679: An Adversarial Relationship With Myself

30:56With regard to your journey with Cloudflare and restricting access to stuff, you were talking, I think, about your vibe-coded, we're still not talking about AI, your vibe-coded status. You're doing a great job. So far, I'm batting 1 ,000. You do terribly. Your vibe-coded status board. And we actually had George Black write in and say, I work on the Access team here at Cloudflare. While Access falls under our zero-trust umbrella of enterprise products, it actually works great as a standalone service for securing personal web apps. This is how a lot of people use the service. I think you'll find it surprisingly easy to set up.

31:30It takes just a few clicks on the dashboard. No need to install or configure anything on your machine. I made a quick video tutorial for John in case he's interested. this was like a 10 minute video which i watched and was riveted by uh george did a great job explaining it and it if you're interested in this sort of thing it's very much worth your time yeah very cool still doesn't it isn't really what i'm looking for but it's good to know that it's there and setting it up is very easy and does not actually require you to get like an open id connect server or any do any weird vpn stuff or whatever it's basically just clicking around like like so many things it's basically like clicking around the cloudflare dashboard a little bit uh to get things set up and then you're off to the races so check out the video even though the video is like personally directly addressing me by name, which is weird.

32:08Check it out. Just pretend your name is John.

32:13Oh, man, that's great. In other news, you moved to Fastmail, which I believe we talked about, right? We did. Okay, good. And Fastmail just tweeted, posted on Mastodon, why don't you hear about Pearl in the headlines? Because it works and keeps working. Something the best technology, sometimes the best technology is the most boring. And this is relevant because Fastmail has donated 10 ,000 American dollar-y-dos to the Pearl in Raku Foundation. Raku? Raku? What the hell is that? I would say Raku. Okay. What is that? Sounds like a Star Wars planet. That's the artist formerly known as Pearl Six. They renamed the entire freaking version to a new name?

32:51It's a long, sad story. What's the short short? The short short is Pearl Six was taking a really long time. and it was uh because it had the name pearl the number one bigger than pearl 5 it was kind of like stealing all pearl 5's thunder and pearl 5 wanted to go ahead but it felt like it couldn't go anywhere because who's going to pay attention to pearl 5 when pearl 6 exists and they solved the problem by saying guess what pearl 6 is now they just switched to like their code name right it's like when you get a pet with like a name you think you're going to change and you don't change it anyway um so now pearl 5 was free to go forward with the pearl name and advance itself without everybody saying why are you working on that isn't it dead pearl 6 is going to replace it now when it's called pearl and raccoon no one thinks that anymore not that it's really particularly relevant that's the that's the best summary i can give it's way more complicated and drama filled than that as as these things always are but anyway uh yeah the foundation supports both of them so that's why it's not just the pearl foundation it's the pearl and raccoon foundation so what are you using for your projects just plain old pearl pro 5 uh which has continued to advance and does lots of things and yeah whenever i see someone writing pearl code and I look at it and I'm like, that Pearl code has been frozen in amber since the 90s.

33:58Pearl has actually advanced as a language and has new features. And Raku also exists, which is mostly being ignored by almost everybody, including me. But Pearl 5 is still out there and I'm glad seeing Fast Metal donate to it. And why would they be donating to it? Well, hold on. I'm not done interrogating you yet. Is there anything that Raku, whatever it's called, brings to the table that you're enthusiastic about? Oh, yeah. No, it's got lots of really cool features as a language. I mean, I've talked, I used to talk about it a lot on the show. when Swift was being developed, I talked about it a lot because Swift actually takes a lot of ideas from both Perl 5 and Perl 6 and what was formerly known as Perl 6.

34:29Raku's got tons of great ideas. The problem is it doesn't really have a solid implementation and community and everything like all the other sort of ecosystem things surrounding it and part of the promise of Perl 6 to me has always been in my mind that due to all the advancements in the language it should also have higher performance and lower memory overhead and all these great things and that has not materialized either so it's mostly just a it's not a curiosity but it's like it is a lesser used language with lots of very interesting features without like a bulletproof production implementation that tons of people are banging on all the time so i'm not sure what the future holds haraku very interesting language from a language design perspective lots of ideas that every other language should steal but i don't feel like it it has the community or the uh the the time and implementation of even pearl 5 let alone all the other more modern languages uh to show Show that it is production ready and substantially better than its press assessor when it comes down to just running all the time on a server or whatever.

35:27Fair enough. Well, I appreciate it. Remember, we're not running long tonight. Anyway, Fastmail donated$10 ,000 to the Pearl and Raku Foundation. Reading from the Pearl.com post about it. Pearl has served us quite well since – oh, I'm sorry. Let me back up a half step. This is from the Perl.com post, but this is a quote from Ricardo Cignes, who is the director and chief developer experience officer at FastMail. Also former pump king of Perl programming language. If you don't know what that is, you can look it up. But this is the Perl connections run deep at FastMail is what I'm saying. Okay. So Ricardo says, Perl has served us quite well since FastMail's inception.

36:03We've built up a large code base that has continued to work, grow, and improve over 20 years. We've stuck with Perl because Perl stuck with us. It kept working and growing and improving. And very rarely did those improvements require us to stop the world and adapt to onerous changes. We know that kind of stability is in part a function of the developers of Perl, whose time is spent figuring out how to make Perl better without also making it worse. The money we give towards these efforts is well spent because it keeps the improvements coming and the language reliable. Yeah, there's a very strong sort of backwards compatibility culture in Perl to a fault where, like, I remember there was just this huge debate years ago over removing EBSIDIC support, which I'm pronouncing in a weird way.

36:39you know what i'm talking about though like that thing the thing that's not ascii for encoding letters is a bunch of numbers ebcdic something like that anyway okay we're gonna like can we remove that from the language is anyone who's still using it it's like what what century or where are we here what's going on that's that's the kind of dedication that's a backward compatibility and then of course perlo 6 overshadowing it was just making it so it's difficult to advance uh now without out of the way slowly steadily carefully always with very careful backward compatibility. Perl 5 has been advancing.

37:09And that's great for a production system because new versions of the language will fix bugs and have better performance and add new features, but not break your existing application. Also, if you were interested in throwing John a little affiliate revenue, and if you're interested in FastMail, which you should be, I don't recall if they've ever responded to the show, but certainly they get our okie-dokie. Where is your referral link, John? It's hypercritical.co slash fastmail. Link will be in the show notes. We have yet another sob story, horror story about doing purchase migration with your Apple account.

37:45Nick writes that I purchased Final Cut Pro for 500 Australian dollars and Logic Pro for 300 bucks on a secondary Apple ID. I chose to migrate the purchases to my primary Apple ID because I was sick of having to sign in and out of the app store to update the software. Since Apple made it possible to migrate purchases, I thought this was a perfect opportunity. Oh, how wrong I was. Turns out migrating purchases simply allows the new account to access these purchases, but the licenses remain with the previous account. So when I deleted the old account, the purchases went with it. Apple told me that because the purchases were linked to the old account that was deleted, there was nothing they could do.

38:18Apparently, migration isn't migration at all. Seems like a useless feature to me, yet still totally an Apple thing to do. Can confirm. Yes, I am aware now that it does say that if the secondary account is deleted, the purchases go with it in the Apple knowledge base. We'll put that link in the show notes. But I was unaware of that at the time or probably forgot as I deleted the secondary account about a month later. Though this still doesn't negate the fact that migration implies a migration and not simply sharing the purchases, maybe they should call it purchase sharing instead. I had no idea this existed either.

38:47And I would never assume that it did. And I feel bad, like just, boy, how many ways can they mess up these features? Like a lot of our stories like, oh, I tried to do it and there was weird bugs and nobody could figure it out but this is not a bug this is how the feature works and i don't think anyone would ever guess if you describe the purchase migration feature at a high level or just hear the name that it doesn't actually migrate the purchases it just lets you use them and if you ever delete the old apple id which of course you want to do like the whole point of purchase migration is like let me consolidate my life and get rid of that old stuff and now i'll just delete that so i don't have to worry about it nope that will take away all your purchases and as usual for with stories where someone doesn't have a mechanism them to quote unquote run to the press uh apple just can't help at all there's there's more to the store which is like well no we can't help you with your whatever it was eight hundred dollars worth of software you bought from us you're just sol sorry but hey you want to get a free accessory from the apple store which was the same thing that said to me it's probably their big go-to uh and nick was like sure i'll take this and they're like no that's too expensive now you get nothing great just terrible customer service terrible feature be really careful there's a reason whenever these things come up uh i'm always so cynical about it i'm like yeah apple says they have this feature, but anything having to do with Apple IDs or warranties or whatever, be cautious.

40:00Because historically speaking, these features have not been implemented well. And because they're a big corporation, there's often very little recourse to get things resolved. We have some semi-breaking news. I think it was either earlier today or perhaps yesterday that YouTube is now available as a native app on the Apple Vision Pro. You get a pretty much full YouTube client. In addition, you can use in a different tab, you can get spatial videos as well as 3D, VR 180, and 360 videos. This is genuinely very exciting. It was an extreme omission to not have YouTube or Netflix on the platform when it launched and hadn't been until, well, at least YouTube hadn't been until a day or two ago.

40:41I haven't had the chance to plug in my Vision Pro in the last couple of days. I did want to try this before recording, but I was running around like a crazy person today. But my understanding is it's mostly pretty good i think the only major complaint that i've heard i think i've seen on uh andrew edwards uh like instagram or something like that that you can't download videos which is kind of a bummer but other than that i guess it's pretty good john have you had a chance to try this yet yeah i tried it out it seems fine it's it's basically like what you would expect a very minimal official youtube client i never tried juno the the one from uh that was very good christian selig that got booted off the app store because google was like no only we can make a youtube app sorry uh i'm glad they eventually did but you know the app seems very basic and bad bones i did go to the spatial tab and the content there is not suitable for vision pro it's very low resolution blurry i don't know if any of it is actually even stereoscopic it is not impressive so don't expect you're going to get the youtube app and like finally this world because they're all they're all labeled with their thumbnails that say 16k 360 whatever and it's just a gigantic blurry mess uh you know it's anyway that's not that's not the fault of the client this just all i'm saying is that vision pro content is not really available in any capacity that i could find on youtube so you're still stuck going back to the tv app apple's own tv app and looking at the very limited selection of stuff they have there um and my question about this like why now i'm wondering if this is part of the whole deal between apple and google to license the gemini stuff or is it just a happy coincidence that they finally relented and released a bare bones youtube client for vision pro who knows nobody's saying but uh i'm glad it exists because it was silly that it didn't before no it would be wild i do not think this is the case but it would be wild if like maybe the terms of the gemini deal were well you have to put uh youtube on the vision pro and they're like no we don't want to bother with it and then apple says well what if we wrote the app because isn't that what they did for uh google maps yeah they used to do And Apple wrote the app and the original YouTube app on the iPhone was an Apple app as well.

42:44Yeah, we're saying the same thing. So can you imagine if they were like, fine, we'll do it. Just let us do it. I think Apple would have done a little bit of a better job. I think it's a bad app. It just seems very kind of, it's very basic. There's not much to it. And the little player overlay thing that goes in the bottom of the window did not look Apple-y to me. I felt like the distribution of white space was unharmonious in a way that I detected. Who knows? It just didn't seem Apple-y to me. So I think Google did this one. But who knows? We are sponsored this episode by 1Password. Now, look, if you're a small company, it's easy to assume that you'll be small enough to fly under the radar.

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45:01the apple studio display 2 is rumored to have a 90 kilohertz refresh rate instead of 120 hertz i just said kilohertz a 90 hertz refresher instead of 120 hertz my bad um the reading from mac rumors in november 2024 an anonymous listener of the relay fm tech podcast upgrade claimed that apple was developing a 90 hertz uh display technology that could be used for the next studio display, as well as future iPad Air and iMac models. Now, a Mac rumor's tipster has backed up that claim based on alleged information from an internal build of iOS 26 that was leaked online. Indeed, they believe the next studio display is likely to max out at 90 hertz rather than 120 hertz.

45:38The tipster believes that a 90 hertz refresh rate would make sense due to bandwidth considerations. Thunderbolt 5 can support 5K resolution at 120 hertz without any compression, but they think Apple likely wants to ensure that there will be plenty of remaining bandwidth for connecting other devices and peripherals to the new studio display. The rumor still warns some skepticism. The internal iOS 26 build the Tipster cited is from early 2025. So Apple's plans may have changed since then. Not to agree with the Tipster's logic here. Like, yeah, you can reduce bandwidth by lowering the refresh rate.

46:05But if you only have one monitor connected, just use all the bandwidth. Like, you're the only monitor connected. I want 120 hertz. I really hope this is not true. Because, like, how many years have we waited for Apple to finally break the 60 hertz barrier on its desktop displays. It's just, 120 is not like, it's not rocket science. It's been on all their dinky little phones. It's on the Macs, the iPads. It's table stakes. Like, what are they doing? Like, is there some kind of differentiation? Like, okay, well, the studio displays for$1 ,600 can only go to 90 hertz. But if you want 120 hertz, you have to buy the Pro Display XDR2 for$7 ,000.

46:46Don't give them ideas. Don't give them ideas, please. You can get it as we discussed, you can get like a PC gaming display. It does like 400 hertz for, you know,$800, like half the price. It's ridiculous. So I really hope this is not true. Not because 90 hertz is so bad, but it's like under 20 hertz is better. Max already have under 20 hertz like the laptops, the good laptops for the desktops, which we know are just never updated to not get 120 hertz. Like, OK, well, I guess I'll go back to sleep for another eight years and wait for them to finally get to 120 hertz. It's ridiculous. Please let this not be true.

47:18I was chit-chatting with Underscore. We did our monthly FaceTime earlier this week, and he was talking about his XDR and pointed out to me that that thing is like eight years old or something like that. I forget exactly what we concluded, but it is astonishingly old, given the fact that it seems to me like it was—oh, that's what it was. We realized that we had seen the launch at WWDC 2019 because we had gone across the street from the McHenry or whatever it was to that like concert venue or whatever. I forget exactly what it was called. But then they had like the pro display, like walk through museum sort of a situation where they showed you like the Mac Pro doing a billion different instruments.

47:57And like they had the Toy Story 4 like carnival area being rendered on a Mac Pro against a pro display XDR and stuff like that. So yeah, it's 2019, if I'm not mistaken. There's another rumor from MacRumors. It's Hartley Charlton at MacRumors. Apple is expected to use TSMC's base 2 nanometer N2 process rather than the newer N2P variant for its upcoming A20 and M6 chips, according to the China Times. TSMC previously said that its base N2 process would enter mass production in 2026, followed by enhanced variants including N2P and A16 in the second half of the year. let's pause here for a second and just just really applaud for the just massive namespace pollution and confusion tsmc naming its next process process a16 oh man that won't be confusing at all not good especially since what are the intel ones called aren't don't they have names with a in them so i don't remember no there's a called like 18a oh yeah yeah they have 18a but This is A16, which is going to be used to make the A21 processor, but it follows N2P.

49:02Guys, guys, let's get together on this, please. They should name Sony headphones. Right. These are short, but that's the problem. Everyone wants to call their thing A and then a very short number, but like coordinate, please. Continuing from Hartley, N2P is positioned as a higher performance version of N2, while A16 is designed for high power and high complexity chips, particularly for AI applications. and data centers. The performance difference between N2 and N2P is expected to be modest. N2P offers roughly a 5 % performance gain at the same power level, but comes at a higher manufacturing cost, which helps explain why Apple is expected to remain on N2 for its A and M series chips this year.

49:43It's a little bit weird because the whole deal with Apple's last several rounds is that Apple would pay through the nose for the very most expensive process that no one else wanted to pay for simply because they had to have the very best of the best for their phones i forget the last time i did that it was like the three three nanometer one where they i have already forgotten the names it was like uh the original n3 no n3b or something i've forgotten see past episodes of the show but that but apple paid for the one that nobody else wanted to use because the yields were just not good so it was so expensive but it's like look if you want if you want to have these three nanometer chips ready for your phones uh you know you've designed them around the idea these are going to come you're just going to have to pay through the nose and they bought up like all the capacity of that and as soon as apple was done with that they just never used that process well actually i think they did for some of the later m series but the point is it was expensive and apple paid for it and now this is a more frugal apple saying yeah do we need the most expensive fanciest one or can we just go with the cheaper one it also may be because they have to make literally millions and millions of iphones and they can't make millions and millions of them on n2p so they have to go with the cheaper one but uh it's either unfortunate timing or apple being wisely frugal because honestly i'm sure it'll be fine either way like it'll it'll be a jump from the three nanometer a note either way and it'll leave the door open for them to use the better n2 and a whatever processes for their later chips all right so we mentioned at the beginning of our 30 minute but don't worry it's a short day today pre-show uh that we weren't going to be or that we didn't know of any m5 macbook pros or anything like that.

51:18And we wanted to focus specifically on some interesting rumors with regard to the M5 Pro, the chip, that there may not be an M5 Pro chip at all. So reading from Julie Clover at MacRumors, the iOS 26.3 release candidate includes references to a pair of unreleased chips that are in the M5 family, according to information found by Nicholas Alvarez. Chip one in the beta is a T6051, T6051, H17C, which we believe to be the M5 Max. Chip 2 in the beta is 6052 H17D, which is assumed to be the M5 Ultra, but not mentioned in the beta is the T6050 H17S or M5 Pro. It's not clear why we are only seeing signs of an M5 Max and M5 Ultra chip, but rumors suggest that the new MacBook Pro models with higher-end M5 chips are set to launch in the next few weeks.

52:07Now, Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac writes, a new report suggests that the M5 Pro and M5 Max might not be two distinct chips, but rather variants of the same one. So, with that in mind, 9to5Mac back in December of 2024, not this past December, but one prior, writes,

52:36Then finally, Vadim Yuryev, who is the host of the MaxTech YouTube channel, tweeted, just figured out why Apple's M5 Pro chip did not show up in the recent beta code leak. Apple is using the new 2.5D chip tech, allowing them to use a single M5 Max chip design for both the M5 Pro and M5 Max models. This saves Apple lots of money on SKUs and design. I don't know if Vadim has any inside info or if he's just spinning fantastical ideas, but I thought this was very interesting. First, to go rewind to the chip code names. We talked about this on a past episode, but like these numbers have been very consistent.

53:10uh the h and the 17 and then the letters at the end uh i think that this macrumor story has the list of code names and we linked to it at one point as well but if you go back through time you can i figure what the offset is but like the h17 is the m5 h16 is the m4 h15 is the m3 like all the way back and then the the letter suffixes have mostly been consistent the c's are the maxes the d's are the ultra but also i think that the ultra can sometimes be a g the s has always been the pro uh you know as they say in stocks or whatever past performance is not necessarily an indication of future things apple can change the code names at any time um but whether or not there's going to be an m5 pro there were only two chips listed here and there should there should be three because we expect there to be a max of pro and an ultra and not seeing only seeing two chips and having the the two existing ones look like they for all the world that they are the max and the ultra codes names where's the pro we talked about like the the 2.5d chip stacking thing and separating the cpu and gpu and the potential to like you know finally divorce the cpu power from the gpu power to sort of mix and match in a way that hadn't been possible before i still don't think that's likely just because apple doesn't want to have a million variants they're not gonna they're not gonna build to auto your cpu they're just gonna make a few variants that they think are appropriate for their machines but maybe it means they're having second thoughts about the the pro chip where it lies in their product line and historically again i wish i'd written down the details but the pro chip has been weird in many generations where sometimes it's basically like a max with a little bit cut off and other times it's more like the base no suffix chip with a little bit thrown on and other times it's been this weird middle ground it's been all over the place yeah maybe apple doesn't know if the pro chip has a place and it's like maybe i mean apple would know we wouldn't like maybe most macbook pro buyers buy the max or they buy the base and a lot of people don't buy the pro so i find this fascinating because of the new chip tech and how this might affect things if you know vadim's thing of saying oh it's the same chip or whatever i think they would just call them by different names even if they if they mix and match a different cpu and gbo combo that that's basically an m5 pro or it could just be that this build didn't have the code name in it because the other two leaked and there was an if def that got missed somewhere like who knows but i i this is making me even more interested in what these chips are going to look like if there really is no pro I personally would be fine with that because all I care about is like the high end and low end chips but I wonder if Mac mini owners and stuff would be like, hey, I kind of like the Pro because it was a nice happy medium between paying through the nose for the Macs or getting the base chip.

55:40What do you guys think? I have found, as I've looked at different Macs since the Apple Silicon transition and as I've been making buying decisions, I have never found the Pro to be quite what I'm looking for because it does end up costing a significant amount more than the base chip. But it doesn't have all of the high capacity support and all the highest performance of the Macs. And I have found that with the Pro, at least in the current lineup, like in the M4 lineup, which I know we're kind of split now, we have some of the M5 lineup, but in the M4 lineup, the base M4 got so good that I think it left very little reason for the Pro to exist.

56:22Because if you actually look at performance per dollar, the base M4 is a really great value. and the pro really is not it like it does not scale up that well to to you know performance per dollar as you go up that that list and the max serves the role of like i need big resource support i need all the ports all the bandwidth you know whatever it you know whatever that is the max serves that role big gpu yeah but the pro it kind of sits in the middle of those and you end up paying a lot more for only some of those benefits. And I don't think that's really a strong selling proposition with the current lineup.

57:02But as you mentioned, though, past generations of pros before the M4 have been very different from each other. Like the M1 Pro was very different from the M2 Pro and they've had different core counts and different balances of things. The M1 Pro was basically an M1 Max with a little bit cut off, like literally. really yeah just went snip snip snip snip cut off some gpu cores i am two m1 pro it's it was so close to the max yeah and then was it was it the m3 pro that had the really weird proportion of of p to e cores that was unlike everything else yeah yeah i had like more efficiency cores and it was like this whole big custom design it's yeah yeah like it seems like they're they're doing it doesn't seem like making a custom design for the pro is necessarily worth it um and and i think by having the base chips, the regular M chips, get pushed up in performance so much.

57:54Again, look at the M4 compared to the M4 Pro and M4 Max. The M4 really stands out as a really great bang for the buck compared to the other two. And also, I wonder if this might play in a little bit to the rumored upcoming less expensive MacBook that is rumored to have an A-series phone chip as its CPU. I wonder if maybe the regular M chip, the M4, M5, those might be actually being elevated upwards in the product line too. That maybe we're going to start seeing more very low-end products using the A series chips from the phone, even in the Mac line. And then the M chip is actually more of a mid-range thing.

58:34And then you have the M max chip as the high-end. And then the M ultra for the one that they very occasionally make for the products they forgot about. they just renamed the the plain old m6 chip to just be m6 pro and there is no no suffix m6 i mean who knows they might like from a marketing perspective like why not because i agree with you like if the low-end laptop is successful with the phone chip in it they're going to do more of that and it makes sense like i think it's a good idea right i think that's that product is a good idea and i think that strategy is a good idea i think the naming is a little bit weird with it you know being an a series chip and confusing people so they might need to work that out but like you can fix naming right so if they don't want to make the pro anymore just call the base m6 m6 pro like just just do it like well i don't think that's the same thing i need i mean the reality is these these m chips have gotten a reputation well deserved for being really strong performers so maybe the m chip doesn't need the same m naming line to cover the entire product line anymore aren't you glad they didn't they didn't do a bmw thing when they first laid out this line and just have like year after year they would have you know the uh the m3 the m5 the m7 and occasionally the m8 like every year they would have that and we had to put year suffixes on them like i'm proud of them for sticking with a letter and a number and then each time they make a new line of chips increasing the number like good job apple i know that's it was hard to figure that out after a few decades but they figured it out but i do wonder if they're gonna they're they can't help self sabotaging with the a series chips and max right and the m series chips and ipads right we had it it was all clean everything was worked out but now what does the m stand for my pad i mean it's also possible that you know if this if the rumored you know less expensive macbook using the phone class chip is true um it's also possible they might not call it the a17 or whatever it would be they might call maybe they'd call it like the m0 the yeah or maybe it'd be like you know the the m5 express you know who knows like m5 air they would just call it the m5 air and then that would be confusing with the m powered uh ipad air and the macbook air yeah se the se hasn't been used for chips either yeah i don't know oh se's good the m5 se or like you know they don't want to call the ultra wideband chip the u2 they did like once or twice but now they're back to not calling it that anymore yeah anyway they i think they have a lot of options here for naming but regardless i do think that the the base m series chip is no longer a low-end chip i mean it kind of never was performance wise but it's it's really a very solid mid-range chip by by most measures and so for them to elevate that i think that that's actually reasonable like a lot of these uh recent reviews i've been reading of the latest releases from intel and amd for their laptops and stuff um you know they panther lake or whatever thing they've come up with like it's finally they got a good chip it's made on a good process or whatever and here are the benchmarks and they show all these graphs or whatever and you're watching like wow intel's really doing well until you realize every single one of the graphs is against the base m4 you're like but you know apple makes other chips like other chips that are in laptops like it's not like oh it's it's not a fair fight you can't put it up against an m5 ultra or something like no just just you know the other laptop chips like so that the the the rest of the industry is so proud when they have a chip that performs better than apple's base m4 they're like so happy it's like victory lap party parades down the streets and it's like you beat their lowest end membership by a little bit.

1:02:01Because the base M4 is awesome. That's what I have in my travel laptop and it's amazing. I have never really needed more grunt out of that for those needs and that includes oftentimes using Xcode and making apps. Obviously we'll see with the thing that we're not talking about if that ends up ramping up the demand for local resources but But actually, if you do a lot of cloud-based things we're not talking about, which most of them are so far, that actually might reduce the need for local processing power. So, you know, we'll see how this all shakes out. But anyway, the M4 is awesome. And I haven't had any time to play with the M5, but it is probably awesome as well.

1:02:37No, no, the M5 is already as well. Solidly a middle-class chip. It isn't a low-end chip at all. Yeah, and I imagine the M6, once it gets the process transition to the 2 nanometer, is going to be even more impressive. So look forward to that for your OLED laptop sometime supposedly within this calendar year if the rumors are to be believed.

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1:04:33Want to do some Ask ATP? We haven't done that in a while. It's built up. We have a lot of it in there. Alan Scholl writes, the recent winter storm has me seriously thinking about whole house generators and batteries. If I remember correctly, Casey uses a gas generator, and Marco has installed rooftop solar recently. So what's best? Would it make sense to have a whole house battery backup without a solar installation? So let me talk about what I've got going on. For short outages, which let me back up, actually. It's very rare for us to lose power here. Very, very rare. It used to happen all the time.

1:05:02And then I think there were some overground power lines that were running through some trees and the power company cut the trees back a lot. And now it's been very unusual for us to lose power. But if we were to lose power, if it was only for a few hours, especially if it's like a weather event, so I know that it's coming, then I'll take that tailgate battery that we use. So this is something that I got inspired to buy from Jason Snell. it's a you know like 15 pound battery pack that has a couple of ac outlets on it a couple usbc outlets on it etc and that's enough to run the fridge i've never tried it but based on like power draw specifications i expect i could run the fridge for probably a better part of a day maybe even two on that thing um and i could also you know plug in a lamp or something like that so for a short thing if you only ever lose power for a little bit of time i'd say a portable battery pack might just do the trick.

1:05:54And this thing is like two or 300 bucks, maybe 400 at the most right now. It's, it's reasonably, I mean, it's a lot of money, but it's reasonably affordable. Um, but then on top of that, we have a very physically large, physically heavy, pretty powerful, uh, gas generator that was figuratively speaking bequeathed to us from my parents. Um, what had happened was they live in an area where they do lose power a lot. And so they had this something like 5 ,000 watt sustained 7 ,000 peak gasoline generator. It's a Honda inverter generator. So it produces like a near perfect sine wave, et cetera, et cetera.

1:06:28I would never have spent the like five grand that they spent on this thing 10 years ago when it was new. But if they're offering it to me for free, hell yeah. So that is in the garage and we have a generator interlock in the fuse box and so on and so forth. So I haven't ever tried this. And in fact, just this Monday when I went and drove the Taycan, I almost did a little experiment since I was the only one in the house. And I really want to try figuring out how much of the house I can run off that generator because I think I can do darn near everything in the house and maybe, maybe even one of the two HVAC systems in the house.

1:07:06if I turn on the natural gas heat. You know, we wouldn't run AC, but in the cold weather, I wonder if I forced the furnace to natural gas because of the heat pump and the natural gas. I wonder if I might be able to run the furnace in emergency heat mode if we really got in a pinch. But worst case scenario, we could use a space heater or something like that. But that's my situation. To answer Alan's question, my personal opinion is, if you can do rooftop solar with like a power wall or equivalent or something like that, that's probably the bestest answer because it serves you the most time. You can use that pretty much all year round.

1:07:43But that is incredibly expensive, incredibly expensive. If you lose power constantly, then a Generac, like a whole home Generac or equivalent, I think is a really good idea. But if you just lose power occasionally, I would really figure out what is it you absolutely need to survive, a fridge or two, a couple of lights, something like that and figure out if a small tailgate generator or portable tailgate-style battery like I have, would that be enough to sustain you for a day or two? Because doing a Generac, doing whole home solar, even buying one of these large gasoline-powered generators is a lot.

1:08:16And in the case of the generator, I have to start it every few months. I have to check the oil. I have to make sure when I do start it, I run all the gas out of it, et cetera, et cetera. So it is a lot of work for something that I only ever use once every few years. Wow. That was a really good answer. I'm going to - Hey, go team. What Casey just said is very important. A generator is a lifestyle. Yeah. Like my in-laws have a generator. Whenever we're visiting them, if we happen to be visiting, I believe it's like Wednesday at noon. Like once a week, it has to turn on and test itself. And so it makes a whole bunch of noise.

1:08:50You're talking about a whole home generator, like a Generac or something like that. Yes, sorry. Yeah, exactly. Yes. It's a whole thing. It's a very physically large thing. It's a very loud thing. if it's ever needed to be running and it needs to run itself to test itself ever so often as case said you know it's a gas engine you got to like maintain it like a gas engine um so it's kind of it's a whole thing generators do have the advantage over solar and batteries that first of all if you happen to have a gas pipeline to your house like from from your town if you have natural gas service um you can have that connected to that and then you kind of have an infinite supply you know infrastructure asterisks and everything but like you effectively have an infinite supply so you don't have to like go buy fuel and keep a fuel tank and you know go refill it and you know and actually let me jump in really quickly something i didn't consider about the freestanding gasoline generator that i have when we had this real bad snowstorm i got a burr up my butt that we were going to lose power for 17 weeks and so i filled something like i think we have like a five gallon gas can and like a two or three gallon gas can i filled both those bad boys because i'm like we're I am going to be okay during this storm.

1:09:57Like, it'll be fine. I'm going to turn my garage into even more of a bomb. Right, exactly. Well, the thing of it is, though, in a normal summer season, we'll go through maybe like three or four gallons of gas. And I now have like eight gallons of gas sitting in my garage. So what am I going to do with the rest of it? I can stabilize it. I can run it through the generator for funsies or whatever. Like, now I have a different problem. I mean, can you pour it into Aaron's car? Don't put it in that car. That car never uses the gas engine. Put it in the Golf. Well, that's true. But no, well, first of all, both our cars take premiums.

1:10:28Second of all, I'm too nerdy about. You didn't get premium for the generator? No. Well, you should have thought about reusing it. Even though your cars require premium, they'll run on regular, right? Yeah, like trash. They have knock sensors, though. They'll figure it out. Engine computers are smart. Anyway, and on top of that, I'm too much a nerd with regard to mileage tracking and things like that. So that's a non-answer. Or non-starter. So you're not going to. All right. Well, I guess you could just let it sit in your garage, which is a better choice than putting it in your car. Well, coincidentally, what I've decided is I told some friends of ours, some local friends of ours, that I was going to put the excess gas into the wife's Ford Explorer because they are good to their cars, but they don't care like I do.

1:11:09So anyways. They'll take your filthy gas. You should have just put like a lemonade stand out at the end of your driveway. It's free gas. Cars that drive by, you just put it in the tank. Just put it a little. Here's a dollar. Here's the dollar. But anyways, I apologize for interrupting, Marco, and I'd love you to continue. But it's just another thing to think about with a freestanding generator. This is not what you're talking about with like a natural gas, Generac sort of situation. But for mine, I now have too much gasoline and have to do something with it. Yeah. So that's, you know, the generator lifestyle, it's involved.

1:11:38It's very like, you know, imposing into your physical space and into the noise and into maintenance and fuel needs and everything. The advantage of generators over solar is, again, you tend to have like, you know, if you can get a natural gas pipeline, you can run it 24-7 and you won't run out. And also, you tend to be able to power larger amounts of wattage for less money. The main downside of solar panels with batteries is that if you – like you have to – what Casey was saying was important. You have to figure out what exactly you're trying to replace. What level of power? Are you trying to run your entire house?

1:12:16And does that include things like a water heater? And most importantly, does that include heating and air conditioning? If you're running your heat and air conditioning and they are electric or heat pump, you're going to need a lot of power for that. That's going to be way more power than your fridge, your outlets, your lights. You know, like if all you need is fridge, outlets and lights, you can get you can get away with a much smaller setup. But if you're trying to power your thermal control of the house, your HVAC system, and if you live somewhere that has very hot or very cold weather and you want it to work enough for that, you need a lot of power to do that.

1:12:53And for that, if that is your setup, I haven't looked at prices recently. I'll get to that in a second. But that might be too much power to have a reasonably affordable setup with batteries. If you have to run it from solar and you have to run it overnight and it's really cold that night and you have to make a lot of heat, that just might be too much power to do that with a reasonable number of batteries in your garage or whatever. So that being said, that might not be what you need. You might not need all of that. when i bought my system it was 2019 when i when i ordered and bought my my solar so my my solar system at the beach is something like i think like 90 kilowatts on a good day it produces like 95 or 100 kilowatts of power so whatever the water for the solar panels is maybe it's that so on a good a good summer sunny day i'm going to run 100 100 or 90 kilowatt production or kilowatt hour production, I think.

1:13:52And I have two Tesla Powerwall 2s before they were known to be a horrible company run by horrible people. So there's two Powerwall 2s, which I think are 11 kilowatts hours of storage each, something like that. But that was in 2019. And that got the cost of a decent amount of money. Today, though, the costs of all of that stuff have gone way, way down since then. I don't know what they cost today because I haven't priced it out recently, but it's way cheaper. Now you do run into limits with how much battery storage you are allowed to have based on local building codes, fire codes, electrical codes.

1:14:29So there are other limits to consider. And so I can't tell you what your limit is. It's different in different places. It's different depending on what kind of space the batteries are in. Are they inside or the outside? Are they in condition space? Are they in a garage? There's all these different rules and regulations of basically how much of a lithium ion bomb you can have in your house because that's what energy storage is. It's a bomb. Various types. Gas is the same way. Anyway, so there's all these different limits of how much battery storage you can have. The solar panels themselves are really inexpensive for what you get now.

1:15:00And I can strongly recommend having solar power for lots of reasons. Climate is a really good, like, you know, climate change reduction is a great reason. Just general, like, energy renewability. It's a great thing to have solar panels on your house if you have a situation where that's reasonably possible. It's a great thing to do. Mine do not cover my entire electricity need, but that's because we use a lot of electricity, especially if we're running the hot tub heater. That uses a ton of power. But it offsets it all, and it's great. One of the great advantages of the battery system, though, for backup power in some kind of situation where you have a storm or you have a power outage, the great thing about that system is that as long as you don't need the entire power plus of all the batteries every day which you won't because that you wouldn't size it that way you effectively then have infinite recharging because you can use the power from the batteries all night and all day your solar panels are topping them off so my setup at the beach is that like having just the two power walls is not enough to run our HVAC and hot water heater and everything.

1:16:14So we don't have those connected to it. We have them connected to a whole bunch of lights, outlets, fridge, ice maker, like all my networking equipment, all the Wi-Fi gear, all that stuff, and a few kind of like critical appliances and stuff. We've never run out of power. Like we've had a few days long power outages and we use the power at night. And then by like 9 a.m., the batteries are back at 100 % from just the solar input. And unlike generators, you never really have to think about the system. There's no moving parts. It produces no noise. They need no maintenance. I have never touched the system since it was installed in 2019.

1:16:57From a reliability, simplicity, elegance perspective, solar plus batteries is awesome. it's way better than a generator the only problem is again can you get enough battery capacity to power what you need to power overnight that's that's the big challenge but if you can get past that or if you can get away with powering not your entire house and you know maybe you don't need your entire ac system to be running at full blast all night long and then there somehow to be no sun all day like you can get away if you can get away with the budgeting of that um it's an amazing setup and i strongly recommend it i would have a shorter answer to this question which is does it make sense to have a whole house battery without a solar installation no doesn't make sense because if you're looking at whole house battery backup you're already spending a huge amount of money get the solar panels just get them like i know they'll they'll be cheaper next year and cheaper the next year still but they're pretty cheap now get the solar 100 like if you're even considering a whatever you consider a quote-unquote whole house battery backup subject to the caveats that marco just put in about what you'll actually be allowed to install yes absolutely get this all i don't think it makes sense without it unless you have the ability to bury a giant uh hypersonic vacuum sealed flywheel in your yard and use that for energy storage also has problems of a bomb than batteries or gasoline but i bet you can't oh no it's just it's just a kinetic bomb no because it's underground so when it explodes it just the dirt protects you yeah okay it doesn't it spins sideways not vertically okay in any case there's other issues it goes out sideways you see it just hits the dirt it's fine again i haven't priced this out recently but i would expect that the solar panels part of it is probably cheaper than the batteries part of it these days right and and boy what a better investment for sure a better investment i mean ideally you know if you can get both components get both components they work very well together and it's wonderful yes exactly but you know yeah because if you're because like if you're just thinking about like what casey was saying like a battery that like can power some of your appliances that you can roll around or whatever then i would say like oh well solar panels are going to be a lot of money but if You're even considering anything that you call a whole house battery, get some solar panels.

1:19:02Absolutely. Yeah, I would agree with that. And again, I think I said this earlier, but just to reiterate, if you're in a situation where you've lost power, you shouldn't likely think of this as how can I get my normal life back to me? What you should think about is what are the bare essentials to keep you and your family functioning, right? And generally speaking, I would say that includes HVAC. But in this scenario, I would say it doesn't. But that probably potentially includes hot water, depending on if it's electric or not, and certainly includes like a few lights, maybe a space heater, something like that, your refrigerators, things of that nature.

1:19:36Yeah. And also, and you know, one other thing too, like if you're deciding between solar and generators, keep in mind that all the rest of the time when you are not having this rare event of this, you know, having like a power cut shortage or storm or whatever, all the rest of the time, your solar panels are producing power that is saving you money and is saving the world. and meanwhile your generator is sitting there doing nothing except losing value and slowly needing maintenance. So that does also probably sway the decision a little bit. Solar panels provide constant value whether you need that value at that moment or not.

1:20:12They're always providing that value. I would say the infinite source of power that you have going through a natural gas line to your house is substantially less infinite than the light of the sun. Exactly. Even when it's cloudy and raining. Yeah, because even when it's cloudy and raining in January, I'm still making like 20 or 30 kilowatt hours a day. Like there's a lot of power generation to be had by pointing things at the sun. Like when the incremental cost of having them on your roof every day is nothing, you can gain a lot of value over time. It's wonderful. So yeah, definitely. Like if you can install solar on your house, you should do it for lots of reasons.

1:20:49and you know whether you need whether you need to you know power your entire life as casey was saying uh for you know indefinitely or not that that's up to you i would also just merely suggest like if if the context is like well we shouldn't get solar because we might someday need you know the heat in the winter on some awful outage and my family needs it to survive like well for the cost of that incremental gain of power you can buy a lot of hotel rooms how often would that actually be necessary like it would you'll be fine but anyway yeah get solar it's really good all right kevin b writes why are you feeling positive about john turnis potentially taking over ceo of apple you all very much disapprove what tim cook has been doing lately and i don't disagree by all accounts john turnis is tim cook's choice to replace him one day if you disagree so strongly with tim cook's decisions why are you okay with this one i have nothing against john turnis it just seems like there's a disconnect between tim cook is making awful decisions and needs to go.

1:21:47And Tim Cook's decision to select John Ternus to replace him is good and exciting. I don't think that's that big of a disconnect. Like just because Tim Cook has selected him doesn't mean the person he's selecting agrees with everything Tim Cook does and will do exactly what Tim Cook did. I mean, Steve Jobs picked Tim Cook and they were very different CEOs. So our expectation, our hope is that John Ternus will be different than Tim Cook in the same way that Tim Cook was different than Steve Jobs. Now he could be worse, could be better, could be worse, but like we're hopeful because the things we hear are good you know like we we want to be hopeful like but the real point is we've i think we've always basically resigned ourselves to the fact that nothing nothing about what we dislike about what tim cook is doing is ever going to change until he leaves so he has to leave so it's if you want to think of it this way you can say it's not so much that we're excited about john turnus coming as we're excited about tim cook leaving and yeah and we feel like anything's got to be like it's the only chance we have for improvement and i think it's a little bit of both because again we we have very little info on john turner so that is we've said that before like we don't actually know he's been he's been in presentations for years we see him on stage talking but like he's more of a cipher we don't have he doesn't have a track record that we know other than he was in charge of hardware and hardware is great right uh but i'm i'm personally optimistic mostly because a transition a departure a change in leadership is the best opportunity for things to potentially get better uh and i'm currently choosing to believe that they won't get worse.

1:23:11We'll see. We don't know and we can't know what kind of CEO John Ternus will be. Again, assuming he is the next CEO, that's a big disclaimer, but it does seem fairly likely. We don't know. But I think we are ready for change in so many ways from Tim Cook. I think Tim Cook has shown us everything he can do, positive and negative. He's shown us what he's really good at. He's shown us what he's not so good at. And I think Apple's in a bit of a tough spot right now. Like, I don't think Apple's going to have a very good year. I think Tim Cook has made a bunch of strategic decisions over time that are coming home to roost.

1:23:53The over-reliance on China is really bad. The cozying up to Trump is really bad. And by, you know, the recent Apple News bias thing, not really helping, not really buying him anything just giving in to the bully more and more so you have those two problems you have the underinvestment in AI which is still sorry we weren't supposed to talk about that but it's like that's a huge deal I've been saying for a while now this is Steve Ballmer missing mobile this is Apple's version of that like Tim Cook blew AI instead making a car and a VR helmet and the car never shipped, thank God, and the VR helmet is limping and it turns out not where the next big thing was and then totally blew the actual next big thing, which is AI.

1:24:47I think Apple really would benefit in this moment from a significant change in leadership. So I am very much looking forward to that happening for so many reasons. I mean, look, the regulatory stuff with the App Store control and anti-competitive behavior, I mean, there's so much that Apple has been squeezing the wrong way or blowing the wrong way. Oh, God, this is going badly. There's a lot of things that the Tim Cook era is not good at handling or has squeezed every ounce of life out of that are really hurting the company's long-term prospects. And I think this is going to be a really bad year for them in a lot of ways.

1:25:28I think they have a lot of humble pie that they're going to be eating and I think by the time Tim Cook actually goes if it happens in the next year or two I think a lot more people than me are going to be saying yeah it's time, this is a welcome change so whether John Ternus will be a great successor we don't know yet but Steve Jobs who was pretty good in this role picked Tim Cook who is pretty mixed in this role Steve Jobs and Tim Cook are nothing alike. They're very different people. Steve Jobs did not have an amazing ability to pick successors for himself. But also, when you look at the pool of people that they have to choose from at that level, it's a pretty short list.

1:26:13when Steve Jobs realized he had to hand off the company, how many people was he going to choose from? Tim Cook was the obvious choice. We all knew it at the time, even before we knew how bad Steve's condition was and how little time he had left. We were all saying at the time, of course it's going to be Tim Cook. That was very obvious, and there weren't that many other clearly good options at that time. Well, now, Tim Cook looking for a successor, there's not that many good choices. there's not many that many plausible realistic choices that would actually you know be good and aren't you know as old as tim and who would want the job and who would be good at the job so the fact that tim is picking seemingly john turnus doesn't necessarily say that you know that there were you know 20 people on the list and tim thought turnus was going to be the most like him it doesn't say that at all i think the list is much smaller than that of practical options And I don't think when people choose a successor, I don't think they are necessarily that good at finding someone just like them or that that would be what they would be looking for necessarily.

1:27:19Yeah. Also, I think implicit in this question is an assertion or an assumption that we disagree with everything, every single thing that Tim Cook does. And I don't think that's true. We certainly lately have disagreed with a lot, but I wouldn't say that I at least disagree with literally everything that Tim Cook does. No, none of us do. It is very possible for us to simultaneously say decision A is bad and decision B was great. So I don't think this is incongruous at all, personally. Carl Walther writes, on episode 675, John was talking about the confusion that would be caused if common menu items had inconsistent names.

1:27:58I'm a lifelong Windows user that came to the Mac five years ago. Recently, I was working with an image in preview, and I wanted to rename the image to separate it from the original image. Instead of save as, duplicate is the default menu item with save as available as an alt click. Uh, it is worth noting, however, that is also option. You know, you can hit option and click as well. Um, why is duplicate the default mat workflow? The workflow I'm used to is to use save as to create a new file, which is a copy of the old one, but with the new name, keeping the same window I was working in, keeping inside the same window I was working in.

1:28:29John, what's going on here? Uh, the menu item is duplicate, not duplicate. I was wondering how long you'd let him do that. Option is alt. They're just a windows user and they think it's alt. I know it says alt on the key. It drives me nuts. Alt tab, which is command tab, not option tab. Anyway. Actually, it should be the Windows key. Because if you go by consistent placement, you should be remapping your Windows keyboard, which is one of the ones I use. The Windows key added years later than it should have been when Microsoft finally got around to copying Apple in one more regard. And they still managed to screw it up.

1:29:03Yeah, there was just a weird gap there before in PC keyboards. Right. And so they. Anyway. so this this change like going from a world where you had save and save as in the file menu to the world where you have duplicate in that menu item and all these options you know all these key combinations that you can press to change those menu items to other things this happened in 2012 um i'll put a link in the show notes to my mac os 10 10.8 mountain lion review from 2012 that's when this was rolled out uh and the idea behind it is hopefully still explained clearly in that article um said hey uh iphones and ipads and other things people love those and they have a different model for dealing with documents than the mac does and people seem to really like it and if you're wondering what that model is take out your phone open the notes app and use it how does that work is there a save menu in there anyway do you have to remember to save in notes uh do you are your changes unsaved and you can decide now never mind i'm just going to close this note and not save those changes no that's not how the notes app work that's not how any apps on ios or ipad have ever really work they've always been like it's just a live thing you don't have to worry about files or saving uh and that's very in line with what people expect if it's what you're used to and that was on the phone um and the bright idea around this era of 10.7 and 10.9 is like things people love about the phone and the ipad we should bring them to the mac uh the problem is the mac it's not the phone or the ipad but they did they brought it they said we're gonna we're gonna have a new paradigm for a document model on the mac and we're gonna have a bunch of new apis and we're going to have new conventions and we're going to show you how it's done by like here's text edit and there's no more save or save as option or whatever we're going to have documents that automatically save we're going to automatically save versions and this janky sqlite database is off to the side and you'll be able to roll back versions so don't worry it's not like you're going to lose your changes you can always go back from one version to the to the other but you don't have to worry about saving anymore uh and they pitched this real hard they had wwc sessions on it they did it to their own apps to demonstrate here's how it's done here's what we think the future is like you know just don't worry if you have unsaved documents just quit the app and relaunch it your documents will be back right where they were don't worry about saving we're always saving we're always and don't worry about getting back press versions we can always show you the past versions and you know again that was uh 2012 here we are in 2026 and i can tell you it did not stick mac users did not universally laud and adopt this new model independent mac developers did not universally adopt it and say it's great and look never look back at that old the crappy model and this is despite the fact that everybody still loves their phones and everybody still loves their ipads and there are mac apps that work this way that people really like but it was not universally adopted uh and maybe it's just because people are older than we all need to die but like wow you know like the the the habits that were formed in the stone age of the pc which is that you open a document in your document-based application and you do stuff in it and if you change your mind you can just close that window and say don't save these changes and you know you haven't modified the document on disk, the capabilities I just described are still there in the model Apple introduced.

1:32:12They're just presented differently. And my impression is that not just developers, not just old people, but the general public kind of rejected them for certain classes of applications on the Mac. For other classes of applications, they work. Notes on the Mac works just like it does on the phone. There's no saving, there's no documents, no reverting, and people love it and it works fine. But for things like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word or all these other applications, they've been always like dabbling in that area. Well, we'll work that way because Apple says we want to work that way, but we do have some cranky users who don't want it to work that way.

1:32:45So maybe we'll give you options on what should the defaults be. And we're not going to use Apple's versions thing. Are you even familiar with this feature? It's so like poorly adopted on the Mac. I'm always wondering if it's even still there. Do you know what I'm talking about? The versions thing? I know it's there. I've never successfully used it. isn't it like a mini time machine presentation for the act for just the document you're working on or something like that yeah like it's the problem with that feature has kind of been like the whole idea is if you have you have auto save you don't have to be saving it'll always be saving in the background you don't have to worry about it and if you want to get back a change before like you open a document you make some changes you're like oh no i changed my mind i don't want any of this i can't i can't get back to the old version because those were all auto saved and i deleted a bunch of stuff and i could you know hold down command z for a long time but maybe maybe the undo buffers gone because i opened and closed the document or something like i changed my mind how can i get that back the idea is that while the app is auto saving every old version of the document like version control style is saved somewhere and you can just go back to earlier this is not time machine this is literally saving like the diffs and chunks in this weird sqlite database i think it's sqlite off to the side somewhere like this this is was and i believe still is built into mac os and you would access it either through the menus or you could do a modifier click on the title of the thing in the title bar like but again it never really caught on the implementation was janky and not great and the ui for presenting it was inconsistent it changed a lot and just people never really latched on to it it's like look there's two worlds there's the iphone world where you don't have to worry about any of this stuff and lots of apps in the mac do that these days and there is the old world which is like pcs where you have file open save blah blah the only thing this change really did was teach a whole swath of the public the weird finger modifier combos to get save as back because that's what everybody wanted they're like just google for how do i get save as back on the mac you'll find a million results like every like this is a widely shared tip since 2012 because people are like i just i used to know how computers worked and i just want that back and again maybe it's just the stubbornness and all these people just need to like live out their lives and die and then we'll enter the brave new world where everything auto saves uh but i just feel like apple's heart hasn't really been in it like they haven't advanced and continued pushing this despite the fact that if you go to text edit today i believe this is still the default of how it works yeah i still get it in preview that's that's where i see it the most oh pre yeah preview drives me nuts with that there's a bunch of other things that preview does that drive me off the wall too but yeah now text edit you've got save duplicate rename move to revert i believe you have the versioning thing still in the accessible somewhere i forget where that is hiding like just like you don't hear much about it like apple isn't like hammering on it like they were back in like 2012 2013 2014 of saying you need to adopt this this is the modern way forget about that all open save close documents that's not it just we want all the apps the mac to work like they do on ios and it's just been like unevenly adopted and what has resulted in is people like carl seeing this and saying what's going on on the mac like is this how this is this how everything is in the mac or just some things and why are some things like this and why are they not and why do i have to learn the modifier clicks to get save as back i think it's actually like it's just option um yeah but the change is duplicated but then other options like it's just it's it's inconsistent in a way that it wasn't before because they weren't able to transition the mac platform from the old model to the new one so now we just have both of them which might sound familiar if you have tracked the history of window management on the mac either just they introduce a new system but the old one doesn't go away and now you have both which in some ways is you know useful but the problem is with every app that you use now on the mac you if it's not doing what you expect you'll be startled because again stickies and notes do what people expect and they never have to think about it but text edit maybe doesn't work the way you expect because you expect it to work the old way because it's just a simple text editor but it doesn't it works the new way and the same thing with preview where you're like is this saved do i want to do i want to duplicate and like oh i made a change but like i just saw the preview icon change on the desktop but i didn't hit save i guess preview doesn't work like i thought it did i guess it just auto saves or what if i want the old version back i guess i should have duplicated first and is there a version feature in preview and how do i access it it's it's it's not a great situation like i understand what apple was trying to do but i think their transition essentially failed and then they lost interest in yeah this this has bitten me constantly preview is by far the most common time i run into it oftentimes it'll be like i'm opening an image i want to resize it and save a smaller copy and so often yeah i open it up i resize it oh i just overwrote the original with a smaller version of itself thanks thanks so much and you didn't save but you're like surely nothing happens until i save nope that's not the way preview works it works like notes and i think the you know the example of notes is a good one the reason why we don't have save in notes i think conceptually that is not at odds with wanting the old file save behavior in preview because notes you're not operating on files notes is a kind of like you know solid data store you are operating on a database inside the app there are also sometimes called shoebox apps.

1:38:02When you are using notes, it does not work like open a file, edit the file, save the file because you're not operating on files. Whereas the reason why this new document model, new being 2012, is so confusing and has been since 2012 when they introduced it is because the entire history of PCs, when you are operating on files, works the old way. when phones came around with phone apps that inspired like this new behavior phone apps don't work on files at least most of them you know and certainly now there's a few but you know as we get into like you know the ipad being a power user thing but for the most part phone apps don't work on files phone apps work on databases and services it is consistent that you can say you don't have to save in notes yeah because notes you're not dealing with files but the workflow of people using PCs, Windows and Mac, forever, has been when you are operating on a file, you can open that file, you can edit it, and it shows a little unsaved indicator somewhere, maybe, you know, the dot on Mac, I don't know what the heck PCs do, it doesn't matter, and you can save the file.

1:39:08And if you try to close the file without saving, it'll ask you, do you want to save what you did? And you can save it, or you can save as, or you can discard it. And Apple said, we're going to change that now the problem with changing that is that you're taking a model that everyone is has already learned and not only throwing it away but replacing it with a model that looks the same until you've destroyed data like it looks and yeah you can revert but no and most people don't know that or it's hard or it's clunky we already had a model for this and it's it's kind of like i'm sorry, John, you're going to hate this.

1:39:43It's kind of like the file extensions debate. I think you mean file name extensions. Yes. Sorry. Where Mac file names don't natively need extensions and the old Mac didn't even have them. And then, you know, Windows PCs use file extensions to indicate types of files and provide associations to whatever app should open it. Over time, like the pressure from the Windows world for Macs to work the same way as people know how to use them and they'd have good interoperability with PC files kind of required Macs just by kind of market pressure to adopt file name extensions. Or that's what the people who did it tell themselves so they can sleep at night.

1:40:19Wow. And it's not, you know, it's not the most graceful thing in the world. And of course, Apple did their Apple way, which is, well, we're going to have file extensions, but we're going to hide them sometimes. And just to confuse the way things work, we're just going to have some file extensions that never show up like you know like project like bundles app and stuff um and we're gonna have some file extensions that show up only if you typed them in when you save the file but not if you didn't and then we're gonna prompt you to change it even when it's not there visibly it's again like apple tried to do something you know pretty and theoretically maybe a little bit uniform and the the real world complexity of it is kind of annoying well the document model introduced in 2012 is an even larger version of that problem where they tried to do something that is different from the way PCs and previous Macs worked.

1:41:15Um, and no one really wanted it. None of the rest of the world works that way. Um, including the iPhone. Like it was one of the, it was one of the many features where the iPhone succeeds or the iPad succeeds and Apple's like, we should unify the behavior between iOS and Macs. And that hardly ever has been a good idea and has hardly ever resulted in positive change. Sometimes it has, but overall, every time they've tried to unify the behavior by basically clobbering what was there on the Mac before with a copy of what's on iOS, it doesn't usually work out that well because they're different platforms.

1:41:54They work very differently. Their users have different expectations and different habits and different needs. anyway so this is one of those things where like we had a model that worked that everyone was familiar with and they tried to replace it no one adopted it really except apple's own built-in apps and even then only some of them and so what we have now is this confusing mess and apple is probably too proud to ever change it back in their apps to ever go back to this or to as far as i know there's still like no system-wide option to change it back is there no but they added so many APIs for this and so many systems but just I just feel like they lost interest in them especially the versioning stuff well I think the market just said we don't care we don't want that because users said we don't want that I mean some some apps do use it like it's it's that's the thing like they can't get rid of it now because some apps do actually use it and rely on it it's it's they just painted themselves into a corner it's not a great situation for for anybody I wish they had either successfully transitioned or not tried to do it but they didn't so we're kind of stuck And you mentioned like the apps not using documents.

1:42:57I don't actually know the answer to this question, but I'm curious to what people, if other people don't know the answer, think to yourself, have you ever even considered this? And what do you think the answer is? Does Final Cut Pro on the iPad auto save everything as you do it? Or is there an explicit save function? I think it auto saves, but I don't know. It must. Because like on iPad iOS, you know, you got to be, you can be terminated at any time. like you have to like the whole you know ios apps basically have to auto save for practical reasons i mean they could i mean they can the thing is like i'm basically adding what what document model does it present yes technically under the covers they have to be auto saving but they could be auto saving off to the side and still like when you relaunch the app it shows it as having essentially quote unquote unsaved changes even though it just reloaded it from disk but like final cut pro is an example because it is file-based like you are working on project even though the files are bundles or whatever but like it is it is totally file-based like it is no it's not a shoebox app there's not i know there's a there's probably some kind of library type structure but the whole point with final cut is you're trading these project files around you can transfer them not losslessly between the mac version the ipad version like it is the proiest of the pro app that has to deal with like media files and libraries of media files and project files and edit decision lists and all these other things right and yet on the ipad i also assume that it auto saves everything so it's it's an example if that's true and i don't even know if it is like that's a difficult situation to be in because like the rule of like well if you're a shoebox app that you you do this but if you're not a shoebox app first of all that distinction is makes sense to programmers but not so much to users because like how can i tell one way or the other but second it's like okay so final cut pro surely that works this way because it's not a shoebox like well when it's on the ipad it does but and here's another question i don't know the answer to on the mac does it auto save i don't know that answer to that either but it's like the fact that we could just speculate and be like i can see how that app could work one way or the other and both would make sense from a certain perspective that kind of confusion that's what they introduced to the mac platform that confusion which is any given app you're not sure and it's and this is the bad kind of fusion i mentioned before when we're talking about window uh you know market was going on about like he wants the app to close when you close the last open window that distinction i'm in favor of because i feel like most of the time it does what people expect close the last window on calculator the app quits close less window dictionary the app quits close the last window of microsoft word the app doesn't quit like even though that is a quote unquote inconsistency it's i think it's fairly straightforward to know what your app should do and let the developers pick that but autosave versus not it's incredibly fraught to the degree where i wonder if you know apple making decisions about its highest end most pro most complicated product even that the decision is not clear which way they should go so this is kind of a a failed it's a failed sociological sociological experiment and also a failed technical experiment i'm not sure when it'll be resolved but presumably i'll be dead by then yeah probably never i mean also in the case where you have the same app on ipad os and mac whether they differ in their behavior in this way i don't think is that important because i don't think there's that many people bouncing between Final Cut on iPad and Final Cut on a Mac.

1:46:08Because as you mentioned, it's not even a safe transfer. But I think most people probably use one or the other. I could be wrong. I don't have any data on this. But just kind of a gut feeling. I don't hear of a lot of people using both actively back and forth. So I think it makes sense. Again, like so many things about unifying the platforms. I think it makes sense for the app to do what is the native behavior on the platform it's running on. And that is actually different between iOS and macOS. Yeah, again, that makes me wonder what those two apps actually do. I don't necessarily think that they should be consistent with each other, but it's kind of mind-boggling to think that the Mac version, for example, might autosave like the iPad version.

1:46:51And it's done it for years and we just don't know because we're not Final Cut Pro users. but like once you make a decision like this you know your users essentially get used to it and you should just basically stick with that i guess but it's so for new users it's so like think of preview right it's not like you don't know that's how preview works and yet it keeps catching you because you don't expect it to work that way and it's not like you preview is a rarely used application that you touch once a year or something it's still it's catching you by surprise when you crop it's like there's something stubborn about the way things should work again it's like it's like if calculator didn't quit when you closed the little tiny calculator window even if you knew that and you you've known it for years every time you close that calculator window and then an hour later so the calculator was still open you'd be like oh damn i forgot about that again because it's not what you expect and yeah it's it's a problem of their own making uh it would have been much more consistent if they just left it alone or they forcibly transitioned everybody but didn't work out uh to be clear i have never used final cut pro on the ipad but on the mac As far as I know, every move you make, every step you take, it saves it immediately.

1:47:55There's no file save or anything like that. Yeah, I wonder if that was true in Final Cut 7. Maybe that's just a cultural thing with video editors. I'm sure people write in Intel. It's obviously not a research. Because that's not how Logic works. Yeah, well, they bought that from a different company. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week, 1Password, Zapier, and Gusto. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. one of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime our weekly bonus topic there is more of the show to be had if you sign up as a member this week on overtime we'll be talking about how apparently everyone is stealing TV now which is pretty fun so we're talking about that in overtime thanks everybody you can join us atp.defin.com slash join to hear that and we'll talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Margo and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L i s s that's casey list m a r c o a r m m t marco armen s i r a c u s a syracusa it's accidental they didn't mean to accidental

1:49:43All right. So a week or so ago, maybe a little more, I don't know. Sometime recently, the 2nd of February, I finally got around to putting a post up on my website about my status board, which we've talked about on and off over the years, over the last couple of years on this show. To recap, a few years ago, well, for a long time, I was using Homebridge. There's nothing wrong with home bridge, but eventually I wanted to have a little more control over what was going on in the house. And so I became one of those people, a home assistant person. And, um, and so now that I'm a home assistant person, all I want to do is automate everything in my life.

1:50:21And, uh, a few months ago, we were talking on the show, maybe a year ago about how I really wanted to have like a status board in the house, preferably somewhere downstairs where we spend most of our time that tells me the state of a few like critical systems in the house. Did you always call it status board or does that? I thought so. I'm wondering if you're calling it that now because of the recent panic status board thing that I was talking about. Yeah, maybe. I mean, it's not really a board, but anyway, continue. I'm just, I just, my memory is making me think, was it always status board? Is this like a Berenstain Barris thing?

1:50:51I thought so, but I'm not confident. It could be. I don't know. Anyway, go on. It's status and it's on a board kind of. Well, it's not really on a board to your point. It's more of a series of status indicators. It's a very thin board. It's status indicators. And so I had initially had the idea, and I remember talking about this on the show. The house was built in the late 90s. So in the kitchen at roughly eye level was a RJ11 jack, you know, a phone line jack. And it was way up high. And the idea was you would mount your kitchen phone way up high, as everyone did at the time, and plug it into that jack right there.

1:51:26And I've since pulled that faceplate off and kind of gotten rid of the jack. And so now it's just a blank faceplate. And my initial cut on this was, hey, I'm going to wire, like, I'm going to drill holes for like two or three LEDs. I'm going to wire those to like a Raspberry Pi or an ESP32 or something like that. Now, I'm not sure how it was getting power to that ESP32, but we'll leave that aside. but I'll put a couple of LEDs on a blank, you know, wall plate and call it a day. And I told Erin this plan and she told me in the most loving way possible over her dead f***ing body. And so I had to rethink.

1:52:06And we were talking about this on the show and an incredibly kind listener, Chris R., wrote to me and said, hey, have you heard of these home seer switches? And that's H-O-M-E-S-E-E-R. and the company, as far as I can tell, is still around, but these particular switches are discontinued. And so that's a real bummer. But in the midst of all the recommendations for a particular Innoveli switch, which I don't remember specifically which one it is, so I'm not going to link in the show notes, but everyone and their mother recommended these Innoveli switches, which do a very similar thing to what I'm about to describe, but it doesn't work quite as well.

1:52:46and I'll try to come back and explain why. But the way this home seer switch works is there's seven LEDs on the left-hand side of a Decora-style switch, like a paddle-style switch. And by default, what happens is when it's a dimmer, and so as you hold down on the up button, let's say, each of the LEDs will start increasing over time as the light is getting brighter to indicate how dim or bright the light is. And they will all, you know, be white or whatever. However, you have the option of putting it in what they call status mode. And what that allows you to do is to control each of those seven LEDs individually.

1:53:25Additionally, each of the LEDs has like seven or so preset colors that you can use. So Chris R was kind enough to send me an extra one of these that he had. It works via Z-Wave, which my understanding is, and we talked about this a few weeks ago, So Thread is kind of sort of Z-Wave, but over IPv6, whereas Z-Wave is not over IPv6. But nevertheless, it works via RF. And so I needed to get like a little dongle for my home assistant installation, like a physical USB-A dongle, B, whatever. I can remember the other ones. I had to get a USB dongle to hook up to the then Synology now to a NUC, which we'll talk about in another show, in order to be able to talk Z-Wave.

1:54:12And that was a little challenging, but worked out just fine. And it took a little back and forth for me to figure out how the heck to get this all wired up, figuratively speaking. Literally speaking, it was fairly straightforward. But figuratively speaking, to get it all wired up in Home Assistant and so on and so forth, it's a little bit clunky. But I finally got to the point that I have my quote-unquote status board, which is really more of a status panel or status lights. And I thought it was really fun to document that, which is what I put on my website. And we can talk more about it here.

1:54:43But the general gist of it is, is that there are seven LEDs, like I said, and going from bottom to top, what I have is if there's a red LED lit at the very bottom, the garage door is open. If it is extinguished, if it is not on, then the garage door is closed. Above that, there's a magenta LED that if it's on, the shed door is open. Gentlemen, how do I know if the shed door is open? A Yolink contact sensor. link. Additionally, immediately above that, if there's a white LED that's lit, then the Volvo is actively charging. Then I have a blank space because I don't know what else I want to use for that particular spot.

1:55:19And then above that, this is now the one, two, three, four, fifth one up, the third one down. If there's a blue LED illuminated, then the mail is waiting, which again, I know because of a Yolink contact sensor. Above that, if there is a green LED lit and solid, then there's some amount of laundry that needs attention, which I can dig into more if you want. And then if it's flashing, that means that the laundry is actively running. And then finally, at the very top, there's also a, figuratively speaking, blank spot because I don't know what to put there either. This is incredibly dorky, incredibly overkill, and largely useless.

1:55:52And I got to tell you, gentlemen, it makes me so freaking happy. I'm surprised you got clearance for a blinking LED when the laundry is running. Well, because she never pays attention to any of these LEDs. But it's blinking. I mean, I could turn that off. That's a choice I made. Also, my first question for this is, so you got this thing in here, and I encourage people to go to Casey's blog post to look at this to get an idea of what he's talking about here. Has the rest of your family acclimated to these lights and they know what they mean, or do they ignore them as just visual noise? More of the latter.

1:56:25I would say of the four of us, I far and away pay the most attention, which tracks. The kids are at least somewhat aware, I think, particularly the red and blue, which is garage door and mail. I don't think they pay that much attention to whether or not the car is charging, which is white. Why do they care about the garage door? I don't know, because if they want to run out and get the mail or if they want to run outside and play basketball or something like that, I think they're at least aware that the red means the garage door is open. I don't need to get your kids on the show. I feel like if they're going to run out through the garage, they're going to open the door to the garage from your house and see whether the door is open.

1:56:59Also true. They'll open it. I'm not sure they're consulting the LED before they make that journey. Perhaps not. But they are at least aware of red. They are aware of blue. I don't think they care about magenta, white, or green, which would be in order the shed door, the Volvo, and the laundry. I don't think Erin pays any attention to any of this whatsoever. I think she is lightly aware of what each of the colors means. I'm pretty sure. This would be a great quiz. You should do this. You should not just do it casual-like. It's not a big pressure thing. and just like see if you can casually figure out if, you know, quiz your family.

1:57:34What are the light colors mean? I should do that. And in fact, I should have done that before we recorded. Now I feel really dumb. I didn't think about it, but I should have. But yeah, again, this is very dumb. This is not something that I think most human beings would want in their house, particularly to John's point, a flashing light. Oh, and the red light also flashes when the garage door is actively going up or down. But anyways, I don't think any human would want this except me, but it makes me so incredibly happy. that's honestly that's great i feel like a actual status board like a panic style status board would be i mean i think you would enjoy messing with that even more because then you'd have like a little animated garage door going up and you'd have all those you know graphics and and like you could do charts and stuff and all sorts of things but obviously that would be you know a tremendous eyesore no matter how good a job i do i have to say that i kind of think this is an eyesore but no it is a smaller eyesore but it also has so much less information like everyone's so used to screens like you know all these smart thermostats that most of us have they have screens that are much bigger than these tiny leds in them and people just accept them in their homes and they have all sorts of weird graphics on them and they change when you walk by because they have proximity centers and all this stuff uh so it's like is it really that far and to go to like a you know an lcd that's the size of this entire panel that you could put some stuff on i mean but anyway if it's working if it's working for you and it makes you happy and your family tolerates it honestly isn't that the best we can really hope for yes all of that is very accurate uh i don't know so i mean it sounds like john you are not at all interested in replicating this and honestly would be no absolutely not uh marco does this have any appeal to you whatsoever no fair enough but but i i recognize like i recognize the appeal for a lot of people to do stuff like this i personally i it's it's not worth it enough for me like i like i have one of those terminals from the problematic guy yeah um which we didn't know at the time either um and uh and it's it's fun for the family to see like weather and stuff downstairs but like i will go a whole week forgetting to look at it because it's just like it becomes scenery because because it isn't reminding me in the corner of my screen every day remind me this afternoon what does that mean i don't care like it's it's not one of those things it's it kind of becomes background and so if i have one of these indicators in my house anywhere i think the same thing would happen.

1:59:45It would just become background to me. I would stop seeing it, and therefore it would stop showing its function. Yeah, I totally get that. But it makes me very happy, and there's a little bit more detail on my website, but it's very cool. Oh, and then coming back to the Inovelli switch, there's a flavor of Inovelli switch that has a bunch of LEDs that you can control, but there is a single diffuser that runs above all of the LEDs, so it's a lot more challenging to figure out what LED is lit and so on and so forth. And so that's one of the reasons why the InnoVeli stuff doesn't really appeal to me.

2:00:19Also at the time, I don't remember if they were doing any Z-Wave switches. I don't have Zigbee in the house. And if you don't know what that means, congrats, you're a normal human. But I don't have any Zigbee stuff in the house and I only have this one Z-Wave device, but I didn't want to go and have to get another dongle to have a different communications protocol and blah, blah, blah. And so that's why I didn't go InnoVeli, even though people had very good things to say about it. And you can actually buy one, which is an improvement over this home seer thing. So what are you going to do?