659: Lose the Ear Lottery

32:40The same Nick from above writes, I've been doing all manner of iPhone migrations and restores many hundreds, if not thousands of times at AppleCare over the last 13 years. And I have strong opinions about which backup and transfer methods work best for whom. Finder or iTunes backups still offer the most unique benefits over other methods, including you can have an unlimited number of full local backups, hard drive space permitting, and they stay in your computer forever until you choose to delete them. Not so for iCloud. You typically get two, sometimes three, iCloud backup dates to choose from, and then you wait too long to restore, and if you wait too long to restore, excuse me, those dates will change.

33:12Combine this worry with your trade-in deadline, and it can feel very stressful. Local backups are included in your time machine backup. Restoring from a Finder or iTunes backup allows you to front load the most time-consuming process and walk away. Also, Finder and iTunes errors give you far more information about what went wrong compared to the other methods, and there are more troubleshooting remedies when a backup or restore fails. For pro iPhones on a Mac, it's the second-fastest migration, assuming you make the Finder iTunes backup before you get the new phone. In summary, and I think Nick had said many other things, but in summary, iCloud is the choice Apple clearly wants most people to use.

33:46It's the practical choice for almost everyone. The best choice for the impatient and or phone addicts the least complete restore method. I feel attacked. The least complete restore method. Encrypted Finder backups and iClude backup in sync is the best choice for nervous or reluctant upgraders, the best choice for anyone doing a trade-in, and the most complete backups tied with device-to-device. And finally, speaking of device-to-device, it's the best choice for rural customers with slow internet and no computer, or apparently if you're in a car, maybe, possibly, the most complete backups, which is tied with encrypted Finder backups, and the worst choice for transferring from very old phones.

34:21My experience is that these devices are not performant or stable enough to go through a multi-hour device to device transfer without failing over and over. With regard to Apple's onboarding, Impthaz writes, I loved the conversation about how many questions and hoops one had to go through to set up new iPhones. Even the AirPods Pros have this problem. Back in 2017, when I first got AirPods, it was magical. Just open the case next to your phone, I was good to go. Even when I set up the AirPods Pro 2 a few years ago, it was relatively easy. But now it was, do you want conversational awareness? Do you want personalized audio?

34:50Do you want to test your fit? Do you want to take a hearing test? Et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, it is getting worse on all products, but I think in the case of AirPods, part of it that is that the original AirPods didn't have a lot of features, and now they do. And that's the time when you would expect someone to show you those features. They didn't have noise canceling. Do you want it to be on, off, or whatever? They didn't have it. And again, having a sort of a wizard type thing where it walks you through these steps instead of just saying, just let me use the AirPods. there probably should be a button for that the phone should probably know if you've had this kind of airpods before if you use this feature before like i said last week don't show me about noise canceling if this is my fourth pair of noise canceling airpods i don't need to see that but i do think that you're never going to go back to you just open it up and and immediately start going because there's just so many more features on airpods than they used to be and the number of features in airpods is going up and not down now it does get ridiculous when it's like you know okay, well, you got to pick which things you want to show in there.

35:48What are the most important features to show the new user of AirPods, assuming they've never owned AirPods before? Because eventually it's like, do you want to test your heart rate monitor? Do you want to test the live translation? It's like, okay, all right. It does a lot of things. Let's just maybe pick three. We were sponsored this episode by Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and and thinks with you, not for you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter.

36:23AI can be so helpful with modern problems and work and everything, and Claude covers all your bases. They have internal and external research capabilities that go way deeper than basic web search. Think comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations so you can turn hours of research before into just minutes with Claude. and they can find connections across sources that you never would have spotted yourself. Claude, of course, can connect to all the tools in your workflow. GitHub, Jira, HubSpot, Notion, Google Workspace, and so much more. So Claude becomes your command center with context from all of your works.

36:58Things like calendars, emails, and of course all of your tools for development and work. It's really amazing. It's like having a central brain for all of your work so you don't have to keep digging through multiple tools and documents. And Claude Code isn't just another coding assistant. It's the frontier of agentic coding, combining the latest generation of Claude models with tools optimized specifically for Claude. It can even do things like project-wide refactors while preserving your style and showing its work. So you are maintaining full control of the agent. Claude, really, they want to work with you, not for you.

37:33So if you're ready to tackle bigger problems, sign up for Claude today and get 50 % off Claude Pro. when you use our link, claude.ai slash ATP. That's claude.ai slash ATP right now for 50 % off your first three months of Claude Pro. That includes access to all the features mentioned in this script, claude.ai slash ATP. Thank you so much to Claude for sponsoring our show.

38:01Thought to text and alter ego. This is, was this Overtime last week, I believe? Yeah. this was the thing where you can strap some device to your cheek and it will read the muscle movements in your mouth in order to figure out what you're trying to say doesn't go on your cheek i thought it was on your cheek no no all right shockingly your memory is not out here well all right side of your head somewhere it doesn't really matter yeah remember like the guy had it he was sitting in the little lounge chair he got the thing like on his like uh like his temples kind of by his ears no okay well i'm also in my defense of being thrown off by this older image which i know is an older image of a much larger thing that's from april 2018 says right there in the notes you know i'm doing the best i can here john not all of us are perfect like you uh all right tell me what firefox the movie from the year of my birth is that's i i threw that out there during the overtime segment knowing full well none of you would get it i meant to clarify what it was just people don't think i was having a stroke or something but i said think russian uh when we were discussing uh thought controlling things with thought the 1982 movie firefox starring clint eastwood is a movie that was on tv a lot uh that i watched when i was a kid about a russian spy plane that actually looked pretty cool like a big you know it's kind of like a cross between the like the the the valkyrie if you know what that is from u.s military and kind of like an sr-71 anyway um like a black spy plane made by the russians and clint eastwood uh goes to steal it but when he steals it the plane is controlled by thought but to steal the plane he's got to think in russian oh my god oh my and i was thinking that like we're really catching up to these 1982 sci-fi movies because you know if you had like a thought to uh text type interface for doing something or whatever and it was in russian you'd have to think you'd have to think words in russian uh anyway that's what the reference was think russian i feel better knowing that piece of information i don't watch that movie you know if we keep doing member specials eventually i'll make you watch terrible 80s movies with me at some point but my recollection is that it was not a good movie but when you're a little kid and they have Clint Eastwood flying a spy plane controlled by thought.

40:07It was cool. I mean, conceptually, that makes sense, but that does not sound fun to me. This is a point of contention with a dear local friend of mine who is in love with all 80s movies. There was some military one you brought up like two or three months ago. Yes! Or a teenager gets to fly an F-16. Again, these are really appealing movies when you're seven or eight years old. Right? Well, and I brought this up with my local friend, Brad, and he was like, oh, yeah, I love that movie. And I told him, he actually listens to the show, so now he's potentially embarrassed or delighted. Who knows? Anyways, but I talked to him about this, and he was like, oh, yeah, it was great.

40:36And I was like, man, it did not look good to me. Great for kids. Well, in his defense, I think that was roughly what he said. But nevertheless. That was back when I was young and wanted to be a fighter pilot before I realized I was never going to be a fighter pilot because my eyes are terrible. And also, I get terrible emotions. I was going to say, before I knew all of these things, many disqualifying factors. I'm pretty sure the eyes are a problem, but I'm not sure they're the problem, John. Ay, ay, ay. All right. And then we have some information from Hans, who writes, Alter Ego seems to have been an MIT project first.

41:08And very suspiciously, the man in the Alter Ego video doesn't show the left side of his head. It might look more like this. And this was the image that I was talking about that was distracting me about the cheek thing. And we will put a link to the show notes to a post on the MIT, I guess, like Media Lab, Media Center, something along those lines, where they talk about this. And again, to John's point from April of 2018. yeah and you couldn't see the side of the person's face but you could see enough of their face to know that i think that their sensors were only like sort of over your ears again kind of like a bone induction headphone this thing had a sensor that was touching your chin like underneath your lower lip i think that would have been visible if that was in the video but i think they're just using they're not using sensors in that location for the alter ego demo video anyway that is true CJ writes,

42:23with AI noise suppression. So it makes sense when I looked into it that it appears to be that the device is only measuring muscle signals, EMG, in the, here we go, in the temporomandibular joint. Ooh, I think I got it. All right, look at me go. Older versions of the device had more contacts targeting the mouth and tongue, so they appear to have refined it since then. See the video, which we will link in the show notes. Electromyography, or EMG, is a technique for evaluating and recording the electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles. We'll put a link to the Wikipedia page in the show notes.

42:56And additionally, electroencephalography, EEG, is a method to record an electrogram of the spontaneous electrical activity in the brain. Holy jamoles. I can't believe I'm mostly keeping this together. So many syllables. Yeah, but that's, that's the distinction I was trying to make, but I didn't know these terms when we talked about it. EMG versus EEG. Continuing from CJ, reading EMG signals is much easier as the muscles are only millimeters away and have much less noise. Maybe there are some accelerometers as well. Therefore, there's no potential for reading thoughts as noted in the video. It's unclear to me whether or not the tiny movements associated with silent speech they are reading are unintentional or need to be developed as a technique to use the device.

43:35Given the sensors and location of the demonstrated device, I see no reason the sensors could not be placed in glasses, arms, or indeed in the AirPods Pro. See, he doesn't know the technical term for the glasses arms, but now we do. Now who's a neuroscientist? Yeah, sticks. They're called temples. The basic signal processing is much less complicated than the audio processing the AirPods already do, and then the AI could presumably run on the iPhone. If it is working on EMG signals, I would not expect that the interpretation would be much more complicated than audio-to-speech. In regards to John's question of being able to measure intention to act or speak, which these devices are not doing, this is a well-established research methodology in neuroscience, particularly in functional MRI.

44:13eye. We're able to see the main motor areas light up in a functional MRI scan when a patient imagines walking, and we see how it is different with different diseases such as Parkinson's. But yes, it has more recently been shown that further networks are engaged when a movement actually occurs compared to when only imagined. Yeah. So I'm still interested in these things, the EMG muscle thing, especially since, well, there's a couple angles. This person is saying that he thinks that the thing that the alter ego was doing could be done in an AirPod or glasses, of course the Meta Ray-Ban glasses have the wrist strap that is also an EMG measuring thing.

44:49It's measuring the electrical signals to the muscles in your fingers to tell what fingers you're moving. That product is out now and then we'll probably have a story next week about the late breaking thing that happened today about Apple's plans to compete with Meta's glasses and whether or not they'll have some kind of EMG reading aspect to it or whether it will just be AirPods on long sticks with cameras in the end. Five years from know yeah we were sponsored this episode by factor you know fall always feels like a reset between back to school busier routines and shorter days finding time to cook can be tough this is why factor is great factors chef prepped dietitian approved meals make it easy to stay on track and enjoy something comforting and delicious no matter how hectic the season gets factor quite simply is the easiest meal kit I've ever used.

45:42And the meals are so good and so fast. They have a huge variety to choose from. You can, you know, premium seafood choices available like salmon and shrimp at no extra cost. GLP one friendly meals and new Mediterranean diet sections. You can, you know, pick meals that are packed with protein and healthy fats for you. And for the first time, you can try Asian inspired meals, bold flavors influenced by China, Thailand, and more. So for more choices to better nutrition, 97 % of customers say that Factor helped them live a healthier life. You can feel the difference no matter your routine. And the Factor meals are so fast and easy to make.

46:19You might think, I don't have time. And believe me, I've been there. I don't have time. And Factor, I do have time for Factor. It's that fast. It's that easy. So check it out today. Eat smart at factormeals.com slash ATP50off and use code ATP50off to get 50 % off your first box plus free breakfast for one year. That's code ATP50off at factormeals.com for 50 % off your first box plus free breakfast for one year. Get delicious, ready-to-eat meals delivered with Factor. Offer only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto-renewing subscription purchase. Thank you so much to Factor for sponsoring our show.

47:27felt she didn't mind that the edges got nicked up or whatever um so when the tech woven case is out it's all right we'll try that one too uh she uh is a wallet person like a magsafe wallet person so far she puts it on the back of her phone she keeps her cards and her driver's license and stuff in there and so she got the whatever it's i guess it's still the fine woven wallet right it's the tech woven case but the fine woven wallet it's a very confusing line but she got both of those uh and the tech woven case i've checked it out she put her phone in it and i'm it's very it's very sort of scratchy and like the bumps on it are very regular i don't know if you've if you've seen it in person you've felt how it's what it's like it's it's kind of plasticky uh it's you know it's not fine woven the weaving is very coarse it's not fine uh but whatever it is it's like lumpy plastic so it's like lots and lots of little lumps and the problem with that is that it provides the MagSafe wallet with less surface area where it is contacting the case.

48:29And that results in less friction. And so she rejected and returned the tech woven case based entirely on the fact that the wallet slid off sideways too easily because it didn't have the friction. It wasn't like the surface area. Like it's touching a tech woven case, but it's only touching the tips of all the tiny little mountains in the tech woven case. And that doesn't provide. We did an experiment of all the different surface materials. So that got rejected. She got an Apple silicone case because she wanted to try the body strap, lanyard, whatever thing, crossbody strap. And Apple's cases have the little attachment points for that.

49:06That was interesting because I was wondering about this from seeing the pictures. Do either of you have the crossbody strap? No. I touched one extremely briefly at the Apple store. And it seemed nice, but I didn't, like, put it on or anything like that. You now know everything I know about them. Yeah, so she was willing to try that as well. She's like, oh, maybe that'll be fun. And of course, Apple's cases have the little corner things on it. If you've seen it in the store or the pictures of it, you know that the things attached to the corner of Apple's cases by these very, very thin, I forget what they're made of.

49:35Someone sent us the name of what they think it is, but very thin, strong, like thread type material. And I was wondering, like, you know, how easy is it to take that on or off? Like, do you have to, like, you know, tie it onto the case and then it's there permanently or whatever? The answer is that the attachment things on the crossbody strap have a little, like, metal bar. And then the crossbody strap wraps around that bar and snaps on the other side of it to itself. So it holds the bar. And the bar has the string coming out of it. So you can pretty easily unsnap the crossbody strap on both ends and then remove your phone.

50:16but now your phone has two little metal crossbars dangling from it by about an inch of very thin string so i don't think anyone would want to use their phone like that so you basically have to take the case off and unthread the threads the other thing is to get those threads it's a loop of threads it's just you know it's like a metal bar with a loop of thread and that loop does not come out of the metal bar it is in the metal bar there's no way to remove it so to get it through the little thing you have to if you have big cameras marco knows about this maybe also case the way the the camera straps attach to most cameras with the little loop that you loop through and then you put the strap through the loop you know i don't know how to describe it but anyway um you don't have to it's a continuous loop and you just loop it over on itself but she had to use a needle threader to get through the case because she couldn't get like you're trying to like it's just like a loop of thread and you're trying to shove it through she can get through the first hole but then get it to make a u-turn and go through the second hole to come back out she couldn't do it and had to use a needle threader so that was a little bit unuser-friendly and it really you really are committing to the crossbody strap because like i said the only way to get it off is to take your phone out of the case and then carefully unthread those things and you know pass the bar through the little thing and it's just it's not a simple uh maneuver so i think there's room for improvement on the crossbody strap in terms of ease of connecting and disconnecting from the case i'm not sure what the solution is but the first try it seems yeah uh the strap itself is fine it's magnetic to itself anyway uh so she replaced her tech woven case with the apple silicone case which she's used many times before she's destroyed many of those came in a fun color the wallet the fine one the new final wallet sticks to it way way better and also i suggested to her you know if you don't like the tech woven and you're just so so about the silicone what about a leather case so she got the bull strap leather case and also she was uh won over by the uh marketing of the uh bull strap uh leather wallet which is a find my device so it's thicker than a regular wallet but it has an actual kind of like air tag type thing in the wallet itself as opposed to just the apple thing where when it comes off the phone knows where it fell off and we'll tell you about it this actually has an air tag in the wallet so leather uh bull strap case with leather wallet on it very good friction between the two of them harder to slide off sideways i think the best friction is probably her old sort of broken in leather she had a leather wallet back when an apple leather wallet she has one of those it's very well broken in that on the back of leather case or that on the back of a silicone case is probably the strongest attachment but uh that's that's her review slash my conveying of her thoughts on all of the cases i thought the bull strap case was nice she got it in a weird like pinkish leather color uh which is not to my taste but she likes it but i thought it was kind of bulky um we should put a link in the show notes to steven robla's um uh leather iphone case review uh he also mentioned that some cases are thicker or thinner than others even though they're all just leather cases they're not like it's like you know whatever that plastic shell or something with leather wrapped around it they vary in thickness uh significantly but she likes the leather one that's the one she's using but she also has the silicone one for the crossbody strap which i'm not sure how often she'll use that because currently the silicone case is sitting on the desk behind me and it does not have those little dangly strap things on it and if she wants to put them on she needs to use a needle threader so i don't see that happening that often but for this year i would say tech woven is more successful than fine woven with the caveat that if you're going to put a wallet on it you're going to get less friction all right i will say also um i my iphone 17 pro case situation is not resolved yet um i have i really enjoyed last year i really enjoyed the nomad magnetic leather back that was just the back made of leather that would go over the whole back of the phone and you could feel the leather on the sides just like you know kind of because it's it goes to the edge of the phone but it wasn't wrapped around the side so it gave a lot of grip and made it you know more stable on a surface and it would you know it wouldn't slide off of slanted things and you know it really improved the ergonomics of the phone but you were still using like the naked sides of the phone which was really nice for like having the nice buttons and being able to see the the side finish and everything i ordered one of these for the 17 pro and unfortunately because of the shape of the mesa that which now goes or the plateau which now goes all the way across the nomad it has a magnet in the middle on the magsaf area and it has those like micro suction uh tape patches on the corners well it used to have one on the upper corner like adjacent to the camera plateau um but now there's no room for that because the mesa or the plateau goes all the way across it only has those sticky pad corners like on the flat part of the phone area which and i posted a quick little video that mastodon the problem is then there's nothing holding the case back against the phone along the top edge above the mesa so it kind of just like flaps in the breeze like it creates a gap it doesn't sit flush you know stuff will get stuck in there so it's basically in my opinion the nomad magnet back is unusable on the 17 pro so i actually returned it like i'm like this i i cannot i can't believe they shipped it honestly and they shouldn't have unfortunately because and it's a shame because i loved it on the 16 pro and what i'm doing right now i believe i mentioned last episode that until my 17 cases come in i just cut the top off of my my 16 pro leatherback from nomad and just so it rests under the camera bump and i've just been using that it's not this is not a good solution it doesn't line up correctly in the bottom edge it looks ridiculous but it does provide a lot of grip so this is what i'm still doing um i've ordered a couple other things to try they're not here yet.

56:06So more to come in the future. But the iPhone 17 Pro case story remains unsolved for me. I will say I did handle a tech woven case in the Apple store. And I thought it was very nice. And in fact, they seem to be selling very well. Because the Apple stores that I keep like walking by, like I'll breeze in and see like, I was in Grand Central earlier today, I looked at theirs. and they're sold out of most of the good tech woven colors for most phone models. The tech woven cases seem to be doing very well with iPhone buyers. So there's something there. I do think I will probably end up preferring something else, but time will tell.

56:52All right. Who has an iPhone 17 in the family that apparently has some thoughts? Yeah, well, I mean, they're sitting on the desk right next to me. They're still in their boxes. like i haven't had much experience with them so i guess i don't have much to say about that i wondered what the timing was with uh when my kids would be getting these but apparently they're going to wait until um uh their uh fall break in october so these i i did take the phones out of the box and put their cases on them just because that's i like to get the phone into the case before the phone is covered with fingerprints whereas no one else in my family cares about that at all so they will take the phone out and handle it for 15 minutes and then take the food-encrusted finger-print-covered thing and stick it inside a clear case.

57:32So I got them directly out of the box, immediately into the clear case, barely even touching it, and my son's got a silicone case. So they're all ready to go, waiting for their phones to come to do a data transfer. But no, they're nice. They look nice. They're normal. They have, you know, nothing exciting to say about them. They are extremely unsurprising, but they haven't yet been set up. All right. AirPods Pro 3. marco remind me you did get a pair i assume i did okay um would you like to start or shall i really don't care either way um okay oh i returned them oh interesting why is that all right so this i did not expect this i'll tell you that um by all accounts they they are much better on paper they do have significantly better noise cancellation which is impressive because it was already like for any earbuds it even the twos were already pretty good um but the threes were even better the sound quality is indeed better i wouldn't say it's like you know world changing better it's still not to the level of full-size headphones but it does come a lot closer and they are certainly good enough that like by noise cancellation and sound quality metrics alone barring other factors I would not recommend anybody ever get like the AirPods Max for instance like I think the AirPods Pro 3 if they fit you and if they're comfortable and if they fit your you know for other like if they work physically for you I think they're the better product in every possible way they sound great they have the best everything like feature wise they're way ahead um my problem is the airpods pro 3 fit very differently than the twos this is not like a little tweak like you know one from airpods pro one to two as far as i can tell there was no fit difference um from two to three this might as well be a different product like this is a very different fit did you lose the year lottery I did.

59:41So I guess I can count myself lucky that I have had a pretty good ear situation with the AirPods Pro 2s. But not with the original AirPods, right? So you've been on and off with the ear lottery. Yeah. So the 3s fit very differently. Mainly, the 3s have the ear tip seems to go further into your ear, and it seems to push harder against your inner ear. So it does come with different size tips. I tried, it starts out with medium and then it has like small and extra small. And I kept going down in size whenever I would like, I would try, like try for a couple hours on one size. It's a little uncomfortable.

1:00:25And like, you know, maybe the next day I'd, you know, reset my ears next day, put new tips on, try it again. And there was no ear tip combination that I found that made these not just hurt after a couple hours of wearing. and that is a problem for me and every time i you know i put him in i'd be like kind of kind of hurts kind of uncomfortable but let's see let me give it a shot i would try adjusting i try wiggling them different angles you know every adjustment i could make there is no combination that didn't result in pain after you know generally about an hour or two uh and And the twos don't hurt at all, ever.

1:01:09They have never in a thousand years have the twos hurt. The threes just hurt my ears. And I think they aren't as secure in my ears either. And again, I've tried different eartips, tried different angles. I couldn't get them to fall out, but they seemed, they felt less secure. It could just be psychological. But they do not work for me. and then every time like when i would when i would go back to my airpods pros twos uh you know after my ears would hurt i'd give them a break and go back to the twos so i could continue operating in my life uh and the twos it's like going home to like a well-worn couch you know it's like the twos fit so comfortably for me it's a night and day difference and so i don't really know what to do I think the 3s, if there were no other products like this, if I didn't have the 2s, if the 2s never existed, I might buy the 3s and just use them for short times because the feature set is that compelling.

1:02:11But as long as my 2s continue to work, I'm going to continue to use them. It's kind of like our discussion about the natural scrolling direction on Apple's mice and trackpads. I can still use the old ones, so I'm going to keep using them because I like them way better. They work way better for me. They don't sell the 2s anymore, do they? They don't, but Amazon does, and they're on sale, so I got myself a backup pair. Yeah, you're going to get backups. You didn't think about getting a third-party ear tips for the three, because maybe you just don't like the ones with the foam embedded in them? So the way that they are achieving the better isolation and the better bass response is with better physical blockage of the ear canal from the outside world.

1:02:51The noise cancellation, they're doing some electronic things with feedback and everything. That's part of noise cancellation. but a huge part of why it got better is they are much more aggressively sealing out the outside world with the fit i i think it's going deeper in the ear it certainly is like sealing against the walls of the ear harder it's like pushing harder against the walls of the ear whatever it is they have they have significantly changed the weighties fit to to be further into my ears and And it just doesn't work for me. It doesn't work. And so, again, I hope the two continue to work for a while.

1:03:32And to answer your question, John, I don't think third-party eartips would actually fix my problem. Because it isn't that the eartips aren't soft enough. It's that they move them. They sit differently in my ear in a place that is far more intrusive and invasive and far less comfortable and causes pain after a while. What if you got third-party eartips that were half the depth? I don't know if they would fit or if they would keep them in my ears if they put them further out. I don't know. Were you afraid of staying within the return window? Because I'm kind of shocked that you returned these without the opportunity to buy more stuff, which is I bought these 17 third-party eartips to see if I didn't even fix the problem.

1:04:13Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't trust third-party eartips for the AirPods Pros 3s to really exist yet that were any that were at all like reasonably considered um so like maybe and maybe i'll try in a few months to look around but again like right now like well my twos work great so i kind of i think i'm just going to sit this generation out and see what happens um i and i'm really honestly i'm really disappointed to have to do that because again the rest of it i do like the increased noise cancellation although that's obviously if that comes at the cost of blowing up my ears. Maybe I don't like that.

1:04:47I do like the better sound quality. That's nice. I like the fact that the new ones are water resistant. Like there's a lot that I wish I could enjoy about the new ones, but they just don't fit me. So I am ecstatic to report that I have yet to lose the ear lottery as I knock on wood because my time will come. In terms of fitment, I think these fit me just fine. There's definitely a tighter seal against my ear canal. I wouldn't say it's uncomfortable for me. I wouldn't say it's uncomfortable, but it is noticeably tighter, and the tips give less. That sounds like an indictment, and I actually don't mean it as such.

1:05:29It's fine for me, but it is noticeably different. That being said, the ANC... Well, let me back up by half step. The reviews that I initially read or watched was that, oh my God, these things are perfect. I cannot believe how great they are. I will, I would buy a million of them if I could, you know, from, I forget who, like MKBHD had a really good review. I feel like there were a couple others, I forget who, um, that all said these are absolute win top to bottom. I, my opinion is more tempered than that. These are an improvement for sure. And there are a couple of ways that I think they're a vast improvement, but I would temper one's expectations if you have not yet bought these and are looking to buy them.

1:06:11They are better. And for me, I'm getting into a USB-C case, which is Chef's Kiss. Even though I almost never charge the case with a cable, it is still so nice to have one less lightning thing in my life. And if you're the kind of person like me that uses AirPods on and off all day long, pretty much every day, I guess to some degree, it is an absolute win unless you lose your lottery. But the ANC, I would say it's better. I wouldn't say it's dramatically better. Now, it is possible that maybe I need to use different tips. I did do an ear, what is an ear fit test, whatever they call it. And it said they were fine, but I haven't actually tried any of the other tips yet.

1:06:49So perhaps going up a size or something like that would increase the isolation and maybe that would make it worlds better. But I just used, I've only used the stock tips, the standard ones that were attached to them when they came out of the case. And the ANC is good. When I was on the plane back from Memphis, I went back and forth with my twos and my threes. And the threes were better. But I heard some people talk about how the plane just disappeared. And I feel like maybe I heard Jason talk about that. I might have that wrong. Yeah, Jason said that. I wouldn't say that was my experience, which I'm not trying to say he's wrong.

1:07:26I'm just talking about what I have experienced. Hear that, Jason? He keeps you saying you're wrong. do you have um uh you have currently or have you had a pair of over-ear noise cancelling headphones to compare with on plane flights not in probably 15 years when the technology speaking of like uh the the extra bit of foam uh blocking sound and wedging itself in your ear another thing that can block a lot of sound is a gigantic piece of plastic for your ear and i i haven't tried again i don't like things in my ear holes so i don't use the little earbuds but i always do wonder about the trade-offs on a plane in particular gives you the air for a long time there's a there's like an obvious drone noise that you would want to cancel out i use the over-ear ones but over-ear ones can make your head sweaty and even they can press on your face and like be uncomfortable after hours but i also don't like things in my ear holes and i i know lots of people who swear by the pros on the plane as great noise canceling or whatever i'm like but but how could something that tiny cancel it but i guess if they just wedge themselves in your ear holes uh well enough they can get the job done but that's why i was wondering if you were comparing the twos and the threes if you had a pair of over-ear cancelling headphones to compare to both of those how they compared.

1:08:31I mean, over-ears can usually do significantly better on planes for the actual noise cancellation, but the reason why I don't carry over-ears on planes anymore is that they're huge. They take up your entire carry-on bag. Sony's come in a really small case. They fold up real small. It's nice. Yeah, but it's nothing. I have the Sony's. I know what you're talking about. Obviously, the AirPods are smaller, but we did note that the AirPod 3 case actually got a little bigger. So if we just graph this now, in the year 2162, the AirPod's case will be bigger than the Sony headphones. It is nothing like what you think.

1:09:09It is so comically small, like the AirPod's Pro case versus the headphones. My wife has AirPod's Pro. I know how big it is. I'm making a joke. It's like an infinite timeline joke. Like straplating. Look at the graph. Oh my gosh. All right. Well, it's worth noting, and I think I've said this before, But my AirPods, when it's jeans season, which we are quickly angling into jeans season here in Richmond, my AirPods live in my little change pocket on my right side. You know what I'm talking about? Like the little baby pocket on your right-hand side, at least for boys anyway. The iPod Nano Pocket? Yeah, the iPod Nano Pocket.

1:09:42Exactly. That's where my AirPods live. And they're always on me. They're basically always on me. And I would not have – and I know you're kidding, but I would not have those Sonys always on me. And honestly, I'd rather not even have them in my carry-on if I could avoid it. because half the time I have my stupid Vision Pro in here. Talk about something that takes a lot of room in your car. But anyways. There's a Sony headphones in the Vision Pro case. You're not wrong. The ANC, it was better. It was not, to me, night and day better. And in general, like I mowed the yard today and, you know, definitely dramatically reduced or I guess attenuated, I think is the technical word I'm looking for, the volume of the lawnmower.

1:10:22But I would not say it disappeared by any stretch of the imagination, which again makes me wonder if I should try some of the larger sizes and see if they fit and if they work better etc but it's not a regression I don't think but the fact that I'm saying I don't think is probably not a good sign also in the case which by the way is indeed bigger but is so barely bigger that I mean I it's hard I can only notice when I'm holding both of them at the same time like otherwise I can't really tell the difference but what's interesting about them is in the AirPods Pro 2, the tips are angled fairly steeply.

1:10:58I would say at a glance, it's at like a, I don't know, I was going to say like a 45 degree angle. I think that's a bit dramatic, but they're angled. If as they're sitting in the case, they're angled down and pointing toward the center of the case. Whereas these point almost laterally, like they're almost at a 90 degree angle. It's hard to do this. I'm trying to paint a word picture and I'm probably They're not doing the greatest job, but they sit very differently in the case, which also means they wiggle quite a bit more in the case. It's not a big deal. And I am 100 % nitpicking, but I see, I noticed it enough that I find it lightly off-putting.

1:11:32That being said, there are two things that, oh, I'm sorry. There's one other complaint I have than two absolute compliments. Connected, I believe it was mentioned this, but the light for the like charging and already charged and pairing and all that. it used to have like a cutout in the front of the case where the light would shine through. Now it just shines through the case, which makes for a better look, generally speaking. But mother of God, this light is so bright. It is ridiculously bright, which 99.9 % of the time does not matter. But I opened the case once when Erin was asleep and I happened to have the case pointed in her general direction.

1:12:12And I was like, oh, Jesus Christ. I didn't want to wake her up. and I'm being a little bit hyperbolic, but truly the light is ridiculously bright. And I'm pretty sure they talked about that on Connected. A couple of really good things though. Number one, the bass response to my ears is night and day better. I never thought the bass was bad in the AirPods Pro 2, AirPods Pros 2, whatever. You know what I'm saying. I think it is worlds better in this one where the twos, it sounded good, but it almost sounded, I don't know how to verbalize it, but it almost sounded like an interpretation of where the bass was and what the bass should sound like.

1:12:54Whereas the threes, this is what bass actually sounds like. And for some, like perhaps Marco, and I don't mean that to be snarky, I'm being genuine, perhaps for you, you would find that off-putting because I know, or at least my recollection is that you generally don't care for bass-heavy mixes. No, I wouldn't say that. Okay, fair enough. I don't like beat style mixes where it's just oots, oots, but I don't dislike a more bass heavy mix. And the bass in these seems much more airy in a good way. Seems like the soundstage seems much wider, particularly with regard to bass. I think the bass sounds incredible.

1:13:33That is a vast improvement over the old ones. I, again, did not, I would not have said, oh, yes, the bass needs to get considerably better in the twos. I never would have thought that. But now, having had the threes, it got significantly better. One thing I'll say on that, so bass response in headphones, especially in tiny headphones like this, bass response really needs a good seal. And so you will have different people have very different reactions to it. That might explain why you were saying, to you, it's a big difference. And some people have reported it's a small difference or they don't notice the difference.

1:14:09Bass response, good bass, you need a good seal. And again, this is kind of what they did with their design choices here with the 3 is like they went for a much stronger seal to get better bass response and to get better noise cancellation at the possible expense of comfort for a lot of people and fit challenges. So, you know, whether that was the right idea for them, it depends on whether it fits you or not. But that is the tradeoff there. I'll say also on the treble response. So I've seen and heard a lot of people complaining that the Pro 3s sound too harsh or too sharp. Oh, interesting. Or I've heard like too digital or like too crisp.

1:14:49Oh, I wouldn't say that at all. Those are all different ways of saying the same thing. Those are all different ways of saying they have too much treble for you. And I did notice that the treble response is very noticeably stronger than the 2s. And treble response is a very personal thing and like what you want out of your headphones. And if you look at high-end headphone reviews, they're all over the place because each reviewer wants a different amount of treble response. And what you hear is you'll hear people who think that they're listening to too much treble. They'll describe it as like fatiguing or, again, sharp or harsh.

1:15:27and people who are listening to something with bad treble or low treble response, they'll describe it as warm. This sounds warm. What that means is it's kind of muffled. There's not a lot of treble. But it's very relaxing. A low treble kind of warmer tone is less fatiguing to your ears over a long time. So it's nice. But you hear a little bit less detail and high crispness in the energy. So anyway, what they've done with the threes is they've pushed that treble i i would say and i i like a lot of treble i think they've pushed it as high as they can and still be within the realm of what i like it's almost too much for me and i love treble so i i think what they should probably do is give some kind of control over this like possible marco we don't have the technology how could you change the amount of different frequencies coming out of a speaker they'll have to invent something i guess Right.

1:16:26And that's the thing. When AirPods were not able to produce a lot of treble response because they just weren't good enough yet, this wasn't a problem. They were able to have no sound adjustment whatsoever because no sound that their AirPods could produce was potentially offensive or objectionable to anybody. It was not good enough to be offensive. But now, as they are getting higher fidelity, higher response, stronger bass response, stronger treble response, less drop-off at those extremes in their frequency response, all of their competitors in the nice Bluetooth headphone or the nice noise-canceling headphone space, they all offer audio tone controls through their apps.

1:17:09Every single one of them. You can customize the amount of treble, mid-range bass. Some of them are pretty simplistic. Some of them you can have a whole parametric EQ. But they all offer customization. Why? Because people want different things out of their sound profile. I think that Apple has outgrown now. Now that their headphones have gotten really good at general sound response across the whole spectrum, they've outgrown the idea that they can just have one tone that they just let everyone have. and i think they've outgrown the idea of having one shape that these products can be to fit in one type of ear but hey well you know i'll keep arguing that over the next three years until they maybe consider that but i mean they they did add more tips they used to have three tips now they add five so they are trying to but like i'm not sure what the alternative is is like uh kind of like the the visor things or whatever you can get airpods 3 with the a shape or the b shape or the c-shape i don't know i mean i honestly uh when i when i tried the different tip sizes it didn't seem to make any difference in comfort at all to me like no i i figured like oh if i maybe if i go smaller maybe there'll be more of a risk of falling out of my ear or i'll lose the seal but they'll be more comfortable they weren't like they i did eventually lose the seal and they did eventually you know risk falling out of my ear if i if i went too small but going smaller and smaller didn't actually improve the comfort for me at all.

1:18:36I think it's a different issue than just the very minute diameter differences of those pads. But anyway, all that is to say, I think it's time Apple adds a little bit more control over this. Now there are like, there's different system level ways you can kind of tweak an EQ or have a hearing profile. There's ways you can kind of hack some customization here. Although, be careful with the hearing profile because if you're old, you probably can't hear high frequencies that well and what the hearing profile is going to do is going to crank them up and so if it's already too shrill for you in the high end don't apply your hearing profile to it if you're old but yeah like and and also like whatever whatever you apply would then apply to i think any headphones that you would wear yeah to all audio yeah which is not that's also not super desirable um so i think it's time i i hope apple revisits the you know the comfort and fit here and tries to get something more more universal they've measured a million in ears, Marco.

1:19:32That's what they'll say next year. But not mine. It's a shame. The twos were great. But anyway, Amazon is still selling the twos. If anybody else has the same problem, you can also buy a spare pair. And I would suggest doing it soon because once these are really out of all the channels, you're going to have a hard time finding new ones with new batteries. So good luck. They saw a million ears and they measured them all. That's a reference, John. One final note on this. One final note. I've got one on sound quality here so the uh on the subject of sound quality of these headphones uh there has been much uh consternation among the reviewers about the sound quality some people like it some people don't my relationship with sound quality reviews uh is mostly through youtube channels that i watch i love it when youtube channels try to play the speakers in their video to try to let you know how they sound what is that about there's about a thousand things wrong sorry but anyway because like just the chain of stuff from that speaker making noise to it going into my ear holes when i watch it on my phone is like okay we're just anyway um but one of the channels that i like one of the channels that has found clever attempts to to be a youtube channel that reviews speakers in some constructive ways um always has an objective measurement section and a subjective part and objective measurements are great because you can put them on graphs and stuff and he always does this is called aaron's audio corner he always does uh his subjective review and then he tries to figure out based on the objective results why his subjective review was like that do it does it make sense does his subjective review just weigh off or it's like ah this thing that i heard in my subjective listening i can see it here on the graph and that is a good way to at least give people an idea of how a sound thing a speaker or whatever might perform and then you can decide how much travel do you like what kind of response do you like and eventually you learn your tastes and you'll know if you would like this speaker or not.

1:21:25I've never heard of this channel that someone sent me. It's called The Headphone Show. I'd never seen it before, but they also had essentially a subjective part and an objective part. I think they have like a little ear-shaped machine where they shove the AirPod in and then they do like frequency response measurements with it shoved into the ear canal. So they get like, I mean, who knows what shape the little fake rubber ear is. But anyway, they're trying to get a good frequency response. And you can see their graphs where they show the AirPods 2 versus the AirPods 3. and sure enough just like marco said and like casey said the airpods 3 are have more bass uh than the two and they have more treble than the two not by much but doesn't take much changes in these graphs if you watch a lot of these videos you learn that like the lines being just separated by a little bit it's it's audible because it's usually a logarithmic scale and stuff like that but i will say that both the airpods 2 and the airpods 3 do not have linear frequency response they are boosted in the bass and they are boosted in the treble the mid-range is nice and linear on you know it doesn't wiggle around too much and then the bass i've heard a lot of people complain that's kind of flabby and not tight uh but like you can't oh i disagree you can't really see that in the frequency response graph but a lot of people thought like there is more bass but they don't like the quality of it but that's and that's again that's subjective listening and then the treble is again it's boosted on both of these it's just boosted more slightly more on the threes and it's not flat um and the thing with one of the things you learn from looking at all is graph and speakers is that you can tell based on there's another measure they didn't do but aaron's audio conner always does which is basically if this line doesn't have any wiggles in it this speaker will take well to equalization which is deciding changing the frequency response you know like a you know like i said 12 band 10 band equalizer or whatever um if you see a response curve that you don't like you can say oh this has too much treble so i'll just turn the equalizer down on those high frequency bands and i can adjust it to sound how i like not all speakers take to equalization that well based on this thing that whatever this parameter is that i again i wish i remember what it was but anyway from watching the channel you just learned oh that line is nice and flat that means this this speaker will eq well and sure enough you can put it through an equalizer and say no look i put it the way i wanted and i can make the curve how i want it and if it's too much trouble for me i can turn it down but other speakers if you try to turn down the the treble with the equalizer it will screw up other parts of the line and it won't be is linear anyway um all this is to say that airpods 2 and 3 are not linear speakers they are very much like tunes to be appealing to mass audiences which makes sense for what they are they're trying to be a single product sold to millions of people they're not going to be like an audiophile linear speaker uh the apple brand is different than the beats brand beats brand their curve is even heavier on the bass and lower on the treble there and this is true of all speaker brands like uh what is the one that starts with a b not banging olsen um what's the other one or that's being um uh bare dynamic the headphones no there's some some it might be banging olsen but i'm forgetting anyway there's there's certain speaker brands b and w is another one yeah i know it's not that one either um there's certain speaker brands and it's not bows uh that have a that cost a bazillion dollars and have a reputation of having really tons of treble like tons of high And exactly like Marco said, some people like, oh, I hate that brand.

1:24:39I find it fatiguing and shrill and it kills me. And other people like, oh, that brand sounds the best. I can hear every nuance of those violin strings or whatever. That's personal taste. So it's good to see. I haven't seen this for most of you. You're right, Mark. Also that like, I feel like the AirPods Pro are good enough that they deserve this kind of treatment now. Whereas before it's like, oh, they're nice. They go in my ears like regular AirPods. Now they're getting out the graphs. Now the audio people are looking at them and saying, this is what AirPods are. They are this U-shaped graph where it's lots of bass and lots of treble.

1:25:10And the threes put more bass and more treble in. And for the people on this show, for the people on the headphone show, it was over their limit. They said this is too much treble and they both hated the bass. But for other people, your mileage may vary. But just be aware that that's the product you're buying. And it is interesting that they made that adjustment or either didn't make that adjustment, but just, you know, the seal is providing that extra thing. And also didn't provide, that was sarcasm before when I said there's no technology to this. It's called an equalizer. Like let people have some kind of adjustment.

1:25:35we've had equalizers we've had analog equalizers for like this is not a new technology if there's too much treble it should be possible to turn it down but it should be possible to adjust that frequency response curve so there's less space or more bass less treble or more but you can even adjust the mid band it's all these bands go across the entire thing equalization if the speaker takes well to equalization you can adjust it to sound better so marco it's not going to help you with fitting in your ear. But the fact that Apple continues to provide so little adjustability for AirPods Pro really limits them because I feel like they are capable of more than this.

1:26:12And especially if you like everything about them, but you just don't like the sound for listening to music, which was true of lots of reviewers. I saw a lot of YouTube videos where they're like, these are amazing, love the transparency, love the noise cancellation, but they sound worse than the AirPods Pro 2. And I don't like how they sound. And that's a shame. That's that I feel like is perhaps fixable for some subset of these people if they just provided basic equalization but i guess that's just too fiddly for apple yeah and again like and you know i usually professional headphone or speaker reviewers usually like a little bit less treble than i do like there's there's this thing called the harman curve and for forever ago like the harman audio corporation developed or came up with this this like kind of target frequency response curve like what people what is most pleasing to the most people because it is not a flat response it is not even response across the entire spectrum most people have a certain balance like you know a little bit a little bit of extra bass you know a little bit of boost here and there a little bit of shape it's a shape of a line i know what shape it is because i put the i put the harmon curve into sound source the rogue amiva thing as my preferred eq for my external speakers i like it harmon curve is appealing yes most people do the so the problem is as as everybody has gotten better at at designing speakers and headphones over the last you know 20 years like we've made huge advances in in the engineering behind developing these products um what has happened is in order to optimize for the most market almost everyone is now making their headphones and speakers try to match the harman curve as close as possible so you have a whole bunch of things that all sound the same the The AirPods Pro don't match it.

1:27:54AirPods Pro don't match it, though, by the way. No, they don't. They definitely don't. Because I like the way the AirPods sound. Because what I know is, again, what I know about myself, when I look at other reviews and when I look at frequency response grass, I know that I like a bit more in certain parts of the midrange, like between 1 and 3K. I like a little boost there to get a little bit more vocals and guitar presence. And then I like a decent treble response, not a like rolled off response where it plummets you know after a certain amount um but i also know that other reviewers don't like that so i i tend to go for choices that have a little bit more treble than most reviewers think is ideal so for me the airpods pro 3s sound great where they already are but if apple wants to only have one tone that everyone gets what they're gonna have to do is issue a software update that changes their default tuning to be worse for me.

1:28:52And that just that illustrates why this should be some kind of control and why, again, all of their other competitors in the headphone space, they all have apps to offer basic tone controls, at least, because people like different things. And again, now that they are capable, like now that these drivers and these headphones have gotten so good, so advanced, that they're able to be good enough to cause these kind of opinion differences to be a problem, this is when you offer control. So maybe they will. We'll see. By the way, the speaker brand, I'm pretty sure, was Bowers & Wilkins. Thank you to hairline1 in the chat room for going.

1:29:30So when I said BNW and you said no. You said BNW. I didn't know it stood for Bowers & Wilkins. All right. One final thought on the AirPods Pro 3. I can talk. This may all be in my head. This may be a placebo. I don't know. But I will use transparency mode and I will use noise cancellation. I mostly have abandoned adaptive, although I think I need to try it again, to be honest with you. But anyways, I typically flip-flop between transparency and noise cancellation. And with the AirPods Pro 2, transparency sounded really good, but you could tell you were listening to a reproduction of what was happening around you.

1:30:09In the same way that when you're wearing the Vision Pro, it's really good, but you can tell you're looking through some, you know, humongous goggles at screens that are reproducing what you're seeing around you. With the AirPods Pro 3, transparency is freaking transparent. It is unreal. how real it sounds. I should have thought that sentence out a little more, but, um, it is just difficult to believe how absolutely real transparency mode sounds for my ears. Anyway, it's as though I don't have anything in my ears, which is absolutely bananas to me. Um, but you know, it, it's what it is. And I love it for that.

1:30:50All in all, I do, these do get my recommendation. I do think that they are worth it. But if you're coming from AirPods Pro 2 that you're happy with, unless you're desperately seeking more bass, my personal experience is, or a USB-C case, if you don't already have one, my personal experience is that these are good. I wouldn't call them requisite. You know, these are not must-buys, but they are definitely good. Again, you know, caveats about ear shapes and so on and so forth. But the initial reviews and certainly the way they were presented, that everything is better in every measurable way? Yes, but I wouldn't say that everything is dramatically better.

1:31:29The bass to my ears, dramatically better. The soundstage, better. Transparency mode, quite a bit better. Everything else, it's a notch better, but I wouldn't say it's night and day. We are sponsored by Zapier. Zapier is how you actually deliver on your AI strategy, not just talk about it. You know, there's a lot of talk about AI these days. Of course, it's a huge deal. It's changing everything about the way we work and what kind of work is even done. But just talking about AI and, you know, kind of guessing about it or, you know, speculating about it doesn't really make you more efficient. For actual work to actually be more efficient, you need the right tools.

1:32:09That is where Zapier comes in. Zapier helps you break the hype cycle and actually put AI to work across your work or your company's work or ideally both. So with Zapier's AI orchestration platform, you bring the power of AI to any workflow so you can do more of what matters. You can connect top AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to the tools your team already uses. So you can add AI exactly where you need it. This can be AI-powered workflows, an agent, a chatbot, or whatever else you can imagine with Zapier. You can even ask it to help you come up with reasons. So Zapier is for everyone, whether you're a tech expert or not.

1:32:47Teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier. And this has been around for a long time. I know power users and automators and kind of workflow nerds have loved and respected Zapier for many, many years. I've heard about them from so many power users over the years. And now with AI, it is more powerful than ever and really takes everything to a whole new level. So join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com slash ATP. That's Z-A-P-I-E-R dot com slash ATP. Thanks to Zapier for sponsoring our show.

1:33:29So let's do some Ask ATP and let's start with Joshua Wold who writes, on past episodes you've talked about the UK demand for encryption backdoors, which, by the way, breaking news is back, baby. This brings up something I never fully understood. How do we know if anything is encrypted? Couldn't everything have backdoors? What if Signal has a backdoor? I don't know, John. What's up with that? So in some respects, as just a consumer who doesn't know about the technical details, you are essentially trusting the products that you buy that claim to have encryption, the companies that make them, that they are telling you the truth about the fact that it's encrypted, and that they haven't made any mistakes when they implemented that encryption.

1:34:11Most of the time, they are telling you the truth. it's impossible not to make mistakes and so that's why there are security flaws and that's why they have patches and yada yada there's that but practically speaking okay but what if you are technical is there a way that people can tell whether apple is telling the truth about encrypting things unlike the world of like linux or whatever where there's you know that you have the source code and even then you what you would say is okay we have the source code to linux but how do i know that this is the source code that you're using when you build your linux that's in your product right so there's always that problem so apple has tackled that in a couple different ways their private cloud compute thing is one of the ways they try to tackle this where they're like we use these signed operating system images that we give to security researchers to say here is the here is the binary that we're running and it's signed in a certain way and you can we can prove that it's signed because only a signed thing would be able to answer this challenge with But, you know, it's this whole sort of like math based cryptography thing to say, we're going to give you the binary that we're using and we're going to try to give you a way to prove to yourself that that really is the binary that we're using.

1:35:16But in the end, as I forget the details of this, but very secure researchers had looked at it when Private Cloud Compute came out and said, in the end, there is still at the very bottom of this trust chain, a place where you have to say, I believe Apple is telling the truth about something or other. It's very difficult to do sort of a zero trust thing. And no, please, blockchain people, please don't. Very difficult to do a zero trust thing that doesn't waste all of our time burning down the entire planet. Apple has also provided for iOS, I believe they provide like to security researchers, like versions of their hardware and software for security researchers to try to crack.

1:35:56because compiled software and even encrypted compiled software running like there are you can do things to look into the hardware and software to see if it really is encrypting things uh because if it's not it'd be trivial for you to get all the data right um the iphone is a very popular just to give one example very popular target for security researchers because people want to crack the iphone so if there was a back door somebody probably would have found it by now because that would be a very desirable thing to have they're finding amazing exploits that are just mind boggling like this chains of 15 different exploits each of which is just you know you can't even believe each one of them and you need all of them to get through and now apple just added that memory integrity protection that we talked about it's going to make it even harder for everybody uh but yeah so practically speaking even though you as a consumer can't really know this stuff you can have some faith that the entire world is trying to break into apple software and they're going to find all the flaws and if there was a backdoor they definitely would have found that i feel like by now because uh it's very hard to hide that given the access that people have to apple's hardware and software to hide a backdoor like that oh you know everyone's you know you can get into anyone's uh phone by typing this special password you know it's a typical sort of silly backdoor but any kind of sort of thing like that even the most sophisticated backdoors like there was um i forget the the details connected to this but there was some speculation by the various people who are tend to be paranoid um that some government uh encryption algorithm maybe it was des i forget but some sort of like government standardized encryption algorithm had some kind of flaw and the idea was that the nsa knew about the flaw when they made it a standard but since only the nsa knew about the flaw they enjoyed you know some number of years where the entire world thought this was unbreakable, but the NSA knew the mathematical weakness.

1:37:49That's also kind of a backdoor. It's not like, oh, if you use this one password, you can get into everything. The backdoor was like the NSA, you know, according to this conspiracy theory, knew the weakness, knew the mathematical weakness in this algorithm. And so they could crack it in much less time than everyone else. That would also qualify as a backdoor because it's like secret information that they know that you don't. But if other people didn't know that, then they could break it. So So in the end, it's very difficult to know for certain that your trust is founded. But on Apple's platforms and in the iPhone in particular, I think you can have some faith just because so many smart people are trying all the time to break into it.

1:38:26Tom Cole writes, what do the neural engine cores in Apple's chips actually do? They spent years boasting about how the neural engines made them leaders in AI or ML. then llms came out and it turned out they needed to boost ram and were massively behind were whatever the neural engines for just a technological dead end uh and so what do we do about this john how do they work what are they about i think we talked about this a while before it's actually difficult to look up technical details on this uh what do the neural engines do they do math that's what all cpus do but like they do math um and why why is there a separate thing called the neural engine does math the whole the whole cpu does math like why do you need this separate thing uh the thing the math that is useful and to do that is required to do for machine learning and ai type stuff involves lots of numbers so for example the math and the cpu you have an instruction to add two numbers together and puts the results someplace right but what if i told you that you're going to have to add 10 million numbers not just two you could take the first two and add them and then take the second two and add them take the third two and add them you're like oh geez how many of these numbers are there what if you could add a thousand of them at the same time give me the first thousand numbers and the second thousand numbers and i will add the first thousand to the second thousand in the same amount of time that it takes me to add one number to another number that's what these simd engines do single instruction multiple data don't just give me two numbers to add give me 100 200 500 of these huge numbers and give me all the memory give them all together and i'll just take this huge bunch of numbers and these and then i'll same thing with multiply you know i'm going to multiply these numbers together i'm going to put the result here i'm going to add it there that's the job that you have to do to run most of these machine learning algorithms and these specialized pieces of hardware are engines that instead of taking two numbers and doing something with them two numbers to multiply two numbers to divide they like hundreds and they it's just you know it's like it's massively parallel right and they can do this because they only do a certain small number of operations that are commonly done for like matrix multiplication and stuff like that um which if you take a course in school to learn about all the big square brackets and the numbers and how you do these things a certain number of operations that you're going to have to end up doing a lot of and if you have huge amounts of numbers you can do it faster now what i was trying to look up is okay that's the neural engine how does that differ from the sort of the existing SIMD units because if you remember back in the Pentium days they had MMX and the PowerPC had Altevec those were the first sort of popular SIMD engines again single instruction multiple data the single instruction is add multiple data is 200 two sets of 100 numbers or whatever although they were smaller back then there were groups of five or six or whatever anyway the Apple SoCs have things in them called AMX Unix advanced matrix extensions those i believe are like mmx and altivec they're like cpu instructions that you feed to the a19 or whatever and instead of going to the adder or like the the multiply units or whatever it goes to the amx units but it's part of the cpu um it's so hard to find details about this i'm sure people know but the silicon know it well but i didn't know where to search on the web so i did find a scientific paper called evaluating the apple silicon m series socs for hpc performance and efficiency hpc is high performance computing and they talked about the amx units and then this is here's what they had to say about the neural engine the neural engine supports int 8 and fp16 precision that's integer 8-bit integers and 16-bit floating point precision as a hardware accelerator the neural engine operate operates independently of the cpu and gpu not as a co-processor such as amx the neural engine delivers higher throughput with for matrix operations than amx but at a lower precision in fp16 while this makes it highly efficient for AI related tasks low numerical precision is not beneficial for traditional high performance computing workloads HPC applications requiring FP32 or FP364 precision may not be fully benefit from the neural engine so the neural engine is separate it's not part of the CPU it's a separate unit so it can operate independently while the the CPU is doing other things it's tailored for the kinds of data that are used in machine learning which is like 16-bit floating point not for a 32-bit or 64-bit floating point which you'd have to use the AMX or the socs regular units for and that that's what it's there for like and it's not a dead end that's that is still very useful in fact it's so useful they recently add those whatever neural cores to the gpu which i'm assuming is the types of matrix math that is done inside the neural engine now there's a separate thing inside each gpu core that also can do that so if you're doing some kind of gpu or graphics related operation or if you're using the gpu as a compute engine now you have some really wide matrix stuff going on in there that wasn't there before a lot of it's probably branding neural engine versus amx versus whatever everyone else calls their thing but that's the answer they do math on a lot of numbers at the same time because the things you need to do in machine learning and ai require you to do math on a lot of numbers at the same time finally for tonight uh sean harding writes i always try to keep my ssds from getting too close to max capacity because i know that filling it up kills performance but why don't we hear about this for phones is the storage and the phone's different enough that it doesn't suffer from this problem either only you ever fill the phone i feel like i've gotten close and i feel like when you get when you get really properly toward the end of your available storage it does get ugly fast but i feel my my vibe check here is that sean's right that you can be you can be pretty close on a phone and it'll be all right whereas if you get pretty close on a computer things are not all right also like do we know how much this is still a problem with modern ssd controllers um you know with when ssds were new this was a pretty substantial effect um but there's been a lot of advances in you know how smart their controllers are how how advanced they're you know how they operate and everything how much is this still the case it's still a case obviously SSDs are better than they used to be but there is a measurement, I forget what they call it in the enterprise world, like over-provisioning or something of essentially how much extra hardware is there in the SSD it's kind of like when you have an electric car battery that they tell you the capacity but really that's like 90 % of the capacity, they never let you fill it to 100 % and then even within the 90 % the car software will also not let you fill the full 90 % so they call the 90 % 100 % Like there's how much it's advertised to hold and there's how much is actually in there.

1:44:58And enterprise SSDs have over provisioned in the amount of memory they have because the cells wear out over time. And before those cells have worn out over time, I can imagine that will alleviate some of the problem. But yes, in all these cases, there is still kind of the problem of even with spinning disks, like when you start to fill the thing up, the number of choices of places you have to store new data become more limited when it's empty you can store it wherever it's most convenient across these three chips and these strips or whatever uh but as things you know in the old days get fragmented or whatever or as like cells wear out and you can't use the ones in this chip anymore or whatever and as the thing fills up you get fewer choices where you want to put stuff and having only one or two or three choices of where to put data uh even if it's the not most efficient place to put it will slow things down um so and phone ssds are no different than any other ssds in that respect in that if you do fill them up you reduce the number of choices and i can sell things down but that's not your problem the real problem is ios mac os the underlying darwin operating system gets very upset when it runs out of disk space even if the even if the ssd was like a quarter full say you partitioned your ssd and three quarters of it is totally empty but the quarter of it that you're using is about to fill mac os is going to flip out because if there are so many things in the operating system that expect to be able to have disk space on the mac for example the swap files if it's time to make a new swap file and it can't make one because there's not enough disk space things are going to go bad real fast if certain things try to write to the disk and they get no space left on device back from the operating system and that part of the operating system expected that never to happen and doesn't handle that failure well bad things happen and so that's the real danger for you should worry about for filling your ssd your spinning disk or anything is that most operating systems and especially apple's operating systems do not behave well when they run out when they start to run out of disk space when anything that expects like surely i'll always be able to write this one little file here with this like process id in it or something and it can't do that how good is the error handling is there's this cascade of like well i couldn't do this therefore this thing happened could this or does it just fall on the floor and things start to fail bad things happen and the other the thing other thing about phones is and like max as we discussed in the past how much space is left on your phone's ssd you're going to go into settings general iphone storage and look at that graph and think you get information out of that that graph is a lot of hand waving right and there's and as we've discussed with the abfs stuff and the mac stuff there's not actually a good solid answer to that question of how much space is left especially on ios where the os has such control about things that it can purge and stuff like that uh and there is the race of like well the operating system needs to write this thing but this this thing is purging like old uh iCloud stuff at the same time and who's going to win that race um so yeah i think i think the answer for why you don't hear about it in phones too much is because ios is such a more sort of controlled environment and it is so much much more aggressive than Apple, than the Mac OS and Apple's other operating systems about doing stuff behind the scene to purge things to make room.

1:48:14But if you fill a phone all the way and then try to do your normal work in it, your phone is going to be worse and slower and probably the OS is going to flip out at some point. So don't fill your phone. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Claude, Factor, and Zapier. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership besides the special we talked about earlier and a whole bunch of other other exclusive member specials is atp overtime our weekly bonus topic so if you have not heard enough from us you want to hear more from us you can do that every single episode with overtime this week on overtime we'll be talking about synology third-party hard drives and the new ubiquity nas products so tune in to hear that atp.fm join thank you so much everybody for listening we'll talk to you next week.

1:49:08Now 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. 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 K-C-L-I-S-S M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-S-Y-R-U-C-U-S-A It's accidental They didn't mean to

1:50:08So I have a USB Odyssey that I went down. Not just a story, not a journey, a full-on Odyssey. It has been an Odyssey. And I have... I'm so sorry. I'll tell you, I have figured it out, and I still can't figure it out. Oh, lovely. Okay, so about maybe two weeks ago, or maybe a week ago, my Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard started to flake out and slowly lose keystrokes or double keystrokes. Now, I've been using the Sculpt ergonomic keyboard for a while. This happens. This is how they die. There's two tragedies to the Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard. One is that they never updated it. And in fact, it's gone through this whole now afterlife of like Microsoft sold their whole keyboard business.

1:51:00They sold part of it to Incase. Incase is now remaking this particular keyboard among a bunch of others. Other people have tried to make clones of the Sculptor ergonomic because it has such a strong following, including Matthias and Kinesis, both of which I have tried and neither of which I can recommend. And this keyboard, the problem is a lot of people love this keyboard, myself included. And it dies after maybe, it depends, you know, it's a roll of the dice. It dies after usually between two and three years of use in my experience. And so I have like, you know, five or six just new in box, like ready to go, waiting around in reserve.

1:51:49So I've seen this problem before. I've gone through, I've probably killed maybe four or five of them over time. I've been using the keyboard for a long time. So anyway, this one starts flicking out. The keys start doubling and missing. I'm like, well, I guess this one's at the end. Just in case, I'll change the batteries. Change the batteries, no difference. It's still doubling. I'm like, okay, I guess this is about to die. And then one morning, I go to my computer, and the keyboard is totally dead. like no no keys work i'm like well that's a new one all right i i guess i guess this one's done get the next one out of the box go to the garage take one off the top of the stack of boxes anyway um i go to plug the new one in and it just it also doesn't work that's weird well i guess maybe something else is wrong maybe like i'll try a different port on the hub or something I don't know what's because it has its own custom USB receiver.

1:52:51That's important. This is not Bluetooth. You have your keyboard connected to a hub? Of course, because I have one Thunderbolt cable going into my laptop so I can take my laptop and bring it to me. Laptops. Your laptop has more than one port, though. Come on. Of course, but it's the one cable dream, John. Plus, it's a USB-A receiver, and I don't want to have this stupid dongle hanging on my laptop all the time. I know. Then you got to deal with hubs. there's a reason my usb microphone connects directly to the back of my computer well anyway um for a while for for years now i've had the same setup here and at the beach i have a pro display xdr and a couple of usb devices put in i have a usb you know sound headphone amp thing i have my usb pre audio device i have the keyboard dongle and you know a couple you know like an extra little drive here and there a few a few things um and a thunderbolt ethernet adapter hanging off of a hub so i have all those things in both places and they've worked great for years many many years but when this dongle died for the when this when this sculpt keyboard died the new one didn't work in the same place first time ever and then so i'm like all right well i keep i keep one of the apple um the the narrower of the two apple keyboard styles without the big numpad on the side i keep one of those around for touch id usually it's stuck to the bottom of the desk.

1:54:15So I'm like, alright, I'll just switch to that temporarily until I figure this out. So I switch to that, and that works fine. And I go through, and I realize, oh, also, why can't I play music? My sound isn't working. My sound devices also plugged in. Neither my headphone amp nor the USB pre-microphone interface, both of which are USB sound devices, both of which are plugged into the same hub, they're not working either. Huh. What I eventually conclude is that USB 2.0 devices, which sound devices they all are, I think, but certainly both of mine are, USB 2 devices are not working when plugged into the ports on my Thunderbolt hub.

1:54:59But the USB 3 external SSD is working. That's bananas. I mean, you hope the SSD is working or maybe it's slowly corrupting all of its data. Well, right, I guess. Yeah. So I'm trying to figure out why do those work? And then I'm like, wait a minute. When I plug in, like, I was moving stuff around, different ports. If I would connect it through the ports on the Pro Display XDR. it worked. But if it's, If a USB 2.0 device was connected through any other way through the Thunderbolt hub, it wouldn't work. It wouldn't be recognized by the computer at all. What is your Thunderbolt hub? Yeah, I was about to ask the same thing.

1:55:42So I was using this OWC one. I forget the name of it. These hubs all have such similar names, and they change like every two years. But it's one of the OWC ones, the one that has a built-in power supply. And it has like, you know, Ethernet and everything. So I was using that. So I'm like, all right, well, I have a couple of Cal digits around from previous buys. I'll just swap one of those in. Maybe the ports on my hub went bad when somehow maybe this keyboard dongle killed the USB ports on my hub. I don't know how, but these keyboard dongles are crap. The Sculpt keyboard works great, feels great, amazingly comfortable, but electronically it's a piece of garbage.

1:56:19This is why they keep dying. And so I'm like, all right, maybe somehow my Sculpt keyboard killed the USB 2.0 bus because USB 2 uses different pins. We talked about this recently. USB 2 uses entirely different pins on the connector than USB 3. So theoretically it is possible for a hub to basically, for USB 2 not to work but USB 3 to work. But I figured like they get power and everything and I'm like well it should be like multiplexed over Thunderbolt to the computer, that shouldn't matter anyway. So I'm like, let me try a different hub. Try a different Thunderbolt hub. One of the CalDigit, the Thunderbolt Element 4.

1:57:04No difference. Same problem. And I'm like, that's really weird. And I take out, I'm like, maybe it's my laptop somehow. Maybe it's a software thing. Who knows? So I take out the other laptop and I connect the Element Hub to that. And I got it to work once. I'm like, well, that's weird. And so I moved some stuff around, like, you know, rewired, plugged it into my other laptop, but then it doesn't work. I'm like, what? What is going on? So here's what worked. USB 2 devices would not work in any configuration except when connected directly to the MacBook Pro or when connected via a USB-C hub that was not Thunderbolt or connected to the Pro Display XDR's built-in ports, whether or not there was a Thunderbolt hub between the XDR and the laptop.

1:58:03Here's a bunch of things that didn't work. Two identical CalDigit Thunderbolt Element 4 hubs. Two different models of OWC Thunderbolt hubs. if I connected the USB 2 devices via USB-C or USB-A through dongles and ports, it didn't make a difference. Whether I connected the USB 2 devices through a USB 2 hub connected to one of the Thunderbolt hubs upstream ports, no difference. Whether the Thunderbolt cable was connected to different ports on the MacBook Pro, no difference. And a completely different MacBook Pro, mostly no difference. but if i connected thunderbolt devices to the thunderbolt hub like the thunderbolt ethernet adapter i have that worked just fine and the usb3 devices worked fine so it's only usb2 devices even if i connected that the usb3 ssd if i used a usb2 only cable to force it to work over usb2 didn't work but you you're not describing the the whole world of devices here but i'm assuming you were going one device at a time or were you trying all these configurations with all your devices i was trying everything i could try like i was i mean i'm sure i didn't do it perfectly scientifically but like it i was i spent like three hours trying to figure this out because i would have gone down all the way just to the keyboard keyboard directly connected to keyboard the keyboard being the only device on the thing because i uh you know you mentioned like you're a device killing the hub and i feel like hubs will die all on their own i always suspect the hub is being bad but you've eliminated that by trying like four different hubs right so it's probably not all four of your hubs are bad so then my next suspicion is some usb2 connected device is like just spraying garbage data because it's flipping out oh yeah that's what i thought too and any device connected to usb2 is now failing because the entire usb2 environment is just inside the inside any of the hubs is totally destroyed by that one device that's just spewing garbage so then i would have said okay does just the keyboard work you know in all the configurations nothing but the keyboard just the keyboard right i see you know what i mean and then add a second device i did that third device yeah so i did that because i had the same thought i'm like maybe one of these is like you know broken and like and like polluting the whole usb 2.0 bus somehow um but in like all all the same thing which like if i connected them directly to the MacBook Pro's ports, they would work, but they would not work through any Thunderbolt hub.

2:00:30Only USB 2 devices. And I'm like, that... But except if they were plugged into the XDR's hub. For some reason, the XDR... I would imagine if the XDR situation would be that the XDR is like, you know, again, tunneling it over the one Thunderbolt cable that connects it back to your Mac, right? But even... So, yes, you're right. So, I have a USB 3 hub that has a couple little ports on it. So I tried, alright, maybe what if I connect USB 3 hub to a Thunderbolt hub and then connect a USB 2 device into the USB 3 hub so that it was like, maybe it's translating the USB 2 back and maybe it will upstream to the hub over 3.

2:01:13I was trying all that. No matter what, if USB 2 devices were in that Thunderbolt hub, they would not be recognized by the computer at all. And I was like, am I going crazy? And I would try different things and I'm like, didn't it work that one time on the other laptop but then I couldn't get it to work again? When I tried it again, I'm like, what happened? What is this? What OSs are these laptops running? My main one is running the non-26 one and my travel one is running 26. And so I'm like, what? What is this? Now, that's all the information I had. What are your guesses? because I did eventually figure out something about it, but what are your guesses at this point?

2:01:54Power supply. Casey? No, I don't think it's a power supply. I don't know what it is, but I don't think it's a power supply. I mean, I feel like there's something about, I mean, obviously, there's something about the fact that it's USB 2, and I'm thinking about how on the TS5, which I know you're not using, but on the CalDigit TS5 Plus particularly, which is what I'm now using, there's a different like usb controller for different pieces of the hub and i think it's running two different usb controllers and i feel i have this vague notion that it's something in that direction but i i got freaking nothing other than that i mean really it's a power supply because that's something you haven't mentioned yet but really like i if i was uh narrowing this down which i have done with like my mouse and stuff oh i would always strip it down to zero devices then one device like i would want to know which one of the things is causing the problem rather than it sounded like you were very often hooking up all your devices through various things and be like no get everything off of this it's just a computer it's just a keyboard it's just a single cable and then build up from there until it breaks and then then you'd figure out what the what the what the thing that's causing the problem is but right and i was doing that but what would happen is like as soon as i would plug anything any usb2 device that would have to be routed through a thunderbolt hub it would not work anymore unless that hub was the xdr's hub even when it was just one even it was just one device yes even if i ran the xdr through a different thunderbolt hub and then into the laptop so daisy chain that worked too like if the xdr was hosting the usb2 device on one of its ports this all worked just fine which single usb device did you use to determine this did you use apple's keyboard use the incase keyboard i was using usually i was using one of the sound devices anyway i always say power supply because the in these devices especially hubs but even like external hard drives and stuff the weakest part of it is the thing that converts uh alternating current to direct current those things if they get wonky and start providing too low voltage briefly and do or just get bad it's not the fault of the hub technically but it's just not getting enough power and so things can be disconnecting or freaking out or whatever but you've tried so many hubs that's probably not it well at one point I like unwired the whole setup and like again pull everything from scratch right and I like move something around oh were you using the same wires when you were swapping in the hubs one of them was the same oh you don't even have cats the the thunderbolt cable that ran between the laptop and the hub which is Apple it's the one that comes with the XDR the it's like you know the the braided two meter long because that's like it's kind of a long run like runs along the whole side of the desk so and it's the only cable i had that was that length your standing desk that moves well that part is fixed that part doesn't go up and down all right um but anyway so that's the only thunderbolt cable i had that's longer than like a foot and a half so it's the only one that can make the run so i was using that one cable for all these tests except the one time i plugged in the other laptop when it worked for a second i couldn't i couldn't reproduce your experiment design is a little shoddy here this cable again it's like the apple pro xdr cable it works for everything else except suddenly when the sculpt keyboard died it then stopped working for usb 2 devices being sent over thunderbolt that are not put into the xdr now i i have no idea why and i even i have a cable tester i have this is what i was about to say because yeah now that you say that to me the yeah the cable cable cue yeah because as you're talking just now i wish i had come up with this a while ago but just now i'm thinking to myself wait a second i'm pretty sure usb2 rolls on different pins it's on a thunderbolt cable so that's It may be the only thing that's using those wires.

2:05:54But here's the thing. Maybe I'm missing something about how this works. When you plug in something into a Thunderbolt hub, the Thunderbolt hub is like a big PCI device, right? Isn't the USB controller on that hub translating the USB pins to the devices into PCI? I think it's more of a tunneling thing where it reserves lanes for plain old USB 2 somewhere in there. I don't know. I don't know the technical details. Like, I don't think that you're sending the USB 2 data pins over the Thunderbolt cable coming from a hub. Well, anyway, I would say that if you have determined that you have a bad cable, no amount of tunneling is going to save you, probably, unless it actually entirely avoids those conductors.

2:06:38but well so here's the thing so i tested with my cable queue this great little cable tester i tested the cable that seemed to be the problem and sure enough it says like it says cable health zero percent like whatever that means charging power zero and it says like is that good i i don't think so but then under the specs like it only lists usb4 and alternate mode it does not list any of the backwards compatible USB modes. I'm like, okay, but it's a Thunderbolt cable. And this is, you know, because of the age of the XDR, this is like a Thunderbolt 3 cable, I believe. So this is before USB and Thunderbolt were united.

2:07:19So you could have, like, USB 4, they're all united. A USB 4 cable should also do Thunderbolt 4 and 3 over it. But a Thunderbolt 3 cable might not have the pins to also do USB. so this tester was that was verifying okay it has thunderbolt basically but not old usb modes but like but again that's been fine for years it has worked for years it was only when that keyboard died that it stopped working so i'm like maybe it fried something so anyway then i test one of the cal digit cables like one of the true uh usb4 thunderbolt 4 cable and of course every light on the tester lights up it passes every possible test and i use that and it works i'm like what changed but i'm like well i go online and i'm like well amazon can deliver me tomorrow morning a brand new one of these cables i'm like okay i still need a long thunderbolt cable so i don't like run cables in a weird way across my desk so i still need a long cable i still need to buy a new one so all right let me get the same apple cable again like now it's officially i think it's like labeled usb4 or whatever but like let me get the same cable again so i got the replacement cable the next morning sure enough replacing the cable in the exact same run works perfectly so i'm like oh cool let me get my cable tester and see what's different is it an active cable uh no i don't think so it's hard to tell these days because the chips are really small but actually cable we need it has tiny microchips in the ends of the connectors to help with the transfer very long cables usually well i think all thunderbolt cables have that but I'm not sure all, but anyway.

2:08:55But when a thermal cable says, I believe thermal cables can also, I think, have like optics, like fiber optics for certain lengths. I don't know. Anyway. Yeah, but even the electronic ones, they have tiny chips in there and the chips are very small, so it's hard to tell whether they're in there. And obviously if those chips go wrong, your cables can have problems. Yeah, but so I got the replacement cable. The tester tests it exactly the same. What? so i cannot figure out what has changed about the bad cable whatever it is this tester does not distinguish it from the new cable yeah i would imagine that tester absolutely can't handle active cables but who knows i don't know but like it's well it handles all the other ones anyway so all this is to say i still have no idea what happened i still have no idea what about the cable went bad such that usb 2 devices would only work if plugged in through a pro display xdr's hub and no other hubs i i this this was the hardest to figure out problem i have ever had on my home computer and i i still don't know the answer i've at least just worked around it by just replacing this cable but like this is the most bizarre thing ever and so anyway um that that's where that's where we are now i still i i'm still using that apple keyboard i did not go back to the sculpt i'm gonna i'm i'm kind of testing to see you should go back to the the keyboard that you thought went bad and try that first i already threw it away oh maybe it was fine it could have been just the cable that was bad my theory is like because it was like dying in like with the with like the key misses and stuff because it was dying in the way those always die i think it was just dying i've like i've as i've as i've killed like five of these over the years like i i've seen exactly this pattern happen so it's very likely the keyboard was dying and it was about time for this one um but i think i think when it died i think it is something really weird to the stuff it was connected to and i think something got fried or something along the way god knows what happened uh but things got very messed up and it all came down to this one cable like the upstream cable between thunderbolt hub and the laptop and i have no idea why well yeah again not even knowing whether the cable is an active cable doesn't let you know whether you could potentially blame the tiny microchips that are in the ends of the connector if they exist or not well again i think on thunderbolt cables i believe there are always microchips in the end it's just a question of maybe of like what kind but there's always but But if those start to do weird things, like that's the type of thing you're not going to be able to debug from the outside very easily because how can you tell whether the chip is working right?

2:11:40And you'd probably have to know more about the protocols and stuff to understand how the chain of stuff is configuring itself and yada yada. But in the end, it doesn't really matter why it's going wrong. You want to get it down to the problem. And I think you would narrow it down eventually to that cable because replacing it. Although buying the exact same cable again, I would have maybe bought a different one. But, you know, it worked for years with that cable. So I suppose. yeah and like and you know it's also you know it's it's still it worked for all these years and i think the apple cable it was the only cable i could find that was anywhere near this length like it's i think it's like 1.8 meters or something like it's not most of them are like either two meters or you know like 0.6 or something like it it's there it's a weird length and it happens to fit like the run that i have for it it fits so perfectly so i'm like i i don't want to get anything else but anyway and it looks nice and you know this is like it's one of the only cables that's visible behind my monitor so i want it to look nice um so it's anyway i'm it's finally it's finally done well next time yeah next time uh come up with a uh more regimented experiment design that it will get you to this answer sooner and strip it down to nothing and then slowly add things back and change all variables different you did a different laptop you did different keyboard you didn't think to do different cable till the end i was expecting this to be some sort of interference related thing like you and i were fighting with my xlr cable the other day uh but no turns out it's just i mean or it could have been like the uh the cable gets caught in one of the uh hinges of your standing desk and gets shredded or a cat chews through it or there's all sorts of cable related uh things that can go wrong nope allusion to cats and that So when I wire a standing desk, I put all the wires that are important and that are actually useful.

2:13:30Like I put all of the wiring that I can somehow attached in, on, or under the desk so that the wires all move with the desk. The only wires that go downward from the desk to the floor are power and network. That's it. And everything, like I have, like there's a whole surg strip like mounted in the desk or under the desk. Like whenever I do a desk, that's what I do. So that way, the entire setup moves up and down, and you only need a little bit of slack in the power cable and the network cable. Yeah, that's the plan, but, you know, cable gets loose, flops down, gets caught between two pieces when the thing has gone up and down.

2:14:03You know, it happens.