654: Athletically Engaged

27:48I believe it's called you're holding it wrong. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of when I posted about this on Mastodon, some people were saying, so they shipped it with this known issue. That's usually not what known issue means. It usually means they shipped it, weren't aware this was a problem, but then very quickly they realized it was a problem because they work in support and you get the same complaint. on that subject again the my very nice support person speaking for themselves only and not for apple said that they believe that apple care one will probably have to be changed because the current support volume on the apple care support line is unsustainable i didn't have the heart to tell this person that i'm not sure apple cares that your support volume is unsustainable because presumably they chose the um structure of apple care one because they feel like that's the most financially viable because the more devices you allow someone to put into a bundle the more money they save and the less money apple makes on apple care that's the only reason i can think of why they would try to confine apple care one to a single apple id as opposed to allowing it to be used by an entire family which would make much more sense which is exactly what the support person said like i don't know why they didn't put it on family again i didn't have the heart to explain to him money money is the reason anyway um i don't have any faith that they will change this plan because the fact that they ship this shows that they don't have enough brain cells to rub together about what makes a good AppleCare 1 plan.

29:07Anyway, so what's my solution? The solution offered to me by the helpful support person was cancel AppleCare 1 and then sign up for plain old AppleCare Plus individually on all your devices. And I asked, will I be able to sign up for the plans that I had before AppleCare 1? And the answer was no, because first of all, Apple no longer offers a bunch of plans that don't have theft and loss protection, and those plans used to be cheaper. and second of all things like my like two-year prepaid upfront apple care on my one-year-old phone i can't get those at all in any form like that's the cheapest way you could get two years of coverage on phone because i change my phone every two years when i re-signed up for apple care on my phone i had to go to the more expensive monthly plan with theft and loss that's you know so on and so forth so the upshot is i canceled apple care one i'm out of the apple care one business it is turned off everywhere i got refunded for it and then i re-signed up for regular AppleCare at higher prices than I was paying before to the tune of an additional$48.03 per year that I am now paying.

30:04And I'm paying that to cover one fewer device because to save money, I left my iPad off AppleCare. Used to have AppleCare with a prepaid plan. Now it no longer has AppleCare because otherwise it would have been that I was losing$68.03 per year. So this entire fiasco has been a learning opportunity for me and hopefully for you. My advice is that no one should sign up for AppleCare one. And you may be thinking, well, what if I don't have multiple accounts? What if I'm a single person living alone? I have all my devices belong to me. It's so buggy that I have a feeling that even in those situations, there could be problems.

30:37And here's the thing. If there's any kind of problem, they send you an email and you have 24 hours from the time they sent the email, not the time you read it, to do something to remedy the situation. Otherwise you lose AppleCare coverage. So, so many situations where people could be like, oh, you know, it's like a device that they left somewhere or they went on vacation and they come back they don't have warranty coverage or they go on vacation and aren't checking their regular email and the thing gets pulled off warranty and they drop it in the water like a warranty plan should not be designed like this i recommend that nobody do this but if you insist on doing it be sure that you do not have any devices that more than one apple id ever signed into and that includes any mac with multiple accounts even if they're all quote-unquote your account like you have a developer apple id and a regular apple id that would screw it up that would run afoul of this So, yeah, and I really hope that nice support person is right, that the unsustainable support load of AppleCareOne will cause Apple to change the plan.

31:30And if they do, you'll hear about it here. But it'll take a lot for me to go back onto this plan, considering the thing that was supposed to save me$18 a month is now costing me$48 a year, more than I was paying before. Oh, and the thing that they offered me to make up for this bad situation was I can pick any accessory from the Apple online store for$200 or less. uh and i mean that more than makes up for the difference that i'm losing on this which is nice of them but i don't really need any accessories right now my wife picked out a mophie three-in-one charger but it's out of stock so i'm not sure what we're gonna do on that because uh they said well you can wait for it to come back and stop or you can pick something else maybe i'll just wait until like the the iphone 17s are out and i'll buy a case with it and the case will be like 60 bucks instead of 200s, but I'll still come out ahead for the year.

32:18Anyway, AppleCare 1, thumbs down. So, to be clear, AppleCare 1 is literally broken on your configuration and there's no way they can put you back on the plans you had? No, I mean, I didn't press that too hard because I know what it's like to be in these companies. I'm sure they literally don't have a way to do it. Well, they should build one. What they should have just done is like, because I said, instead of letting me pick out a$200 accessory. Can you just give me a$200 gift card or something? Like I'm looking just for cash reimbursement. And they said they couldn't do that either. And also keep in mind, it's not like the unsupportable call volume is all people with my specific weird problem with multiple accounts on Macs.

33:00The problem, you know, is characterized by the person is that Apple Care One sends you threatening emails and people get the emails and they don't understand why. A lot of them are legitimate as in, hey, Apple, not legitimate, but like, hey, Apple Care One suggested that I put my wife's phone on and that should never work. And it didn't work. And people, it's happening to everybody there because Apple's own thing says, sign up with these devices and people like, great, I'll do that. And then they get threatening emails and then they call support. Like that I imagine is a bigger problem than my specific known issue with multiple accounts on the Mac or whatever.

33:30But the whole, the whole thing is designed badly and people don't understand how it works because it works in a way that people don't expect. Including Apple. Uh, with regard to trackpad dragging. This was your complaint, John, last time. Is that right? It was like an Ask EDP of how to use the trackpad, and I realized I had stopped using it the old-fashioned way and started using it the newfangled way, but I don't like the newfangled way, so I was intentionally going back. I said I was going to go back to the old-fashioned way, and a lot of people had some suggestions to things that would help with my annoyance with trying to do one-finger dragging.

34:04Right. So many people have suggested three-finger drag. You can find this in system settings accessibility pointer control trackpad options dragging style three finger drag and what that lets you do is when you move three fingers across the trackpad guess what you're going to drag i tried this and i was overjoyed i had forgotten that this was an option i had known at one point and i thought oh my gosh this is incredible this is gonna be so much nicer and then i went to flick my three fingers in order to go to a different space because as we've covered many times on the show i'm a devout spaces person and i can't do that anymore because now it's a three finger drag.

34:40And yes, I know I could like rejigger the, uh, the stroke, the, the, whatever I'm thinking of, not hotkey, not stroke, but whatever the, uh, gesture, there it is for, uh, for switching between spaces. And I think the new default when you turn on three finger drag is to do a four finger drag for spaces, but I have years upon years of muscle memory for three finger drag to switch spaces. And I don't typically have a problem with dragging as it is because I use the faux, you know, the, the bottom left corner, the faux button on the bottom left corner, uh, in order to do my pointing and clicking. So I did love this idea for a hot second and then immediately went right back.

35:16But John, have you tried this? I did. I found it a little bit awkward to do it first. And like, there's also like, there's also like three fingers up for like app expose and stuff. There's a lot of things that want three fingers to, for the gesture. Um, so there was that little bit of interference. Um, even though I don't use spaces, I do occasionally use like the expose three fingers up or whatever thing but there's also drag lock in this same pop-up menu and drag lock i couldn't quite figure out until i read the documentation they should have like a tool tip or something but basically with drag lock you double tap an item but then drag without lifting your finger after the second tap i did not figure this out on my own i had to read the docs uh and then dragging continues when you lift your finger that's the thing with the three finger drag people were saying you can three finger drag something and if you like hit the edge of the trackpad if you quickly pick up your fingers and move them and go, it continues the drag.

36:02And then with drag lock, uh, it, uh, it, uh, it locks the drag. Like you don't even have to quickly reposition or whatever. So there's lots of accessibility options to essentially deal with the situation where you hit the edge of the trackpad during a drag. And that was one of the things I was complaining about, or you can just use a mouse. But anyway, these options are great. Check them out. They are buried in accessibility, but they're very useful. All right. Apple's blood oxygen feature workaround has now brought around a new Massimo lawsuit. So last week we talked about how Apple had gotten Customs and Border Protection to agree with them that, oh, well, if you're not showing the blood oxygen reading on the watch, I guess that's fine, right?

36:42And so CBP said, sure, why not? And Apple did some software updates to turn all this on. And Massimo, understandably, is not happy. So reading from Mac rumors, medical technology company Massimo on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in which it challenged the agency's decision to allow Apple to restore blood oxygen monitoring to its Apple Watch models. In a complaint filed August 20 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Massimo said the customs acted unlawfully when it ruled on August 1 that Apple can import watches with pulse oximetry technology without notifying Massimo.

37:13Massimo said it only discovered the ruling on August 14 when Apple publicly announced it would be reintroducing the pulse oximetry functionality through a software update. Massimo claims CBP exceeded its authority when it issued the ruling permitting Apple's redesigned approach. That's the problem with talking about any of these things that have to do with patents and lawsuits. It seemingly never ends. So there's always one more lawsuit. So anyway, the situation is still that you can buy Apple Watch products that will do the processing and display off the phone for now. But we'll be sure to let you know if that changes.

37:48But at this point, they'll still be fighting it out in court when the patents expire in 2020. All right. Speaking of dumb things, apparently the UK's dumb demand for backdoor into Apple encryption may be going away. Jess Weatherbed at The Verge writes, The United Kingdom will no longer force Apple to provide backdoor access to secure user data protected by the company's iCloud encryption service, according to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. This announcement follows the UK issuing a secret order in January this year, demanding Apple provide it with backdoor access to encrypted files uploaded by users worldwide.

38:18In response, Apple polled the ability for new users in the UK to sign up for its Advanced Data Protection, or ADP, encrypted iCloud storage offering, and challenged the order, winning the right to publicly discuss the case in April. Earlier this year, U.S. officials started examining whether the UK order had violated the Bilateral Cloud Act Agreement, which bars the UK and U.S. from issuing demands for each other's data. With the order now reportedly removed, it's unclear if Apple will restore access to its Advanced Data Protection service in the UK. The BBC adds, the BBC understands Apple has not yet received any formal communication from either the US or UK governments.

38:49Quote, we do not comment on operational matters, including confirming or denying the existence of such notices. Quote, a UK government spokesperson said. So when we talked about this, that was the part of the problem with it is that like, if the UK issued this order, they would also bar Apple from acknowledging that the order exists. And so we're always like, how are we ever going to know whether this is still in effect or whether it has been withdrawn or whatever, But here we have an announcement from someone in the U.S. government. Unfortunately, announcements for people in the U.S. government.

39:17This was announced on X of all friggin things is not that reliable. So I was looking for some confirmation other than a post on X from an unreliable person in our current terrible government. And then the BBC does not help by saying, well, if this is a thing that happened, we couldn't tell you about it anyway. but it seems like maybe that ridiculous demand is not going to take effect, which I think is a good thing, but I can't be entirely sure because how can you be sure about anything these days? A lot, lots of this secrecy combined with unreliability. I wish I could believe what, uh, these, uh, a terrible government official would say.

39:53And I wish there were not gag orders associated with everything having to do with this kind of thing. So I still don't feel great about this whole thing, but I think this is potentially good news. I mean, I would hope so, because this thing that the UK wanted was pretty, pretty bananas. So if it really is going away, I think that's good for everyone involved. We shall see. All right. With regard to the Studio Display 2 and potentially having an A19 Pro chip, a couple of very interesting points that were sent to us. Daniel Luce writes, reminder that the A13 in the current studio display has 64 gigs of storage, which is the lowest amount of storage Apple ever bundled with an A13.

40:35The A19 Pro will be the iPhone 17 Pro's chip, and there are rumors that the iPhone 17 Pro will start at 256 gigs of storage. That's the same today as the starting storage capacity for the iMac. Oh, boy. I joked like, hey, how is that a monitor with an A19 Pro? How is that not an iMac? And I said, well, you know, it doesn't have an SSD, but I forgot. Of course, it does have storage for the OS. I mean, 64 gigs isn't really big enough to be an SSD for a Mac, but it's overkill to boot whatever the heck the thing is running from the display. And yeah, if the A19 Pro has 256 gigs of storage in the monitor and the iMac also starts at 256, so what a world.

41:12And then Fabian Hausler writes, it is possible that Apple is using differently binned chips for the display that otherwise would have gone into the bin. Apple usually only disables CPU or GPU cores on their chips for most consumer devices. On the A18 Pro, these only take up about 24 % of the total chip area. If the defect occurs anywhere else, the neural engine, display controller, IO controller, memory controller, etc., the chip would be unsuitable for a phone, but it might still be used for display. I do want, isn't the display used the neural engine and stuff, though, for, like, the center stage thing?

41:42Like, I'm wondering if it really is using, I see where they're going with this. Like, maybe there's some part of the chip that is not used at all inside the monitor, but the neural engine is probably not it. The IO controller is probably not that. Not the memory controller. The display controller, probably not. I mean, like, I'm not sure which part you can accept, but I could imagine them using an SoC with, like, multiple GPU cores that are dead instead of just, like, one or whatever. So, yeah, maybe reusing what would otherwise be parts that were useless does make a lot of sense. With regard to Apple's Hide My Email feature, Timothy Martin writes, you accurately described how conventional Hide My Email works when you go to settings and create a specific hide my email address for use.

42:22However, if you sign in with Apple to create an account and choose to hide your email when creating that account, it has an additional benefit. It will only accept emails from domains owned or provided by the developer of that app or service or website. So if they sell or share your email, they are breached, etc. The provided email address is entirely useless to anyone else. This sounds great, right? Well, maybe not. David Beck writes, Hide my email is such a bad idea. A while back, I got fed up with all the spam I get and decided to switch email addresses and use it for everything. It seems like a great idea until you realize it's tied to the domain it's used with.

42:51And if some other server tries to send to that address, it just silently gets discarded. There's no way for you even to see that something was blocked. Sometimes it fails immediately because the site uses separate domains for their site and for sending emails. Sometimes it'll work until one day the site changes providers. Sometimes most things will work, but certain features send from another domain. Yeah, I think IconFactor was complaining that one of their Kickstarters had this problem because lots of people signed up with it for Hide My Email, but then said they were never getting any of the Kickstarter emails.

43:16it's the same type of thing like the idea that when you sign up for an account on a website that all email will come from that website's domain is not always the case like with kickstarter versus like the the domain of icon factory that is running the kickstarter like with a platform thing or even just plain old websites that sometimes have you sign in through one domain but land on the actual website on a different domain and again this like maybe would be a thing that people could deal with if they had visibility into it like as david points out like the emails just get silently blocked and you just you just think you never see them you have no way to go dig them out and retrieve them you don't have a way to say oh and for this email also allow this domain it's just so so uh non-transparent and so feature poor that it's not the type of thing that i would want to use and we got these two things are representative of the feedback we were getting people uh reminding us about the the two different kinds behind my email the one that's restricted to a domain and the one that's not.

44:11And then lots of people saying they like it, but the restrictions to domains is too harsh. And other people saying I'll never use it again because it messed up something XYZ where I wasn't getting emails and I didn't realize it. So I'm not a fan, but some people do find it useful. So the more you know. We are sponsored this episode by Sentry. How much time does your development team spend on debugging problems? Or if you are the development team, like many of us and myself listening to many of you listening out there, how much time do you spend fixing errors? Especially if you get woken up in the middle of the night by your servers throwing a whole bunch of errors.

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46:59right right uh this was not surprising but nevertheless it would be fun to do that sometime i've never been able to do that oh yeah i would love to uh all right so there is an interactive logo on apple.com which is like a what i think they're trying to imply it's a cool blue like apple logo and as you mouse around it or click it it'll it's supposed to look i think it's supposed to look like a thermal camera like you're appointing a thermal camera at something to see the hot parts are uh like go to like to red and then to white for the hottest part and then the cool parts are black to blue yep so uh sam henry gold wrote i reverse engineered apple thermal logo effect it's a three three dot js shader that combines four inputs a video texture heat map a mouse driven heat map an apple logo mask and a thermal style color palette yeah you can move your finger or cursor around on the apple logo and like it's interactive and you can move around the heat thing but yeah it the the tea leaf reading for this one uh is i think it's mostly having to do with the rumored vapor chamber cooler on the new uh fancy iphone 17s i guess maybe just the pro and the pro max that they're actually doing something uh that's more significant than they have in the past to try to keep these things cool which will be great for casey who's always complaining about the sun making his phone turn up now i want to set your expectations casey like i am excited that they are doing something more than just you know putting some piece of metal to dissipate heat or like a thermal pad or whatever vapor chamber cooling sounds cool it's a yeah it's it's like it's like marco's non-working air conditioning it's like a phase change thing and the phase change pulls heat away from it right um anyway that'll be great but i'm not entirely sure that's going to help with your screen thing i always feel like the the the phone and the sunny thing is because like the screen is essentially a greenhouse it like it gathers the light and then it bounces all inside around inside there and it overheats it's not going to hurt i think it will be better maybe better than it is now but yeah i think you may still you know if it lasts twice as long would you be satisfied no you'd be like oh it still turns off now it turns off after two minutes instead of one minute so i just want you to not get your hopes up too much but anyway i'm excited about the the cooling stuff the other guess was like this has to do with thing we're going to talk about in a second which is like the colors of the phones or maybe the case colors or something but i'm going with thermal imaging which is weird a weird thing to emphasize uh the tagline is awe dropping instead of jaw dropping awe dropping um yeah i guess they could only be talking about the the uh the iphone 17 air the really thin one does it kind of crappy battery life but we'll see uh this as usual this iphone event like every single thing has leaked we'll we'll have maybe more of an event preview next week and our traditional iphone 16 exit interview but for now just be aware september 9th as expected yeah this looks i'm i'm excited like the iphone event is always it's such a hallmark of the entire apple year um i am not excited about the the imminent release of ios 26 as discussed earlier just as a developer i that's going to be a bumpy ride but i am very excited for the new iphones i think the i the rumored iphone air sounds really cool and i don't know if i'm gonna want one probably but i i don't like there's gonna be a lot of trade-offs there so i'm not sure marco did you see the rumor about the bump possible bumper case for the iphone air i did that actually sounds really cool like i mean i i get where that rumor would come from because for people who don't remember antenna gate a bumper case is a case that they still make them for phones but it was it was big with the antenna thing because the iphone 4 had a case that would like go around the sides only but leave the black and the back entirely uncovered that's actually good for heating and cooling and if you have a thin phone that's good to like maintain the feeling of thinness because if you put a case on it suddenly it becomes thicker and it's not as exciting so this would just make the edges thicker but make the whole middle of the phone thin so we'll see if that rumor ends up being true yeah i mean in practice um i never liked the iPhone 4 bumper case.

51:00Of course, I got the free one. Thanks, Steve. But I didn't like it because, like Apple silicone cases, it added a lot of friction going in and out of pockets. I couldn't bear it. It was too annoying. So I just used the phone without a case and eventually had this leather stick on back that I got on it and it was fine. In this case, it would be presumably a lot thinner than that and we have a decade or so of materials advances and so maybe... I think it would still be grippy, though. Like, don't you think it would still be just as grippy? Yeah, it would probably still be silicone. So, you know, probably, but who knows?

51:35But anyway, that sounds fun. I'll tell you, I mean, again, we don't know anything about these phones yet, and I don't want to get too much into it now since we'll know in like a week. We don't know anything about these phones. We know everything about these phones. What do you want to know? Ask me a question. Well, okay, fair. Yeah, I guess there are a lot of leaks for iPhones that almost always prove to be 100 % right. But I guess I think the iPhone Air could be very interesting because I would expect that it's going to be a lot lighter weight. And that'll just feel so good in a pocket. So I don't know.

52:07As you've heard me talk about over the years, I always get excited whenever a new iPhone is actually lighter weight than the outgoing one, which doesn't happen very often. Part of what I liked about the iPhone Mini was that it was so much lighter. well this one's going to be uh it's going to be sized between the max and the pro so it's even bigger than your current phone the length and width wise if not thickness yeah so that's that's why it sounds interesting i want to see what they did here you know the iphone pro i i've been i i buy an iphone pro every time or almost every time and i it's great i know what to expect from it I don't necessarily use all the Pro features, but I like a lot of them.

52:48If the iPhone Air loses too much of the Pro-ness, then I probably wouldn't like it. One of the things I'm curious about is how they decide on 120 hertz on the screen. Right now, only the Pro phones have 120 hertz. Rumor is the Air has ProMotion. I know. See, that's the thing. like so is the are you mainly just giving up battery life and and additional cameras which are not small things by by any means like those are those are big considerations but if that's the main trade-off is like you save a bunch of weight and it feels great in the hand maybe and it doesn't have the pro soc oh yeah well but like i don't think you'll care about that anyway we'll see i think you should get it and try it for the show and then return it if you don't like i would probably keep it i mean it's but like wait wait wait wait wait marco should do what john get it and try it for the show and return it if you don't like it how'd that work out for your vision pro what are you talking about i never i never want you two with two people two of the three bought for the show and didn't liked it enough to keep it or keep it in their prosecution rests your honor well no where are your mac pros oh nobody wants that there's literally nobody that wants only one of us has to buy a mac pro apparently uh-huh uh-huh anyways uh sorry carry on yeah so anyway i think it's going to be really interesting we'll talk more about this once we actually know more about it john but but i think i think it'll be very interesting i like mixing it up sometimes like like when i did use the iphone mini for that one year that i did but that was i really liked the the mini it was really cool in a number of ways and yeah it was limited in many of these same ways it had worse battery life than the bigger phones it didn't have the pro camera system it didn't have you know some of the super pro features but the difference between the pro features and the regular features i think was a little bit smaller than like that was before promotion before the always on screen like do we know does it have always on screen yeah i think so so like so that's that's what i want to see with this is like how how many of the pro features does the air have that's the question uh and that and we we know some of those from the rumors, not all of them.

54:59We'll see. Also, how much better does the Pro camera get? You know, right now I've had, you know, the 16 Pro, yeah, the 16 Pro, you know, been using it for a year. The 5X lens is kind of useful and it does, and the pictures from it are pretty bad. So I, both of those things I kind of knew going in were very likely. Both of those things proved to be correct. if i lose the 5x lens i'm gonna have you know less reach but also those pictures are bad so we'll see uh if they if they make the pro phones a lot better in those areas maybe i would stick with the pro phone and just get whatever the the orange rumored color is because i don't know it looks kind of bronze to me yeah it's hard to tell the colors are hard for the rumors here right and by the way the the latest breaking and i would say kind of shaky not maybe that reliable rumor is that the pro max will have um like a a zoom camera with a moving uh element with the lens element inside it um and i forget what the range was i think it was like 5x to 8x or something like an actual inside the camera a periscope lens where there's an actual optical element that moves from left to right or whatever to change it and that would only be on the pro max but i'm not i'm I'm having a hard time buying that, but we'll see.

56:20That was like two days ago, rumor. Yeah, I think for me, the idea of the iPhone Air sounds really, really good. and I'm going to be so in on it. And then I'm going to see, oh, the camera system is way not as good. And that'll be me noping right out of it. That doesn't even sound good to me. I don't want it. The length and the width are more important. Actually, that's true too. The size of the camera, like looking at it head on is more important to me than the thickness. I do not want to sacrifice the battery life and I want all those cameras. So I have no desire for the air whatsoever. But we'll see how many other people do because it's, you know, as Marco said, But if you're dying for a new phone form factor, we don't get those that often.

56:59Presumably, we're going to get them in the next few years with the foldable phone and the whatever 20th anniversary phone. Like there's going to be lots of new phone form factors. And the Air is just the start of that. So if you're dying to try something new, this is a good year to check it out. But me, first, I'm not even getting a phone this year. But anyway, none of these new form factors appeal to me. I still like the ProPhone. I think also one thing that might so for me like again it isn't about the thinness of the air for me probably I think what I would notice the most about holding it would be the weight but we don't know what's going to happen to the weight of the pro phones either it fluctuates a lot year to year and didn't they say new material shoot what did they say this year aluminum so yeah instead of well it's not titanium anymore they're just using aluminum yeah which is great aluminum's lighter yeah I would imagine the weight on the pros is not going to be that I don't know what the rumors of that are, but I'm just guessing based on the size of the thing that it's probably going to be very similar.

57:54So aluminum cased phones typically are lighter than the titanium ones. Also, aluminum tends to be lighter in this kind of use than glass. The back of the Pro phones is rumored to have less glass and more aluminum than it used to. So there could actually be a decent weight savings. Now, did they just spend that on more stuff in the phone? maybe your battery right like that's probably probably they probably just spent the weight savings from the case materials on guts of the phone which you know for many for many phones or many configurations that probably is the right call like most people who use iphones would love extra battery life so if they can you know shave a few grams off the case weight and then just make a slightly bigger battery that's probably the right move most of the time that was one of the rumors by the way when we were asking like what are they going to do with that giant camera mesa that now spans the full width of the phone.

58:48Like, what are they putting under there? And the answer was that one of the possible answers was, because we don't know what the internet looks like exactly, was that they're able to slide more of the battery up to where they couldn't before, because now the elements that would have been in the way of the battery can basically live in the giant camera mesa. So that would be a good use of that space. Like, what are they wasting all the space for? Other than making it so your phone is slightly less wobbly by having to go all the way across, it'll still be wobbly because it'll end up still poking out on one side and not on the other.

59:13But anyway, one theory is they use that case, use that space in the case to extend the battery further up, which would be great. Again, people love more battery life. I would love more battery life, but more than anything else, I want better thermals. And I know you're right, John. I know you're right that the better thermals will be better, but not enough better. If you think about it, it is a really difficult challenge with the sun beating down on your phone to be able to control that with a phone that's like inside a case in your hand. it's it's difficult but like maybe better screen technology like maybe oled will help with that i'm not sure if that maybe make it worse actually i don't even know how like dealing with the heat of first of all dealing with the light of the direct sun which means that your screen has to be on like maximum brightness which is terrible for heat right and then just dealing with the heat of the sun heating up your phone like if you leave your phone uh strapped to the dashboard of your car and the sun is beating down on it through the windshield of your car like it's it's a difficult challenge but yeah i'm apple doing something this area with the vapor chamber cooling is a great step in the right direction yeah very much so so we've also got some other leaks uh speaking of things that we know nothing about right marco uh we've got some other leaks so this one like the phone rumors are solid we've had the designs down to the millimeter this thing you're about to read is late breaking and people are still expressing some skepticism about so keep that in mind as you Listen to this.

1:00:35All right. So allegedly, they're reading for Mac rumors. Apple is designing new tech-woven cases for the iPhone 17 with photos of some of the alleged case colors shared by leaker Mai Jin Boo. They claim that the cases will include metallic buttons for improved tactile feedback, a camera control button, MagSafe compatibility, and two small holes at the bottom for attaching a crossbody strap or accessories. The cases appear to be for the iPhone 17 Pro models that are rumored to have a horizontal camera bar given the size of the camera cutout. But Boo says the tech-woven cases will be available for all of the iPhone 17 models.

1:01:07It is unclear as of yet if the cases are real, but we will find out in less than a month when Apple unveils new iPhone 17 models. Let me tell you, if these are fakes, they are incredible fakes. They got me if these are fake. Yeah, so this is replacing fine-woven, which was their terrible idea for a leather-free premium case that picked up stains and was not durable. And I look at these cases, what do you think they're made out of from looking at these pictures? Well, I'll tell you, it looks very similar to cases that already exist on the market that have like fat, like one of the things. Like the Peak Design ones?

1:01:41Yeah, exactly. I was going to say like the Peak Design phone cases have a like tech fabric on them that is great. It's sturdy. It looks good. It feels good. It has kind of like a weave. Here, I got my right here. Let me see. I'll pull it up. Yeah, like it looks very similar, honestly. I think the Peak Design one has a finer grain on the weave compared to this. It's like fine woven? It is finer woven. But materials like cloth-based or fabric-based materials that are strong enough to be pretty decent phone cases do exist. And they've been made by other companies for a long time. So I don't doubt that this could exist.

1:02:30The only thing that gives me a little bit of pause on whether I think this is real or not is in the side picture where it shows the buttons. It's a little off center. They're not aligned. They're a little like crooked on like the orange one, the green. The buttons are a little crooked. And I've seen that on cheap cases. I've seen that on Apple cases, though, to be fair. Oh, OK. And presumably these aren't production ones. But yeah, like these do look very plausible as third party cases. they also look vaguely plausible as first party and i say that because we are in a post fine woven world i'm not sure i would have believed that apple i remember we i think we had we talked about the fine woven rumor on the show with the same kind of like uh unsurety about it but not only did they nail it they even got the name so and again this is not the same source of these rumors so i'm not giving them any more credence but i having seen that apple will ship something like fine woven i can't entirely dismiss these out of hand no honestly i think with the with the exception of those crooked buttons i think these look very good and very plausible i don't know you know i don't know if they're real or not but you know a few things jump out of me like number one like the rim that goes around the camera opening that looks exactly like some of the cases apple's made recently um the colors are current fashionable colors in apple's current style.

1:03:53The general design of the case, the shape, how the fabric wraps around it. It isn't like a plastic bumper around with fabric all in the back, like what Peak Design does. It's like the fabric wraps all around, so the corners can wear away for you. That's very Apple-like, too. The Apple logo placement makes sense. It's probably matching the phone. It's tastefully done here. I think these are probably real. And I think if they are real, it looks pretty good. And they might actually be pretty nice. Yeah. I mean, we'll see what happens. But if they've learned from their mistakes, which one would hope Apple has, then this could show some real potential.

1:04:35I forget. I've got to click through to the thing to see. I know they show it in the ones we're about to look at, but do they show the lanyard strap thing in photos here? Well, anyway, the rumor does say that they're supposed to have lanyard strap things in the corner, and so do the next cases we're going to look at here. Right. Actually, no, I didn't click through to Majin Buu's website. Let me do that real quick. No, it doesn't look like it. No, I don't see it. All right, moving on, as John just alluded, there's also liquid silicone, which are the new silicone cases, again, by Majin Buu. Allegedly, the liquid silicone cases have a soft surface velody finish with the potential for two variants, one with a liquid glass effect providing an opaque and satin texture and one without this effect.

1:05:15It includes a rubber lanyard implemented as an integrated feature with the addition of multiple dedicated holes for attachment. So this one does show the little corner, like, you know, two little holes where you'd thread something in and out, and presumably that's connected to something more sturdy than just a piece of silicone because Apple's silicone case is always a shred, so hopefully this has got a more sturdy frame in there. Again, questionable origins on these rumors, but it does look very Apple-ish. This is essentially just a silicone case. I've been interested in this rumor. It's been going around for like a couple weeks now.

1:05:45I'm interested in this rumor because of the word liquid being put into it as you know presumably a tie-in with liquid glass like what is it that makes this silicone liquid silicone how is it not just a silicone case and the text of this uh summary does not give me any more information one with a liquid glass effect providing an opaque and satin texture and one without the effect what like is it see-through like is it partially see-through does it have like swirling is it like hyper color shirts where you like you put your hands on it it changes color like i don't you know i'm i'm interested to see if they're if this brand if assuming these are real do they try to brand the cases to match liquid glass by putting the word liquid in and somehow making the silicone cases liquidier anyway these are all closed in the bottom cases so the only other interesting things about them is the idea of a lanyard strap which um do you remember maybe you don't uh back in the day the ipod touch had the little um circle in the back bottom corner you'd press it in and it would pop up like a little toadstool and you could wrap a little string around there and then put yeah the idea of attaching a string to your phone i think is more plausible now than it has ever been given the massive popularity of pop sockets and other things like that but i'm not entirely sure that that corner is going to hold up like again especially apple silicone cases which are notorious for uh breaking apart on re-entry after a few years and just having pieces of them peel off not sure i want to trust the corner of one of those cases to uh hold my phone but we'll see these are two uh you know setting aside all the things that uh have been massively leaked these case rumors i'm always looking at askance and going it's plausible like margo said it's plausible the pictures look plausible but when it comes to cases uh you never know so in a post-fine world world i can't uh rule anything out also i so you know whether they call it liquid silicone or not I mean, that's kind of a weird name.

1:07:40It is weird. Why would it be liquid? Typically, if you see liquid coming out of any kind of plastic material, that's a very bad sign and you should throw it away. You don't want it to be like wet. Right, exactly. But, you know, sure. Apple has funny names for things sometimes. What's interesting is that if this, you know, however it is worded, maybe in a weird way through some translation um it sounds like they they have maybe a new surface texture or a new surface finish maybe the silicone maybe these new silicone cases are less pocket grippy yeah yeah let's see hope springs eternal i don't think but okay okay i mean look it's a stretch i know but they're saying it has like a new finish a new texture maybe that's it because that that has always been the biggest downside of the silicone like the silicone cases are great in many other ways but that that grippiness going in and out of pockets has always held them back from a lot of people um so look this could be great also i think if the rumored or if the you know the pictures that accompany this rumor are accurate i think these colors look great yeah i hope this is real you know i am typically caseless these days but the apple silicone cases if they don't have that you know the major pocket friction problem are otherwise great so i'm kind of crossing my fingers on this one yeah silicon cases have usually come in pretty good colors the phones don't but the silicon cases usually have one or two really good colors the difficulty with like the grippiness factor is obviously when it's in your hand you want it to be grippy when you're sliding into your pocket you want it to not be grippy it's hard to find that correct middle ground if you go too slippery i feel like it's the case will get dinged more in the court of public opinion than if you go too grippy, right?

1:09:24So I think that's why they keep leaning in that direction. I just wish they could make those cases not fall apart. But anyway, I don't buy them because, not because I don't like the feel. Like, I actually do enjoy silicon feel like leather better, but silicon I don't mind. But they're all closed in the bottom, so I can't, they're not to my preference. I will say that the fine woven case, or sorry, tack woven cases, the colors are good, but they're very, very muted. Whereas, as you guys have said, the silicon cases, I think, are just genuinely good colors. So we'll see what happens. but I don't know.

1:09:52I don't know what I'm going to do this year. Since I've gone through like 94 screen protectors, I don't know if having a case would potentially improve that. I think you should have a case. People have been sending, by the way, saying, hey, those screen protectors are not meant to be hit from like the edge. So they're meant to be used with a case and that would save you from shattering them. So maybe you should try that. Yeah, but I don't want a case. Like I know I should have one. How about you just don't want a screen protector then and just deal with the scratches on your screen that you're going to inevitably put there?

1:10:22Maybe. All right. With regard to the iPhone 17, or no, excuse me, 18. Is that right, actually? Yeah, I guess it is right. I didn't realize we were talking about 18. The iPhone 17 is old news, Casey. My bad. Yeah, because we know everything there is to know, right, John? Exactly. All right. So with regard to the 18, reading from Mac rumors, an established Chinese leaker has pushed back against recent rumors suggesting that Apple plans to eliminate the camera control button from the iPhone 18. Instead, claiming the company is working to simplify the component to reduce costs. According to Weibo leaker Instant Digital, the camera controls pressure-sensitive modules for the iPhone 18 series currently remain in trial production.

1:10:56However, Apple is reportedly removing the capacitive sensor from the current dual-sensor design and opting instead to rely solely on pressure sensing to achieve all-button functions. Instant Digital says Apple's revised approach is similar to designs found in devices like the Oppo X8 Ultra and Vivo X200 Ultra, where pressure sensors alone can recognize light taps, firm presses, and sliding gestures. The leaker suggests cost concerns are driving the change, noting that the current solution is genuinely very expensive for Apple and is generating costly after-sales repairs. Yeah, so I mean, this rumor is a rumor by extension of saying camera control essentially unchanged in the 17s, but in the 18s, things might be looking to cheap out.

1:11:35I guess, well, this probably would have been better for next week for our exit interview for the 16. I'm not sure we'll all have more to say about the camera control, but it's interesting to know that they are thinking about cutting costs there. while still putting it on the 16s and apparently the 17s. And they still want it on the 18s, just if it could be a little bit cheaper, please. Well, and I mean, that is one way to look at it, you know, the kind of, you know, cynical, like, you know, expense angle. But the way I would look at it is the camera control is way too complicated. Like, the moment it was released, we all said, this is way too complicated and fiddly.

1:12:07And, like, it is kind of remarkable that it shipped the way it did when that seemed to be pretty common feedback. and it's shipping again on the 17s well yeah because they you know they don't change things that quickly with the iphone but you know if if they took the feedback last fall to say hmm people are people don't really need all this complexity and what really serves most of the value here is just making it a button what it sounds like they're doing is basically making it a button but it's still with all the same functionality the rumor is it will still do all the things it just they can eliminate one kind of sensor they use that pressure sensor and capacitive they said we think we can keep all the same functionality but just have pressure sensitive and not have capacitive i mean but what aren't there like don't you like press a little bit and like swipe back and forth i don't know maybe that's that's exactly what that's a rumor but the rumor claims that they can maintain all the same functionality with just pressure sensors because and they're they give comparisons to these phones that are not familiar with the oppo x8 ultra and the vivo x200 ultra that do similar things but maybe you know maybe not so they say they support sliding gestures with just pressure so i again i don't see how that could be possible especially when you have a case over it where like the current cases like the one i have now is like sort of capacitive conductance you know what i mean like it knows when i'm touching it because i'm touching the case and the case is touching the button or whatever but you know it's a rumor so we'll see how this turns out this iphone 18 not this year next year we are sponsored this episode by delete me delete me makes it easy quick and safe to remove your personal data from hundreds of data brokers online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable.

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1:15:31Okay, let's do some Ask ATP, especially since we may or may not have time for it next week. Phil Hurst writes, what are the key differences between snapshots and backups? Can you rely on snapshots as backups or for retaining versions and recovery of files, but obviously not as a backup against drive failure as it's usually on the same drive? Follow-up, do snapshots change following the application of hyperspace to a disk? So snapshot is definitely not a backup. It is just sort of a retaining of a past state of your drive on your drive. And even if macOS offers a way to manually create snapshots and then make sure that those snapshots are never deleted, which I'm not sure whether it does or not.

1:16:09But even if it did, I would not trust that as a backup because, as Phil noted, backups are for when you have a problem where you lose all your data, you can get it back. And one of those problems might be the failure of the volume that your data is on. Snapshots are on the same volume. So it is, you know, don't make backups on the same. putting them on the same drive mechanism is bad putting on the same volume on the same drive mechanism is also bad so yeah not an ideal strategy um that said i think in most normal people's encountering of snapshots they were all temporary and maybe purged by the system at any time so it's even less of a backup if you're not finding a way to manually create and preserve them forever and then finally you wouldn't want to manually create and preserve them for any period of time of backups because you're just hogging space on your main drive you know essentially it's like having your backups on your drive now it's not the same thing as doing a complete backup because obviously all the parts that are in common you'd only pay for once uh but anyway yeah don't don't use snapshots as a backup snapshots are important to making backups for example time machine takes a snapshot and then backs up that snapshot so it has a internally consistent point in time snapshot of the whole disk instead of having to start copying and then by the time it gets to the end of the copy the disk is changed right so they're good and they're a good important part of time machine but they're not the same thing as backups um and as for uh do snapshots change following the application of hyperspace uh they have nothing to do with each other um anything you do to your disk whether it's using hyperspace to save play uh space which is my uh app for saving space on your drive without having to delete any files it's pretty cool um or if you're just doing work i'm making some files i'm moving the files around i'm renaming things i'm deleting things anything you do your disk that's also not changing any of your snapshots snapshots are frozen in a point in time but later when there is a snapshot that snapshot will look different than it would have had you not made those changes that's true of any changes running hyperspace writing files reading files deleting files anything anything you did to your disk when you take a future snapshot will reflect the current state of your disk and yes hyperspace does change the current state of your disk so there you go all right good deal did we get through that entire thing without you saying file system once yes we did wow can you say it for me no my voice is my passport i can't believe i didn't say it either but you know there you go you know what i've always loved to hear you say file and passport yeah exactly hooray all right uh dan writes why does the modern finder take a thousand years to move copy or delete batches of thousands of files didn't used to be this way i've had an empty trash finder progress window open for about 20 minutes to delete several terabytes of local data and it's only up to 748 out of thousands of files.

1:18:49Even moving files to a different directory takes so long these days that I often skip to the command line to speed things up. I'm afraid to delete so much data at the command line though on modern macOS because it might complicate its known inability to tell how much free space is available. What do you do, John? So first thing I'm going to say to Dan is do not worry about doing it from the command line. It will not complicate macOS's ability to know how much free space is available. It won't make it any better, but it also won't make it any worse. So do not be afraid of doing stuff from the command line other than just you know fat fingering it and screwing yourself up yeah either way it has no idea how much free space you have yeah like it's not helping it's not hurting it is what it is and it's as we've discussed on past shows it's not like this is some kind of bug or there's some easy solution that apple needs implement it's just complicated it's just because of snapshots and all those stuff it's just complicated to express the actual state of things to people in a way that makes sense it was much simpler where the disc was just like you know you have x amount of space and y amount of stuff and you could add and subtract and it all made sense that's not the world we live in this world is better in most ways but in that one way it is more difficult to know how much free space you have so oh well anyway um i put this item in here i think this came in today which is a rarity because most of these things and ask you to be here for months or weeks or whatever um because i just encountered this problem today and when i saw what i i thought i didn't quite understand what was going on um i'm like yeah it's probably just me who knows whatever but then dan wrote it and i'm like no i'm gonna have to file this one because i feel like this might be well i should test it in tahoe first honestly this might be another like too many windows type thing so what dan is talking about and i think everyone here has noticed especially like developers oh yeah the new xcode beta came out so you throw out the old xcode beta and put in the new one and then you go to empty trash and it's like emptying trash and it starts counting up files thousand two thousand three thousand ten thousand it's like preparing to empty trash by there's a lot of files in these trash because of course the xcode beta.app is filled with just thousands and thousands of files so it counts up it counts up it counts up then it goes okay now i'm deleting them you can see this progress bar and it's like moving along real slow like the full progress bar is like 90 000 files or something and it's like 100 150 157 you're like oh my god why is this taking so long which is why it's been my habit to you know uh command backspace the old xcode into the trash and then go to the terminal and do rm minus rf very carefully on the you know tilde slash dot trash directory xcode dot app and it deletes it so much faster rm deletes the trash so much faster than anything trash does it's not even funny i've been doing this for years but fine whatever that's a known issue today what i was doing was refreshing my um folder full of favorite images that i use for this apple screensaver i apple screensaver apple's photo screensaver has the ability to say hey we'll show like an album the photos from your photos library in one of our like floating photos screensavers things i'm like great could you use my favorites collection in photos and it says ha ha ha you have too many photos i give up so i'm like okay because it just it can't handle i have 200 000 photos which i and i have maybe 20 000 favorites and it just doesn't work so what i do is i export from apple photos apps like not full size but the quote-unquote large size like used to be jpeg but now he compressed images into a folder just a plain folder on my disk called favorites it's in user shared photos favorites and i export all 20 000 photos at a slightly smaller size because they're just going to be shown on the screensaver and the little floating image thing they're going to be shrunk anyway and then i point the photo screensaver at that folder and i say forget about the photo library.

1:22:23You can't handle it. It's too much for you. Just use the photos that are in that folder. But what it means is periodically I have to go and say, okay, last time I exported my favorites, it was this such and such a date. Now I need to select all the favorites from that date on and export those and add them to the folder. So I was doing that today. I exported 1 ,900 new favorites for the folder and I exported them into a folder on my desktop. It took a while for photos, but it's got, you know, it's compressing a bunch of raws into Heek or whatever, like fine. It fills the folder with 1 ,900 new photos.

1:22:55There are about a few hundred K each compressed, right? And then I'm like, okay, I got to copy this over to my wife's computer because I have the same setup over there. And so I mount her thing on the desktop and I drag the folder over there and it's like copying, you know, 1 ,900 files. And it was going so slow. It was like one, two i'm like how many how many hours is 1900 seconds because he seemed like they're going about one in a second like it was like what is going on here what could it possibly be doing i it was still saying estimating time remaining it never gave me a count but i feel like it would have been way too long and i left the room like i'll probably be done by the time i go and do something i came back in and it had progressed like nine percent of the way through the progress where i'm like oh f this i hit the little x thing and waited it takes forever to stop too yeah and it said rsync like three seconds it was like three seconds which was like i i thought i had typed the command wrong because i just like rsync blah blah blah return it was like return oh it's on an empty line up there's my prompt again i'm like wait maybe i typed it wrong nope it copied them all it was only like a gig of data it was so fast so i think there's something terribly terribly wrong with the finder when it comes to multi-file operations some things like duplicating huge files are instant because of the magic of uh space saving clones and apfs thank you but like what is the finder doing it has always been slow and pre-flying but i have never seen this kind of slowness this is the kind of slowness that like makes me give up and not do it like the speed comparison of emptying the trash with xcode in it versus rm minus rfing the trash with xcode in it that's always been pretty extreme but both of them get done eventually but copying less than 2 000 files from one mac to another in the same room in the house connected by gigabit ethernet should never take this long as evidenced by me doing rsync and no it wasn't doing an rsync where it was like oh you maybe you already had all the files there so it didn't have to copy no it was rsyncing them into a new empty folder on her desktop okay it copied all those files nearly instantly from the command line and i think it was going to take like 30 minutes to an hour by my estimates i have no idea what it was doing uh dan thank you for putting this bee in my butt.

1:25:08If this still happens in Tahoe, I'm going to have to file another one of my you've broken Mac OS by not accounting for people who have lots of stuff. Wow, that was a journey I was not expecting. I wasn't expecting until today either. Sam Hunt writes, how do you think the rise of AI will affect Apple's 2030 goal to make all Apple products carbon neutral? It seems to me that AI will use a lot more power over the lifetime of an Apple device, especially with many tasks being on device. You know, this is a great point. And maybe there's an obvious answer to this that I'm not seeing. But I will say that one of the advantages of Apple being so all in on Apple Silicon is that it is considerably more efficient than most of its peers, like power efficient.

1:25:47And that means it's sometimes in some ways slower, but it's also the power use is comparatively quite a bit less. And that is working in their favor. But I don't have a good answer for this. And maybe they just say, oopsie doopsies, we're not going to be carbon neutral after all. Or maybe they'll just buy a million of those offsets which i think we've all decided are kind of bs is that right yeah i mean they're not bs but they're like they're there's there's qualities of carbon offsets of how much how much bs are they legitimate are they totally bs are they some very in between but yeah like i just i don't think they're going to give up on the 2030 goal they seem pretty committed to it ai is not going to help let's put it that way it's absolutely it's going to make their life a lot harder i think when they came up with this 2030 plan they didn't expect ai to be what it is now remember they're running stuff server side with their private cloud compute i don't know if they're accounting for that as part of their stuff but as you noted casey they're also running lots of stuff on device and that's using more of people's energy as well maybe if they just put bigger batteries in i don't like i i think it's got to hurt them and i haven't heard them address it directly but it seems like this 2030 thing is just like it's really important to the company and they're just going to make it happen no matter what including as you noted casey perhaps buying even more slightly more shady carbon offsets to claim victory and there's a story maybe we'll get to in some future episode about uh i think it's germany saying that apple can't call its devices carbon neutral anymore for reasons that are not yet specified but the carbon neutrality is difficult to measure and ai is not helping and on the topic of ai and being um and you've been using a lot of energy there's lots of stuff going around about you know how much energy uses how much like water it uses what the environmental impact of all these things so on and so forth the reason i am much more chill about this than i am about bitcoin which i think you know is a complete waste of energy and resources is that despite ai using tons of resources it does do some useful things and i tried to choose those words carefully like I think Bitcoin does pretty much no useful things except for crime.

1:28:00But again, I don't think that's something that people should be. Oh, man, we're going to get so much email. You're not wrong, but we're going to get so much email. How about email us on the blockchain? Yeah, email us on the blockchain. Yeah, we'll definitely see it. Yeah, exactly. AI does some useful things. And so we expend energy all the time on things that we find useful. Heating and cooling our homes. all of the data centers that make up the quote-unquote cloud when we use websites where are those websites they're running somewhere in a data center that requires cooling and water and so on and so forth and yes i get the argument like hey well but ai uses two orders of magnitude more energy per unit time spent by a human but if it does something useful historically we as humans have said if we're if we're getting use out of something if there is utility in it we will continue to refine it and enhance it and we will it is essentially worth the energy now it would be great if we could have in general better ways to make energy with less carbon pollution more renewable energy more solar so on and so forth like fusion energy someday when we're all dead right like we're always doing that but like what i want to see is the the energy use the ways we're finding to generate energy should be put towards things that are useful to humanity and obviously this ai stuff people argue it's not useful enough to be worth the cost but i think there's enough useful things in it that we should find a way to expand our energy budget to encompass that in the same way that we have expanded our energy budget to encompass the massive amount of data centers that did not exist before the dawning of the internet and popular culture that do exist now and take huge amounts of energy because we all find the utility of the internet is worth it um and while we're spending energy there one would hope that we're taking energy away from other areas like you know electric cars or led light bulbs or more solar and like it was a couple of news stories last summer was like on certain days during the summer the entirety of california was powered by like renewable energy or if you look at the explosion of solar in china right those you know we're talking about before using like spending the weight gains on giving more battery we should be making gains in energy generation everywhere despite our current government trying to stop that as hard as they possibly can because it's filled with idiots um and we should be spending those gains on new useful things that we otherwise would not be able to do because we use energy now none of this helps apple with the 2030 goals to be clear because their whole thing is carbon neutral within the realm of one device they're not looking at the whole globe so they've got their work cut out for them but my stance on ai and energy use is if it's doing useful things for us, we should find a way to power it.

1:30:44If it's not doing anything useful except for allowing people to commit crimes, then maybe we should not allow it. Yeah, I think also, you know, AI is a new way for devices to use a bunch of processing power to try to be smart for us. This is not the first way we've done this. It's just the most recent and maybe most intensive. but even before these new AI tools that Apple's building into their software to run locally even before all that we were using ML, we were using machine learning we were using other forms of heavy computation to analyze stuff on your phone to do things for you to try to be smart don't forget the GUI, when the GUI was introduced you're using all your computing power to show pretty pictures what a waste, and again it wasn't at the same scale as AI I get that.

1:31:37It's a significant difference in scale. I totally get that. But the GUI was slammed for exactly the same. And it's true. How much of the computing power on the original Macintosh is dedicated to the GUI versus, quote unquote, doing actual stuff? It's like 90 % power in the GUI. We got several of these emails, too, about liquid glass, which on the one side, I'm like, come on. But on the other side, well... Doesn't help. Yeah, when you're talking about something on the scale of the iPhone, everything matters. You're talking about try to offset the energy use or try to provide it via renewable means for billions of devices out there.

1:32:12I was like, yeah, that's going to be hard. That's not a small problem. And every little bit helps. Even something like using plug-in wire charging instead of wireless charging because it's more efficient. That can help a ton too. There's all sorts of things like that that can help. You know, having having every new iPhone, despite being migrated over from an old iPhone, reset the screen dimming behavior. So it dims like four seconds after you stop touching it every single time you change phones. Like that's not an accident. Apple does that because it helps them in various ways. It probably helps their, you know, their green initiative.

1:32:50It definitely helps the perception of the battery life of their phones. So it helps them in lots of ways. And I guarantee you that's why that's always been the case. Everything matters, but where AI is starting from is not the phone was sitting around doing nothing. They've already accounted for the phone having background processing for things like photo indexing and deciding when to run certain tasks and analyzing the power use. There's already been lots of those background tasks on phones. So I don't think having AI used, honestly, reasonably sparingly for not that many features, I don't think that's going to be massively different from any other new feature, new application they've added to the phones over time.

1:33:36It might be. I could be wrong. But again, they're not coming from nothing here. So it's not like they all of a sudden have to offset everything. I think you're right about on device. like the like the easy way to think about this on devices like the batteries in our phone are not getting astronomically larger so it's pretty clear that the uh additional battery drain from apple intelligence stuff is not that big because if it was our battery life would be destroyed because the the the uh battery size increase that came along with the advantage of apple intelligence was not significant and yet we're all using our phones with apple intelligence on it and it's not that bad it could get worse in the future but like they're going to be limited by how much energy can you put in a battery on a phone and until there's some kind of breakthrough there's not going to be this huge difference now the server side is where there's the biggest problem this is what most people complaining about to be fair because in a data center you want higher utilization like you you don't want things sitting idle if you have some server that's running ai stuff in the data center in general you want that hardware to be optimally utilized as in whatever whatever like 80 usage or whatever you think is the sweet spot between like heat generation and whatever.

1:34:42You don't want it to be idle, okay? And it is true that doing anything in AI can take orders of magnitude more power than doing the same thing non-AI. So, for example, doing a Google search in the pre-AI days versus doing anything with ChatGPT. Both things may respond to you within a second, right? But you spent 10, 100, 1 ,000 times more energy doing the ChatGPT answer than you did doing the Google query. And it's if that you spread that across an entire data center that used to be doing simple, you know, simple queries doing like something for iCloud drive or something that doesn't, it doesn't require a lot of computation.

1:35:21And you have an equally sized data center that is now doing AI stuff at orders of magnitude, more energy. That's where you start to see all these horror stories about like, look how much more energy is using or whatever, but, but that it like, it's concentrated in one place on device is not going to be like that again, unless we have some kind of breakthrough in battery power, because it just can't be, You can't use 10, 100 or a thousand times more energy from your phone. The battery will last, you know, an hour and the phone will not be satisfactory. So I wouldn't worry about on device in terms of like we're destroying the environment.

1:35:53Although see Marco's thing of like, yeah, but every little bit multiplied by a billion does add up. But it is a problem for Apple for the 2030 goals. But I don't think it's a problem for humanity. The data centers may be a problem for humanity. but again see previous week where we were talking about chat dpd5 and open ai suddenly getting kind of interested in being able to do inference uh more cost effectively because all that energy costs money you know and so this i feel like we're we're burning a lot of energy on the early days of ai and hopefully we will get better at this we will get better at doing ai at about the same speed as we use more and more energy with ai so you know i i'm pretty optimistic about the energy use impact of AI as provided we continue on our current accelerating path towards less carbon generation from creating electricity, which again, our country is fighting against because we're bad, but the rest of the world is marching forward.

1:36:46And hopefully we won't be bad forever. Yes. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Delete Me and Sentry. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of ATP membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about a rumored five-year roadmap for Apple's Vision and smart glasses products. So this could be really interesting. You can hear that and more by joining atp.fm slash join. Thank you, everybody. We'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin.

1:37:29Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them. At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-G 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 I don't think I political in the after show, but just before we came on the air, I saw Jeff Atwood post that he had sold one of those new electric mail trucks.

1:38:35What did he say? But he said, a friend sent me this photo from a walk, and it's a nice reminder of progress showing one of the incredibly ugly but still electric new mail trucks. I didn't want to be that guy, but sometimes it's my turn to be that guy. So I had to reply to him with a link to a story from August 17th that says the current administration is trying to make a U-turn on the federal commitment to electric vehicles for the Postal Service because electricity is bad and we should not have electric vehicles and we should go back to diesel or whatever the hell. So there is nothing that is good in this world that our current government will not try to put a stop to and reverse.

1:39:11Sorry for that pessimism, but it really is just it's difficult. It's difficult over here. It's not just liquid glass. Yeah. We're in a bad place, and it's getting worse, and it's going to take a lot of time and a lot to clean up. But I do think we will eventually clean it up. It's hard to see a way out right now. And that's the thing. The Democrats are just – as far as I can tell, they're just sitting there. They'll die too, eventually. Well, in all fairness, that's what the Democrats do best is they just sit there. They're great at that. Believe me, I'm not a huge fan of the Democrats in absolute terms.

1:39:50They're just, you know, the only functioning governing party we have. There are some good ones out there. They're just not in charge. So, you know. Right, exactly. Hopefully, there'll be some kind of turnover and eventually things will get better. But it just boggles my mind. This is all kind of centralized around, well, on my vacation, I got to see the big wind turbine blades. I've taken pictures of them a few years running now. Now they're all set up in like new London and being taken out to the water to be set up. And those wind turbine farms were also stopped by the government because electricity through wind is bad.

1:40:24Kills the whales or something. I don't know. Anyway, it's just like we can't. It's just so frustrating to see things that were like put in motion, paid for, nearly completed. And someone comes out and says, no, we don't want electric cars. We don't want electric mail trucks. We don't want wind turbines. we don't want any of that we need to go back to coal and it's just like oh my god what what and then i have to update the liquid glass too on top of it i didn't give by the way to get this back on tech top because i didn't give my liquid glass thing because you guys were going on for a while at the beginning but like us my yeah my um my plan was always for uh for tahoe as i just have mac house my plan was always not to change any of my uis like you guys were planning on doing like not to liquid glassify them to use the new controls or whatever but to simply make my existing apps look and work more or less how they do now with liquid glass i wasn't going to use the like the ui fallback whatever that is like ui compatibility blah blah i was going to compile the new sdk i was going to use any new apis that are available add features as appropriate like added the new glass material to switch glass because you know it's liquid glass makes sense right but i wasn't going to like oh now i'm going to add a toolbar i'm going to use the search i'm not going to do any of that and just doing that doing essentially no ui changes just make it work with liquid glass i feel like i'm barely going to make it by the skin of my teeth and my apps are simple and so casey's like yeah last week i looked into changing call sheet i'm like what that's that you started so late no i did way too late i started the day after wwdc banging my head against these five dinky apps and every beta that comes out like marco said every beta that comes out i go back through my screens like well they broke this oh here this is broken a new way i've never seen that before what the hell is this i don't even have time to file the bugs anymore like they're breaking things in ways that i i can't even understand how they're breaking they're breaking things in ways that are making me go back to my my my sequoia versions like the versions that are on the app store and say was this always broken like no it works fine in sequoia and it's 100 broken and top like code that i did not change that has not changed in any way that used to work and now doesn't anymore and they're like i don't even know how to file this as a feedback request it's just it's exhausting and i'm doing nothing i'm doing absolutely nothing like i just it should just be like it looks the same as it always did right that should have been no work for you it's like no i've been working on it every single day since wwdc so i feel for you guys but like yeah this i think this is gonna be a it's making me fearful of upgrading my my other devices to like because i'll have to deal with everyone else's app and like like you guys said it's not it's not their fault it's not the developer's fault that these apps don't work apple's just breaking stuff and regardless of the whole like oh well they usually only have eight betas and that's probably the last one like that's not what we should be worried about we should worry about the calendar the event is on september 9th like there's a deadline like there's they're gonna ship these phones then yeah the pizza box things updates the os either way like whatever os is ready to go on the little pizza box things in the apple stores and like september 15th like that's what we're getting yeah i mean this is like you know you say like you're out of time to to file bugs it wouldn't matter it's too late like whatever no it's it's too late but like i've having things that are breaking that are like i need this to be fixed within the next year please otherwise like people are like hey why is your app broken i'm like taho broke it i don't know i don't know why it doesn't work it's the same damn code i can't fix it yeah like any at this point like any significant bug that you still see will be lucky if it's fixed in 26.1 it might even be like 26.2 26.3 i don't be lucky if these are fixed two years from now like it's a type of thing like some bugs that are like fought with and like you know like like graphical glitches like you're talking about graphical glitches it's even more some echoes because i have like an app kit window that has a ns hosting view inside it with a swift ui view and like the way wind like literal windows on mac os interact with the views that have swift ui views inside them when those things resize and how they like the timing between the app kit window resizing versus the swift ui thing resizing being slightly off and stuff and that behavior is 100 change and it's changed in a way that i can't get it to look right in tahoe period no matter what i do but it works fine using my existing code on the old os and it's like i don't even know how to file that like that's never going to be fixed my app is just going to be janky from now on until apple does something to magically fix it i did file a bunch of bugs on this years ago and they never got fixed and i just found workarounds i guess i'll just have to try to find workarounds in tahoe but like i spent i spent the past week trying to find workarounds for like window resizing view resizing jank in tahoe and i could not find a way to make it not janky so guess what it's going to be janky in tahoe not great yeah it's we're we're in for a rough fall and and you know and you're right like on the mac your odds of getting bugs fixed are are much lower and take much longer timelines you know we're lucky here in ios land me and casey like we're lucky that like ios bugs do tend to get fixed significantly faster yeah because there'll be some important app like you know like netflix or facebook or i don't know some app that apple cares about will have the bug and they'll fix it but that's why i'm saying my timelines are years like will this be fixed in the in the next two major releases if and with with mac bugs it's years if ever like many mac bugs are just never fixed and we just have to deal with it yeah or they just become irrelevant because like the thing that you had the bug in goes away like so much stuff in mac os went away like there are things like there are constants and appearances and settings that just simply do nothing now because liquid glass has no concept of that thing and so you could just change these attributes and it's like no it doesn't change anything about it because that whole thing's gone and that's happened for years like you remember all the brush metal stuff all that stuff's still in mac os and you can set it but you're never going to see brush metal obviously right and so if you had any bugs about the brush metal appearance, they're all fixed because those attributes do nothing now.

1:46:21Gracious. It's not fun out there, y 'all. It's not fun out there. But you know what? In a couple of weeks, we're going to be able to be distracted by consumerism, which I know is not great, but I feel like all three of us need a little distraction in that regard. I bet you do too. Yeah, the AirPods, put it this way, the AirPods Pro 3, which I know you're looking forward to, there's no visible UI on them.

1:46:44So they'll either work or they won't, but you won't have to look at any screenshots and no one will have to write software that morphs some button into some other thing or whatever yeah the airpods are still delightful they're still an amazing product i can't wait to see what what the threes bring because the twos have been so great for me i'm i'm very much looking forward to the year and we didn't even mention too like you know there's also most likely new apple watches coming out we don't know what that's going to be yeah apple watch ultra 3 although i think that's a good look just like the two but still yeah probably but uh but still like you know there's a lot to look forward to for consumerism.

1:47:16And yeah, it is consumerism. But you know what? In the world we live in right now, especially as Americans, we could use some distracting, fun, fluffy stuff. We could really use it. So I know it's not the best thing in the world to buy phones that you don't need. But you know what? Look, look around our country. We can have a drink, which is not super healthy, or we can buy a new iPhone. Whatever we need to cope at this point, do what you got to do. Just give your old phones to your kids. Try to keep that e-waste out of there. Pass it on to someone who can't afford to get a new phone and will still be doing a net good, sort of.