:20:29All right. And then we need to talk about gaming on the Mac, which believe it or not is a thing. And apparently if you're gaming on your MacBook pro, your game is probably rendering blurry. John, do you want me to read this? Do you want to talk about this? How do you want to proceed? You can go through it. All right. So from Colin Cornaby, they write, if you game on a MacBook pro display, your game is probably rendering wrong unless you've adjusted your settings. If you're a developer building a full screen game and app kit or catalyst, list apple's apis have some issues you need to be aware of when most games start they ask the system what resolutions are available for the current display and pick the best one a mac app can get a list of suggested output resolutions through the cg display copy all display modes function this worked well for decades on macs with regular displays but modern apple laptops have a notch at the top of the display the full screen area your game runs in is not the same resolution as the screen most games do not account for this problem they output frames size for the entire screen instead of the region they can draw to.

1:21:25This output is height compressed and blurry. The problem is that the resolutions returned from the CG display copy all display modes function are mixed in a single list with no built-in way to filter. Worse yet, most games default to the first resolution on the list. That happens to be the resolution of the entire display instead of the area under the notch. Out of the box, most games draw using this squished down output. I've submitted the issue described in this post as a blah blah blah feedback number, which will be in the show notes. The issue has been open since September of 2023, which means it's a wee little baby feedback.

1:21:57It's barely alive at this point. Yeah. So just to clarify what they're talking about here is like the game thinks it's going to draw on the whole screen, like basically drawing behind the notch, like the whole resolution of the screen. But then when it actually does display, it displays in the region below the notch because you don't want your notch interfering with things. So they're taking the full screen's worth of pixels and just squishing it down a tiny little bit to get under the notch, which is terrible. Like it's it's not like non-native or whatever, but you would you would hope that the game spends the time rendering the pixels at a certain resolution that it would display it at that resolution.

1:22:33Instead, like squishing it, making things look, I mean, it'll make things look wrong and blurrier and just it's bad. This reminds me of when I think I had a rant about this on one of my old Arstechnical blogs or something like Mac games would. you'd launch a mac game a mac os 10 game back in the day uh and it would go full screen but it wouldn't use the mac os apis for essentially locking the screen like there's an api that said hey i'm a game i'm about to go full screen give me exclusive control over the screen and then change to whatever res the game is going to be running at and then play the game and then when you quit unlock it and the reason you'd want to do that the reason it was important to me you'll shocked to learn is that if a game didn't do that it would say i'm going full screen and my settings are set to you know 1024 by 768 so please go full screen 1024 by 768 and every other mac app that you had running when you launched that game would get a notification that says hey fyi the screen resolution just changed to 1024 by 768 and mac os itself would say oh all you other apps uh you just changed to 1024 or 768 and it would gather all the windows so they fit on screen in 1024 by 768 so when you quit the game and it turned back to like whatever your you know apple cinema display resolution was all your windows have been moved and squished into it 1024 and it drove me bonkers because apple had an api said hey game developers before you go full screen call this api so we won't tell the whole rest of the system that the resolution has changed because we trust that you're going to change it back before you quit.

1:24:06Like there'll be there'll be none the wiser, right? You're going full screen, you've blacked out the whole screen, you've locked the screen. Don't tell all the other apps that you squish, you know what I mean? And they made a specific API for this. And this is one of the frustrations with Mac gaming is that to properly port a game to the Mac or write a game on the Mac, you have to actually understand the platform enough to get basic stuff right like how do i display full screen in a game on mac os and the right way to do it was back then to lock the screen so you don't destroy the placement of everybody's windows right even if you're not like a picky window person like me people notice when suddenly all their windows that used to be arrayed across their screen are squishing to a little central like imagine if you went to 640 by 40 in the game to get higher frame rates and all your windows are now squishing to 640 by 480 this is just like that where it's like apple's doing all the stuff about the game porting toolkit and look at all these triple a games that are coming to the mac and we're getting all these game developers and these games can't be bothered even with apple's presumably direct support to make sure they're correctly drawing their you know correctly sizing and drawing their display to account for the notch again the notch is not a new thing all these games have basically come out on the mac in the post notch era and so does apple not care enough to say hey we looked at your game and it looks like it looks like you're squishing your output to fit under the notch because you're picking the wrong resolution from this thing and in this case it seems like apple doesn't even have an api that says or i guess they do you can still find essentially the safe area inside or whatever but it's just so disappointing with all this press and all this technology about gaming on the mac they can't be bothered no one no one in this situation can be bothered to make sure something basic about the games is correct which is that they are drawing into the size and area that they think they should be drawing into on apple's most popular macs very disappointing i i like this post from colin because this is an issue i had never heard of because again i don't have a laptop with a notch that i game on or a laptop with a notch at all and i don't like that so this doesn't affect me but like every time they show gaming on the mag it's like look at it and you can run on your laptop if you don't mind uh shoddily constructed games that don't correctly render by default oh and there was a list of affected games fyi so shadow of the tomb raider was used as an example which is a very game that was poured to the mac ages ago maybe this predates it but uh um colin says riven defaults to a squash resolution stray the game where you cool game where you play a cat defaults to 17 28 by 11 17 which is not 16 by 10 in a squash control ultimate edition uh colin says control gets around the issue by just making up its own resolutions there are a few 16 by 10 resolutions on the list but none of them are the actual native resolution of the mac of colin's macbook pro uh no man's sky defaults to squash non-1610 resolution the resolution pickers lists both safe area and non-safe area resolution so you know a lot of these cases just like what it defaults to and you can you know change the settings to make it not squish so it's not like a permanent thing but it's embarrassing when it's the default and then honorable mention of for world of warcraft which has actually been a pretty good macOS citizen for its entire life world of warcraft at first looks wrong but world of warcraft is an older game used in legacy core graphics display services full screen api that API actually allows World of Warcraft to draw into the notch.

1:27:17So in this case, the 34 or 56 by 22, 34 resolution is correct. So if your game is super old, it has no idea the notch is there, uses the old things, but at least it doesn't draw squished. We are sponsored this week by HelloFresh. Let me tell you, here at the List House, not only is everything upside down because of home renovations, but school started and so everything is doubly upside down. Does that make it right side up? Who knows? but one way or another what I do know is that at the end of the day Aaron and I do not want to have to think about what's for dinner how are we making it where do the ingredients come from etc so we love having something like HelloFresh because HelloFresh makes it easy to fit quick home-cooked meals into your schedule every week by curating delicious recipes right to your door and they have not only these full recipes but over 100 seasonal snacks sides and treats a couple weeks back they sent us a box and we've already cooked all this up and all of it was very tasty let me tell you what they got.

1:28:11They sent us sweet chili turkey lettuce wraps, which are very tasty. And since they're lettuce wraps, I liked that there wasn't a whole ton of carbs in there. That was really great. Chicken sausage ricottoni, hand to heart. This was freaking delicious. And I'm still dreaming about it a couple of weeks later. And finally, pork chops and cranberry shallot sauce with garlicky roasted potatoes and green beans. Let me tell you, if there's anything you need to know about Casey, it's that Casey loves garlicky roasted potatoes. I love them. And I'm also talking in the third person. I don't know why. That's okay.

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1:29:35All right, let's do some Ask ATP and let's start with Aaron Bushnell, who writes, with Apple working on new LLM, AI and voice technologies, do you think the name Siri will continue to be used or do you think it will be retired and they'll use a new name after years of Siri disappointment? This is a really great question because as soon as I read it, I was like, oh, yeah, they should get rid of Siri if it's actually good now. But I don't think that's what they would do but i think it would be a very wise choice to do it let's start with marco what do you think i think they won't you know but if they did i think they would call it just ask apple because that's that's kind of their their direction oh i hate that but you're probably right and we would sue them right yeah because we invented the entire concept of ask something and didn't steal it from another podcast yeah exactly um yeah so i i think if they did if today's apple you know like with moderate with you know this group of you know marketing and decision making people i think they would just say ask like hey apple what's the answer to this question whatever like i think that would be their their answer which i kind of hate but that that is probably what they would do um but that being said i don't think they're going to change it because to change it away from siri like number one apple would have to think siri is unrecoverable and i don't think anyone high up at apple actually realizes how bad siri is and how bad the siri reputation is um certainly many of the non-high up people know very well but i think the people at and near the very top have convinced themselves that siri is awesome and and i don't i don't think they have the the self-reflection to really see how bad it is um also apple you know we said earlier they're a very patient company apple loves recycling names and using them for a long time we have magsafe like that's one we you know like we have a lot of like once apple comes up with a term and they market it they tend to return to it whenever possible so even if siri is damaged now i can see them you know possibly even oh hold on my phone just woke up thanks thanks for that even if it is considered damage now like i can see them you know just kind of downplaying it for like a year or two and then going right back to it again um or or never leaving it in the first place because apple loves the names they invest in you know and and they they continue to use them as much as they possibly can so even so again i don't think they're leaving the name siri but if they did leave the name siri they would just say apple because they would want it to stand for Apple intelligence.

1:32:15And so it would just be, you know, hey, Apple, what's the weather tomorrow? Like, that's what it would be. I agree with you both in that that's what they would do, and I hate it. But do you think they would do hey, Apple, even considering that hey, Google has long been a thing? Well, it used to be okay, Google. No, that's true. You're right. So when all of these wake phrases started, they needed to have certain audio characteristics to make them more easily distinguished from other words and other sounds and you know the and the hardware and the software back you know back with alexa and the first google home things like the hardware and software were much simpler and much more primitive so they like certain words and rhythms and sounds and frequencies would work better than others and would be more easily distinguishable from background like you know from false wake-ups basically from from like other sounds and other words as technology has gotten better and more advanced now i think they have a lot more flexibility in what those words can be you wouldn't know it from how my phone just woke up um but but they did like over time we do have you know better better options available to us um that's and like you know that that's why they they dropped the hay requirement recently although i'll tell you if you turn the hay requirement back on it reduces the frequency of miss wake-ups.

1:33:33Yeah, that's why I never turned it off. Yeah. But anyway, I don't think they care that Google was okay, Google. And then I believe now they're hey, Google. I don't think they care. You can do both. Yeah. I don't think Apple would avoid using the word, you know, hey, Apple, or just Apple. Like, I don't think they would avoid that for that reason. Yeah, I don't think they will because the earlier discussion about Apple's stubbornness, like just because they're just, damn it, we're going to make Siri good at some point, surely, right um there i thought we had this in fall for next week but apparently we don't but there is actually a story about um maybe i just didn't pull out of my stuff so maybe i'll spoil it here but like there was a story this week about uh rumors of a visual redesign for the new siri because they burned their pretty pretty cool current visual redesign for the siri that wasn't any better right and so they're thinking of having to do a new one and that's that's i feel like how they're going to like there may be like a rebrand even if they say like siri 2 or siri now it's good or like new siri or next gen siri or whatever like but i feel like siri is going to be in there i think they should do like you know the whole uh i don't know like uh bell atlantic verizon at &t like the airlines that changed the name uh comcast xfinity right the the reputational associations of siri are so bad with just regular people justifiably bad that they should get rid of siri and pick a new one if and only if they have an actual good voice well that's the thing so clear like they did the visual design which i think i think the new one is cool and they wasted it yep like they just so like if that is true if they come out with a new visual design and the people who designed the current cool one, they're like, oh man, we made this cool thing.

1:35:21You just didn't give us a thing to associate it with. So yeah, I don't think they will change it, but I think they totally should. And I'm secretly hope that they do. Rolly C writes, does John have an update on the accessibility feature vehicle motion cues? Have you tried it? So to recap, I think this was iOS 18, maybe even 17, but recently there was a thing you could opt into where, and I think it would try to do it automatically, but you could also put it in control center where there would be a series of dots predominantly along the side of the screen, if I recall correctly. And as the car that you're in or the boat or what have you moves around, those dots would move in a commensurate way, which allegedly will help keep your inner ear and eyes in sync.

1:36:03I presume that this didn't work for you, John, because you have more severe motion sickness than pretty much anyone I know. But tell me, what has happened? I've never tried it. Oh, come on! Well, okay. In John's defense, it was announced, you know, like Apple does those big accessibility feature previews in the spring. But those features often are like months away from shipping. And so when it was announced, we talked about it. But I don't think it shipped for like at least three or four months after that. And so I think we all just forgot about it. I didn't forget about it. That's not why I didn't try it.

1:36:35Like, look, I've been this motion. I've known that I've been this motion since fifth grade. There's a lot of things. Early on, I tried all the various things that you can try. Granted, they were different back then. But like what I've learned is I've learned what works for me and what doesn't work for me. And those dots, like my motion sickness was to just laugh at those dots because they are insufficient to properly sync up my inner ear and my eyes. I would here's the thing I would never attempt it because the punishment for finding out that they don't work is so terrible when I have a known solution which is do the things I currently do like you know make sure you're looking out the front of the car or stare at the horizon or whatever I have known things that I know will work for me I would never risk like let me see if I can ruin my entire day and puke my brains out to see if these dots work so I don't have anything against the dots I'm sure they work for a lot of people I just don't expect them to work for me and I don't need them to work for me currently don't need them to work for me because i have other things that i can do to accommodate this the most important being like don't put yourself in situations where you're getting emotional now if someone said you have to be on a boat i'm gonna puke my brands out anyway so of course i'd try the dots then because hell i'll try anything you know what i mean but like uh i'm just not gonna go on a boat that uh that rocks like that right you know what i mean like it's so yeah i i haven't tried them i know it's disappointing to some people what i have done is heavily promoted these dots to my children because my children insist on being on their phones or ipads in the back of the car and then complain that they get motion sick i'm like i know you're on your phone of course like you have some of my genes i this is not a surprise to me i'm like they won't get off their phones right so i'm like try the dots and they're like ah the dots or whatever i'm like at least like it's it's like me on the boat like you're gonna like apparently you can't stop looking at your phone while we're sitting in the car and you always complain that you get motion sick the same thing with reading they'll read a book i'm like don't try to read you're my kids don't try to read a book in the back of the car it's not gonna work out well for you like oh i feel so sick yeah i know i know you they're not as bad as me like they're not as bad they don't have the problems that i have but like all child things like i've been trying to tell them to use the dots because i think they're they're at the level maybe maybe the dots would help them the dots are a good idea they're they're sound there is a rationale that makes sense and i'm sure they do work for some people but i'm just probably never going to try them unless if you see me trying them you know everything else has fallen apart and i'm i'm completely desperate all right well uh homework assignment have tina drive you around because i want to know if this works i've been no thanks come on all right so i'll do that if you drink some ipecac all right i think that's not exactly apples to apples it is because the the the failure scenario is the same where's your sense of adventure ellie writes when you use a Trackpad, what method do you use to actually register a click, tapping, clicking with your pointer finger, or old style clicking with the thumb?

1:39:28I've realized at some point since the introduction of Click Anywhere trackpads, I've switched from old style to clicking with my index finger, but I don't know when that happened. I'm an old, and I'm the only one who regularly, or well, pretty much always uses a trackpad of the three of us. And while I will occasionally click anywhere, 99 % of the time I am doing my thumb on the bottom of the trackpad click. and that will probably never stop happening because I'm an old. Marco, you occasionally use laptops. So what do you do? Sometimes I will do the old style, like what you were just saying, like where the button used to be.

1:40:04Sometimes I'll do that. Usually I'll just click the finger I'm using to move around, which is almost always my index finger. Fair enough. John, I know you hate trackpads and avoid them at all costs. Do you have any thoughts on this though? uh i i avoid them but they still exist and i have to use them especially when i'm fixing my kids laptops and stuff or uh you know i my laptop is another one of my uh tahoe test machines so i have an intel tahoe machine an arm tahoe machine and anyway um so i do have to use trackpads i hate trackpads not my friend um but when i read this question like i thought about it for a little bit i'm like oh we'll put that in like next whatever but then the next time i was using the laptop i started to pay attention to what i do because i was like what do i do how do because you know i I started using track pads when they had the physical button at the bottom part of the thing, right?

1:40:51So I'm like, that must be what I do, right? But no, it seems like most of the time, I do the clicking anywhere with my with my pointer finger. And once I realized that that's what I was doing, I don't know when that transition happened. But like, you know, some at some point after they introduced the, you know, the track pads where you can click anywhere, I started doing it because it is convenient. But once I realized that I was doing that a lot, I said, I shouldn't be doing that because one of the things i hate most is when i'm doing that and i'm like doing a drag and i like get to the limits of the trackpad because the tracking isn't quite what i expected it to be or whatever and then it's like i gotta like do this little maneuver to like continue the drag without releasing it but give myself more room you don't have to do that if you do it the old way and the thumb is holding down the quote-unquote button while the other finger goes swipe swipe swipe swipe to move over so i've consciously been trying to change how i use the trackpad to not run into these more problematic scenarios and obviously again i'm not a great obviously i'm not a very good trackpad user like it's one of the reasons i don't like it it doesn't it doesn't fit with my it doesn't fit with the way i use computers and i've never really gotten particularly good at it but uh paying more attention to how i'm using it and using different techniques i've even gone so far as occasionally to the old person thing where i use my other hand to be the holding down the quote-unquote button and then use that hand to do like dragging things or whatever i still feel so constrained by trackpads and I hated a mouser for life.

1:42:13But yeah, apparently I used the click anywhere thing and I shouldn't. Alright, thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and HelloFresh. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is exclusive content in many forms. You do specials here and there and we do, after every episode, ATP Overtime. This is a special, exclusive, weekly bonus topic for our members. You can listen to everything we've ever done. It's exclusive by joining 18.fm slash join. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about Apple's research into using LLMs to make UIs with SwiftUI.

1:42:56What could possibly go wrong with using LLMs and AI tech to design user interfaces? We will find out in Overtime. You can hear us again, 18.fm slash join. Thank you so much, everybody, for listening. We'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because 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 Antimarco Arman S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long Did we ever promote the vacation special?

1:44:13We did not That occurred to me like an hour ago and it was way too late i was about to jump in but i'm like maybe we did maybe we did sure we're still we're still on the regular show we can still save this no this is the after show this is the after show what i'm saying but it's not overtime yet so yes we can save this maybe we'll just save it for let's just save it for next week no we're committed now at this point we got to do it we're yeah no we're this is you got to get better in increments we're getting incrementally better right so we should have done this in the pre-show but we didn't but we have a new member special ATP Insider Vacations, where we talk about our vacations, what we want out of them, what kind of vacations we like, how do we handle them, what are our roles when going on vacations, what's a trip, what's a vacation, et cetera, et cetera.

1:45:02I don't know. John, anything to add? Yeah. How we think about vacations, the role they have in our lives, because there are surprising variants from the sort of stereotypical view, especially the stereotypical American as promoted in the media view of what a vacation is supposed to be versus how people actually engage with vacations in their lives so that's that's the topic we tackle tackled in our typical uh fashion you want to hear about us and our vacations and our weird uh ideas and attitudes about vacations there's a member special for you that we forgot to promote at the top of the show us weird we don't do anything weird us forgot to promote a member special that that never happens I don't know why this has become a sickness with us.

1:45:43It never used to. And then like the last three, it's been a problem. Yeah. It's just, I don't know what's happened. Maybe they just become so routine. Anyway, members, you get member specials every month, like clockwork, but we just can't remember to promote them. Yeah, it's bad. But hey, you know what? You should check it out. And I mean, whether or not the Vacations Members special is interesting to you, I would like to plus one, if you will, Marco's typical outro where, you know, even if this one isn't interesting, at this point, we have amassed a pretty solid library of specials and whatnot.

1:46:17Over 30. Yeah, there you go. So if you are interested at all, join at least for a month, preferably for longer, and check them out. And you can listen to them and enjoy them. The tier lists seem to be the crowd favorites, but we have heard many pieces of extremely lovely and good feedback about pretty much everyone we've done. So definitely do check that out. And if you're not a member, ATP.fm. Yeah, they're all different. Like there are ones about tech topics. There are ones about like this one's mostly about kind of family things. There are funny ones. There are goofy ones. There's there are ones where we watch movies like it's it's all over the map.

1:46:49But like each one is, you know, different. So if you say like, I don't want to hear you talk about your lives or vacations, I want to hear you talk about software development. there's a member special for that and there'll probably be more so yeah check them out