660: It’s All Chicken Salad

34:50But the main thing is it makes it really hard for it to fall off in everyday use. So it's much more secure. You don't have like your wallet constantly popping off the back of your phone. It also, you know, because it has this big cutout, it's also just a nice minimal, you know, case. Like you still get the protection around the edges where it really matters, around the corners and everything around the camera. But overall, you save bulk, you save weight, and you have a big window, if you're not using a MagSafe accessory, to see the color of your phone. You got the nice new orange phone, you want to see that color, right?

35:21You can see the beauty of the phone, you can see the Apple logo, all that stuff. So it's nice. So OpenCase, it's a great option for cases. There's no vendor lock-in or anything. You don't have to buy their accessories. Everything fits in there that reasonably can, but it's a great option. I really think, honestly, I'm going to order one and try it because it looks pretty cool. And I'm always looking for a good case. And this was a great one. So you can see for yourself by going to theopencase.com. It's theopencase, theopencase.com. Use promo code ATP for 10 % off. That's theopencase.com, promo code ATP for 10 % off.

35:57Thanks to Open Case for sponsoring our show.

36:03All right. With regard to last week's Ask ATP question about filling SSD and particularly iPhone storage, David Schaub writes, my iPhone 8 got full once, resulting in a reboot loop whenever springboard loaded. Yikes. The solution, accept a call from the lock screen, add a person, type in the passcode, go to control center, try and change the Wi-Fi, go into Wi-Fi settings, and then once you're in settings, delete all the things. Never let, David continues, never let an iPhone have less than about five gigs of free space. Why does iOS let you fly so close to the sun? Recovery should have a boot directly to settings option.

36:39Don't make the phones angry. They don't like it. Nope. Additionally, with regard to phones, Mike Taffet did some science, which was very kind of him. Mike writes, I just transferred from an iPhone 17 Pro Max to an iPhone 17 Pro, both wired via two and a half gigabit Ethernet adapters that also take in power through a 10 gigabit, or 10 gigabit, excuse me, ubiquity switch. neither device ran out of power but also the unify interface interface allowed me to see the bandwidth being used by each port it seems this transfer was running on average about 500 to 600 megabits per second so for simplicity i don't see any reason why wi-fi isn't the best option again the usb port is 10 gigabits this was running at five to six hundred megabits probably because it was transferring lots of small files yeah uh then we have some feedback with regard to marco's USB Odyssey, this was Marco figuring out that or just discovering that you couldn't plug in a USB 2 device to your Thunderbolt hub, right?

37:35Is that a fair summary? Yeah, if any USB 2 device that was plugged in through any Thunderbolt hub in any method, except through the Pro Display XDR's back ports would not work anymore. And I had traced the problem to a bad cable that once I changed out the cable that ran from the Thunderbolt hub to the laptop, the problem was fixed. Jack Wolborn writes, I had a Thunderbolt cable fail on me a little over a year ago, and while it wasn't the same symptoms that Marco had, it did involve only some devices working. In my case, it was the USB devices that worked and the Thunderbolt ones that didn't. Sid Polk writes, I'm starting to think that Tahoe and the latest version of Sequoia made a change in the Thunderbolt or USB that breaks older USB or Thunderbolt hubs.

38:17My OWC Thunderbolt 4 hub stop serving usb my caldigit 3 at work now kernel panics my mac unless i unplug all of my usb devices i bought a caldigit ts5 for my m1 mac max macbook pro and it works flawlessly fabian writes uh in this fabian was arguably the best person to describe what they were talking about but we heard this from a lot of people and i should have thought of this as well uh but anyway fabian writes my usb extension cable came with a sticker that reads quote usb 2.0 low speed devices such as a mouse, keyboard, USB 2.0 flash drive, USB 2.0 of hub, etc. This is not Fabian's fault, this is the sticker.

38:53Can only work with one side of the ultra high rate extension cables interface. If USB 2.0 devices do not work as you expected, please flip the type C connector over and connect again. So Fabian writes, maybe that's why you had inconsistent results with the same hardware, an inadvertently flipped connector. Additionally, Keith Heaton provided a pinout or whatever you would like to call it a pin diagram of the USB-C connector. And we will put a link to that in the show notes. And it says, Keith writes, USB-2 data runs on the A6 and A7 or B6 and B7 pins of a type C connector. If only the A bank or B bank has an issue, you might be able to keep using that expensive cable by rotating the connector 180 degrees.

39:31So the hub and the computer are both using the functional bank. Even without a cable tester, there are only four possible combinations. This is worth noting as well. So in my tailgate tub that we've talked about in the past, I have a GLI net router that can take in tethering, including via phone, via a USB-A connector. But on the front of the tailgate tub, I put in USB-C connectors. And so internal to the tailgate tub, I have a C to A line, cable, whatever. And I've noticed that I need to make sure that I connect it the exact same way. So I drew on the connector, you know, with like a silvery Sharpie that shows up in the black connector, which side needs to be on which side of the input on the tailgate tub.

40:14So basically I'm connecting the two sides correctly because I found, wait, why is this not working? Why is this not working? Why is this? Oh, flip. There it goes. Works perfectly now. And I didn't think of this when we were recording, but I should have. So my apologies to you, Marco. Well, I mean, if it makes you feel any better, I would not accept that solution. because yeah what it basically says is like if one side's pins go bad or whatever part of that controller like if one side of pins goes bad the other side might still work so flip it over and try it that to me is not a solution the solution is replace the thing that is bad because i'm not gonna like it because it'd be one thing like if this is the kind of thing like it's if it's part of my setup that I just plug it in once and it stays there for years maybe I tolerate that but this is like when I take my laptop to go somewhere I unplug this cable and bring it somewhere and then when I get back I plug this cable back into the laptop and I would not tolerate it working half the time and having to flip it over for that situation but to be clear that's not really the cable's fault as far as I understand it's just circumstantially there's USB 2 pins on both sides and perhaps no but they're but they're duplicated that so theoretically it should be able to like you should be able to plug in a usbc or thunderbolt cable in either direction on either end of the cable and everything should work if everything is working properly it does not matter which direction you plug it in what they're saying basically is like sometimes things don't work properly and it and it can start to matter but in that case like something is broken and so you know consider replacing it or that thing with the sticker that fabian sent is probably they left out two conductors to save money right exactly they're trying to say don't bother with that which to me is broken yeah and there was someone else wrote in i don't have the details of it it was just like wrote in uh just a couple of hours ago about the idea of a dedicated like the usb2 alternate mode where you have dedicated uh pins on the thunderbolt cable just for usb uh but the other version is where you don't you use that alternate mode and you tunnel everything through thunderbolt in theory is that the xdr is tunneling everything through pcie and thunderbolt whereas the cheaper hubs and of the things are using the usb alternate mode and having dedicated wires which is why if if those if one set of those four wires one pair of those four wires went bad on your cable yeah maybe it would work flipped but i would definitely get a new cable uh then with regard to active versus passive thunderbolt cables uh this was such a nightmare there's there's like three things in here but it's because i thought i thought we'll get one thing in here someone said a thing i'm like let me try to get an authoritative source and then you'll see it just goes down this terrible rabbit hole where there's no straightforward answer, but we'll try to give you three buckets of information, see if you can reconcile them without reading the freaking Thunderbolt spec.

42:59So on OWC's website, they write that Thunderbolt 3 cables longer than seven-tenths of a meter are active cables which do not support DisplayPort. Thunderbolt 3 cables that are one meter or longer, there are passive cables which are 20 gigabit Thunderbolt 3. They support 10 gigabit USB display port and works with the usb c display directly active cables are up to 40 gigabit thunderbolt 3 up to 480 megabit usb does it does support display port but it does not work with usb ck display directly so even that this is owc like they're a big hardware manufacturer for mac stuff you figure they're what they know what they're talking about they're pretty authoritative source right it already from these two bullet points they're contradictory thunderbolt cables longer than 0.7 meters are active but then it tells me about a passive cable that's that's one meter or longer but it's 20 gigabits like that they're two bullet points contradict each other if i have one meter cable well i'm sure that it has to be active because it says if they're longer than 0.7 meters they're active except when they're passive but then they're 20 gigabits but then they have 10 gigabit usb but if you have a 40 gigabit one that's active then you only have 480 megabits usb sure that's just owc then then i'm like because originally i came up with a reddit result but like no let me find something more authoritative let me go to owc but nope now i'm going back to Reddit.

44:15All right. So there's a Reddit comment from LaughingMan11 on active versus passive Thunderbolt cables, which reads, cables rated at 40 gigabits per second with a length of 0.8 meters of all kinds, Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 4, USB 4, are 100 % guaranteed to be passive. If you see 40 gigabits certified cable at 0.8 meters or shorter, it is a passive cable. For distances between 0.8 and 2 meters, some cables are actually certified passive cables. I've seen cable manufacturers stretch and make one meter 40 gigabit per second passive cables with no problems. They managed to squeeze the extra two tenths of a meter and keep up the signal integrity just fine.

44:54So, again, there's more info in that post. I just pulled this out. But at least it sounds very authoritative. And, you know, Laughing Man is a reference from an anime series that I like. So I'm on board with Laughing Man 11 from Reddit versus OWC, the company. But at least it's not self-contradictory, these two points. You know, and it does really outline that it is possible to have passive cables. In fact, passive cables that are longer than you would expect. Then, with all things, we turn to Wikipedia, and Wikipedia writes, Copper Thunderbolt 4 cables of up to 1 meter are passive cables, while longer cables must integrate active signal conditioning circuitry.

45:242 meters maximum is the length of active cables available for most brands, including CalDigit, Cable Matters, etc., while Apple is currently the only company that offers a 3-meter active copper cable. It's madness. I dare you to Google this. Notice how all the numbers change? one meter point point zero point eight zero point seven some companies have been extended to this thing active passive how fast things go the only thing i took from this stupid adventure that i spent so long wandering through uh and i found way more than just owc reddit and wikipedia but this is a sampling is that passive thunderbolt cables exist that's it that's all i can come away with and they're probably short we were sponsored this episode by squarespace the on one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.

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48:26They've come pretty far since I last checked them out. Their software stack looks very Synology-ish, sometimes down to the exact same name brand apps or similar looking apps. And the other thing QNAP has going for them is that they support ZFS, which I like. It is the thing about ZFS. And I looked at this when I was looking at the QNAP stuff. It's got way more features than it's got lots of cool features. It's got the automatic self-healing replication. It's got tons and tons of options. but it is very enterprising in that it is farther from the drobo dream than uh than the synology setup the drobo dream people don't remember drobo was you buy this big box full of drives and whenever you need more storage you add another drive of any size you feel like and it just adds the to the space and it maintains whatever level of data protection that you had and it dies disastrously right well that was the the pitch right because that that appeals to consumers consumers aren't going to buy fleets of things with giant hard drives that are like Like, I'm just going to buy as many drives as I can afford.

49:27And later when I want more space, I'll buy another drive or whatever I can afford and stick it in. And I don't have to have all the drives be the same size or make subgroups or make separate VDEVs and add them to the ZFS RAID Z pool. And like, I don't want to think about that. I just want to buy a drive for whatever amount of money I have and stick it in. Three years later, do the same thing and stick it in. And I want data protection, whatever data protection I picked when I set up this array, I want that data protection to be maintained as I add drives. And I don't care what size they are. um and that is not what zfs delivers zfs wants you to add things in a more regimented manner it wants it's not as flexible when you add things you can't always add any drive of any size sometimes it does want you you can't add like drives in pairs and add new uh things to your pool like there are ways to to get some more flexibility than just like you have to replace every drive like a traditional raid but it's it's more fidgety but anyway i do like zfs but then i looked at the prices and qnap stuff is just as expensive as synology so it's like i mean maybe not as expensive i think they have like better cpus and more ram for the same as synology's prices but anyway qnap if you're looking for alternative synology just looking at their product offerings they seem to be the closest thing to synology that i've seen their software stack really does look like they're copying everything that synology has in a good way and they have the option of using zfs you don't have to use zfs you can use plain old raid you you can do zfs anyway i was impressed with how far qnap has come also some other recommendations people had for us were ugreen which is the company that i just think of as making like usb hubs and ethernet hubs and stuff like that but they apparently make nas hardware now too unraid is a software solution then there's free nas true nas there's tons of options for you out there depending on how much stuff you want to do but qnap look like the same type of solution as synology and that like you give us money we take care of everything like it's not diy it's not like you can get down nitty gritty and do like fancy stuff with zfs but if you just want to buy like an appliance and use an interface to set it up qnap will do that for you and it does have features that synology doesn't because it has zfs cool uh that's all very useful and i appreciate all the feedback from everyone but i have news as of about 24 hours from now or thereabouts synology has mostly backtracked on their uh complete refusal to work with third-party drives so that's an The Synology Europe thing we had last episode was right.

51:48It turns out. A stray YouTube comment from the official Synology at Europe account. Who'd thunk it? So Synology released DiskStation Manager 7.3 DSM, is their operating system, if you will. And their press release reads, Synology is currently collaborating closely with third-party drive manufacturers to accelerate the testing and verification of additional storage drives and will announce more updates as soon as possible. In the meantime, 25 model year DiskStation Plus, Value, and J-Series running DSM 7.3 will support the installation and storage pool creation of non-validated third-party drives.

52:20This provides greater flexibility while Synology continues to expand the lineup of officially verified drives that meet long-term reliability standards. However, the creation of M.2-based storage pool and cache still requires drives from the HCL. I have no idea what that means, but... On the hardware compatibility list. So basically the asterisk, it was a footnote one saying, we'll support the creation of non-validated third-party drives. Footnote. and the footnote was yeah except for m.21 so there's more detail from this space recs youtube channel here all right so from space recs youtube uh the m2 nvme restrictions are still in place due to the highly diverse m2 nvme market in wide variation we've seen many instances where consumer grade m2 ssds with low endurance performance and quality combined with poor firmware implementations have directly contributed to system instability and data loss and that's directly from synology this was the space recs uh youtuber asking synology hey what's the deal why can't we use arbitrary third-party NVMe flash drives?

53:17And that's Synology Exploration. Still only the approved list for those. And then Lee Hutchinson at ArtsTechnica writes, we asked Synology whether the requirements will also be lifted from previous generation Synology products, and the answer to that question appears to be a no. Quote, this change only affects the 25 series models, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Models in the XS Plus line are considered a business or enterprise model and will remain under the current HCL policy for our business lines. sinology explained you got hcl is not hydrochloric acid but uh hardware compatibility list so this is this is why i said they mostly backtracked they're they're trying to have their cake and eat it too they like their enterprise product lines as xs plus line still only sinology validated drives old pre-2025 products and that is sinology products that don't end in 25 because all their products like ds725 ds225 those are all 2025 products uh if you have a product that's not a 2025 product you're not included in this either uh it's only exactly what the press release says which is the um only running dsm 7.3 and it's the plus value in j series which i imagine are what consumers buy right so they're trying to say enterprises with lots of money we still want to sell you overpriced storage because that's what every storage company enterprise does like it's how you know these big companies make a lot of their money but for consumers because you all got mad at us we will let you do this but only if you buy a new 2025 thing or you have one of the really older ones if you got caught in that middle thing too bad for you which is still kind of crappy like i'm saying like if you're gonna if you're gonna walk this back walk it back all the way they want they're walking it back halfway which is better than nothing but still not great yeah i i'm not sure what to make of this that is probably enough to make me consider going i'm saying going back as though i've left but you know whenever the time comes that i replace my like two-year-old model this if this continues for the home market i'd probably stick with technology but it's certainly kind of put a gross taste in my mouth and we'll see how long that lasts yeah a lot of the youtubers a lot of the various people reporting on this news for like had uh in typically typically youtube fashion would come right out and say this is because their sales got destroyed when they did this and it's like do you have their sales numbers like citation needed as they say in wikipedia like probably their sales went down we know that there was lots of people complaining about it but like they just definitively say it's because their sales were you know in the toilet it's like well you know like i would like to see something anyway they the bottom line is they want to sell to enterprises everyone who sells to enterprises makes you buy their storage like you buy like emc or i think dell owns them now hour i'll do the big like i had to deal with all these vendors and doing like a uh what do you call vendor uh evaluation for lots of big storage vendors for a big storage project back when i had a jobby job so i got to hear all their sales pitches and they all want to sell you just the most expensive hard drives you've ever seen in your entire life like it's like apple with ram and storage like storage that's where all their margins come from and you can see why synology wants to do that too their mistake was thinking they could also apply that to that to people who want to have like a two drive nas in their basement or something and that has not worked out so i think qnap is probably reaching reaping the benefits um i would definitely uh consider trying them but now this analogy is backtracking mostly on this and if i ever buy no one it'll be a 2025 model or later i'm like i'll probably just stick with synology All right.

56:41Let's do some more first impressions. but I actually have a very quick bit of, I guess it's sort of kind of follow up. Sorry, John, about the AirPods pro three. After hearing the discussion about, Oh, you should try the bigger tips. I thought to myself, you know what? I should try the bigger tips. What's it going to hurt? And even though I didn't feel like the tips were not snug in my ears, I thought, let me give it a whirl. And I've tried the bigger tips, which I think there's only one step larger, if I'm not mistaken, in the box from what they have mounted on the, on the, on the device. and you can option into one size larger, if I'm not mistaken.

57:13And I tried that. And I got to tell you, they fit. They fit just fine. And who'd have thunk it? The ANC got just a touch better. I wouldn't say it was bad before. I wouldn't say it's night and day better than the AirPods Pro 2, but it's definitely a touch better. So even if you don't think you need the bigger tips, give it a shot. Can't hurt. Just like Marco was saying earlier. Marco, you have some case updates for us. I do, yeah. So in the intervening time, last episode of this one, um i have tried three new iphone 17 pro cases um as i wait for my sutti leather back to be delivered ever i don't i don't even think it has shipped yet i think i need to email them oh speaking of your leather back by the way did you see that person who had your leather back and just cut the top off of it i meant to say that when you were talking about cutting the cutting the top off of one of your older cases but did you see that person's post yeah i mean certainly that person did a much better job than i did but but you were you were using a a leather back for an earlier phone oh right sticking it on your 17 this person took the the leather back for the 17 pro that you returned and just cut the top off of that one i'm done rebuying things i've returned i don't want to i just i just don't know if you saw it because it like it looked pretty good again i don't know how well if maybe those little things lifted up i'm trying to find i mean they seem to have a lot better dremel skills than i have um so there there's looked a lot better than i think mine would but there it is omar shaheen um yeah it's looking pretty good i mean i again i don't know if those little pointy bits i'll send you the link to i don't know if those little pointy bits might catch under your finger or whatever but it just that i immediately thought of that when you're talking about chopping up your things last time and i forgot to mention yeah i'm hoping the sudi leather case comes also like what i'm what i'm also hoping to see i don't know if this will exist because it seems like the the market for like leather magnetically attached phone backs that don't have any side protection seems like a pretty small market i mean it is kind of a weird thing like people usually buy cases for protection not back grip but true and i i also i did try um i found some amazon seller for like seven dollars they were selling this some kind of like gel uh back like oh my like like a stick-on decal that you'd stick on the back jelly shoes for your uh phone it was horrific um i did have from for my casey goose trip i did have just a cheap clear case um from torras t-o-r-r-a-s from amazon it was it was relatively inexpensive i think like under 20 dollars um and it's like a basic clear tpu case no magsafe support um so it does you know it did kind of ruin magsafe's strength um but it was cheap and it would it was it would come the next morning so i tried it it was fine um the only the only thing i don't like about the about the torres clear case is that the lip around the camera plateau is very tall and so it which makes sense like it helps it stand off the table better but it kind of protrudes and makes like an outline on your pocket in your jeans like you can see the rim around the camera mesa as its own outline and i didn't i didn't love that but it can't beat the value yeah on that topic of the of the having tall rings around the mesa i've seen a lot of people complaining about this and i don't think people have have thought it through they're like uh they made this big full width camera mesa plateau thing but the cameras still stick out from it so when i put it on the table it still rocks because the cameras stick out uh you know more on the side where the the three lenses are than the side that doesn't have any lenses they're like why didn't they just make it flat all the way across if there was first of all the cameras are not sticking out just for the hell of it that's how deep they are that's what they can fit there's the screen on the other side of them those are the cameras believe me there is no empty space that they're wasting inside there and given that if you made the iconic plateau even with the tops of the camera lenses all the way across that would look like this case that you're describing it would be huge like you don't realize how prominent that sort of five head would be to borrow a phrase from the flop house it would just be gigantic and granted they could probably put more stuff in there or whatever but like i don't think you want that like it's a shame that the camera lenses stick out as far as they do, but you don't want the whole plateau to be even with the tips of the cameras because that would just be very top heavy and weird and leave weird prints in your jeans.

1:01:28Well, interesting that you mentioned that though. There actually is a slightly better solution, but I'll get to that in a second. So I also tried John's favorite, the bull strap case with the open bottom. This is a nice leather case. I got the black one. It looks very nice on the phone and with the open bottom you still get to see the nice orange strip of your phone on the bottom which i found to be a nice feature um i don't like the way bull strap partially covers up the camera mesa i like when cases leave the mesa itself like the full round rect shape and don't try to like just leave the cameras open in a square and then have like you know the two holes for the two things on the on the right although in this particular phone because as we noted on an earlier episode, that sharp edge around the camera plateau is the place where the anodization will come off.

1:02:15And the bull strap case does protect that whole sharp edge with leather. It does. And the bull strap, the way the case like rises up around that, it doesn't create any sharp or like, you know, blunt edges. Everything is rounded. Yeah, that's one of the things I like about my 16 Pro bull strap case is that the thing around the camera is kind of smooth and slanted and leather it's not a plastic frame a metal flame a champ chamfered metal frame you know like lots of cases do that that i don't like feeling that on the back of the phone i like it to be smooth up there my wife's got the bull strap case too and i don't like how it looks when it covers that the the fold with plateau but i do like the protection it provides and the fact that it's leather like in more places yeah honestly the it looks like a car bra it really does like going back to our very first podcast together like it looks exactly like a car bra but it has the opposite because it will protect the thing under it instead of getting grit under there and causing abrasions and having it all yeah but it's i i wish it was more open but anyway otherwise the bull strap case is pretty nice the leather feels fantastic it's a great quality leather um even like after only a couple days of use it it already feels amazing um the black i think is a really nice color combo with the orange uh and overall i'm very happy with the bull strap except that the sleep wake button is not a good button feel yeah the buttons aren't great this year on the bull strap case yeah that and that really hurts it like it's it's the kind of thing like you know you push sleep wake and like you think it pushed but you don't really you don't really feel that click the way you do with a good button so like double clicking it to like for apple pay or something like it feels awful you also might have a you might have a bad one like there i think like the quality control of the buttons is variable because again the buttons on my bull strap case from the 16 pro they're okay my wife's buttons i think are worse than mine but they're still clicky so i mean i don't think you want to return it or whatever but like no i don't want to go through that but their buttons like something i've heard about the apple case was it the apple cases they said like the buttons are much improved this year or whatever like the the tech woven good buttons versus bad buttons there's a wide gap with cases and it's very difficult to tell what you're getting by looking at the pictures on the website yeah apple tends to have the best buttons um like that that's just the reality of their cases like if you want the clear cases like the buttons on a clear apple clear case compared to the buttons on an apple like like the tech woven or fine woven huge difference because the clear case yes that kind of has to be like all one thing and they're not great that's true yeah yeah the clear case it's not nearly as good as the others but um yeah overall bull strap best looking case i've seen uh best feeling leather i have found in a long time in a case but the buttons are not amazing open bottom is great uh covered up plateau is less great so it's kind of of a mixed bag, but overall a very strong showing.

1:04:56And then finally, I have for the last few days been using the Peak Design case. I got that in a couple days ago, so I've been trying that out. I've had great success with these in previous phones. And the Peak Design, if you've ever used the Peak Design phone case, it's the same case. It's like they just keep making the same thing over and over again. But that's a good thing. It's a good case. I really like the Peak Design case. there's a couple things about that i don't but mostly it's a very positive uh so first of all i think it looks fantastic like this is this is the material that tech woven wishes it was but it's not i don't know why but peak design material um they do have a couple of material choices i still get like the gray one that has like the original like nice gray weave um the other choices are getting poor reviews um so i would say be careful with those but if you get like the like the woven texture ones it's the same old texture they've always had and it's great The rim around the camera plateau is a little bit pokey, but not nearly as bad as the cheap case.

1:05:57And it doesn't stick up quite as far overall. So it's overall like a nicer ratio for that. You do slightly see the outline in a pocket, but it's much more subtle. I love having the little square indentation on the back to kind of put your finger in as you're like resting the phone in your grip. it kind of serves as like an inverse pop socket in that way um it does have a covered up bottom but it does not obstruct like the speakers in any meaningful way you know charging cables even like the thick anchor cables go in it just fine um the buttons feel great peak design buttons are almost as good maybe even as good as apple's buttons they're very very good they have a camera control button this year um which is also so did the bull strap by the way both of those camera control buttons are very very good um the torres cheap clear case does not have a camera control button it just has a cutout um but bull strap and peak design great camera control buttons they feel good they're easy to push they click in nicely um so overall peak design is good the only the main downside of the peak design case uh is that it's just bulky uh and that's just their cases have always been this way it's a trade-off it is not super slim it is not super lightweight it does cover up most of the orange of the phone, although you do see the entire camera plateau, which is nice.

1:07:15So it's a mixed bag. The Peak Design case, it's like the mid-sized SUV of phone cases. It will take you anywhere you need to go. It is overall, if you're going to have one case on your phone all year round and you want it to be relatively protective, you want it to be able to get wet unlike leather and still be okay, the Peak Design case is a great choice. that if you does it not have a lip uh around the screen that sticks out farther than the screen it does it just it's not very tall i mean it's a pretty shallow look at some of the reviews and stuff for the older cases they're complaining that there's the lip isn't enough to essentially like if you put your phone face down that your screen will actually be touching it versus like no the bull strap case for instance a grain of salt could very easily be on the table and not touch your screen if you put a screen face down in the bull strap case no the peak design case actually i'll compare them for you the peak design case it it does have a raised lip it's not a very tall raised lip um but it definitely does have it here i'll pop it into the bull strap now let's see stop taking your phone in out of cases you're upsetting me i i get my phone to be used i don't care if it gets like minor little dust here and there no it's every time you put it in out of the case you're risking you're stretching out the case you're making the fit worse and you're risking probably not risking bending your phone but i would say the bull strap is about the same depth maybe the bull strap might be a little bit taller ridge around it but not it's not a meaningful difference um but yeah overall i i would say bullstrap for formal occasions peak design for general utility and uh and you know a cheap clear case if you want you know clear view of the phone but ultimately i'm still waiting for a good leather back and i still like you know kind of more like minimal cases than these um but for now this is good um the peak design also for whatever it's worth if you have any needs for a strong mount on something like um if you have like a bike you want to mount your phone on your bike um peak design makes mounts like that for then they they latch in way stronger than magnets they latch into like the hole in the back of the case the square hole and it's like a physical latching mechanism so it's it's much stronger than anything magnetic that being said for whatever it's worth the peak design case also has by far the strongest mag safe strength i've ever seen in a case like when you put this on the mag safe puck when you want to take it off the puck you got to pull hard which is actually really nice in a lot of cases like i tried earlier in my car mount i tried to like jiggle it off the car mount to see like will it fall off amount and the entire mount moved before the phone did like it it's a very strong magnetic connection on the back of the peak design case way more than the bull strap and any other case i've ever had way more than the naked phone even and so if that's if that's a relevant thing to you, again, the Peak Design will probably win that comparison as well.

1:10:04So overall, it's a great overall case. It's just a bit bulky, but that's kind of the nature of it. And otherwise, it's very, very good. Cool. So you seem like you found at least a couple of winners. Yeah. I mean, like last year, I'm probably going to change it up throughout the year as seasons and needs change. But overall, I'm happy with what I have found. But I do wish that my Suti leatherback would ever ship i'm so sorry uh for what it's worth i got a considerable amount of amusement uh with aaron and marco tag teaming me on making fun of my blue phone and saying how much i should return it and get an orange phone oh my god i stand by i stand by my blue phone that's sometimes purple but occasionally blue i don't think i want an orange phone every time casey referred to the color of his phone on the trip it was resignation and slight displeasure and we're like you're within the return window you obviously don't like the color you picked just return it while you still can and get the one that you actually want well but i don't think i want i genuinely don't think i want the orange phone i just doesn't want to go through the phone transfer process also that also that very much that and i mean there are definitely times where i really really do like the look of this and the color of this.

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1:13:27Let's talk iOS 26 first impressions. And John, it seems like you would like to start, so please do. Because I didn't run iOS 26. You two have had it, obviously, for your betas of your apps and everything like that. but i was avoiding it because i had heard terrible things about it and you know i'm like i'll wait till the release version comes out oh quick update by the way the 26.1 beta 2 and tahoe beta 2 have made tethering less broken all right it will once you connect now it will stay connected but the the initial process of connecting now takes like three times longer because it can get into a state where the little circle next to the you know marco's iphone 17 pro like the tethering circle in the menu is lit up but then the menu bar item still shows like no wi-fi and you have to like deselect it and then reselect it for it to actually connect and make you connect it to the tethering so it's still a mess but at least like once you are connected at least it stays connected so it's less broken but still broken cool yeah so i installed i installed ios 26 when the release one came out i don't have the beta that marco was just referring to it and i'm not on the beta train i'm just on the release train so i'm running 26.0 uh and again i've been using tahoe since it was released in all the betas so i'm familiar with how that looks and i don't like it and how it works and i don't like it but whatever got to deal with my apps but i was 26 like i'd i'd seen all the screenshots i'd heard youtube talk about it i heard marco talk about it at length and his experience with his apps and everything but i didn't really quite know what to expect other than i would i knew that i wasn't going to like how it looked because i'd seen how it looked um so now having used it i don't know for a couple weeks now uh here's the few additional things i have to say about it on top of what you two have already said about it during the betas uh to find at least two nice things to say about ios 26 wow okay um first um in previous versions of ios uh various things especially in like top navigation and stuff like that like the back button or like um you know i don't know the the thing you hit to close a sheet or whatever the touch areas may have been the same size as they are in 26 but 26 due to its different style where it draws like if you have like an x button it draws a circle around it or if you have like a toolbar, it draws like an outline around it.

1:16:00The touch areas in iOS 26 look bigger. I don't know if they are bigger, but they look bigger because visually used to have like the word back and a little left facing Chevron. And I'm sure the touch area for that was probably huge, but you didn't see that because you just saw like the background that it's on and you saw the text and you felt like you had to tap the text and the text can be small. Like the capital B is big, but the ACK is small. And you're like, do I have to hit that? No, like the touch area was probably huge huge but it felt smaller with the big actual outlines around buttons like the big circle around the x or the big circle around a chevron or the big circular capsule shape around like a toolbar at the top or checkbox or whatever or a checkmark or whatever those touch targets feel bigger to me and i like that number two second nice thing in earlier versions of ios in the post ios 7 era when there was any kind of state change on touch like you touch that back button you touch the little x thing or whatever it was pretty subtle maybe the word back would change from light blue to dark blue or some other kind of highlighting type thing ios 26 usually the entire background of the thing that you hit does some stupid glowy effect right but it's not you you won't miss it like it's sitting there and when you touch it it like i don't know if hdr lights up but it like lights up and like this little transition and glow goes through it and there's an animation or whatever but that happens as soon as you touch it and imagine having things react to you activating them is a good thing in ui design one of the things that we kind of sort of lost in the ios 7 transition because that became so much more subtle so those are my two nice things to say about ios 26 oh no the touch targets feel like they're bigger even if they're not and more things that are buttons like that are button like in the ui make it clear when you hit them immediately as soon as your finger hits them they do their their highlight thing everything else is about it is what we've said before and in particular like i i felt like doing a blog post about this because i feel like the like the three like the three main sins of the 26 redesign not just ios but across all the platforms are like how it looks like subjective stuff which is like you might like it you might not but i don't so that's just the subjective thing um moving everything away from the edges like and you know the the whole like not having things go edge to edge and having them be inset in capsules and whatever the third one is that i put in my notes document that they can't remember now but like like those are like there there are a few fundamental oh and the third one i remember to me just showing stuff through behind you know like i can you know why do i need to see through this control to the content that's behind it or whatever right those are the three main sins as far as i'm concerned of the entire os redesign and we keep thinking like when they come up with the 20th anniversary phone or the folding phone with a wraparound edge to edge screen this this redesign will quote unquote make sense and i don't think that's true because all you'd have to do is change a safe area insets with the old design and it would make just as much sense like it's no you don't need them to be floating lozenges you don't need to see the content through them you don't need to see the content behind them but yeah those are the three main things that i object to this entire os design i think it's ugly your mileage will vary but just subjectively i think it's not attractive i think in you know in setting everything off the margins and making them floating and having to have margins around all the buttons waste space and is bad uh and the content that and it makes problems with the content being able to be seen not underneath the controls but around where there are no controls and then finally having the controls show content that's literally underneath them is a terrible mistake and those are the three big ones there's a lot of smaller nitpicks to pick but uh nothing about using the ios 26 has changed my mind about any of that it's just as bad as i thought it would be much like tahoe like i said about tahoe you get used to it it's fine like it's not a big deal i said this from like day one on tahoe like I hate how it looks.

1:19:57I think it's incredibly stupid, but it's fine. You survive. It's not the end of the world. It could be worse, right? And this is coming from someone who doesn't even like how it looks. And I feel that way about iOS 26. Now, on iOS 26, I have been, I'm still am, and have been trying to, like, just leave it on the defaults. Because I didn't want to be like, oh, day one, I'm putting on reduced transparency. I'm putting on, like, I just want to use it like it shipped, just so I have a legit experience from it. And so far, I'm mostly sticking with that. there are all sorts of situations where things are legible on the screen and like i i basically got burned out on those before the thing actually shipped because we've seen so many of them but they're real they come up like in particular one that blew me away on day one was like if you take a screenshot on ios 26 and then you look at that screenshot and the stupid photos app with the stupid ios 26 design guess what the screenshot which is a picture of your phone screen that It has like the time at the top on your battery shows right underneath the actual time on your screen and the battery when the screenshot is shown full screen.

1:20:55And why? Because the photos app has a completely transparent status bar that shows the photo underneath it. So you get to see the time. You get to see what the time was in the screenshot exactly superimposed on top of the actual time. And it just scrambles that whole top of the screen. It looks, it looks ridiculous. Like I just, I can't even believe that they shipped something. This was so dumb, but in, in the grand scheme of things, when that happens you pinch and you can see what time it really is and you know like there are always ways around it it's not the end of the world it's fine your phone will be fine and practically speaking I still haven't turned on reduced transparency I just deal with because I think it looks even uglier with reduced transparency honestly I just deal with the way it looks well also 26.0 has some pretty bad bugs with reduced transparency especially in dark mode yeah which I still continue to hear from customers every single day about i cannot wait for 26.1 to be lured to the public as long as they fix tethering first but yeah i cannot wait yeah i wish they would fix these other obvious things that are just like fundamental to design but it's like i don't know what they can do about it but anyway uh and then finally on the sort of keeping the default front there was lots of discussion on earlier episodes of youtube going back and forth about uh the whatever compact uh toolbar and safari at the bottom right you can have it be two stack and you get the immediate one tap access back to your tabs and stuff like that I've left it on the default just to see if I could tolerate it and the answer is yeah I mostly can I find myself using most often the double tap on the three dots button which is a nice gesture I think they it seems like it might just be a consequence of like oh actually you're just catching the animation in the process but I think they programmed that in I think they made sure that a double tap like I don't think you're catching the in transition animation of the pop-up menu I think they're just registering a two-tap gesture and doing it so I use double tap occasionally you swipe up from the little bar thingy um and the reason i haven't gone to the two stack is because i don't want more i don't want eating into even more of my space it's bad enough that i have that stupid useless area on the bottom where there's nothing then i have the floating toolbar uh i don't want to waste more space for the second row so yeah i've been using stock ios 26 i've been surviving it's fine except for all the parts where it's ridiculous and stupid And I hope that someone comes in and changes this in the next five to 10 years.

1:23:09Wow. Cool. All right. So I was in Memphis when iOS 26 dropped and I was around a bunch of Allsac employees. Again, Allsac, what is it? American, Lebanese, Syrian, something, something. I forget what it means. But anyways, it's a fundraising arm for St. Jude and Associated Charities. There you go. anyway so I would ask these like regular people what do you think of iOS 26 and did they have it on their phone or you asked them yes your phone no no their own phones and I think in fact I think a lot of them had it pushed to their work devices which they were not happy about but anyways for the most part the reaction was not great and the only consistent feedback I got that was that was specific was a lot of people really hated the way messages looked, particularly the lack of like a opaque bar at the top.

1:24:07And at least one or two people commented, and I have the same issue. A lot of times when I want to send a screenshot of a messages conversation, I want to send like a comment or two. Like I don't need the whole damn conversation. And what I would do in iOS 18 is if you're quick about it, you can scroll, scroll, scroll so that there's a big gap between the last message in the keyboard. And that would shove the last couple of messages all the way up to the top of the screen, right? And then you can take a screenshot and then crop that screenshot. So you've got the top of the screen, you've got the header in the navigation bar with who you're talking to, and the last couple of text messages sent.

1:24:42And I do that oftentimes to call attention to the specific context I want, or maybe it's private information that I'm not trying to share above that. But I do this not infrequently. And that is effectively impossible now, because there is no top navigation bar in the same sense that there was an 18. And what's there is translucent. And there were a handful of people that really didn't like that. So then I get home. I transfer Erin's old phone to her new one, which means she's getting iOS 26. And the first thing she said to me is, how in the name of Zeus's butthole do I close a tab in Safari? Not her words, but you get the idea.

1:25:17How do I close a tab in Safari? And I explained, well, you know, they really rejiggered everything, and I tried it for a few days. I couldn't handle it. I really did give it an honest thought, but I couldn't handle it. And so I went back to the best of my knowledge she hasn't yet, which probably relates to the fact that she has about 11 billion tabs on her phone. It drives me bananas, but it works for her. But the one positive feedback that she gave me, most of it, she was like, meh, whatever. But the positive bit of feedback she gave me, which I am also enjoying, but I think she's gotten genuinely quite a lot of love out of, is being able to see typing indicators in group text.

1:25:52Because Because it used to be you could see a typing indicator in one-to-one chats, including an RCS. But you can now get that in group chats on iMessage. And she was really, really into that. And I thought that was interesting. So that's my feedback. Has Tiff had anything interesting or worthwhile to note about it? No, she's basically been like, it's fine, whatever. Fair enough. Yeah, my kids haven't gotten it yet. They're going to get it with their new phone. So it'll be interesting to see what they think. Because, again, like I said, my daughter, when I put Tahoe on, quote-unquote, her laptop, which is not really hers.

1:26:22Wow. she did not like it she was like no no don't want don't want i'm like all right well you know then she's got a new laptop now that doesn't have tahoe on it and i had both my kids turn off auto updates before tahoe came out because they both expressed that they did not want it so now they don't have to get it uh eventually they probably will but anyway uh i bet they'll probably be fine with it on their phone but my daughter has complaints about a lot of things but eventually she gets over it it's just like i said i this is a blog post that i almost made like three times of just those three things that apparently I need to write better in my notes document of just like how it looks.

1:26:56I think it's ugly, moving things in from the edges and the fact that you can see through stuff. And those are the three like top level, top three sins of this design. And they spread to all the OSs and they're just, they're bad ideas. They're just bad ideas. And so, and we get to deal with them everywhere. And I mean, obviously the look, if you like the look, it's two bad ideas, right? But for me, it's three because I don't like how it looks. All right, tell me about iOS. or excuse me ipad os 26.1 john i'm even more wary about the other os is obviously uh like with the ipad i mentioned we were talking about the betas like oh slide over is gone that's like my main use case for using my ipad as i watch full screen video because it's like my little my little bedtime tv i watch full screen video and then i have social media apps and slide over i'm watching like some you know thing that i don't need to pay tons of attention to like some crappy reality tv and i have stuff in slide over slide over like my normal slide over apps i have these days are slack ivory and tapestry tapestry is the thing i used to read blue sky most of the time and it's nice i got full screen video when i want to see something a slide over i slide it over uh and if you swipe at the bottom of a slide over thing you can cycle through which thing you're seeing in slide over so i can rotate through those those things that i just said with the slide over staying there it just goes like a little bunch of cards one two three it just goes around in a cycle swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe and when you're done with the slide over you just chuck it you can flick the slide over to the other side of the screen if you want on the left and the side of the right you can hide it that's slide over and i heard that ipad os 26 doesn't have it i'm like i'm all you know i don't the windowing features are not for me like i don't i don't use my ipad in that way but i'm like i don't mind them should all be fine but i want my slide over so everyone was all excited when ipad os 26.1 beta came out and said slide over's back slide over spec and ipad os 26.1 everyone's so excited about it and so i foolishly updated from 18 to 26.1 beta just to get slide over and i think that they did a bad job oh no what happened well so first of all the thing that everybody knows is now you can only have one app in slide over which doesn't make any sense to me because like i said when we talked about ipod os 26 slide over fits perfectly with the windowing system of ipad 26 it's just another way of dealing with windows it makes your windows tall and skinny and it puts them off to the side where you can't see them and when you swipe in from the edge they come and when you cycle through it like it it fits perfectly there's tons of other things you do with windows and windowing mode and ipad that are just like that this is just another one it's just another place where you can make windows you know you got stage manager you got the windowing thing you got all sorts of ways to deal with Windows and iPad.

1:29:30And this fits the paradigm perfectly. It doesn't require the Windows to be anything but what they are. It's just an automated way to have them off screen and then on screen and cycle through them. But they said, no, you can only have one of these in 26.1 beta. I don't know why, but that's what they did. Second, they put a translucent sort of liquid glass, whatever, outline around the thing, pretty big, like half a centimeter outline around the thing to indicate that it's not like other Windows, like it's going to behave differently. You know, at least i'm guessing that's what it's for so you don't think it's just a regular window because it behaves like a slide over window you can gesture to chuck it off the screen you can gesture to pull it on that's not true other windows it's true slider fine it's an affordance didn't need to be there before but i don't object to it at all the real thing they screwed up well a couple of things one and if you remember the original iphone one of the cool features they had and it's still there to this day is if you're doing something like say scrolling a web page um if especially back in the olden days of the original iphone not a lot of websites were updated for mobile as they say they were just regular websites that would render on your iphone and sometimes the text would be real small and you'd pinch a zoom blah blah but they weren't like sort of mobile savvy um so i mean like daring fireball yeah exactly i said i needed a website to test this on and i immediately went to daring fireball sorry jones because he hasn't updated his website uh and here's the key thing when you when you have a sort of a non-mobile savvy website or any kind of content any kind of content on your phone screen that you can scroll up and down and left and right there's this more to the left there's more to the right there's more up there's more down this can be an image this can be whatever but very often non-mobile savvy web pages are like this right but what the iphone would do from day one is if it sensed that you were trying to scroll vertically it would lock you into like a rail vertically and even if as you started scrolling vertically your your finger went off to the left or your finger drifted right a little bit the content wouldn't go off to the left or drift right it would be like it was stuck on a rail it's like ah you're vertically scrolling i'm not going to make you carefully perfectly move your finger in a straight line down the screen i'm going to let you once i realize you're vertically scrolling i'm going to lock it in there and just makes it much we take it for granted but this is a thing about the iphone if you've ever noticed this before go load daring fireball and try it out as soon as it figures out you're going up and down it locks you into that and so even if you move your thumb side to side it won't do that slide over that's 26.1 beta miraculously undoes this because when you try to chuck the slide over thing back off the screen you're like why is the thing moving up and down it exactly tracks my finger it i'm trying to like old old slide over and when you chucked it it would be like oh i see you're trying to dismiss that and it would move it exactly to the right exactly east right or exactly west and the current one tracks your finger so it looks like it's like it's all loosey-goosey and it's like it's going up and down and it's like that's stupid like i why would that how could they screw that up and then on top of that in my context where i'm watching full screen video and sliding a thing over and back first of all when i swipe it in from the edge of the screen it doesn't slide in from the edge it like fades into its final position like what the hell it's called slide over slide it over people like just slide it from slide it from the side it like cross fades into its final position and then it makes the full screen like it has a full screen flash of both windows like a flicker like a one frame flicker flash when the thing comes in like i got i brought my ipad that just tried it out because like it's so it's so maddening to me that like that they managed to screw this like i should slow mo it because i think it like it half animates but then fades into the final position and if you're playing video it makes the whole screen flicker every time it comes in and out now granted this is a beta maybe they'll fix this stuff i'm like how do you screw up slide over so bad it's a feature you already had that you could have taken exactly as is and put it into the os and somehow they found a way to make it less useful and screw it up in every possible detail oh and then the final thing is and this is not the fault of ipad os 26 i guess um but lots of the apps i use don't understand ios 26 windowing system so for example in ivory if you swipe left and right and like the toolbar on the top of the thing you can change accounts but when you're an ipad os the windowing system grabs that swipe and thinks you're chucking the window to the left that's not what you're trying to do in tapestry when you tap a link in the thing and it brings up like an in in in-app browser sheet type thing and you dismiss that sheet by hitting the big x in the upper or whatever to dismiss like the web view sheet thing it dismisses the web view but it also registers it as a tap on top of the timeline and scrolls you immediately to the top because of the confusion about who is controlling what safe area and set or whatever these are a combination of like apps not being updated for ios 26 and beta bugs and stuff like that but the overall experience is that i the thing i was trying to avoid i did to myself i like casey i was trying to avoid messing with trying to avoid messing with my workflow like watching full screen video and having apps and slide over and i messed with it in every possible way because now i'm constantly accidentally scrolling tapestry all the way to the top and have to use to use the jump back button i'm sliding things in and out and having a screen flicker every time it happens i'm being distracted by the fact that the thing is wobbling up and down as i move it in and out i'm being annoyed every time the fade animation comes in and i'm being annoyed about that big outline i don't i don't know how they managed this it was an existing feature but they they re-implanted it poorly with fewer features so it's better than not having it like i'm saying it's better than not having it but i kind of regret upgrading wow so other than that did you like the play i mean and if you think how i use my ipad what else am i getting out of ipad os 26 like i'm not a power user of ipad it's i'm using i got this thing for the freaking oled screen so i could watch tv on it and also have slack and ivory and tapestry and just it's kind of sad, but you know, I will endure.

1:35:33I'm glad. All right. So we have more first impressions to talk about. We're going to have to shelve that because there's been some news this week. Apple has pulled IceBlock from the app store. Richard Lawler at The Verge writes, Apple has removed the IceBlock app from its app store. The IceBlock app is intended to be used anonymously to report sightings of US Immigration Customs Enforcement or ICE officials and see sightings reported within in a five-mile radius. IceBlock rose to the top of the App Store's charts this summer after being targeted by Trump administration officials, with U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem calling it an obstruction of justice, and Attorney General Pam Bondi claiming it was not a protected speech.

1:36:12On October 2nd, Bondi took credit for the app's removal, saying to Fox News Digital, we reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the IceBlock app from their App Store, and Apple did so. IceBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed excuse me while i pick up my eyes which has just rolled out of my head oh i'm gonna have a lot to say about this but now we have to be quick it'll be fine don't worry ice block developer joshua aaron is quoted in the same report as saying it counts over 1.1 million users and that apple has claimed they received information from law enforcement that ice blocks serve to harm law enforcement or officers this is patently false apple made similar claims in 2019 when removed HK Map, an app that allowed Hong Kong protesters to trace the movements of law enforcement, with CEO Tim Cook telling employees that over the past several days, we received credible information from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present.

1:37:11At the time, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle spoke out against Apple's censorship of apps, a letter signed by four Republican and three Democratic members of Congress, including Cruz and AOC, if I'm not mistaken, Said cases like these raise real concern about whether Apple and other U.S. large U.S. corporate entities will bow to growing Chinese demands rather than lose access to a billion Chinese consumers. You know what would be great? It would be really great if we had an alternative way of getting apps on our phones. Let's just get through this before we do the commentary. But yes, that's true.

1:37:43Reuters says Apple removed more than 1 ,700 apps from its app store in 2024 in response to government demands, but the vast majority, more than 1 ,300, came from China. followed by russia with 171 south korea 79 over the last three years the united states has not appeared as one of the countries where apps are removed due to government demands according to the company application transparency reports mj sai writes back in 2011 a group of democratic democratic senators asked apple to remove dui checkpoint apps from the app store apple's position at the time was that these apps were a net positive in terms of public safety then the government brought the apple vp of software technology bud tribble before the senate the Judiciary Subcommittee, where Senator Schumer demanded, and Senator Udall lambasted, and Apple changed its mind and banned the apps.

1:38:24Cool. So this last bit of context here. So the Verge story is like, here's the deal. Here's what people said about it with the IceBlock app. I think the Reuters and MJSI story provided some important context, in particular that 1 ,700 apps were banned in 2024 due to government responses. Government asked Apple to pull an app, and they said yes, 1 ,700 times. Again, most of them from China, followed by Russia, and that the U.S. was not on that list. But then MJ Tsai points out, actually, the U.S. has made Apple pull down an apps. And it was kind of similar, like law enforcement related to remove DUI checkpoint apps.

1:38:56You remember that happened back in 2011? These are apps that would tell you, like, here's a place where police are checking for drunk drivers. And you could note them. And, you know, again, Democrats and Republicans asked Apple, you need to pull these apps. Apple hadn't pulled them, even though people had asked them to. And then they brought them in front of the Congress and they said, you've got to do this. And eventually Apple pulled the apps. Right. And obviously the HK map one is very similar, like tracking protests or whatever, again, a law enforcement related. So I feel like the story here is that Apple has always been pulling apps when governments ask them to.

1:39:30But usually those governments are China and Russia. And it has happened once or twice with the U.S. when it's related to law enforcement. but now it's happening again with an app that very much looks like a law enforcement type app um you know knowing where ice is or whatever and before we go wandering off into ice ice block and the current context which is much more dire for us than the dui checkpoint time was in 2011 let's say um but actually is very similar i do want to say that this whole this whole thing is a good example of the limits of apple's strategy because apple's strategy with the trump administration both times has been essentially appeasement try to make nice with them try to make them not mad at you because when they're mad at you they they are you know it's a corrupt administration and they will do things to harm your company individually in a vindictive way because they because they're just you know mobsters and bullies right um they'll they'll specifically hurt your company and we want them specifically not her our company so we're working within a corrupt system to try to get favors blah blah blah the problem with that strategy is the strategy is not to make them mad and you can blow that whole strategy appeasement stops working and becomes pointless the second you push back at all and make them mad at you because then it's like well what did you do all that appeasement for so it leads to like the sunk cost fallacy of saying well we already made nice with all these things we already did all this stuff when they ask us to pull the ice block out if we say no they'll be mad at us and it's like well then what did we do all that appeasement for what what did we sell our souls for before and so you're inclined to say yes and say yes to the next thing and say yes to the next thing and it's a slippery slope of appeasement the word comes up in the context of world war ii all the time appeasement looks great right up until you have the rise of hitler and then doesn't look so good anymore does it because you're like anyone who was on board with that appeasement thing tends to look bad in the eye of history of saying you were appeasing this monster and you're like well when i was appeasing them they weren't really that monstrous they were just on their way to monsters and i kept appeasing them and but eventually i found my limit and apple apparently has not found its limit and i'm and it's not just the you know the fact that we have a terrible corrupt administration now again in 2011 situation was different it was still apple was still making the same calculus oh the government wants us to do this thing we don't really care one way or the other we'll probably get bad press from this if we say it's helping people to drunk drive so we'll do this but we'll still leave the speed uh you know the speed radar checkpoint things in the apple maps app like they didn't get rid of that but dui is over the line like they're always doing this very cynical corporate calculus of if there's too much public or government pressure to get rid of an app in the app store we'll do it in the end we control it and it's our decision but we will do it and devoid of any context i feel like the ice block app feels exactly like that it's like oh some government thing doesn't want us to have a thing and oh this is harming law enforcement or so they say they lie about everything but half the country believes them anyway so whatever we'll just get rid of and it'll be fine but that's missing the wider context which i'm sure marco will get to in a second which is uh 2025 is not 2011 the current administration is not what it used to be and appeasement in this scenario even though it has been apple strategy from day one uh it has its limits and apple so far has not found that limit for them but i think a lot of their observers have said you need to like you need to just get over the sunk cost fallacy and give up on the appeasement strategy and throw away all the stuff that you've done and screw your whole company over because if you keep down this path of just always saying yes and always agreeing that's not going to lead anywhere good like we all hope that they're going to find a line somewhere but every time something like this happens people like marco flip out justifiably and say i guess there is no line i guess there's literally nothing that could they can ask for that they won't do it's not that again not removing ice block is not the biggest thing in the world but it's like you just start extrapolating well what if they ask for this what if they ask for that because again the appeasement strategy requires you to not make them mad and saying no to them will make them mad which means you will say yes to anything marco please go understanding i would like to go to bed at some point tonight i'm i'm gonna go and uh you're gonna have to bear with me here so this entire premise is predicated on a lie it's predicated on the idea that they had to remove this app because it was dangerous to law enforcement that is a straight up lie you know if you think about okay what unreasonable danger is posed to ISIS, they use the term officials, I would use the term kidnappers and murderers.

1:44:12What a reasonable danger is posed to ISIS kidnappers and murderers by people telling other people where they are. They're the ones that have the guns, zero accountability, and the complete support of a fascist federal government behind them. They are kidnapping and murdering US citizens. And we are supposed to believe that they are the ones that need protection from people knowing where they are. ICE agents, just like Donald Trump himself, are pathetic, weak, thin-skinned racists who only know how to demonstrate strength with cruelty, violence, and punching down. They are cowards, and they hide their cowardly faces behind masks because the only real danger they face is cameras.

1:45:01And they're such cowards they can't even handle that. Now, just like when racists twisted Black Lives Matter into Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter, the idea that the ICE agents are the victims in need of protection from the people they're assaulting and killing is a dangerous lie. And that lie will be used to justify using more deadly force in retaliation. And Apple is now complicit in that lie. And the context of this is very important. The Trump administration is literally waging war on America, on Americans. This is not a metaphor. They are waging war against U.S. law, the U.S. Constitution, and U.S.

1:45:46citizens in the U.S. They are deploying military troops intentionally into liberal cities that will probably result in them shooting liberals. And now this might sound like an exaggeration, but if this does, ask, say, your parents, if you're maybe under age 50 or so, or ask Neil Young, what happens when a thin-skinned Republican president does deplorable things, and then when people start protesting, they deploy National Guard soldiers against them? This is going to escalate. People have already died. A lot more people will probably die as this escalates. and apple in this war against americans on american soil has chosen not only to not fight against it but to explicitly and repeatedly support the aggressors of this war tim cook's legacy will forever be tarnished by his trump support and not only is is he destroying apple's brand and reputation by doing this he's supporting the destruction of our democracy and our home country.

1:46:57Tim Cook has shown us exactly who and what he is. He is cowardly, spineless, and I would say at this point, irredeemable. But there are other people, powerful people at Apple, who can still make a difference. So Tim Cook is a lost cause. He has shown us who he is. Believe him. I urge the rest of Apple's senior leadership to do some serious soul-searching right now. And consider what they're willing to support, what they want their careers and legacies to mean, and what they would like to tell their grandchildren in the future about how they handled what's going on in America right now with the power they had.

1:47:39Please, Apple leadership, really do some soul searching and consider how you want this to end. It's pretty concise. I disagree with a lot of your more extreme statements there, but the gist is that I think we're all more or less on board with. Like the lie that they're perpetrating does have a foundation in plausibility, which is like, in theory, knowing where law enforcement are located could cause them to come to harm because now people who are trying to harm them know where they are and can ambush them and so on and so forth. In practice, has that happened? No, not to my knowledge. So it's just a theoretical thing that could happen.

1:48:13It's the same thing with the Hong Kong protesters, like trying to avoid the armed forces or whatever. It's like, yeah, you're picking a side. You're picking the side of law enforcement saying we don't want people to know where we are through eight of this app. despite the fact that in our country anyway, it's perfectly legal to take pictures of police in public and so on and so forth. Still, the story that our government says to Apple is like, you know, Apple even says they told us that law enforcement officers are coming to harm because of this. Could it have happened? Maybe. But our government lies so much about everything routinely all the time.

1:48:43Like, look at all the court cases. They just straight up lie. ICE in particular lies like crazy. Again, as proven in court multiple times, it's hard to take anything they say uh as truth but in theory it could happen so like the issue is actually somewhat nuanced kind of like the dui checkpoint things like do you want people evading dui checkpoints when they're drunk probably not um as casey pointed out earlier this whole thing is a problem caused by apple being the only way you can get apps because if apple wasn't the only way it's fine let them ban whatever they want we'll just get it from an alternative app store but that's not the world we live in at least in this country um so yeah it's problems on top of problems on top of problems and like the the appeasement strategy like it's just it's it's essentially a trap like it's it works fine right up until it doesn't but when it doesn't it negates everything you've done it's like well what was the point in all of that what was the point and all the harm that we caused if it turns out that the strategy is not sustainable and i really feel like the strategy is not sustainable at this point like it's just it's not the fact that they pulled an app it's that's not the thing it's everything that marco said that what's happening with ice in this country is just very very bad it's very bad it's not like the dui checkpoints nothing like this was happening in that context so it's like oh apple pulls an app it's kind of crappy but whatever and now it's like okay well apple's apple pulling the app is part of what part of a thing that is happening that is terrible and is just getting worse by the day i i'm a little bit more optimistic than you are marco that i'm hoping that the people wearing uh uh dinosaur suits in portland will actually not uh get themselves shot and killed by ice but you never know what's going to happen so i'm you know i'm hoping that uh ridicule and peaceful protest and uh you know we'll keep this from escalating because i'm hoping that our side is not going to escalate this because honestly like the premise of all this of sending you know sending the national guard into cities like the cities are war zones everyone's dying which is not which is obviously not true but part of the whole fascist thing is you just make up lies get enough people to believe it and then you send in troops and then the troops you know cause violence to happen and they say see look we told you there was violence and it's just it's a terrible thing but hopefully people know that that's what's happening and can do things like dressing up in silly outfits to combat it uh but anyway it's yeah it's grim and apple is not helping i hope you are more right than i am i don't think you will be but i hope you are yeah we'll see like it's you really can't tell how these things are going to go but like for people who are in positions to to influence it like you know obviously individual citizens protesting and voting and so on and so forth but like in positions of power like apple or any of the other companies that are or universities or any of any other of the large institutions in our country that are being that the government has essentially captured with this with this appeasement is the path of least resistance strategy they can actually make an even bigger difference and it's uh sometimes heartening to see like a couple of universities actually standing up for themselves but it's incredibly disheartening to see apple and all the tech companies and columbia university and all the other things that just have folded like a house of cards and they're not pushing back and like i said it's because the second they push back they it they are self-negating their entire you know nine month long appeasement strategy and that's going to feel bad for them it's a sunk cost fallacy but they they probably need to just get over it yeah and also i think at this point it It is very clear that Apple needs to, at this point, recognize what they are and stop quoting Martin Luther King on their homepage.

1:52:17And also, I would say other people who would have pretty strong opinions about what they're doing right now, stop quoting them too, including Steve Jobs. They should never quote Steve Jobs again on their homepage if they're going to act like this. Because a lot of people say, what would Steve do? And a lot of times, it's wishful thinking. steve would not do this he he was a hippie he was there he would do a lot of things for the shameless seeking of money and success he would not do this i don't know people get old he did do that thing of like uh colluding to uh not let people change jobs for more money with like pixar and everything that's pretty close to this again not great like he's he did a lot of not great things and had a lot of not great opinions and he was a master bs artist to try to rationalize what he was doing but he would not do this well anyway what we really got to be hoping for is what the next ceo will do and steve's not going to be the next ceo and neither is tim so fingers crossed that that transition cannot happen soon enough i did you see the recent story they're talking about all the like that jeff williams leaving and stuff like that a german had a bunch on it and it was mentioning like if tim leaves he might still be chairman of the board like no tim just go to an island do not stay on as chairman of the board please i mean at least it would be at least it would be step one like step one is get out of the ceo role i know but like you know i know obviously he's going to be around for a while not to turn this to a succession topic but like part of the one of the things that tim had a problem quote-unquote problem that tim had is just the long shadow of steve jobs so for like his first few years it was like he was steering the steve jobs ship and they didn't let him become his own ceo which you know for better or for worse and we would say for worse at this point right yeah um but like i'm so afraid that like the next ceo will feel like they have to like be steering the tim cook ship for the first two years like no like that's why i want him to get it i don't want him i want to want him to be on the board i don't want him to be there looking over anyone's shoulder i want the new ceo to say i'm the new ceo i have different ideas clean break from the past but i'm not sure that that's going to happen i mean we'll see like you know the you know the the uh recent reigniting of the rumors that john turnus might be the one kind of you know slated up in line next you know we we don't know that much about john turnus and in ways like this like we don't know like what kind of ceo he would be but so far like honestly if you look at you know look at what what at apple is working really well and what could use some help hardware is going really well but the hardware is not there's nothing not much political in the hardware so it's hard to tell where he stands on that stuff you know like that like we don't really we we won't know that unless we actually you know have that situation and see how it goes and that's the worst that's the worst thing about like the like the second and third level of the org chart on apple you almost have no idea what the hell they're thinking because everyone speaks with one voice and is so aligned on the message you know what i mean yeah and it's like it's kind of like when you're electing politicians you just hope that like this politician did what it took to get elected but once they get in there they're going to do all this great stuff almost never happens like because to get that far to become the senior vice president at Apple, you have to be so willing to, you know, be on message and be aligned with the leadership that are you ever going to get somebody who spends all those years working all the way up, but in their secret heart is like, what's what I get in charge?

1:55:33I'm going to change everything. No, I feel like you don't like you breed, you breed like the only way you get that close. The only way you get to be second in line or whatever is to be like, to essentially just drink the Kool-Aid and be like, yep, no, I agree with all these Apple things. and just that's and like turnus is just a cipher in this because you know again in hardware you don't spend a lot of time having to make any kind of decisions that touch this at all because it's like it's microchips and like i mean i guess maybe like sourcing parts and like sweatshops and stuff like that but even even that is more of like a jack williams type thing and anyway it's it i'm i'm ready for it to be an uncertain future i'm kind of over the present i mean it's an i think it's uncertain future now like we you know we don't know i'm ready to be in the uncertain future like i'm ready to be like in in like oh there's someone new and i don't know what they're gonna do because i know what the current people are gonna do and it's not good yeah i mean like yeah we need we need a lot of turnover right now in a lot of different ways a lot of different places that's what the german story is about that we're referring to that like all those all the you know jeff williams i think we mentioned this in the show ages ago when it happened like of bringing a second command up and he's on his way out the door and a lot lots of people are kind of of that age in senior leadership where they're going to retire within the next few years including tim cook we all hope um and so there could actually start to be some turnover at the top level of the company which is an incredibly dangerous situation things could go terribly wrong but it's also your only possible hope for you know positive change yeah it just sucks it all sucks everything sucks from top to bottom and i feel like it is i'm casting about trying to find something to be excited about something to feel like, yes, yes, this group or this person or these people, they get it and they're fighting for the same thing that I am, to whatever degree I'm fighting, fighting for.

1:57:21And I feel like I have yet to find that person, that group, et cetera. They're out there. They're just losing all the time. I guess, yeah. That's why if you follow all the court cases, you can enjoy all the lower court decisions before the Supreme Court overrules them all and says Trump can do whatever he wants. So if you can just enjoy the in-between period after they win decisively in the lower courts and you get to read those court decisions where they just take the government to task for being terrible, you know, just bad all over. And then just don't pay attention as it wanders up to the Supreme Court and they say, no, actually, it's fine.

1:57:52Well, let me tell you, I'm sure the Democrats are fighting tooth and now never mind. No, some of them are, but most of them. Like at this point, it's like I love that everybody has the quaint idea that the courts are going to save us. look at how much they have saved us so far that's not going to happen they're not going to save us the courts won't save us and the democrats won't save us so you know keep looking well the court the supreme court won't save us the lower courts the government's losing all the time because they're wrong and breaking the law yes but then when it gets to the supreme court they're going to win again yes that's right so just enjoy that brief period between those two things the entire first trump era was defined by you know like you know max's old joke like this time we got him this time and like we never we never are going to get him that's it you want to get him this time you've got to be rooting for heart disease yeah like nothing else nothing will ever get him like that's except for heart disease we can we can all pray for that but uh nothing else will get him and nothing else will stop him and you know if you think this is all going to be over in three years i got news for you about that too like i wouldn't necessarily count on that either uh until until time saves us all.

1:59:05that's you know don't count on anything coming to save us anyway what a great show thanks for this would have been fine as an after show no you you can't end on that it's terrible we'll have the after show to pick us back up thank you to our sponsors this week squarespace delete me and open case and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join one of the perks of membership is atp overtime our weekly bonus topic This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about the new meta Ray-Ban display glasses and Apple's changing plans in response to that. You can join to listen atv.fm slash join.

1:59:44Thank you very much, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

2:00:03search 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 casey list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-e-n-t marco are men S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long. So this after show is going to be potentially fun for Marco and I, and real sad for one of us. Oh, no. There's only one left. uh john news broke over the last i don't know 24 48 hours as we record this that tivo is exiting its legacy dvr business oh you're gonna have to wake up and join the 2020s what are you gonna do no this is not really sad for me because it's like uh tivo i'm proud of tivo for living as long as it has yeah because it's it's been a while like tivo kind of like uh a couple other companies that uh i've previously enjoyed like they lost the ability to make good products several years ago uh it's the reason i'm still running older tivos because they're they're literally better spec wise than the stuff they were selling like they stopped selling uh dvrs that had the hard drive capacity of the one that i bought ages ago they just like made them smaller and worse and put smaller diameter noisier fans in them and crappier hard drives and just their products got worse right even as technology marched on and they never really made the treasures into the 4k era mostly because cable card didn't make a transition to the 4k era like they're that's not true time has passed them by but we have 4k cable cards that's a thing yeah i'm almost sure of it because i get 4k from my cable card powered hd home run i'm i might be wrong but i'm almost certain i think we went through this when we did like the hd home run thing like that it's not that it's not the cable card it's the problem remember i was saying like Like the only channels I get in 4K are like when they have those Red Sox games locally every once in a while, but everything else is 1080.

2:02:24Oh, that is 100 % true. That's basically what I mean. Like their idea was they would take quote unquote cable television and record it to a hard drive. And if the cable television is 1080, but you can get 4K on Netflix, you know. But anyway, the streaming area obviously came and passed them by. Like, you know, and even though I still have TiVos connected to both of my televisions, I have a good one on my downstairs TV and not so good one on my upstairs TV. uh you know our viewing is just basically transitioned away from them almost entirely almost but not quite entirely to streaming services so i got i mentioned this on ages ago that i got rid of hbo and my cable plan and just subscribed to it in the streaming app because the streaming app had higher resolution right uh you know streaming is has come and displaced tivo um and so it is kind of amazing that they've lasted as long as they can it is also a shame that as this transition happened they lost the ability to make good products they could have done more of like a transition into like a more niche consumer product type thing but like again they're they're constrained by the fact that the television coming to the house either over the air through cable uh lost the spec race to the television coming into your house through streaming services because streaming services just went to 4k faster and higher bit rates and hdr and cable was still jamming lots of channels over a single wire and blah blah blah so you know time marches on uh i still have my tivos i'm still running them i still will continue to run them I still pay for quote unquote cable television and I get stuff on there.

2:03:47But these days, for example, and I'm watching the Super Bowl or something when that's on, rather than just going directly to TiVo and watching the Super Bowl, I'll check if it is in higher resolution on a streaming service somewhere just to try to get a better version of the Super Bowl. The answer is usually it's not. It's usually basically the same because sports is still kind of behind the times for a variety of reasons. But anyway, so yeah, TiVo is no longer making a thing with hard drives and computers that will record cable television to the hard drive and let you play it later. But I do want to say, pouring one out for TiVo, even though I don't drink, is that the original TiVo back before high-definition television, it was just, you know, standard-definition cable television, analog cable television coming over a cable, going into a cable card that was stuck into one of these things that had a computer and a hard drive in it, was one of the best consumer electronic products ever made, both in terms of how good it was at doing its job but also in terms of how it changed the lives of people who had it it's not iphone caliber obviously it didn't take the world by storm because it was kind of geeky but like the way i mean if you talk to anybody who was around back then and got one of the early tivos the way it changed your relationship with television is actually analogous to the way streaming services have changed the way that everybody deals with television uh because it lets you you know let you pause live tv let you record multiple shows without using vcs you know vhs tapes let you fast forward and rewind and skip commercials which is the big thing that changed everyone's lives right and eventually it's recording six shows at once which is the thing you only the people with like 17 stacked vcrs used to do and then you had to rewind all the tapes and blah blah but the real thing this thing was so great at was you know that little peanut shape remote and the fact that that thing was so responsive back in the analog cable days i don't even know what resolution it was was like 480 i480p with like mpeg one code or whatever garbage like low resolution primitive algorithms we had that was the signal i was recording anyway so responsive pause immediately pause played immediately played you could fast forward and rewind in increments of x number of seconds as fast as you could hit that button just incredibly responsive incredibly easy to navigate apple tv cannot touch the tivo up down left right select button like every menu was like the old iphone you go right to go into something you left to go out up and down to scroll up and down the whole interface was that so fast so simple so readable from the couch everything was instant play the show it's playing pause the show it's paused skip commercial it's like and as time went on and as hd came out and so on and so forth the tvos got worse they became less responsive the inventory interface went through a terrible transition where it got way way worse and some of the interface was in non-HD and some of it was at HD or whatever.

2:06:24And they, you know, they, they declined, they diminished, they got worse at what they were doing. Streaming came and wiped them off the face of the earth. But today with TiVo stopping the production, you can't even buy these anymore, although you shouldn't buy them because they're worse than the old ones. But stopping production of their hard drive based DVRs, it's worth remembering just how good the TiVo was in its heyday and how it totally transformed my relationship with television. It stopped being a thing that I had to sit down at a certain time and watch or whatever. I stopped seeing commercials entirely, which kind of disconnected me from popular culture for a while because people would talk about commercials that were on TV and I'd never seen them.

2:07:02That's still kind of true this day because I think a lot of people add support to streaming services and I don't. But what a piece of hardware. That remote, still amazing. By the way, if you have old TVO remotes, you can teach the Apple TV to use them as long as you have IR line of sight to the thing. I don't necessarily recommend that because in some situations, the Swavy Pad is faster than the five-way button but in every other respect using a ti-vo remote with your apple tv is a much more pleasant experience if only the apple tv with eight bajillion times the computing power was as responsive as like a series 2 ti-vo was back in the day i'm sorry for young people who didn't experience this but believe me like same way you don't believe that changing channels used to be as fast as it was back when we were little kids because you've only ever seen a modern tv where changing channels takes for freaking ever whereas the channels used to change as fast as you could turn that dial.

2:07:48Like, yeah, analog. It had its downsides, but it also had its upsides. Anyway, with TiVo going away, I just want to remember TiVo for the great, I will always have great memories of it. It made my life better. It continues to make my life better, even as the company not goes out of business, but stops making those products. It still has a place in my entertainment center until the thing finally dies. And then I guess maybe someday I'll eventually be a quote unquote cord cutter because one thing I'm not doing is ever having a cable company box in my house. And that's the thing that I never did because TiVo, there's another thing TiVo did, TiVo saved me from ever having a cable box.

2:08:23Every time I went over to someone's house and they had cable and had to use the cable company cable box, man, it was grim. TiVo was just living in the future for at least a decade. And it also happened to coincide the time when both my kids were born or at least my first kid and a little shading to the second. I do not know what I would have done without TiVo giving me all that stuff to watch at 3 a.m. as I bounce my children on a bouncy ball trying to get them to sleep. You know, again, in the same way that I give Marco a lot of stick about Fish, even though I bet you I would enjoy it a lot more than I admit, I give John a lot of stick about TiVo, particularly running it in the year of our Lord 2025.

2:09:01But with that said, what John described, I cannot begin to tell you how revolutionary it was. I mean, my children don't understand what commercials are, And that's not because of TiVo. That's because of the things that TiVo brought to us. And, you know, there was no cable company DVR that I was aware of until TiVo existed. I mean, it really was revolutionary. And if you're born in the year, you know, in the new millennium, if your birth date is it begins with a two, I don't think you understand how incredibly revolutionary a DVR was because, you know, my kids don't understand that there are things that you can only watch when they're airing.

2:09:40yeah you know as an example there's a brief window a time over the summer where the family really got into jeopardy and then school happened it's we've mostly fizzled about that but they didn't understand that you couldn't just watch jeopardy whenever the hell you want like what do you mean it's not on yeah what do you mean what does that even mean what what is a channel i don't even like i hear you say those words but i don't know what is a channel what does that mean like a youtube channel right exactly exactly and so i all of that to me genesis was the tivo and even though i think it's ridiculous to continue to use a tiwo in in 2025 it's not ridiculous though like if it keeps working like the ridiculous thing is paying for cable that's the ridiculous thing but having a tiwo in the house if you are paying for cable this is great it just makes cable better like well but so does channels like they're they're much more modern versions yeah i mean remember i did try channels and i do believe my current tiwo is still nicer than channels because i tried it i tried channels i did it channels is really good if tiwo didn't exist maybe i would do it but my tiwo is better than channels i'm not sure i agree but you might be right if the content it was 4k channels would be better but it's not i mean what if the channels will slurp up whatever you give it so i know i just but i'm saying like i don't files doesn't deliver 4k except for and remember we went through this like the the red sox games every once in a while and a few really high number channels but almost everything else is not 4k yeah well on the exact same day that tivo stopped making dvrs we also lost another revolution aol dial-up service ended literally the same day, September 30th, both of these things died.

2:11:11It is kind of remarkable to think that those both had the same lifespan. Although I would say that AOL dial-up service was revolutionary for a lot of people, but its useful lifespan was way shorter. Yes, agreed. But also probably 10 years earlier. But yeah, the remarkable thing in both cases, in the case of AOL dial-up and of TiVo DVRs, in both cases, most people hearing the news today, the reaction is you could still get those. Yeah. Didn't they say like how many people were actually using dial-up when I stopped it? It was some number that's way bigger than you would think. It was a couple hundred thousand, I think, or something like that.

2:11:46I just wonder if those are like accounts where there's no, that's just like some auto pay thing going on. And there's like, I have a hard time believing that there's a hundred thousand actual humans dialing up to AOL. But maybe, you know, like really old people. I don't know. It's just. Yeah. I mean, figure like maybe if you live somewhere rural where like you haven't had good internet service options for most of the time, you might still not. And you have really simple needs and you've been doing the same thing for 40 years, like maybe, yeah, okay. I would think the capacitors would blow on their PCs.

2:12:13You know what I mean? Like how is the modem still working? Yeah, well, I guess like, you know, people still make like all-in-one printer scanner fax things. So like the components must still be made for the fax modems in those. So I guess like you can still make a modem, but I mean, how would you, like how would you get the computer version? Like who even still makes, I'm sure somebody makes a USB one. It can happen. I've got my Synology down in the basement. I was at 13 years old of continuous running, and I've used my Mac Pro for 10 years. I don't know, 30, 40, you could get lucky. I bet Casey's right.

2:12:48I bet it's mostly, probably, subscriptions that were just never canceled. That was John that said that. I was looking for a link to put in the show notes, and I stumbled on a Tom's Hardware link. In the US, there are still some ISPs which can make good use of your old US Robotic Sportsster 56K or Diamond Super Express modems. Diamond. No, the sports store was the best one. Come on. We all know that. We all know that. We've been through this many times. The biggest name alternative is MSN Dial-Up, which is$22 a month. There are also dial-up services offered by NetZero and Juno. Remember that name?

2:13:20Juno still exists? That's a name I haven't heard in a minute. I wonder how many companies that's been passed around through. Right? That was my first, you know, quote, internet. I mean, that was when it was back when it was just email. Like, that was my first internet. I miss NetCom. NetCom.com. What a domain name. That's incredible. Finishing up from Tom's Hardware, we recently also had the pleasure of seeing a pair of network enthusiasts bond 12 56k modems together to set dial-up broadband records. They managed to achieve a record 668 kilobits per second using multi-link PPP technology. This is like the floppy disk raids.

2:13:53Right? Exactly. Oh, gosh. Incredible. The term broadband is being used pretty generously here. I mean, maybe they mean broad like physical width. Yeah, right. all those modems lined up. You line up those modems it's pretty broad.