672: Wi Hyphen Fi

34:42Everything's crap everywhere. And when everything's crap, nothing's crap. Exactly. It's very freeing. I'm not sure if I agree with that philosophy, but anyway. Gracious. We are going so far off the rails. All right, bringing it back. An anonymous industry insider had thoughts about the RAM shortage. The Verge article, called RAM is Ruining Everything, was not quite fair to the DRAM makers, implying that we are artificially keeping supply low. This is simply false. We are in a pure demand overrun right now. Our fabs are running at full max out mode currently, optimizing bit output over all else, even shifting new product introduction in order to optimize output on the already high yielding parts.

35:18And why wouldn't we? Every chip we make is making huge margins right now because demand is so high. At the end of the article, they did mention that Micron and Hynix are, in fact, building new fabs, but this understates what's actually happening. After spending almost 20 years without building any new DRAM fabs in the world, the next 10 years could nearly double the total DRAM wafer output, at which point the DRAM companies better hope to God the AI bubble doesn't burst. Some examples of this that were provided by the anonymous person. Micron has six DRAM fabs on the roadmap, all in the U.S., three of which should be online before 2030.

35:48This will increase Micron wafer output by nearly 200%. Hynix just doubled the size of their biggest fab, and if OpenAI's order of 900 ,000 wafers a month goes through, Hynix is going to build four more mega fabs, each of which is the size of four regular fabs. Additionally, Samsung is converting NAND fabs into DRAM, which will hurt NAND pricing but help DRAM. I don't want to hurt NAND pricing. I need my 8-term ID to be cheaper. I guess cheaper RAM in 2030 is something to look forward to after the AI bubble burst. Additionally, this doesn't help things in the next year, but these things take time to build.

36:23One more final technical note, What a major reason consumer in mobile DRAM is getting squeezed so hard is because the AI companies are buying HBM, or high bandwidth memory, and a lot of it. HBM has a 3 plus to 1 trade ratio with normal DRAM. That means to make 100 gigs of HBM, it takes 3 to 4 times more wafers than it does to make 100 gigs of DDR whatever. LLP DDR whatever, or GDDR whatever. The trade ratio is due to both technical reasons. For example, the HBM dies are much larger per gigabyte than standard dies because they have to allocate a ton of silicon floor space for the through silicon via technology used in the chip stacking, as well as lower yields due to the very complex packaging.

37:02Every gigabyte of HBM that's being made means three or four fewer gigabytes of regular DRAM that can be made. By the way, for whatever it's worth, I really enjoyed last week the Vergecast did a RAM Holiday Spectacular episode. And it's a lot of fun. And also I learned a lot about the DRAM shortage right now and what all these factors, how they all play into it and everything. So I can strongly recommend the episode of the Vergecast from last week called RAM Holiday Spectacular. Excellent. All right. Let's talk about Git portability. Simon Joday writes, Git is very portable, and that's why GitHub tries to keep you with other proprietary features such as GitHub Actions.

37:46They use their own syntax, and migrating can represent a significant investment. It's no surprise Microsoft tried their crummiest changes on this aspect of their product. Luckily, some open source projects like Gitea, G-I-T-E-A, use a compatible syntax. For do-it-yourselfers, Gitea is really easy to set up with a Docker Compose file. Now you're speaking my language. yeah i don't use any of those fancy features in github but yeah they do provide value add as they would say in the business by providing features above and beyond just what git provides but if you avoid them or are willing to you know port from those things you know github issues are similar i can use those casey like that's not really strictly part of git that's part of github but most systems have some kind of issue tracking thing so yeah migration gets more difficult the more you integrate with those platform specific features but uh those features are good so you You know, there's a reason they call it value-add.

38:35It's not entirely cynical. Tom Hartnett writes, John gave me the impression he might be going to GitHub.com, creating the remote repo, and then setting the upstream locally and pushing to it. I wanted to mention that you can create a new remote on GitHub from within your Xcode project, assuming you have your credentials wired up. You can even add the repo's description and set its public or private visibility. I was indeed doing it manually for two reasons. One, I had no idea this feature exists, so there's that. But two, some of the features, like the Git integration that it provided in Xcode, i just avoid because it's either been crashy or unreliable for me based on my experience from like years ago maybe it's gotten better now but for example i never push from within xcode because for a long time every time i pushed it would like crash and lead stuff in a weird inconsistent state or it would say it pushed but it wouldn't really so i always push from the command line i mostly do my get stuff from the command line but yeah xcode does have this feature and this is definitely easier than copying and pasting the commands that github puts up so the next time i have to do this I'll try it.

39:32We're not going to put these screenshots in because they're from Tom's actual thing and have like his username and stuff in there or whatever. But if you go to the little repo thing in the Xcode sidebar, right click on remotes and say new. You can say new remote and it will prompt you and you'll be able to type in you want it to go on GitHub and blah, blah, blah. And you want it to be public or private. You can do that all from the GUI in Xcode without having to go to the command line. So I will check that out next time. in the future switching between iphone and android will get easier with new apple and google collaboration so reading from mac rumors apple and google are teaming up to make it easier for users to switch between iphone and android smartphones according to nine to five google there's a new android canary build available today that supplies data transfer between two smartphones and apple's going to implement the functionality in an upcoming ios 26 beta apple already has a move to ios app for transfer transferring data from an android device to an iPhone, while Google has an Android Switch app that can migrate data from an iPhone to an Android smartphone.

40:26The new method will apparently replace the existing apps. Both Apple and Google are facing regulatory pressure around the world, with multiple countries scrutinizing practices that might keep customers locked into a platform. Making it simpler for users to transition from one platform to another would be beneficial to both companies. Get portability and data portability. We talked about this before, about things that can increase competition and regulatory things being passed that might force platform owners to make transitioning easier. Again, Apple and Google had been doing something in this area.

40:56I'm sure their efforts were not great. This seems to be an improvement on both of those. We'll see when it ships. And I kind of assuming they're doing it in response to regulatory pressure or just makes their life easier to for them to both work. Here's the thing about this. It is actually to both their advantages to have a because everybody wants switching to be easier. They just all want the switching to go in their direction. And it's very difficult to make it so that switching is only easy in your direction and hard in the other because that's also extremely anti-competitive. And we'll probably run afoul of all the people currently suing Apple and Google.

41:28So fingers crossed that this helps a little bit. But, yeah, this is something we don't really talk about much in the show because we're not really we're not recruiting people switching to Apple platforms from other platforms, nor are we frequently switching from Apple platforms to Google platforms. But people do. It's a thing that happens. Everyone doesn't stay on the same platform forever. People switch in both directions, and anything that makes that easier is welcome. Can confirm. All right. With regard to display flicker in Tahoe, Daniel writes, the annoying thing about display flicker is that it can mean about a thousand different things to different people.

42:00Full screen or just some content? Did the screen get all the way to full black, or did the brightness level just not change smoothly? Or was it the amount of HDR headroom, et cetera? The public comments are sort of all over the place on how to reproduce it. First-party displays only or third-party as well? Only HDR content or SDR as well? Do people realize some UI is now HDR? Do people realize the studio display does some fake HDR tricks? If nobody who can fix the issue is able to reproduce it and there's no existing radar that seems to correlate, then there's not a lot that can be done. Unless somebody can get an iPhone or whatever video of the issue and post it online.

42:32That would be super helpful, theoretically. Taking video of Screen Flicker is going to run afoul of a whole host of problems. I mean, just taking video in the presence of certain LED lights can cause weird strobing stuff. And you're going to try to catch flicker on another display by taking video of it. It's tricky. But here's the thing about these kind of bugs. Like, I get that, you know, there's a lot of ones that we just avoid filing feedback on because it's like it happens intermittently. I don't know how to reproduce it. It's hard to see, blah, blah, blah. But when something like this is just it's so widespread, like I've seen enough of these stories all over the Internet that it's not an epidemic.

43:06that Mac is not crippling everybody's computers, but it's also not extremely rare. Like I would say it is more common than the podcast app opening stuff up. This is a thing, and people have said that there's been screen flicker issues with the studio display and other displays even before Tahoe, but everyone agrees that it's gotten much worse with Tahoe. I kind of feel like this is on Apple. Like every one of that company is using Macs to do their dev work, right? They're running Tahoe, presumably. They've got to be seeing it. They probably have studio displays. If anyone's going to have studio displays, people at apple right they're probably seeing this right so it's are they as the whole company going well i get i just assume someone else is taking care of this like eventually they should be just as annoyed as we are oh hey we all upgraded to tahoe and now the stupid flickering is happening in all our studio displays it's not my department because i work on the whatever app but somebody should be fixing this right please apple like it's it's an institutional competency to be able to uh have your your internal user base like all the people who are apple employees who use max all day if they're all seeing or some significant portion of them are seeing a bug like this flickering tahoe thing find it and fix it it's not going to be any you know some person who's working on the notes app it's not their responsibility to fix this but they should be able to raise their hand internally and say uh this is the thing somebody fix this because we on the outside can't like if we file a feedback just to go into a black hole like show me the reproduction again show me the video or like how do you even capture this but it's a thing that you see with your eyes.

44:31So I really hope that there are folks working on this already, and I hope they do address it. I'm thankful that I haven't seen it on my studio display, but the Mac it is attached to is not running Tahoe. I mean, I'm on Tahoe on this MacBook Pro, and I don't recall having ever seen this, or if I have, I explained it away internally as something else, because I've never noticed this, that I can tell. Sean Santry writes along the same topic, the studio display flickering introduced in Tahoe happens with my M2 Ultra Mac Studio, so it's not just laptops. For me, it seems to happen pretty reliably when visiting YouTube and Safari, and there's an auto preview of an HDR video, even though the studio display doesn't support HDR.

45:09Philip Hofstadter writes, the flickering of the studio display happens whenever any HDR content appears on screen. It happened in previous Mac OS versions too, but HDR was much more sparingly used in the system UI. So in our own follow-up, we've gotten that it's only for HDR, and it's only in Tahoe, except it's not only in Tahoe, and it's sometimes HDR. like it's all over the place i know so i know hdr is used more in the ios interface like it started with the the new siri surround thing and then tahoe does it even more and any of the ml stuff right but uh not tahoe um ios 26 does it even more uh with all the uh the machine learning and the ai stuff that everything being bright like cleanup and photos does hdr right but does tahoe's interface use hdr a lot like i don't i'm sure it uses somewhere again cleanup on tahoe we'll use hdr because it does everywhere right in the photos app or whatever but just for like menus windows sidebars toolbars buttons i don't think any of that is hdr in tahoe so i'm not sure about the idea that oh it's worse than tahoe because the um the ui uses more hdr i I mean, I'm willing to believe it uses slightly more, but most of the UI you're seeing is not HDR, even in Tahoe.

46:27So I'm not sure about this, but I'm willing to believe that the Flickr could be triggered by having HDR content somewhere. And the thing that Daniel was referencing of like the studio display is not HDR, like it doesn't get that bright, but it does. You know, I think it does like reserve some portion of it to if you have the screen brightness down to go higher than your brightness setting to do sort of fake HDR. I'm not sure how that works, but I think that's what he was alluding to. So anyway, this is Apple's bug. Marco's got his weird bug to fix that he doesn't quite know how to fix. This is Apple's weird bug that hopefully someone there knows how to fix.

47:00Maybe they should file a DTS incident and see what happens. Or just drive their computer over to Craig's house. All right. Let's do topics. And we might only get to one today. And that is the disappointing truth about Wi-Fi 7. So, John, you've brought this to the table. and there's a post by Michael John Wood at Ratings, Rtings, or whatever it's called. And Michael writes, Wi-Fi 7, IEEE 802.11be, extremely high throughput, is billed as the next major leap in wireless performance. At the center of these claims sits one headline feature, Multi-Link Operation, or MLO, a core capability of Wi-Fi 7, and a required feature for Wi-Fi certified 7 devices.

47:42Intended to allow simultaneous use of the 2.45 and 6 gigahertz bands for faster, smoother, and more resilient connections. The problem is that the 802.11BE specification defines MLO broadly, permitting implementations that technically satisfy the requirement while delivering only limited real-world benefit. Existing Wi-Fi implementations treat 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz as separate, mutually exclusive pipes. MLO is supposed to let a client device use multiple bands simultaneously. The 802.11BE specification actually defines two very different modes of multi-link operation. simultaneous MLO, which enables multiple bands to operate as a single unified connection.

48:19This requires precise coordination across radios, keeping them time aligned so that they can transmit and receive concurrently with microsecond level switching across all links. There's also alternating MLO, which is designed for hardware that cannot keep multiple radios synchronized. Instead of true concurrency, a single radio rapidly time slices across different bands with predictable padding and transition delays. None of the routers we tested support simultaneous MLO, this gap likely reflects the limitations of current hardware, which is not yet capable of achieving the sub-microsecond timing alignment required between different independent radios.

48:52Instead of implementing true simultaneous MLO, most routers fall back on the simpler single radio alternating mode. As shown in the results table on their website, 21 of the routers we tested advertised some level of alternating MLO support, however nearly all of them report non-physical timing values, specifically 0 millisecond transition and padding delays. Such values are not feasible in real operations, strongly suggest placeholder or incomplete implementations. Only one product, the Euromax 7, advertises realistic, physically plausible timing parameters that indicate a correctly implemented alternating mode protocol.

49:25Because alternating MLOs still serializes traffic through a single radio, it provides little of the latency benefit that MLO is marketed to deliver. And without proper timing and padding, even the theoretical advantages of alternating MLO cannot materialize in practice. Our results highlight how wireless networking terminology and even formal certification can obscure meaningful technical differences. In current product marketing, three similar sounding terms are often conflated, despite having very different implications. Wi-Fi 7, that's Pascal case, Wi-Fi 7, vendor-defined marketing label with no formal standing in the Wi-Fi Alliance's certification programs.

50:00wi-fi 7 is an informal reference to the i triple e 802.11be generation of wi-fi technology while y-fi itself is a trademark of the y-fi alliance use of this term alone does not imply certifications let me repeat that the difference between the first thing i read and the second thing is a hyphen then finally y-fi certified 7 is a designation used exclusively on products that have passed the Wi-Fi Alliance's official certification process and appear in its certified product database. Of the 25 routers evaluated in the study, only three are currently Wi-Fi certified 7. Certification establishes a baseline for standards, compliance, and interoperability, but our results show that it is neither a guarantee of a complete MLO implementation nor a reliable predictor of real-world behavior.

50:46Notably, the only router in our testing that advertises a technically coherent implementation of alternating MLO, the Euromax 7, is not Wi-Fi certified 7. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. oh my god this is our things at its best like it's just you know they're digging deeper into a topic uh you know instead of just saying we tested a bunch of routers and here are the good ones they're like wi-fi 7 it's a new thing it promises a bunch of stuff uh let's test these to see if any of them are using the big fancy new features and in particular to be able to use three radios at once which has lots of advantages that are mostly snipped out of the summary it's like it obviously using three radios at once uh you have the advantage of you know potentially more bandwidth um if you have any kind of interference on one of the channels the other channels might still be good uh you know it's it's it's and obviously you can see why it would be better and you'd get more bandwidth and lower latency or whatever and be more resilient to interference because you're using you know 2.4 gigahertz 5 gigahertz and 6 gigahertz all at the same time uh but apparently nobody does that i mean they only trust they didn't test they tested 25 routers that's not all the routers in the world but one of these routers was like a thousand dollar router like asus like a thousand dollar uh wireless access access point so they didn't shy away from testing the high-end stuff ubiquity is in there as well and literally nobody is doing simultaneous multi-link operations simultaneous mlo they're all and only some of them are apparently doing alternating alternating is use one connection and you switch from 2.4 to 5 to 6 or whatever as you need very quickly right which is still good and interesting and a a kind of mlo but it's not the simultaneous kind of MLO.

52:22So even the fancy Ubiquiti routers weren't doing that, although they were not the most expensive in the test. And the certification thing is just ridiculous. So we'll link to the article, obviously. The table they're referring to is like a table that shows a bunch of features along the top and then along the left side are all the different routers. And you either get like a green checkmark or red X or like a yellow half-filled circle to see whether you implement it. And simultaneous MLO, red X is for everybody. and then alternating mlo red x is for almost everybody including all the euro routers except for one uh so it's not not looking great for the standard and i saw this article i'm like okay well like but why like i i like that they dug into this and i can read the article to see how they did it they had like a linux computer set up analyzing the traffic to like they were trying they weren't just testing like well if it goes faster it must be using simultaneous mlo they were trying to detect the actual protocol differences and the use of the the different spectrum or whatever and i'm assuming they did a pretty good job but it's like all right well you did this article but like is this is this actionable it's it may be interesting from a technical perspective but if if like again they only tested 25 routers but if you can't buy a quote-unquote good one like then this article is basically like they're all they're all not good like there's no like avoid these ones but get these ones because these ones say wi-fi seven but it doesn't do the cool things that these do even though they also say y57 but this is like nope nobody does it so i was like this is very unsatisfying like what what is the deal here uh i did some uh brief searches of my own to try to figure out what i could find here and where i ended up where you always end up when you google for things reddit and it was a reddit discussion of this very post uh and the top rated comment on the reddit thing again it's a person on reddit take for take it for what you want but I think what they had to say rings true for me.

54:13I'm going to find out in the next episode. They're going to say, oh, this person works on the IEEE 802.11BE standard. It was like the last time it was the person who worked on the USB standard. But yeah, I thought this was interesting. So Protons and Neutrons on Reddit writes, the Wi-Fi Alliance and IEEE are two independent bodies. Wi-Fi 7 certified is not the same as the complete IEEE 802.11BE specification. In fact, the Wi-Fi Alliance picks and chooses what it wants from the IEEE drafts. Yes, drafts before they are released. Wi-Fi Alliance traditionally rejects some of the features from IEEE, especially in the first release.

54:47Wait, first release? Yes. For the past three generations, the Wi-Fi Alliance has split every Wi-Fi release into a release one and release two. We had Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 5 wave two. We had Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6 release two. We have Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 7 release two is due in less than a quarter in late 2025, which is over now, or early 2026. These are hardware releases. It is unlikely your Wi-Fi 6 Release 1 access point or client will ever get uplinked M-U-M-I-M-O, even though that was heavily marketed for Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi Alliance decided that features needed more time for implementation, or that feature needed more time for implementation, and pushed it to Wi-Fi 6 Release 2.

55:26Wi-Fi Certified 7 was announced by the Wi-Fi Alliance in January 2024, but IEEE was still tweaking until August 2024. So the Wi-Fi Alliance jumped the gun by around eight months. Why? IEEE is, as you expect, just an engineering body, but Wi-Fi Alliance is a marketing and standards body. Some optional features basically never get implemented by some routers and clients because they are too complex, too expensive, not reliable enough, too power hungry, etc. It's usually the same reason why we don't have 4x4 laptops or 3x3 smartphones. It costs more, it consumes more power, and the performance difference is marginal.

55:58For example, I would not be surprised if simultaneous MLO is never widely implemented in consumer mobile devices, with some high-end exceptions, of course. Why? It consumes more power to transmit on two or three bands at once. We do not get 1.5 gigabits per second transfer rates for free, unfortunately. The general advice I give to people, if you buy a Release 1 device, don't expect most of the marketing for that generation to be true. The Wi-Fi Alliance has ensured you will not get all of the marketing features that news articles actually take from IEEE months or years earlier for that generation.

56:27but you should get most, if not all, release two features of the previous generation. So a Wi-Fi 7 release one access point or client should confidently get you Wi-Fi 6 release two features. And then Mr. Heo Super replied, this is somehow even more messy than Bluetooth and USB. I mean, at least it maybe works better than Bluetooth. I do think that USB still probably takes the cake for hardware confusion, but this is quite a mess. I mean, I think we've all been aware of, uh wi-fi uh and i guess even before wi-fi modems like analog modems back in the day uh hardware being released before the standard that they're based on has been ratified or finalized you remember that with like 56k modems and stuff oh yeah like because people want to get the hardware out there and like people that you know these standards bodies are working on standards for some faster way to transmit data over some medium right and they're almost done but they haven't really like ratified it and now done all the details but hardware makers like no we're making hardware based on your draft specification and we're going to sell it and people will buy it because it is faster than what was out there but then they said okay well when they ratify the standard like you you'll be able to firmware update your modem or whatever your access point and it'll become compliant with the standard sometimes that's true sometimes it's not but here in the case of like these standards that have lots of different features some of which apparently are way more expensive or complicated to implement i mean it happened with wi-fi six that is happening again with Wi-Fi 7.

57:52If, like, the standard is out and, you know, again, the difference between IEEE, which makes the standard, and then the Wi-Fi Alliance, which, like, certifies, them being two separate bodies that seem to only coordinate a little bit means that, like, the Wi-Fi Alliance is saying, okay, well, there's the standard, but nobody makes anything that complies with the whole standard. So we're going to make a certification thing that says, here's the Wave 1 certification. If you do these things from the standard, We'll give you our stamp that says you are Wi-Fi certified seven, at least one, whatever, whatever, like tag they want to put on it.

58:28And then later when, if people figure out how to implement more features, we'll say, okay, that you'd be released too. And as this person points out, apparently there, there is, they may not ever have a Wi-Fi line certification that covers all the features in eight or two 11, uh, be right. And I'm so glad we moved away from those, but I remember I used to know all those initials and everything. And they changed the, i guess they changed with wi-fi wi-fi five or six they started using the big number instead of the 802 11 uh a bunch of letters uh that's an improvement at least but yeah it's confusing because do you have wi-fi seven yeah i have wi-fi seven oh well is it wi-fi certified if it is which which releases is certified to it if it's not what the heck features does it support um and one of the reasons i thought this was interesting is because i was reflecting on my wi-fi seven situation which is i ain't got it i mean i have wi-fi 7 not like i think i think my iphone 16 pro has it i have my wife has an iphone 17 pro that i believe has it as i've complained about in past episodes i think apple's macs still do not support wi-fi 7 which is crappy but the bottom line is in my house my wi-fi setup was purchased before wi-fi 7 existed it so it's wi-fi six i forget which variant of wi-fi six but it doesn't it's not wi-fi seven and all and i've been thinking about like well you know kieran healy just posted about this i'm astodon like everything in my house networking wise works fine no one complains that they're not getting enough bandwidth no one complains they're not getting enough signal everything i do on my network works video never stutters my downloads go fast like i don't have any complaints and yet the number seven is in fact one bigger than the number six and so i find myself thinking when is the right time for me to for example replace my euro with an euro with that supports wi-fi seven and after reading this article i think the conclusion i've come to is not quite yet but i thought uh i you know i didn't know any of this the simultaneous mlo versus alternate mlo stuff and reading that one random person on Reddit makes me think I kind of believe that no one will implement that because if no one's implemented it so far and it does take more power and everything like who's going to do it but we'll see but anyway what what what are your situations like in your house in terms of Wi-Fi 7 do you have it do you want it are you going to get it I mean for me I am starting my unified journey mostly by bequeathed or you know secondhand hardware and no none of my stuff is Wi-Fi 7 compatible and I don't expect to go down that road anytime soon.

1:01:11I mean, anything that I feel like needs a whole bunch of bandwidth, I have wired. And I even have 10 gigabit Ethernet between my Synology and my MacBook Pro, which is really freaking great. And so for me, I don't think I'm going to be jumping on this bandwagon anytime soon. If it becomes real, like everyone keeps saying, or I feel like the nerds keep saying, oh, no, Wi-Fi 7 will make Ethernet obsolete. And leaving aside latency, which I know this is supposed to help with, but even leaving aside latency, I'll believe it when I see it. And nothing that I've read today has made me think it's closer.

1:01:51In fact, this makes me think it's a long way out. I thought you had 2.5 gigabits between your Mac and your Synology because of the Thunderbolt thing. No. So the CalDigit TS5 has onboard 10 gigabit Ethernet. And I think there's some things I lose out on by not having Thunderbolt 5. But I have definitely pushed like hundreds of megabytes per second between my Synology and my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, because it's all spinning rust in the Synology, it usually will peak for 500, 600, 700 megs for a few seconds. Then it will drop down to like 200 or 300 megs a second. but it's still pretty freaking great nonetheless.

1:02:32And to be clear, what you're referring to is the Ubiquiti brand of networking hardware. Again, some Ubiquiti stuff was in this test. I don't know. I'm sure they didn't test every possible thing Ubiquiti offers. Again, it was only 25 routers. But yeah, buying a fancy expensive brand is not a guarantee to lose. In my Googling, I also found a bunch of Cisco presentations and they were talking about their Wi-Fi 7 hardware rollout and whatever year they started it. and they had specific slides that said basically yeah we're not doing simultaneous mlo because it's too hard and too expensive maybe we'll have it in the future right so the sort of high-end fancy enterprisey or like prosumery things like ubiquity are not usually the first ones to jump on the bandwagon of a new thing and they're taking more cautious approach because it's more important especially for like enterprise stuff it's more important for their stuff to work reliably than for it to get just a little tiny bit faster or whatever because being flaky is worse than going a little bit slower um but yeah i i do think like for especially for home wi-fi like i'm trying to think of a scenario where it depends on what the power like this this thing is saying oh it takes more power it takes more power to run radios at the same time is there a scenario where i would make that trade-off where i would say okay well obviously it doesn't matter for the access point the access point is plugged into the wall i can use as much power as it wants as long as it doesn't have obnoxious fans but are there any devices that use wi-fi that i would be willing to make that trade-off to get the increased bandwidth that i'm not entirely sure again everything in my house is not wi-fi 7 now and i don't have any bandwidth complaints which every time i think about upgrading stuff i think what are you doing everything works don't touch anything yeah just just leave it alone but uh speaking of that marco how's wi-fi 7 going in your house i my policy for my Wi-Fi gear is when I am setting up a home network, I buy whatever is pretty good at that time from Ubiquiti, then I just leave it because I don't know if I'm unusual here.

1:04:31I don't think I am in this case. Wi-Fi speeds are not my limiting factor to almost anything. Now, I think it's very important for people to realize also that whenever there's some new Wi-Fi standard, they always brag about a certain speed capability that in practice, no one ever gets. Like in practice, you would have to be like standing next to the router in an environment with perfect conditions and no interference to get most of the speeds that are advertised by the Wi-Fi specs. These are like speeds in ideal cases, not speeds that you will get when the router is, you know, in your living room and you're upstairs or, you know, not speeds that you're going to get if there's like a wall anywhere in your house or if there's anyone else using the Wi-Fi at the same time.

1:05:19And so what I usually experience with Wi-Fi is am I using my phone or laptop and does it seem to work? Yes or no? Like it's more of a Boolean. It's like does it work or not? Does the Wi-Fi connect? And if the Wi-Fi is connecting, odds are it is going to offer enough throughput that I'm not going to notice the Wi-Fi being a problem. them. Now, you know, my internet in each place is gigabit Ethernet, which is, you know, wonderful. I love gigabit Fios. Thank you so much, Fios, for existing. All the wiring, all the hubs and switches I use everywhere, those are all gigabit too. I've been at gigabit speeds for my internal and external networking for many years now, and I've never really felt that was a problem either.

1:06:09everything is fast enough for my purposes of like do i notice the networking um i'm not doing frequent large multi-gigabyte file transfers between my computers and my synologies or whatever different storages but if i were doing those things it would be over wires i wouldn't really be subject to the whims of wi-fi but the wi-fi in my house so at the beach i have i think a mix of Wi-Fi 5 and 6. That's the oldest equipment I currently run. At the restaurant, it's all 6 because when I was setting up the restaurant, everyone was saying like, eh, it's a little bit shaky maybe. And then here on Long Island, it's a mix of Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 6 gear because it's just whatever I bought.

1:06:53I bought a few and I'm like, oh, I need one or two more, that kind of thing. But it doesn't really matter. Nothing I do with Wi-Fi, nothing ever matters. I never look Like, am I connected to Wi-Fi 7 or Wi-Fi 6? Am I on the right frequencies? Am I using all the channels I can use? Like, I never look. I let Ubiquity auto-manage the channel spreads and everything for me. And all I care about really is, do I have signal in this room or not? And that's much more to do with the placement of the Wi-Fi APs and how many of them there are and what they're going through to get to you. and every new Wi-Fi standard that comes out doesn't do anything to meaningfully make that more robust.

1:07:38It's more like if you have great conditions, this is what we'll be able to do for you. But what most of us are battling with our Wi-Fi issues is like, yeah, this bedroom over here is getting 15 megabits because it's like a little bit weak on the signal and it's a little bit far from the thing because it's going through two walls instead of one wall or whatever it is. Like that's real Wi-Fi problems that real people have. No one is actually going to notice if their Wi-Fi goes from 600 megabits to 800 megabits or a gigabit. Like that's so far beyond what anyone's actually getting in real life and what they would actually notice in almost any usage.

1:08:16Well, the new standards do have things for battling interference, one of the advertised features of simultaneous MLO. Yeah, they all say that. But that one bedroom, you still can't get that great of a signal unless you put an access point nearby. Right. But I'm saying I do think that if you upgrade your Wi-Fi, in particular, if you upgrade your access point hardware, even if you leave it all in the same place and the new hardware is both newer and also uses a new standard, you do have a chance of potentially getting slightly better signal. um it's not going to make the the room that's really far from an access point suddenly be perfect but it could improve matters i saw that when i upgraded whatever my current one is like wi-fi 6e or whatever whatever old ero i had before the access points are in exactly the same place i just removed the old access points and put in the new ones from the same company and i did get better signal everywhere uh it's not not not as measured by like bandwidth like i'm not doing like speed tests or trying to download huge files uh but the signal strength is better um and i'm thinking of applications where it would make a difference for me i'm also not transferring huge files and the video stuff that i have i mean i get one thing i don't do because i don't have a disk space someday when i oh my synology finally dies knock on wood um and i upgrade to like modern storage and i have much more space maybe i will revisit the idea of putting blu-ray rips on it i experimented that when i first got my synology blue but blu-ray rips are huge uh and i believe i would run into wi-fi bandwidth problems trying to play essentially like you know the original quality in plex or whatever like you know playing a blu-ray rip directly from my synology in a distant bedroom that has bad signal like onto an ipad like what's the what's the device here uh yeah an ipad or anything like that like you wouldn't be wired you're saying yeah well yeah wireless ipad uh television watching in bed and i do it all the time and it's fine but all my i'm not watching 50 gig blu-ray rips i'm watching you know much more compressed content and it's you know it's fine for the lower bitrate compressed content but i did experiment with doing blurbs and everyone's like oh you got to do that i have all these blu-rays i would love to rip them at original quality like no no recompression at all but that might stress my current wi-fi now would a new wi-fi thing help with that or to marco's point what would really help with that is better access point uh locations but part of the problem is part of the dream of a new wi-fi hardware for me is like it's not that easy for me to add new wi-fi access point locations like i don't have my house is not plumbed for any kind of wiring and the places where i can put access points are pretty limited and then the places where i would want to put an access point like in terms of not being an eyesore is also very limited and you know my house is filled with a hundred year old plaster and lead in the walls or whatever the hell stuff i've got going on it's like it's a challenging situation um another scenario that i thought of again reading this reading this artings or ratings.com article about about the promises and dreams of the wi-fi 7 thing one of them is about um with the simultaneous multi-link operation which nobody has was about latency and i was just mentioning this to my wife the other day uh we were in costco and i was uh looked at this i look at it occasionally when i go by there is a extremely stupid sony device that they sell that looks like uh like a nintendo switch but by by sony that plays playstation games but it's not what it is is a playstation 5 controller cracked in half with the screen stuck in the middle but it doesn't have any like you can't play games on it all it is is a remote viewer for your actual playstation 5 console in your house so that's basically it's okay it's a i'll put a link to it in the the chat room um it's called the playstation portal remote player and you need a playstation and this wirelessly connects to your playstation and lets you play it like a nintendo switch now i like it because i think the playstation 5 controller handles are much more comfortable than switch like i don't do any handheld games because of rsi issues but i do use my playstation 5 controller all the time and i find it ergonomically way better than holding a switch and also i find it better than the switch pro controller both the original and two but anyway uh and it's got a not very good screen in there i do occasionally on my ipad launch the playstation remote play app because there's an app for ipad os that lets you wake up your playstation and then just use it from your ipad with like on-screen controls i do it when i like forgot to do something in one of my games or something and so from bed with my ipad with with terrible on-screen controls i will fumble my way through doing some kind of chore in destiny or arc raiders or something and then turn the thing off uh but i could fully play my playstation in bed with this thing except do i want to be playing a real-time like sort of you know reaction time is a factor kind of action game like destiny or arc raiders over my current wi-fi setup from my bedroom which doesn't have the best signal maybe wi-fi 7 would help like i've resisted buying this thing because it's 200 for like a controller and a screen although i think you can buy an individual controller with no screen for$200 from Sony as well.

1:13:24And also because I think my wife would not tolerate me using this thing in bed next to her because the, whether you know it or not using controls makes noise like the buttons and the joysticks actually make noise. You don't notice when you're playing, but certainly if someone was trying to sleep next to you, it makes noise. What doesn't make noise is me watching video with my AirPods in on my iPad because I'm not doing anything with my hands. But I think she would be annoyed by this, but I, this is the one application i could think of uh maybe casey's case would be like i don't know like transferring to synology without wires from somewhere if you ever need to do that but mine would be could i play the hypothetical playstation portal remote player um let's say from my couch or something because my my playstation is it's not a it's not on the connection to television it's got to do a gaming monitor could i do handheld gaming within my house with my current wi-fi setup and would that be improved by a theoretical simultaneous mlo wi-fi 7 setup i guess stay tuned because i mean our tanks usually does a good job of following up on this um if hardware ever is released that supports the the simultaneous mlo i'm sure they'll do a follow-up story on it and we'll try to cover it here as well um it does seem like wi-fi 7 it's not brand new like there's plenty of hardware out there apple is shipping it in a lot of their devices that's the other part of this that i didn't mention like it doesn't matter if you buy an access point like say they found an access point this one supports simultaneous mlo great do you have any client devices that support simultaneous mlo because i'm assuming nothing apple sells does like they're actually going to support wi-fi 7 the phones almost certainly don't for power reasons like and you know the the ipad doesn't does the playstation portal remote player support it probably not like you need it takes two to tango here so it just seems like this is a standard that's like ahead of its time and like the the advice at the end of uh the reddit posters thing is saying basically like maybe when you get your wi-fi 8 release one thing it will support all the features from wi-fi 7 release one and two uh kind of depressing but it does have some historical precedent so i guess the moral of the story is that networking is always complicated and if it works don't touch it although i'm kind of shocked that marco does that honestly no because because again it's like my wi-fi is fine so for whatever it's worth um i i looked up what is the bit rate of like the highest uhd 4k blu-rays and the answer seems to be somewhere around 130 peaking at 150 megabits per second um so but it's around 130 megabits per second uh you know sustained um then and i opened up the ubiquity uh wi-fi man app on my phone to just like what's how how fast is my phone currently you know connecting to the access point that is maybe 10 feet away in my office closet and it's telling me that it's connected via wi-fi 6 mode even though it is a u7 access point but whatever um because i don't think the phones are wi-fi 7 right so no the phones are wi-fi 7 now oh well it's not using it for some reason i don't care why but it's so anyway my phone's connected to via wi-fi 6 um currently sustaining a transfer rate of approximately 460 megabits per second um so that's you know almost four times the data rate of a 4k uhd blu-ray so to give you some idea like if that is like your your stress test for like how can wi-fi handle this like my you know pretty good modern wi-fi setup handles it just fine when the access point is close yeah that's that for my bedroom is not this is one of the worst case scenarios for access point locality like obviously if i did it from the room with the access point i would have no problem but if i get distant in my in my very uh wireless unfriendly house uh that's where it gets harder and that's like i did see an improvement in terms of data rates when i upgraded to the from whatever i had before i think i had a wi-fi 5 thing before i upgraded to 6c i did see an improvement in the bedroom in terms of that sounds bad i saw an improvement in the bedroom when i upgraded to wi-fi 6c um were you using a true grip mac the smart skin technology that's right easy here's the comply tips um uh and so i have hope that like a place because you know i can play blue ray rips but they would occasionally stutter right and i'll be like oh just you know whatever the the rats are moving the lead inside the walls like you know i just it's such a bet i would hope that it would get better and same thing with the playstation portal like that's not a bandwidth thing it's because the bandwidth i'm sure massively compresses the signal it's all about latency you want to be the lowest possible latency and again that's one of the advertised features of the fancy wi-fi 7 is they can reduce latency by essentially routing around any uh weaknesses in the signal by using three radios at the same time instead of switching between them so by the way um six milliseconds the answer the current latency of that same connection i was just talking about so it's really not like this is wi-fi 6 it's just with good reception like being close to the exit point matters so much more than what protocol the access point is speaking yeah i just need to run an ethernet wire up to my bedroom but just there's a lot of walls between yeah me and that i just just run it out the window we can pop it back in but so the people who had this house before us they like their coax for like their cable television they had cable television in many rooms because you know i don't know they did in the 90s or the 80s or whenever it was the style at the time and how did they get into all the rooms they ran it they drilled a hole through the house to the outdoors they ran the coax outside the house up the outside of the house and then drilled another hole into the room they wanted to go to and they did that in every room in the house oh my god so why don't you get mini splits what are you waiting for now well when i got the house recited all that crap went away and there are no longer 500 holes drilled through my house with coax stuck to the outside of it you didn't just fish some cat six through there instead or use mocha bridges it's all gone now it's all gone now well unfortunately when i did when i got new side out of the house i also filled the walls with insulation which was a massive improvement in the comfort of the house uh but also made it one more extra difficulty to try to route why i'm sure an electrician could do it but like i mean with plaster walls it's always just such a mess like anyway uh i'm i don't know i'll see if i can figure it out i do have a if people can say you should have a mesh network i do euro is a mesh network but mesh networks are no match for running ethernet wires to your wireless access points that is just so much better than mesh networking if you can do it yeah in both latency and throughput it's it's no contest we are sponsored this week by quince so here in the northern hemisphere it is the new year well it's new year everywhere but here in the northern hemisphere it's also winter where it's really cold even way down here in the deep deep deep south if you believe john syracusa well here's the thing you probably want your winter wardrobe to be just locked in.

1:20:09And if you're ready for a winter reset, or if you just want to add a couple of things, you can start with pieces truly made the last season after season. Quince brings together premium materials, thoughtful design and enduring quality, so you can stay warm, look sharp, and feel your best all season long. Quince has everything you need. Men's Mongolian cashmere sweaters, wool coats, leather and suede outerwear that actually hold up to daily wear and still look good. And each piece is made from premium materials by trusted factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production, which I love.

1:20:35Also, I'm talking a bunch about men's stuff because that's the stuff I'm most familiar with. But Quince also does children's and women's things as well. So they sent me a couple of pieces at my request. And one of the things they sent is an organic cotton long sleeve fit and flare pocket dress for Michaela. And this thing is adorable. Not only does it have pockets, but it has these like orange and pink and blue hearts all over it. It's super duper cute. For me, I chose a Comfort Stretch Traveler five-pocket pants, which is, it presents as like a semi-formal pant, you know, something you could wear for business casual situations or meeting or whatever.

1:21:12But it feels more like jeans, and I mean that in a complimentary way because jeans are typically, well, for guys anyway, really, really comfortable. And I want to focus on something silly here. The button at the top of the fly, it's flat. It's a very tasteful silvery color, and it's flat. It doesn't say quince all over it. It's not advertising or anything like that. It's just a button, a well-made button, which I love. So if this sounds good to you, and it should, you can refresh your winter wardrobe with Quince. Go to Quince.com slash ATP for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now it's available in Canada as well.

1:21:44So go to Quince.com slash ATP. You can get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash ATP. Thank you to Quince for sponsoring the show.

1:21:57All right, let's do some Ask ATP. and Michael Crusun writes, what is the distinction between minimizing versus hiding Windows and macOS? As somebody who uses command tab to jump between my applications, I pretty much just hide my Windows using command H, but find it confusing that the two are very similar UI concepts with different consequences. Why doesn't Apple merge this concept into one? Not a fan of Windows, but they at least have a single concept of minimizing application Windows. In your opinion, should macOS be updated to have the same behavior? No. John, thoughts? I mean, I don't know how windowing works exactly on windows i am familiar with minimizing with the little like underscore minus whatever button thing but here's the thing uh mac os 10 introduced this distinction between hiding windows which existed for i guess the entire history of the mac maybe i don't know i don't know when it was added but ever since multitasking has been around it existed in classic mac os let's say that hiding windows that existed in classic mac os and continued on in mac os 10 mac os 10 added minimizing windows and minimizing means hitting the little yellow widget and that means the window leaves where it was and goes down into your dock now how it manifests in your dock is modifiable like i i think there's a setting where you can have your minified windows sort of tuck into the application that they came from you can also have them as separate items on your dock this is all new to mac os 10 because the dock didn't exist before mac os 10 in mac os classic mac os did not have a dock mac os 10 did have a dock it's still there minimizing windows are still there it's totally different than hiding hiding means leave the window where it is just make it invisible and you can hide and show with all the various windowing commands and there are other ways you can do it but anyway the window hasn't moved it's just either it's visible or it's not minimizing says take it from where it was and put it into the dock somewhere somehow if you have minimize windows i believe this is the default visible in the dock as separate items you will see a tiny little version of your window with a little badge for the app icon and current version of megawas like you can recognize your window from its tiny tiny thumbnail in the dock and so then you can visually scan and say where was that window it's not you don't have to wonder where it is and go to the app where it is and do show all or anything like that you can see it in your dock click on it and then the little genie effect will go or the scale effect or whatever you picked will make it leave the dock and go back to where it was i don't know how you could confuse these two things because they're just so incredibly different but that's why they're both there one of them lets you optionally continue to see tiny thumbnails of your windows while taking them off your screen and the other one does not and just hides them in place where they are and i wouldn't like them to replace either one of them because people like both of them and you can mix and match them if you like i have a window minimized right now, but just one, but I have a thousand hidden windows, right?

1:24:45Why did I minimize that one window? Cause I wanted to remind myself it was a window I had open, but it was like really big. And I didn't want it to like cluttering up my stuff. I'm like, I gotta, I gotta remember to get back to that. And if I just hit it, I know I would just forget that I was in the middle of that big thing. So I minimized it before this podcast. So now I see it sitting in my dock there and it's going to remind me, Oh yeah, I was in the middle of that thing. And I will unminimize it because I'll see it in my dock. That's just one example of me using minimize. And I use use it for that one purpose and i use hiding all the time so again i don't know how windows works but i think having both of those concepts in mac os is an advantage and they should keep them yeah as far as i know the windows model is there's just minimizing um but the what what makes the mac model powerful it which also makes it confusing for a lot of people uh especially you know newbies to it um but what makes it powerful is that you don't hide windows you hide entire apps and you don't minimize entire apps.

1:25:42You minimize single windows. And so you actually have those different layers of management. You can hide individual windows. You can? Yeah. Option click away from it, right? What? Really? I don't think I've ever done that in my life. Anyway. No, no. That hides everything. Let me see. Let me see if I can find an example. I believe you can with certain arrangements that just hide one window but leave the others visible. I got a front and center is thwarting me here. Yeah, right. anyway all right so while john does that so basically like to me when i hide an app like i am done with this entire app right now i don't need to see this entire app right now minimizing i very rarely use minimizing the only thing i use it for is safari the idea basically is safari i tend to have not a john level of windows but not not a small number like right now i have oh geez one two three four i have about looks like about 12 safari windows i got a lot of stuff gracious yeah um you got more than me i have oh no two three four five six i have six you have double the number of safari windows i have a lot of tabs on those windows but i mean so do i but so for but for whatever it's worth like six of those windows are minimized and have been minimized for months i think oh my gosh you're killing me you two um but it's like here's something because Safari is like there's so many times that I have to open something up in Safari and like, oh, I want to deal with this.

1:27:10I can't deal with this right now. I should make an app that deals with this problem for me. But it's like I should I want to deal with this thing in this window. I can't deal with it right now or I'm not ready to yet. I'll come back to this. And then at some point, clearly that's working well. It's like the badge on your mail that says 10 ,000 unread messages. It is exactly like that. I am equally bad at doing this for all of my applications. But the way I do it with Safari is like if there's some like project or something that like, oh, I'm not ready for this right now. I don't want to lose these tabs.

1:27:40I can't deal with it yet. But also every time I open Safari, I don't want all of these windows popping back into view and crowding my entire screen. That's a good case for I'm going to minimize this window. Also, all the clutter near my dock should remind me of it over time. Like the badge on your mail will remind you. Right. I think the thing I was thinking of with single windows is option double-clicking a folder and finder window, and it will open the new folder window, but it'll close the one behind it. So it's not actually hiding. It's closing. So anyway, so to answer Michael's question back from a thousand years ago, why hasn't Apple merged these concepts into one?

1:28:16Well, honestly, they're different concepts. But that being said, this is the kind of thing that like today's Apple, if you look at like, you know, what do we have like on the iPad, like the newest windowing system that Apple has made. Granted, that's still very much in flux. And that's, you know, that's fine. I think they're making progress overall. But modern Apple, I don't think, would ever have created this system from scratch this way. But this is something that came from legacy. And I think we're better off for it because the idea of the Mac in today's computing ecosystem is like, yes, this is the computer that like everyone can use, asterisk.

1:28:52But like this is the power users platform. If you are a desktop computer or laptop, if you're a PC or Mac power user, chances are you're probably a Mac user in a lot of cases. And if you are a power user on the Mac, it rewards you in a lot of different ways you can manage things, including all these different window management styles and techniques and different options you have. Regular people who are not expert users never hide anything. They quit apps or they minimize things. That's it. And that's why regular people have way more minimized windows usually than I have my Safari windows in my little minimized dock area.

1:29:31Or they just close apps with the red button. Yeah, because they just want it to go away. And once they learn that yellow button makes it go away to the dock, they just do that. That's why you see so many people with their docks that are just filled with just a huge amount of stuff so you can't even tell what anything is anymore. Like a thousand minimized windows or a million application icons because they find that one system. They're like, oh, every window has these red, yellow, and green buttons. And I kind of recognize them, and I learn what they do, and I learn the yellow one makes the window small and go away, and that's the tool I'm going to use to manage my windows.

1:30:01And, you know, if it works for them, it works for them, but there are many more tools at your disposal besides just that, and just using that yellow button can overwhelm things very quickly, especially if you don't understand the concept of, like, you know, that app is still running, and unlike iOS, it's not going to quit it for you because so many people didn't adopt auto-termination. Anyway. Well, that leads me into my next point, which is i think there's actually two things apple should steal from windows in this area number one is auto termination i think number one that i mean they tried when when the last window of an app is closed the app should terminate oh i just madly disagree that is optional disagree that is optional in mac apps and mac if you're writing a mac app you can choose whether you want your mac app to do that and i'm glad that's a choice because some apps like say calculator you do want that or dictionary you do want that to happen but other apps you absolutely do not so the apple way is better it should be a developer choice developers unlike automatic termination develop i thought you were talking about something else which i'll get to in a second but this thing i believe most mac developers including apple make the right choice for when they do this again this is a developer choice you can decide how you want your app to behave apple has guidelines on it they had guidelines back in the day they still are basically the same um this should definitely be developer choice because both modes of operation are important and you don't even think about i bet you don't like casey were like i disagree i don't like that or whatever but i bet you never even thought about the fact that when you open dictionary and close the window the app quits no yeah i was like it just works the way you expect if what you expect is sanity wow i so i think it breaks enough people's expectations that that's that's why it is the wrong behavior well and by the way the other one the auto termination that i'm referring to is there is there's an api that a developer that was introduced years ago back when i was reviewing mac os 10 apple introduced an api that said uh hey mac developers you know how ios if your app is not being used actively used and we feel memory pressure or whatever like we just kill your app uh and then like we'll relaunch it and it has to resume and restore it state you know how that works on ios and everybody loves it why don't we do that on the mac and they introduce a suite of APIs that you can opt into that say, hey, macOS, you can kill my app if you need memory or whatever.

1:32:17And when I relaunch, I'll restore my state so people won't even, just like iOS. And Mac developers mostly did not adopt those APIs. Is it because it's not the Mac way? Is it because Mac users didn't want it? They still exist. You can still implement them. And I feel like good Mac apps should relaunch to their previous state but very few mac apps have opted into allowing mac os to kill them when it feels like it and i kind of don't as a developer of a mac app i kind of don't blame them i know that's just the way things are on our ios and it always has been that way on ios so it's like the culture there but the culture on mac os is no mac os don't kill me don't kill my app i could opt into it but i'm not gonna see i think that's that's very different though because that's like the user still has content in a window open of that app so like that makes sense yeah no i know but it is called automatic termination yes anyway okay so i we disagree on that but hey and and i as a power user i appreciate the fact that i can that i have command w and command q doing different things but i also know that no one else who's not power users ever manages that correctly um so i think termination after the last windows closed which is something windows does i think that is the right move for apple to do if they ever want i think you should be cursed marco to have your mac suddenly enable that feature for every app and it will drive you insane all right all right and then secondly the second thing apple should borrow from windows john's going to kill me the green button should maximize the window to the entire screen bounce thank you very much i mean everybody wants that an option green button will almost always do that here's what i want the green button to do and what i don't remember if it ever did this but like there was a button in classic mac os that it was kind of the natural analog to the green button they didn't have stop lights it was on the right side of the window or whatever but it was a when the button looked like a small square inside a big square like there was a square and then there was a square in the upper left corner so it was like little square big square right it was basically like minimize maximize and here's what that button did in classic classic mac os and it is the thing that i wish buttons uh one of the window control buttons did on mac os 10 and modern mac os but doesn't and never really did which is automatically size this window to be appropriately sized for the content that's in it so for example if you're in the finder and it's an icon view window and you have a bunch of icons and you're like i just want this window to be big enough to show all the icons right now there's a bunch of empty space all around them just shrink shrink to fit just shrink it so it fits all the things without scroll bars that's useful in lots of apps like an image editing app or whatever, like, or preview.

1:34:53And, you know, and you want, I just want to see this window at 1x. I just did a crop or whatever, but now there's a bunch of gray, empty area around it. Just shrink this window to be just big enough to show all the content without scroll bars. None of the, like, apps can implement that. You can do anything you want in response to the window widgets, but that is not a standard feature of the window widgets in macOS. And that's what I miss. I do get what you're saying. I don't mind the green thing, go full screen all the time. most apps do that if you option green click thing and the app doesn't do that the option click will usually make it do that but yeah there's a lot of confusion with the green thing because some apps will size to fit and people don't want that they want it to go full screen i don't actually object to that too much too much because i do feel like most people see the green thing and they just expect it to do full screen all the time and i think the culture in mac os these days is most apps do it can you think of an app to use frequently that doesn't do that no i've never used like the option thing to make that used to back when back when the recommendation was slightly different the option thing was like okay and that will force it but again you could programmatically you can you know as a mac developer you can make the button do whatever you want which is insanity coming from ios but you can make it do whatever you want but the defaults and the recommended approaches uh usually to do full screen but you said what you want is for it to do full screen all the time that's what i'm asking is there some app that doesn't do full screen with the green widget by default that you use frequently um let me see hold on let me see what safari does see so see what i don't want is for it to go into full screen mode that's oh you just wanted to make it the size of the i get what you're saying all right you wanted to just make the window big enough to fill the whole screen you don't want to go to full but on windows it gives the full screen screen well sort of menu bar so it's harder to tell but it does like it But full screen mode on Windows by maximizing a window on Windows.

1:36:43Full screen mode, we can call it that. But like on Windows, it's just, okay, now you have one big window. On the Mac, it's a whole show. It's like you maximize, you go, it's like, woo, here we go. But it does the same thing on Windows in that it doesn't like it doesn't leave any gaps or seams. Like it gets rid of the window chrome at the edges. It just, it pushes it off. Like it's full bleed in the print sense. where it's as if you had printed it and then cut like windows does the same thing and so does mac os but you're right the animations and mac os and the whole flashing and everything like that and of course on mac os it hides the menu bar as well which is not a thing on windows in the same way so yeah like it's it's much more disruptive to the mac experience to go in out of full screen mode and yes and it is slower because of all the woo animation so it's like you're getting sent along for a ride like oh no i accidentally am in this ride now and then oh let me get out woo all the way back like it's just it's such a it's such a heavy operation yeah it's try the option try option click in safari by the way all right hold on although uh you will ruin your window when you do this because i don't know how to undo it let me see option shift click nope there's no oh no i just gotta i well i option click just give me like the move and resize menu now no option option click the green uh widget yeah that's what i'm doing when you're at not in full screen mode get out of full screen mode i'm not get a safari window and option click the green widget nothing happens.

1:38:01What are you talking about nothing happens? I just did it. I mean, I'm not on Tahoe. Are you on Tahoe? No. Why would I be on Tahoe? It's hideous. I don't know. I'm saying, Casey, can you confirm? Go to Safari window and I just did it. It expands vertically to fill the space. It does not expand horizontally. Oh, it was already vertically filling it. Mine expands horizontally and vertically. Yeah, mine is only doing... No, I'm sorry. You're right. It could depend on what web page you're on. Like, if you're on a web page... Yeah, I think I'd try ATP.fm. Oh my God. All right. This is great programming john great program maybe familiar with i'm gonna it only is adjusting the height yeah it expands horizontally and vertically not mine does horizontal but only the teeniest little bit anyway see this is the problem though like the a button like that should do the same thing every time to every window like the the red button does the yellow button does the green button is like i'm gonna randomly make this larger but not probably what you expect yeah they're like i said there's developer control over all these things most developers don't mess with the the close button or the minimize button but the the green button is as you noted it's got a menu that comes from it the option click thing far predates the menu and the option thing that i used to in most apps do what you want it which is make this window big enough to fill the whole screen but don't enter full screen mode because that that existed before full screen mode was a thing on macOS because macOS 10 didn't always have full screen mode and that's that's what i that's what i i'm saying that's what it should do every time like it should make the window the full bound to the screen minus the menu bar and the dock but i i think a lot of mac users really love full screen mode though i think the current default is probably right i don't mind what you're saying like i i don't i'm not a fan of full screen mode and i would be just as happy to have it like make the window big enough to fill the whole screen with an option or something but i mean i've always said and this is my complaint forever there should be public apis for the windowing system and things like stage manage should have been possible as a third-party app that's absolutely not the case now and it's even less the case than it used to be because mac os 10 used to have all sorts of like hacks and everything but you know system integrity protection everything stopped all that right but there should be public apis for the windowing system kind of like there was back in x windows system i'm sure the links people are you know if you want a configurable window manager x 11 is sitting right there it's like yeah it is in wayland or whatever but um and there's lots of cool utilities for the mac like hammerspoon and stuff where you can hack together stuff that does this but there should be public apis from apple with full access to the windowing system above the layer of an application so you can if you want a tiling window manager someone third party should be able to implement one if someone has an idea that's like stage manager third party should be able to implement if someone wants to do what make a window manager that behaves the way marco described third party should be able to do that the wrinkle is that mac apps can override some of this stuff but again that would have to be part of the public api the public api is out for this that is a super duper power user feature though like on x11 back in college i had my window manager configured i think i've described before in very on mac like ways because i just had come up with a workflow that worked for me in x windows on the x terms that was very different than the way i worked on max like doing you know like a focus falls mouse but without auto raise so i could be like move my cursor into a background window and not have it come to the front but have the input focus be there and stuff like i was doing really weird on mac like stuff you know experimental time in college i didn't prefer it all the time but it was great to be able to configure all of that and use different window managers and stuff and the mac a lot of that experimentation has gone away and ipad and ios it never existed to begin with although there's a little bit of experimentation back in the jailbreak days um but that is definitely you know someday when we do the uh john turnis's to-do list or insert apple new ceo he to hear to-do list adding power user features like this to the mac specifically does make a lot of sense after they shore up all the crappy stuff that's broken with the existing functionality.

1:41:53But yeah, maybe that'll be their new Apple 2030 plan. All right. Thank you to our sponsor this episode, Quince. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is exclusive bonus content. We do an exclusive content topic every single week called ATP Overtime. This week, we're going to be talking about the rumor that Apple is making a iMac Pro again with an M5 Max chip sometime soon. We're going to talk about that and over time you can join and listen to ATBZFM slash join. Thank you so much everybody and we'll talk to you next week.

1:42:30Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. or who is accidental and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into Mastodon you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S so that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M and T-Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. All right. I have a question. What the hell is the story with thread and matter? I feel like an idiot. I feel like I am capable of understanding what all this is and means and does.

1:43:44But I don't get it. And I need someone to write up like the idiot's guide or what was that? Thread and matter for dummies. I need somebody to write this post and send it my way, please. It might already exist for all I know. But this is all brought on because a year ago now, I bought a, I believe it's nano leaf set of Christmas lights, of LED Christmas lights. So you can program them and you can make them dance and react to music and do all sorts of stuff, most of which we don't bother with. but they were incredibly on sale after Christmas last year. And so I thought, you know what? I'm going to get these.

1:44:20I think they were at James Thompson's recommendation. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I think that's true. And so I got this set and I'm mostly happy with it. And it said that it works with HomeKit. And so I was like, oh great. Okay, perfect. That's all I really need. Then this year, when I went to put it on the tree, I realized, oh no, I have now somehow joined the thread matter, you know, thread slash matter ecosystem. I don't think I really wanted to be here quite yet. And so I did eventually get it on Apple Home, but that meant I couldn't get it into Home Assistant, which may be user error, or at least not at first anyway.

1:44:58And then I found a Home Assistant add-on plugin, whatever, that would work with it. And so I did get them eventually into Home Assistant, which is good, so I can automate stuff and whatever. But when looking at how to get something over, I think it's matter over thread or thread. I think that's right. I don't think it's thread over matter, but it's something like that. Mind over matter, Casey. Right, exactly. But when I went looking at, okay, how can I get this connected directly to Home Assistant and then bridge from Home Assistant into HomeKit like I do with so many other things? And one of the things I discovered really quickly was that apparently either thread or matter, one of them, requires IPv6, which is all well and good on my physical network, but is a freaking nightmare to get working in a Docker container on a Synology.

1:45:50And so now I'm wondering if maybe I need to get, like, physical hardware for home assistance, so I don't need to bother with that whole dance. It's all a mess, y 'all. It's all a mess. And most of the reason it's a mess is because I have no friggin' idea what I'm doing. And so, I would love it if someone could point me to the Idiot's Guide to Thread slash Matter and help me figure this out. And I'm assuming that you two are also clueless. I mean, it sounds to me like what you need is a guide for getting IPv6 networking working in Docker containers. Well, that would also work, specifically on a Synology, because my limited understanding after having looked at this very briefly is that doing it on the Synology is uniquely crappy, whereas in general, it's not.

1:46:31I don't think it's ever great, I don't think, but it's apparently particularly crummy to do it on a Synology. But that would also be an acceptable answer. Yeah, this is you engage in smart home stuff a lot more than I do because your tolerance for futzing with it when when things are not easy or break over time is way higher than my tolerance for it. Like the extent of my smart home stuff is actually I believe it's gotten smaller over time. That's because you're a smart person. I, however, am an idiot. Like literally all I have now is Lutron Caseta switch it like light switches. And even then, like I only command them via push button switches on the wall or on my desk.

1:47:19I don't even use voice control with any smart assistance anymore. I have some very basic routines like for the outdoor lights, turn them on after sunset, you know, like stuff like that. But like I have very little smartification going on here. and I have a lot of sensors that I can check from yo link thanks John a lot of sensors like reading data that I can like you know look at if I want to know like hey is it getting too cold in the house while I'm away on vacation or whatever like that's worth you know having that kind of stuff like actual like automation with integrations between different systems I'm doing almost none of that and I'm so much happier for it because every time I would try to set up some kind of automation it would last maybe a year before i would before something about it would break and i had to set it up again and i'm just like i'm like i'm so tired of like tech like wheel spinning like i'm just just reconnecting things that broke that already did at some point work like i just i have no time for that anymore and i have no tolerance about anymore and i gotta say I'm a lot happier for it.

1:48:25Which I get, and not to be that guy, but in my experience, Home Assistant is one of those things where you have to, and I'm sure I've made this speech before, you have to be able to see through the matrix, so to speak. But once you can, and once you wrap your mind around Home Assistant, which is not approachable in my personal opinion, and is very weird to set up, but once you can wrap your mind around it, it is incredible. And the stuff that I've set up, the automations I've set up in Home Assistant are bulletproof. Whereas in Apple Home, I feel like I ran into similar circumstances where they would work when they wanted to and occasionally.

1:49:04And it's pretty much bulletproof in Home Assistant. And that's why, for me, Home Assistant is the kind of system of record. And then I will bridge things into HomeKit if necessary. Or I shouldn't even say if necessary. I'll bridge lights and switches and stuff like that into HomeKit. but I don't do any automation unless absolutely necessary in HomeKit. And it's worked out pretty well for me. But yeah, I can't make heads or tails. And I haven't really sat down to figure this out. I'm sure I am smart enough, as much as I joke. I'm smart enough, I'm capable enough, and gosh darn it, people like me.

1:49:39I'm sure I am capable of figuring this out, but I was hoping that someone... You're smart enough to do it. You're not smart enough not to. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. But in any case, if someone has a primer on it, or John, if you're just going to swoop in and save the day for me, that's also acceptable. I mean, I use very limited home stuff as well. And by the way, on the Yolink thing, I just had to change my first Yolink battery. So look back on past ATP episodes. When I first mentioned that I got my very first Yolink device, one of the batteries just needed to be changed. So that's how long the batteries last in these things.

1:50:12It's pretty good. anyway yeah I do limited stuff with home stuff and like what do I have I have one set of lights that I control with voice assistants and it's hooked up to both my Google voice assistant and and my Amazon one and my Apple one they can all turn the lights on and off I also have physical buttons because it's Lutron Caseta but I do use voice to do those lights a lot I have a smart thermostat from what do you call it not Eero what's the other one nasty echo be yeah uh ecobee thing i use the ecobee app it's also connected through home kit blah blah blah but i don't use that i just use their app for the yo link stuff i use the yo link app i don't even know if there's an option that probably home assistant does it but i just use the yo link app but i don't spend that much time interacting with these things and i'm happy that they all just work and i also have another pre yo link leak detector in the basement which also has its own app and i just let that be in its own app um for your question about thread matter blah blah blah my understanding is someone who has really no interest in this and just has a few things in the house that i'm happy they just work and i just don't need to touch them is that the promise of this one back when we originally discussed it was thread is basically a wireless networking thing that is not wi-fi that is lower power and is more suited to home stuff and based on you know whatever the previous standards that are but i've i've experienced miniature versions of stuff like that for example yo link uses a wireless communication protocol that is not wi-fi luchan caseta uses a wireless protocol that is not wi-fi but i don't think any of those things are thread thread was an attempt to say everybody let's standardize on this home wireless thing that is not wi-fi because as we all know having home devices on wi-fi is just a formula for tears um it's just the wrong solution to this particular problem so i don't know how that's going except that apple has been shipping thread radios and all of its devices so there's thread and then matter was like oh you know how you can buy these devices and this one works with home kit and this one works with google thing this one works with that and like they'd have to some devices work with all of them but then they'd have to write you know different software stacks to say okay when you're integrating this into an apple home it should do this but when you're integrating to a google home it should do this it's like why are people writing multiple software stacks and potentially also multiple different hardware to support all these different things and some devices support one and not the other when we come up with one standard that we can all agree on if you make a device that conforms to this standard it will work with apple's home it'll with Google's home that'll work with the Amazon thing.

1:52:34And that was supposed to be what Matter was. And as someone who is not into this field, I was waiting for like the day when finally everything comes with thread radio and everything standardized on Matter, and you could buy any device and it would have reliable Yolink or Lutron style non-Wi-Fi wireless communication with low power and great reliability. It never falls off the network. And it doesn't matter which device you buy because every home device is a Matter device. and listening to Casey talk about using Home Assistant and bridging things into HomeKit makes me think we have not arrived at that world.

1:53:06So the only help I can give you is my vague understanding what thread and matter are supposed to bring and then you telling the story and me thinking it has not arrived. I don't think it has arrived. It hasn't arrived in your house anyway. Certainly not. But I mean, I've also been actively avoiding it. I probably wouldn't have bought these Nanoleaf lights, which I otherwise mostly enjoy. I don't think I would have bought them had I realized they were thread and or matter or whatever. And I have a couple of friends in my life that I'm sure could set me straight on this, but I haven't had the time to talk to them about it.

1:53:38And we needed an after show. So here we are. But nevertheless, I just I feel like as with all things and I could turn this into an entire different after show. Maybe we should make this in overtime some at some point. But I feel like I was talking with my friend John who writes channels earlier today about this. I feel like everything is getting more complicated. Everything in the world is getting more complicated, which I think is a pretty common trend through all of time. And yet, as I get slightly older, I feel less and less equipped to handle and roll with those changes. And I feel like...

1:54:09Does your fingerprints still work with Touch ID? Well, that's true so far. Although I don't actually have any Touch ID devices in the house, but that's either here nor there. But anyways, I lament that as I get older, it's not an instant understanding. You know, maybe 20 years ago, I would have instantly understood by magic what thread and matter were. It wasn't instant. You just had a lot of free time with which to bang your head against the wall and to understand it. It just seemed instant because time flies when you're young. And coincidentally, that's pretty much what John said to me is that, you know, back in your 20s, you had all the time in the world.

1:54:41Who cares? But anyways, I again, we can explore this and pull on this thread another time. But I don't know. I feel like the world is getting more complicated. and what used to be, oh, just drop something on your Wi-Fi network, which not to argue with what you were saying, John, I agree with you. But, you know, it used to be, oh, all these things, a Belkin Wemo, which is now dead or whatever the case may be, just drop it on your Wi-Fi network. It'll be fine. And maybe it wouldn't be fine, but at least it was understandable. And now I have to figure out thread and matter. And because of my own potentially poor choices, I need to figure out IPv6 on a Docker container, on a Synology.

1:55:15Maybe Cloudflare could help you. I didn't have IPv6 support from my website until I went to Cloudflare and they just gave it to me automatically. Done and done. Yeah, and I mean, honestly, I've been kicking around and now we're really off on another tangent, but now I've been kicking around getting like an Intel NUC or something like that to actually host my Docker containers. I have no particular issue with what's going on on the Synology, but as I think I might migrate, and we have talked about this, I might migrate away from Synology over the next several years and perhaps just get like a Ubiquiti UNAS or something.

1:55:42Then I need somewhere else for those smarts to be. And the obvious answer for that is my Mac Mini, but I've had really crummy experience with Docker containers. I don't know if the Mac mini is the obvious answer. That is not the right tool for this job. But like a Raspberry Pi or like you said, an Intel Nokia, much more appropriate than a very fancy, expensive, way overpowered Mac mini. Sure. But in either way, I say the Mac mini because it's going to be always on and here anyway, because that's what I like to use for some other things. So logically, it makes sense to put my Docker containers on there, especially because my containers, I'm not going to list them all, but suffice to say that they're generally pretty low need there they'll occasionally get bursty but they're generally low need um and so it would make sense to put them put them on the mac mini but i personally have had awful experiences with docker on mac os i know that there's some virtualization thing that came with either tahoe or maybe it was whatever preceded tahoe sierra um that was supposed to make all this better but i haven't really tried since then i'm still using docker all the time on my mac and it's fine so your mileage may vary i mean my mac is an intel mac Well, fair.

1:56:48It seems like it's very much the Tahoe Flicker that we were talking about earlier this episode, that it's either perfect for you, like it is for me, and it seems to be for you, or it happens all the freaking time. Well, like, it's similar. You know, Docker either works perfectly or it doesn't work at all. And I was— I mean, my struggles with Docker are just because of my lack of understanding. But I think the Mac implementation of it, I haven't had any bugs or issues with it. It's updated frequently. It does what I want it to do. Once I switch my main Mac to ARM, maybe that will all change. but yeah i use docker containers for all my dev work for atp i use docker i have my my website is in a docker container two versions i have my cloud for a version in a docker container i also have my non-cloud flare cheap shared hosting also in a docker container so that i can you know this you know we used to write people used to write cmss back before static site generators i always feel like static site generators are kind of like just a uh a side door to laziness because it's like oh well if you want to make your own cms of course you have to have a login system and a web interface and you can edit your entire you know like wordpress it's like you you go to the web all you need is a web browser and you can go to your website and write a post and post it on your website people said you know what that seems like a lot of work how about i just have a thing i run from the command line it spits out a bunch of files and then splats them onto my website and i'll pretend that by making a markdown file in this dropbox folder that triggers a bunch of scripts to run that's the same as having a web interface right well it's certainly a lot easier but it also means hey what if you want to post to your website but you're away from your setup what if you know like you you can't just go to your website to do it it's like oh well all i gotta do is put a markdown file on my dropbox but what if you can't get access to your dropbox what if what if what if what if you just have access to a web browser what can you do uh and docker is kind of my side door to that was like worst case scenario if i have no access to anything can i get somewhere where i can run a docker container because if i can get there and i can you know go there and do a pull request from a git repo and have things up and running in docker and you know that's that's my solution to that sorry for the long sidebar there but yeah making a real web-based cms would certainly be easier but that wouldn't be easy to deploy in different locations so here back over here at the ranch uh somebody explain thread matter to me please because I don't know what I'm doing.

1:59:03And so, yeah, I mean, I think my future might be, like, the easy way to solve this problem is to get either IPv6 working on the Synology or, well, on Docker on the Synology, or just getting a Nook or Home Assistant sells their own hardware. I think it's either Home Assistant Green or Home Assistant Yellow. I don't recall the differences between them. Like a Pokemon game? Yeah, basically. And I think they are themselves either like Nooks or Raspberry Pis by another name, if you will. And I could do that. But my thought is I could just get a NUC and start using that as my Docker host. And that would take some of the pressure off the Synology.

1:59:39Again, not that the Synology is having problems yet. But I'm trying to potentially divorce myself of Synology as I really don't like the direction they've gone recently with their hard drive requirements and whatnot. So we'll see. But someone explain it to me, please, and thank you, because I'm lost.