680: A Lot of Holes in That Cheese

19:27Marco Arment:See for yourself at squarespace.com slash ATP. Start a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code ATP to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. Once again, squarespace.com slash ATP, code ATP. Thank you so much to Squarespace for being so awesome and for sponsoring our show.

19:49John Siracusa:all right let's do some follow-up uh i have had a terrible terrible thing happen to me i've received the verizon cable card email oh no i got it i got it last week there's still no date on it as to when the cable cards are expiring and actually by pure coincidence it's been a very busy social calendar for me today i went to lunch with john from channels um today and we were talking about this. But anyways, it has come to me. There's no date involved. As far as I know, even the first people to get it, which I think a lot of them were in the New York and Boston region, none of their cable cards have died.

20:21John Siracusa:As far as I know, John, your TiVo is still chugging along.

20:24Casey Liss:Yeah. Is your plan to just ride it out like me and just wait for the day doesn't work? Yep, pretty much. Because who knows? That could be a year from now.

20:29John Siracusa:Yeah, exactly. I mean, it will come at some point or another. But yeah, that's my plan to ride it out. The very, very short version is I was thinking about maybe just cruising along with paying Verizon for cable service, even if I don't use like their new IPTV app or anything like that, and just using TV Everywhere in order to stream things and suck it into channels via TV Everywhere. But in the last like week or two, Disney has pulled all of their channels, including importantly ESPN and the associated properties, off of TV Everywhere. So I don't know what I'm going to do. I suspect that if anything, what I'll probably do is, is, is upgrade my Disney plus package to include ESPN and all that for sports.

21:09John Siracusa:And then maybe pay for Peacock for a Bravo and one or two other channels that we watch. And then maybe that'll be it. No. And I, and use an antenna for local stuff, but it's a bummer, man. It's a bummer.

21:19Casey Liss:Oh, Peacock and TiVo related complaint. Uh, we subscribed to Peacock this month for the Olympics because my wife wanted to watch it. She, she was away on a work trip when she came back from the work trip is like, I want to watch x y and z events that i missed when i was on my work trip i'm trying to find it in the peacock app can't find that she's searched for it i searched for it she eventually looked it up online turns out replays of olympic events are only available for one day after the event why am i paying for your streaming service if you will not show me a thing that happened more than one day ago you know what doesn't have that limitation if we had t-voted but we didn't didn't we're like oh we'll pay for peacock we had all the stuff just pay for the streaming service we We should get used to this post cable, post TiVo world.

22:01Casey Liss:This was not a problem with TiVo. If we had set up TiVo to record the Olympic event she was interested in, maybe it would have been a little bit more work to set up. But when she came back from the work trip, she could watch the events. Yep. The world we're living in. And it's worse. It is worse.

22:14John Siracusa:All right. Yolink alternatives. Joe writes, you were talking about Yolink sensors, I guess it was last episode, whatever it was, 16 weeks ago when I last spoke to you two. And Joe continues, and I wanted to share that IKEA has come out with some new matter over thread devices that are mind-boggling. bogglingly cheap. They have a leak sensor for about$8, a scene controller for about$6, and a motion sensor for about$8. I think they have a contact sensor as well as some light bulbs, but I haven't bought any of those, says Joe. So far, I've had these for about two months, and they're rock solid. I especially like that these are all integrated with HomeKit, so I just need to go to one place to look at the status or inspect alerts, which, by the way, these three products, and I cannot speak Swedish, are called Klipbok, Bilresa, and MIG Spray, which I did literal translations of the three of them.

23:00John Siracusa:And allegedly as per Google translate, they are called scrapbook car trip and mosquito spray. Something may have been lost in translation there,

23:07Casey Liss:but then maybe not. I don't know.

23:09John Siracusa:Right. Uh, yeah, yeah. Anyways, but that is good to know. I have heard, um, through some, uh, acquaintances that these are at least at first glance, pretty good to corroborate what Joe has said. I personally haven't used any of these, but it is very interesting and worth checking out. All right. With regard to, uh, we talked, I think it was last episode as well, about home batteries and generators and things like that. And Russell Prowse writes, I enjoyed listening to your conversation about battery backups and solar. One thing you didn't mention is vehicle to home or V2H. This allows your EV to act as your backup battery as long as it's connected to a home charger that supports bi-directional charging.

23:42John Siracusa:A few EVs already support it, including the BMW iX3 and the upcoming i3, nudge, nudge, Marco, and more on the way. Also, it's worth noting, and I think, John, you've put this in the show notes for us to talk about, there's vehicle to load as well. John, what's the difference between V2H and V2L?

23:57Casey Liss:That's the little part that I put there for you to read. It explains it.

24:00John Siracusa:Well, I was trying to give you the credit, John. I know it's right there.

24:03Casey Liss:You're still stumbling over the JS notes. No, no, no, no, no. I just wanted to make it clear that Russell wasn't saying this, that I was. No, no, no.

24:10John Siracusa:I know. Genuinely, hand to God, you know I will fess up if I stumble over it. I've done it a million times. This time, I was trying not to steal your credit for once. But all right, fine.

24:17Casey Liss:Credit for anything. I put all this in the show notes. Just read it. Jesus Christ.

24:23John Siracusa:I'm leaving it all in. screw it. Marco, if you want to clean it up, that's up to you. All right. So anyway, I happen to know, and it has nothing to do with John Syracuse whatsoever, that there's also a vehicle to load, or V2L, where the AC inverter in the EV is used to supply power that is plugged into the generator inlet or whatever. V2L does not require a bidirectional charger to operate. And by pure coincidence, I don't know why I didn't bring this up last episode, because it's fresh in mind. My friend Brad, who has the F-150 Lightning, he had just installed in the last couple of weeks, a generator inlet for him to plug his F-150 Lightning into, because that has 220, or I'm probably getting the details wrong, but it's basically got a NEMA 1450 or whatever outlet on the back of it that you can plug into a generator inlet.

25:07John Siracusa:That's exactly the point. And so as best I know, he has not yet tried this, but in theory, he can use the battery in his Lightning in order to power at least some subset of the house. Going back to Russell, to me, this removes almost every downside of a battery backup system and keeps all of the upside. Most EVs have batteries in the 80 kilowatt hour range, so you're starting with way more capacity than you get with a Powerwall or equivalent battery backup system. If it's a car you already own or we're planning on buying anyway, that's an enormous amount of money you can save versus having a car plus the equivalent amount of battery storage, which is a great point.

25:39All right.

25:39John Siracusa:With regard to fans in the M-Pro line.

25:43Casey Liss:No, I mean, I meant enthusiasts. Sorry. Should have been clear.

25:46John Siracusa:All right. With regard to, see, you know not even you were perfect john who knew i didn't i didn't even think about the whole like spinning thing that blows air right with regard to enthusiasts of the m whatever pro uh rick baum how or hower writes i think marco was confusing the m3 pro with the m4 pro when he said the latter wasn't a good value the m3 pro is a terrible chip basically an m3 plus rather than m3 max minus as the m1 and m2 pro had previously been i don't see how m4 pro with two and a half times the P cores and two times the GPU cores of the base chip can be called poor value at$600 more than the base M4 and$1 ,000 less than the M4 Max.

26:23John Siracusa:The Pro chip, except for the M3 Pro, is for people who want near max performance and core count, but don't need all those GPU cores. Musicians are one such group.

26:30Casey Liss:Yeah, that's the problem with all the chip lines is, you know, you don't generally get to pick what comes inside the SoC. How many P cores? How many E cores? How many GPU cores? You get to pick from the three or four sets of stuff that Apple gives you. And if you really just want a whole bunch of cpu cores and don't care about gpu you end up paying a lot more because you have limited choices so yeah the the m whatever pro chips do apparently have fans especially people who do not want to pay for all that gpu that they don't need yeah we did get a

26:59Marco Arment:lot of feedback kind of you know defending the the m pro chips because i i was kind of crapping on them last episode and i think i did a poor job of explaining my my made my main point which is is that the M4 base chip has gotten so good that if you're looking at performance per dollar in CPU performance in particular, the M4 is way better than the Pro or the Max. What I was saying was that the Max usually at least has the benefit of if you need really big RAM or other very large resources, sometimes you have to go with the Pro or the Max chip to do that. But neither of them, in terms of CPU performance per dollar, neither of them are good values compared to the base chip.

27:44Marco Arment:So I think the Max makes its case that if you need the biggest of everything, the Max is it. And if you need the best bang for your buck, the base chip is it. And the Pro, it is between those two. my thinking was not fully considering the pricing aspect because like i didn't realize like because i haven't i haven't bought one in a couple years like my i'm still using m3 max for my my main mac here um so i didn't realize like oh the price difference is actually pretty big between them so it is a middle step in terms of like you can pay some more and get some more but in terms of like sheer computing power for the dollar neither the pro nor the max are good values compared to the base chip, which is a very good value.

28:30Casey Liss:By the way, the biggest of everything is still the Ultra, even though it is still the M3 Ultra. It is definitely the biggest.

28:35Marco Arment:Well, I mean, yeah, but like almost no one should buy that. It's true, but it's the biggest.

28:40John Siracusa:All right. With regard to Tahoe window resizing, Nathan Manso Pano writes, on the topic of resizing windows in Tahoe, you can actually enlarge the exterior clickable area. Just run this command and then log out and back in. And we'll have it in the show notes, but it's defaults, right? Hyphen G, Apple Edge Resize Exterior Size, 8. The default seems to be four. You can revert the change with such and such, which will again be in the show notes.

29:02Casey Liss:I haven't tried that, but I'm glad to know that these, you know, little undocumented P-list things are still lurking in there for you to mess with the UI.

29:09John Siracusa:Indeed so. All right, let's talk macOS document model. First of all, apparently our timeline was a little bit wrong. The new document model was introduced in macOS 10.7 Lion, not 10.8 Mountain Lion, as we, I think, stated last episode. And John, you're eating crow in our internal show notes writing in fact the first sentence of the section of the mountain line review that we linked last episode was quote apple's far-reaching changes to the document model

29:34Casey Liss:and os 10 lion yeah it's my bad like i did the google link because i didn't remember off the top of my head so i'm searching for my i'm searching through my old reviews to find out when they introduced this and i found the mountain line section that explained their document model i'm like this must be it but i didn't read literally the first sentence which linked back to my 10.7 review and said here's when it was introduced so my bad um i do think the mountain line section it does a better job of explaining it but it is interesting to look back at the 10.7 review and see what i thought of it then and how my thoughts had changed even just a year and by the way it's also fun to look at uh the fact that apple could not get its act together marketing wise on 10.7 and couldn't decide whether it was mac os 10 10.7 or whether it was just os 10 10.7 the 10.7 documentation marketing materials and everything had both of those things in it which to this day i still remember being like well which is it are you dropping the mac or you know eventually i believe they did drop it i forget but i in my reviews i always tried to do whatever apple said was their official like here's what we call our thing so i'll call it whatever they call it and in 10.7 they just couldn't decide or they decided too late and they couldn't update all their materials so even in these notes like you can see in my mountain my review i call it os 10 lion but then in my notes here i called it mac os 10 lion anyway apple and naming uh has never been great.

30:50John Siracusa:No, it is not. Uh, Ian Robinson writes, and I don't know why I didn't say this on the episode. This is one of those things that either you two were on a roll and I didn't want to interrupt or I asked you about it. Oh, then I don't know what my deal was. Uh, but anyways, Ian Robinson writes, uh, final cut pro does auto save on the Mac. Of course it does. Where were you on this? Casey? Uh, you have to choose the name for the project when you first added to a library in the app. I don't know how long this has been the case. I've only been using it for about five years and that's pretty much exactly the same for me again.

31:15John Siracusa:Apologies. I don't know where I was on that. Video Alex writes, ever since Final Cut Pro 10 launched 14 years ago, you do not need to save as you work. File format is a database of incremental changes so you can undo back to the start of your edit. I did not know that. That's very cool. When you quit, it commits the changes to the file, which is a bundle. Eric writes, when you're using Microsoft Office 365 apps on Windows with files in OneDrive, the apps have the default option of auto-saving all you're doing without asking anything.

31:43Casey Liss:I didn't actually test this one but this this feedback makes it sound like if you're using office 365 and your file is in one drive then it default auto saves and i'm wondering so does it not default auto save if the drive if the file isn't in one drive that would be a weird behavior that users would never guess but anyway it's it's just another example of a app that we traditionally think of as a file-based app deciding you know what auto save is is the sensible default for this situation

32:11John Siracusa:Alex Kent writes, does Xcode work on files? How often do you hit Command S every day when working in Xcode? There's no number that can measure, that can go that high. A billion times? A trillion times? Wait, what? I hit Command S constantly.

32:27Casey Liss:In Xcode, you hit Command S?

32:29Marco Arment:I do too. Absolutely.

32:31Casey Liss:I have never hit Command S in Xcode. Yeah, oh no, absolutely. What are you hitting Command S for? To save my work? To save what? The stuff I just changed. The source code that you're editing? Yes. If you didn't do that, what would happen?

32:45John Siracusa:I mean, what if the computer, see, now I'm exposing my Windows priors, but what if the computer crashes spontaneously after I've just written a block of code that I don't feel like rewriting or asking an AI to do for me?

32:57Casey Liss:So Xcode, finish this thing, but I'll tell you what my impression of how Xcode works is.

33:01John Siracusa:All right, so let me, I'm going to back up to the beginning because I interrupted Alex, if you will. So Alex Kent writes, does Xcode work on files? how often do you hit the command s every day when working in xcode autosave feels totally natural in some apps and totally foreign in others i have no solid rule for which is correct but it's not as simple as shoebox versus files i agree with pretty much everything alex is saying whether or not it

33:20Casey Liss:makes any sense whatsoever i agree with it because xcode i mean so clearly it works on files it is most ids are very much file based like some in certain situations where the files are and what their call is actually significantly important and in swift and xcode it's not as important as in other languages and other apis but it's still kind of important where the files are and what they're named uh but it's certainly a file-based app um my impression of the way xcode works and the reason i don't ever hit command s is the only thing that i care about is like if it was let's pretend it was like old school file base and you had to hit save i would be like okay i'm type it type it type it all right now command r because i want to run my changes um but wait you forgot to hit command s so when you hit command r actually what you're running is the version of that file that you last saved three minutes ago and so now you're running the app you think you're running it but really you have unsaved changes that were not part of your build that never happens in xcode my impression is that when you hit command r to run it doesn't matter if you hit command s in the last hour when you hit command r to run every single one of your buffers is it's going to it's going to do use what is in the file at the time it gets to compiling that thing in fact i will continue to type crap while it's building confident that that it will get you know that that it's probably already picked up the chain like whatever point it hit that file especially if i'm adding like a comment or something like that so essentially i assume i treat xcode like apple notes where i never have to hit save it is always saving my thing when it needs to i'm also under the impression that is constantly auto saving in the background i don't know if that's true but that's my impression my sort of the equivalent of command s is uh commit and push because then if the meteor hits my house you know and i'm dead my source code will be like i always want to push as in get it out of my house get it off of my computer get it somewhere that is not here um but anyway that's i don't all i can say is that i never have to hit command s and it doesn't affect my life and so far i haven't lost any work because of this but marco casey you are hitting command s because you think is that like okay my case said he's hitting it because like well what if my computer crashes i'll lose that code i just type marco why are you hitting command

35:30Marco Arment:s because i grew up in textmate doing web development and textmate i mean so did i like i know well but so so textmate is basically an ide for web development sort of you know it's like it's a text editor then you can open a whole bunch of files in and you can you know and if you're working in a web app you're dealing with you know a directory tree full of files and you know and so in text mate uh if you don't hit command s your data is not saved and so when you go back to the browser and hit refresh or rerun the script or whatever you will not have whatever is unsaved being run in you know in your test so i just developed the habit of like whenever i go to run whatever i've written i hit command s first i mean i grew up in that same

36:16Casey Liss:environment and have that exact habit but i did not bring that habit with me to xcode because it

36:20Marco Arment:was so clear that it worked differently i do so i am a little bit more loosey-goosey about an xcode like for instance i will um if i do like a like a find and replace across multiple files in xcode i will do that find and replace and then i'll just hit run i won't have i won't think like are all those files saved um whereas in textmate i actually have to think about that and you have to do like save all or whatever whatever the command if you did think about it would you go

36:45Casey Liss:to all the files that have the little m next to them in the sidebar and click on them and hit command s or it did like i don't even know what command s does in xcode does it save every file without standing changes just the one that's in the currently active text editing thing i think

36:57Marco Arment:it's just the current one but but because it's not connected to anything like the elevator door

37:01Casey Liss:close button and you two were just hitting command s to make ourselves happy well like but it doesn't

37:05Marco Arment:it doesn't like if you if you hit command s and notes it'll beep at you to kind of yell at you

37:09Casey Liss:like don't don't save me what are you doing i feel like xcode should do that i mean i would

37:14Marco Arment:probably stop doing it eventually like i don't do it that often in notes but uh but yeah it just it's it's that same character habit because it does like you know the thing with notes notes again notes makes more sense not to do that because there is no explicit save action that the app is doing like on your behalf like to a file whereas xcode it is still working on individual files and until you hit command s or run or build and run the app those files are not saved are you

37:42Casey Liss:sure it's not constantly auto saving in the background i haven't tested this i'm just asking hold on i'll tell you i should check i should check next time after i spend 10 minutes writing code and then i have not yet hit command r i will go look in the file system and see

37:53John Siracusa:i'm not 100 sure but i am like all right i can i just tested it because you can tell like whether

37:59Marco Arment:it shows up in your git diff um and yeah if you just type some code if you just type something and alt tab away sorry command tab away um and you know look at like it won't oh wait a minute

38:11Casey Liss:oh my god now it's there i'm gonna take it it's auto saves every two seconds doesn't it gracious oh my god it maybe did it this is the year of efficiency you can stop hitting command

38:22Marco Arment:s as much i think it might just be auto saving like whenever you switch away or do i think it's

38:27Casey Liss:auto saving like every 10 i think it's constantly doing it oh my god that's amazing all right

38:32John Siracusa:moving on we learned something new right all right eric de reuter writes you can get back to the old save as model in mac os i use a hybrid of auto save and save as so i have the benefits of auto saving with the mental model of using save as and system settings uh first of all in desktop and dock you disable close windows when quitting an application this will be in the show

38:49Casey Liss:notes i don't want to add by the way that setting is a thing that nobody would guess at i tried to i think what glenn fleishman had an article about this but like what why would you ever go to desktop and doc and look for a setting that says close windows when quitting an application and think in any way that's going to mess with the document model but it is an essential part of this yep and

39:08John Siracusa:then secondarily in keyboard then keyboard shortcuts you should create an entry under all applications for save as and assign it to command shift s and uh you might want to get a true to form ellipsis by hitting option semicolon again that will be in the show notes you have to

39:23Casey Liss:because the the uh the keyboard shortcut things that works in the menu system on the mac you have to write the menu item exactly as it appears in the menu. So if you don't know how to type in ellipsis and you just type three dots, you're not going to figure out why it's not working because it's just like a text-based matching thing.

39:38John Siracusa:Right. I forgot about that. Thank you. And then finally, for this portion, Emily Campbell writes, NoPad++ on Windows presents a pretty basic text editor. You open existing text files or make new files and they don't save unless you save them. The tabs for each document show very clearly which files are unsafe so you're never confused. But here's the best bit. You don't need to save the files. It will remember forever the edits you have made to the unsaved files. It's obviously storing a copy somewhere under the hood. If you close the file, it asks you if you want to save your changes with the options save, don't save, or cancel, which is the close action.

40:09John Siracusa:Or cancel the action of trying to close the file. If you close the application, it doesn't ask you anything. It just remembers all your state without touching any of your original files. In my ideal world, every application would work this way. It's literally the best possible combination of both models. It never loses any of my data, but everything feels 100 % intentional.

40:25Casey Liss:this is how bb edit works uh you know like marco was saying like you have to hit command s because if you go refresh in the browser you won't see your changes if you didn't hit command s but i never worry about losing anything because for years and years and years i forget when bb started doing this but it's been many years i have so many as we've discussed in past episodes so many bb edit windows open half of them have the little dot of them that they have unsaved changes or whatever when i quit bb edit it never asked me anything it just it quits and when i launch it every window comes back to exactly where it was it doesn't retain undo history across launches which i believe textmate did at one point um and is that a feature or bug i'm just kind of used to it at this point but this this i don't know if it's the best of both worlds but it is a system i prefer if you don't want auto save but you also want sort of the quote-unquote protection of auto save bb edit is effectively auto saving your documents off of the side everywhere but still presenting the model of oh you didn't save these changes so they're not going to appear in the actual file they're just in my file off to the side that i'm using and it works for untitled windows too like you can have like an untitled window open for months and just use it as a scratch pad and every time you quit restart whatever the untitled window is always exactly where you put it size the way you made it it's just there it's called untitled 1572 or whatever huge number is on there that's that is a great uh system especially if you love having lots of windows open so i'm glad to hear that notepad plus plus does that on windows i'm telling you the BBF does it on Mac and there's probably other Mac apps that do it as well.

41:51All right.

41:52John Siracusa:Finally for today, with regard to repeating reminders for Marco, Patrick DeMontel writes, yes, DUE app is fine. Do is fine. But good task is what you want. It uses the reminders data, but keeps reminding every five or otherwise configured minutes. I am an avowed do super fan. So I personally like having a different section for all this stuff. But if you really like the Reminders app and want to just kind of supercharge it, apparently GoodTask is what you need to look at. And we'll put a link in the show notes.

42:21Marco Arment:I actually downloaded GoodTask years ago. It was in my App Store history because I've been ranting about this need occasionally for years. It is a very involved app. Like, it does a lot. And it kind of does, like, its own version of a lot of things. And it's, you know, it's a full-blown, full-featured app. And that's not really what I was looking for. I was looking for something much, much simpler that basically still left reminders to be reminders to a large degree. I didn't want something that added that much on top of it. So that's what I've been vibe coding for the last day or two.

42:57John Siracusa:Oh, nice.

42:58Marco Arment:I decided, you know what? I need to learn these AI tools beyond just very quick little dumb tests. Let me actually set up. I'm using Codex for this. I first tried the Xcode integration. It's fine, but I like the full Codex app better. So I've been using the full Codex app, and it has been a remarkable experience. I'm very impressed by it. We can talk a little bit more about it now if you want. I have some thoughts. But suffice to say, I've made my own app to do this, and I do plan to release it. I don't expect there to be a lot of users necessarily because I'm making what's best for me. Sometimes that works out and sometimes other people want it to.

43:48Marco Arment:That's not a guarantee with things I make. So it might not have any other users except me. But I am making it. I am going to release it. It's very, very simple. It's almost done. I basically need to make screenshots and fix one screen of kind of a bad UI. But this is exactly the kind of thing that makes me excited about AI coding. It's exactly like what drama is making. It's the kind of thing that if I had to do all this from scratch, I just never would have made it. This app just wouldn't exist. But now, by lowering the bar to how much work it is to make it, I was able to make it in a day and a half while also doing many other things in my life.

44:27Marco Arment:It's been coming back from the vacation and catching up on everything. It's been a lot in the stupid weather. There's been a lot going on in life. There's just stuff to do. so it's not like this has taken me a day and a half of constant work. This has taken me like a day and a half of occasionally like oh do this, do this, do this and then you know oh I have to do something else now and come back to it later and it's been kind of amazing. I guess do we have a minute to talk about it now?

44:53John Siracusa:I think we have a lot to get through but if we can contain ourselves. You and I did not contain ourselves about Apple Watch so if we can contain ourselves about this please

45:01Marco Arment:let's do it. Maybe I'll save it for when I actually release it. I will say. Oh that's a good idea The reason why I want to release it, first of all, why not? I mean, if it can help somebody else, great. Again, I think it's going to be pretty specific to the way I like things to be done, which is a bananas system that no one else should use. Everyone else should use more discipline and be more organized than I am. But this ridiculous pile helps me with my life such as it is. but also like a while back I one of the apps that I made to learn the basis of Swift UI was called Coffee Ratio and it was like whenever I go upstate to my in-laws they have you know pour over cone and a big air pot that I brew coffee in for everybody up there and it's always a different number of people depending on like who's around that day and who still wants coffee and I never remembered like how much how much water to beans do I use for this number of people or whatever.

45:57Marco Arment:So I just made a really simple one screen app called Coffee Ratio. And I actually made a really good icon, if I can say so myself. I don't know if it stands up today, but I liked it at the time. This is probably four or five years ago, at least. The problem is if you make an app for yourself on your iPhone, even if you have a paid developer account, the way that works is you open it up in Xcode, you build and run, you deploy it to the phone. Well, if you change phones, that app is gone. And the only way to get it back is to go to a Mac, download the app, figure out, register it with provisioning, and turn on developer mode and make sure, add that certificate to the privacy permissions thing so it trusts that developer account.

46:40Marco Arment:And so it's a big pain that isn't always possible. And so when you're making little personal utility apps for yourself for iOS, it's actually easier to just release them to the app store than it is to try to manage that. So like in many ways, like it's even if no one else ever installs it, as long as it's something Apple will approve, it's actually way easier to just have it in the app store than to try to manage that developer thing over time for an app that you only occasionally use. So that's why I actually am going to release this app. You know, it's not going to become a big part of my business, I don't think.

47:15Marco Arment:Because again, I don't think it's going to fit what most people want. but it is so far fitting very well what I want. And I've been very impressed with the AI coding and I'll get to that another time.

47:27John Siracusa:We are sponsored this week by Aura Frames. So if you're anything like me, you've got a gazillion photos on your phone. Photos that in a lot of cases are actually really good. And even if they aren't really good from a photographic point of view, there are people that you really truly love and they should live somewhere other than that phone. They should be out in the world. and you can think to yourself, well, you know what I'll do is I'll get one of those god-awful crappy photo frames that I used to buy 20 years ago to give as gifts that I hated because they were ugly and the screens were worse.

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49:27All right.

49:28John Siracusa:So as we record this, it is Wednesday, the 25th of February. And in a week on March 4th, Apple is going to have an experience. an Apple experience. And so Jess Weatherbed at The Verge, Apple is hosting a special Apple experience in New York City on Wednesday, March 4th at 9 a.m. Eastern instead of at the Apple Park location it typically uses for events. It's also hosting press in the cities of London and Shanghai at the same time. The invitation includes the words, you're invited, and an Apple logo depicted in segmented disks of yellow, green, and blue, the rumored colors of the new low-cost MacBook.

50:04John Siracusa:Otherwise, it provides no hints about the purpose of the so-called experience. However, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has previously said that he's expecting Apple to launch a low-cost A18 Pro chip-powered MacBook and new MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, and Mac displays over the course of the next several weeks. Alongside the iPhone 17e, a new base model iPad, and an M4 iPad Air. And maybe we'll even see a preview of Apple's new AI-infused Siri, which we'll find out later is probably not so likely after all. But yeah, this is happening a week from today. I know I was not invited as far as I know. Neither of you two were, right?

50:37John Siracusa:Okay. Unless I didn't hear John, but maybe.

50:40Casey Liss:I was not invited. So they didn't mention in this story, but like a theory that I saw Gruber speculate about and then Gurman either echo Gruber's speculation or confirm it with sources. I couldn't really tell which was that it would be like a week of press releases. Like on Monday, they'd press release some stuff. On Tuesday, they press release some stuff. On Wednesday, they press release some stuff and then have the experience, which is why it's not an event on the Wednesday because the idea is and they've done this before where they do a press release each day announcing some products culminating in an in-person thing where presumably they'll get to have people who are there will get to have hands-on experiences with some hardware but just look at this list in the verge thing that's a lot of stuff i mean there is a backlog because the the m4 pro and max macbook pros essentially got delayed they were supposed to be the end of last year and the chips weren't ready according to the rumors so they kind of get shoved out into spring but even if you ignore those having new low-cost macbook new macbook air new displays which is in itself is a momentous event for apple because it happens once every decade uh iphone 17e new base ipad new new ipad air that's a lot of products even for three days worth of press releases and then you add on top of that which what i have to assume was going to be the headlining feature which is our new most powerful laptops which are our most popular our laptops are the most popular mac line I don't know if the most powerful laptops are the most popular, surely the MacBook Air is.

52:04Casey Liss:But anyway, the highest profile, the highest glory level of laptops are the ones with the biggest laptop chips in them. And this would be them. And so it seems like it's going to be a really busy week next week.

52:16Marco Arment:Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I'm very excited to see whether the low cost MacBook is interesting.

52:24Casey Liss:Oh, I'm sure it'll be interesting. It's just will it be interesting in a good or a bad way?

52:28Marco Arment:Well, right. But like, you know, like there's been some rumors of like, you know, what it will cut out. And I really did enjoy our theoretical thought experiment months ago about like, you know, what how would we, you know, cut down or what would we expect to be cut down to make this, you know, significantly cheaper?

52:42Casey Liss:Do you remember what we said? Someone was asking about that before the show. I'm like, I've already forgotten what we said because there was a rumor story that we don't have the notes for this episode saying like, oh, here's what we think will be cut. And at this point, I'm like, we'll just we'll just wait until next week. We'll find out like there's no reason speculating further. But we did long ago talk a lot about things we thought they could cut. And so we'll see next week what they actually have cut.

53:02Marco Arment:Yeah, I believe my big thing was obviously like I was pretty sure they were going to cut Thunderbolt. I forget. I forget what else.

53:08Casey Liss:We'll have to go back and listen to the episode to see. And to be clear, I don't think it wasn't a predictions episode. It was a brainstorming episode where we were like, what do we think they could cut? Like if you had to do this, what would you cut out or what could they cut out? It wasn't a like we're now predicting like we didn't have any inside sources and we weren't saying this is what I'm going to do. will do i think we were more exploring the space of things that could be done to make a cheap lap

53:29Marco Arment:what can you remove to remove cost yeah okay because i remember like one of one of the things that i was you know kind of theorizing a lot about was like they don't want to cannibalize sales of the macbook air and so they actually might restrict it more than they have to just so that more people don't choose it who would have bought the air otherwise but just like the colors or the size better so one of my theories was like they would make it app store only apps or something like that. I don't think they would do that, really. But I was trying to figure out, what would they do to make sure, for instance, that businesses don't buy this?

54:01Marco Arment:Having no video output would be a big one, so you can't connect it to projectors and stuff like that.

54:06Casey Liss:I know we weren't going to talk about this, but I guess now we'll have to link it. One of the rumors was you can't get an SSD. You can't get a one terabyte or larger SSD. Which has been rumored today. That's not true today of the MacBook Air. No, no, I was saying that was rumored today. Yeah, I know. That's what I'm saying. this is the story of the mac rumors that just came out that i guess we'll now have to link sorry casey yeah that's right but it has a whole bunch of rumored things again i don't want to speculate but that that aligns with what you're saying mark of like artificial segmentation there's no reason you can't put a one terabyte ssd in this low-cost one like apple would charge through the nose for it and it would make the price go up but like to your point okay but once you if you if you spec this out so that it costs way more than a macbook air wouldn't you rather have these people buying a macbook air uh anyway well we'll see we'll see what they do um there's also rumors as you would imagine about like how low cost will it really be now with ram prices going that's because of the whole you know ai server farms and everything using all this thing so we'll find out next week uh presumably they will announce pricing as well i'm actually most excited about the color rumors i mean the this verge story mentions that there's there's a whole bunch of rumors of it coming in colors and what those colors might be and yeah as we always do we look at the invitation like does this tell us anything well it does i mean it's a bunch of like it's got a it's got a spectrum of colors from yellow to green to blue if those are the only three colors of this thing yellow green and blue it seems weird but you know i'm i'm open to any kind of colors and laptops that are visible to the human eye unlike the sky blue macbook air which is it's visible to the human eye but it's

55:36Marco Arment:tough yeah like at least these won't just look like weird white balance differences we'll see

55:40Casey Liss:maybe they will maybe they'll look like pea colored white but you know it's green is that green or is that yellow and like uh we'll find out but uh you know there's there's some signs of hope with the orange iphone 17 pro and also the rumors of the deep red iphone 18 which maybe we'll talk about in a future show so fingers crossed but yeah i'm this of all these things that they're talking about announcing i am actually the most interested in the low-cost macbook pro because i think it's such a it's it's such a good idea like i think it's a product they should make it's just all about kind of like the uh the 16e it's all about execution what do they lay out what do they put in i still think leaving mags i hope the 16e was a terrible mistake will they make a similar terrible mistake with this thing or will they get the balance just right for you know for a thing that is cheaper than the macbook air and less powerful than the macbook air but like this is the time for that because the macbook air is so massively overpowered for the things that most people do with it that there's room for this to exist yeah i i have i this is

56:34Marco Arment:by far the product that I'm most interested in like in seeing what it is because it has all these unknowns and what I've always hoped for this product was that it would be like you know kind of like what like the when the 12 inch came out obviously it had a lot of problems limitations as we've talked about at length especially that that damn keyboard but you know a lot of other problems But a lot of people bought it despite that because it was so much smaller and lighter than everything else that we were like that everybody was like, oh, my God, I would love a smaller Mac to fit some role in my life or just to be delightful when you pick it up.

57:13Marco Arment:If this doesn't have too many significant tradeoffs, I could see a lot of people, maybe myself, like wanting it for its fun color and its small size. That could be enough. If it is a delightful looking and feeling product, many people will want it. And so one thing that we heard a long time ago, I don't know if this was true. We heard a long time ago that Phil Schiller was responsible for pushing up market some of the details about the 12-inch MacBook. I believe things like memory capacities and stuff like that. And he apparently was the champion of that in the company of making the small computer not just a bad low spec computer, but giving it some premium options or premium capacities.

58:01Casey Liss:It could be a bad high spec computer.

58:02Marco Arment:Yeah. But because the idea is like, yes, some people will buy something if it's the smallest, cheapest one. But also some people would buy a small one because it's nicer to them in some way. and they want it, but they would also either need or want a little bit higher spec in some way. So, you know, if the rumor is true that came out today that the thing maxes out at 512 gigs, like, you know, that's going to limit some things. You know, I'm sure there's only going to be one RAM option, maybe 16. You know, we'll see how that goes. But if it's a good enough product, if it's really interesting, if it's really visually or tactically, or what is the?

58:40Marco Arment:Tactily. Yes. if it's visually or tactically appealing to people many people will buy it who don't necessarily need to be the cheapest mac they just want something that that they can use and the the better it is possible to spec it the more people that will fit in its in its range um so i i i'm very curious to see this from that point of view also i i've been saying for a while that like one thing i was hoping for with the Apple Silicon era was for them to make a successor or spiritual successor, at least, to the 12-inch MacBook with the Apple Silicon era. They haven't quite done that. The MacBook Air has been made closer to that, but it's still not close.

59:26Marco Arment:They still have not really flexed and shown what is the most amazing, very small computer we can make with our new technology that we have now. Again, the MacBook Air is very good and it has almost no compromises. It's a great computer overall, but it's not nearly as small and light as the 12-inch was. It's not even close. So if they give themselves permission to make more trade-offs, to say we're going to make a computer that's more compromised than the MacBook Air, which is almost not at all compromised, we're going to make a computer that's a little bit compromised in some ways, but that will allow us to make something really awesome in some other form.

1:00:07Marco Arment:You know, typically the form factor, the size, the weight. I feel like there would be so many fewer trade-offs required to do that now with Apple Silicon and all their modern components and stuff now. I was hoping this computer would be that. I don't know that it will be. It sounds like it's mainly there to fill the cheap spot and they're going to market it a lot next week and then we'll never hear about it again. That's probably the more likely outcome. Similar to when they release a new base model iPad. The new base model iPad, they sell a ton of them. No one ever talks about them. They're not interesting.

1:00:41Marco Arment:They do sell a lot, mostly to schools and stuff. They sell a bunch, but no one cares after the day. day it's announced like if we get a one day present we're like oh cool they've updated the new the base ipad now it's five dollars cheaper and comes with the a whatever chip okay and then no one talks about it again i i hope that's not what this mac will do i i fear that it is but i hope this is actually a more interesting mac model um and hopefully we'll know in a week

1:01:09Casey Liss:i think it actually might uh have more staying power than the base ipad or even the base imac or the iMac period, which is a great comparison because the iMacs became colorful and they all love them, but we don't talk about them. But we don't talk about them because nobody buys desktop Macs. That's why we don't talk about them. But with laptops -

1:01:25John Siracusa:I mean, why would you, John?

1:01:26Casey Liss:But with laptops, everybody buys laptops. And most people I see in the world do not have a MacBook Pro. They have a MacBook Air because it's cheaper. People buy the cheapest Mac laptop because they need a laptop. They don't understand why they should pay thousands of dollars for a bunch of crap they don't understand. So they say, well, what's the cheapest Mac laptop? and then maybe they get, you know, option crawled by a salesperson into getting a bigger SSD, which they should probably do anyway, let's be honest. Yeah. Or, you know, whatever. But mostly like base MacBook Airs are everywhere. But that's because that's their cheapest laptop.

1:01:57Casey Liss:What happens when there is essentially the equivalent of an iMac, a colorful, interesting computer that is also cheaper? Assuming it is not compromised in a terrible way that everybody hates, I can see it being very popular based on the fact that it is colored. And unlike the iMacs, it's not a situation where it's like, well, I was never going to buy a desktop anyway. So, yeah, they're cute and everything, but who cares? Because this is very relevant to people's lives. But it all depends on, like, what are the balance of features and price that this thing comes out with. And in terms of the size, the rumor is that the screen will be a little bit smaller, like diagonally a little bit smaller.

1:02:28Casey Liss:But I haven't seen any rumors saying one way or the other about, like, will it be thinner? Because I feel like they could make it thinner because an A18 Pro is going to be even less hot than an M anything. So you have the space to make it thinner, but to the point of the Phil Schiller thing before. But is that can you make it thinner and cheaper? Like, I'm not sure that they're going to go for the old 12 inch MacBook. Like, this is the this is the thing that fits inside underscore David Smith inside jacket pocket. Like, if they can do that and also make it cheaply. And that's one of the rumors, by the way, they've come up with some new process for making the unibody aluminum case that is also cheaper.

1:03:03Casey Liss:A way to pull cost out of the thing. but i just like the thinnest you can possibly make it tends not to be a cost saving maneuver so we'll see like they have some inherent thinness savings by using an a-level chip i feel like because you know you're producing less heat right so that is in there uh but i don't know if they're going to really push it because again you do need room for the battery and everything i don't want them to use scout batteries again or something because that's also expensive so we'll see it'll be very very interesting computer in multiple fronts and then i guess the 17e is in there as well like because you know again 16e i think should absolutely have had magsafe will the 17e have magsafe will they fix that one mistake we'll see you know can you can you imagine if the new

1:03:45John Siracusa:low-cost macbook also offered a cellular chip i i will say outright i don't think that'll happen

1:03:52Casey Liss:i don't think that'll happen that doesn't seem like a low-cost option but i you know i can see

1:03:56Marco Arment:where you're out there hoping for it well like if if this rumor is true that like they're only using one NAND chip. They're not even using their own Wi-Fi chip. There's no way.

1:04:05Casey Liss:Yeah, they're not even using the, yeah, the rumor they're not even using the N1 makes me say no see anything in there either. Agreed, agreed.

1:04:11John Siracusa:No, again, I'm not trying to say I expect this, but holy cow, that would be so hilarious to watch Marco and I have a crisis of whatever. As we look at this,

1:04:20Casey Liss:Marco would buy one instantly. What are you talking about? Oh, yeah.

1:04:23John Siracusa:But, you know, here's something that's like pretty underpowered and arguably not very good in a lot of ways.

1:04:28Casey Liss:We'll see how underpowered it is. We'll see. I mean, I don't anticipate

1:04:31Marco Arment:them making like a cellular nanotexture version of this with a one terabyte SSD and 64 gigs of RAM for me.

1:04:39John Siracusa:They would be amazing though. No, just very briefly to kind of build on what Marco was saying earlier. I had a 12-inch MacBook. I think Underscore and I were the two biggest 12-inch MacBook fans and possibly the only 12-inch MacBook fans.

1:04:51Marco Arment:You guys and Matt Alexander.

1:04:53John Siracusa:Yeah, that's right. But I love that thing. It was a piece of trash. It was one of those things when it was brand new, it was awful. But I loved it because especially compared to the contemporary machines at the time, it was impossibly thin and impossibly light. And the fact that it was woefully underpowered and the fact that to my recollection, the battery life was not great. And more than anything else, it had only one USB-C port, not Thunderbolt, mind you, USB-C port, which made everything difficult. I still love that computer. I absolutely adored that computer because it felt portable in a way that no other computer I've ever owned has ever felt that portable.

1:05:35John Siracusa:Aaron has an M1 MacBook Air. I also really like that computer, but it feels like a boat compared to the 12-inch MacBook. It was just unbelievably light and cool and fun. And I would love for them to go that route, but I think this is just going to be something that's smaller and cheaper and mostly unremarkable.

1:05:54Marco Arment:Yeah, just to give some perspective. So the current 14-inch MacBook Pro is 3.5 pounds. The 13-inch MacBook Air is 2.7. The 12-inch MacBook was 2.0.

1:06:09John Siracusa:Yeah, that's a big difference.

1:06:10Marco Arment:That's a huge difference. It's about the same difference between the 14-inch and the 13-inch Air. So it's about that same difference, but in relative terms compared to the Air, it's even bigger. like 2.7 to 2.0 yeah that's a huge difference absolutely and nothing else has come close the the 11 inch the old 11 inch macbook air i think was a 2.3 or 2.4 something like that um so that was kind of that was kind of between the two um but yeah 2.0 pounds nothing has been like that i mean now i mean if you have i think if you have an 11 inch ipad with a magic keyboard I think you're somewhere above that.

1:06:49Marco Arment:I think you might be right. The 11-inch iPad, because I think part of Apple marketing's argument in the meantime has basically been that the 11-inch iPad covers that role. And it sort of does, but it doesn't cover it well. It doesn't cover it nearly as well as the 12-inch did for people who wanted that kind of form factor. It's not the same. The Magic Keyboard and iPad is a brick.

1:07:11John Siracusa:I do love the Magic Keyboard and iPad combination, but you're right. It is not light by any stretch of the imagination. I'm excited to see how next week turns out. I'm very curious to see what they do launch, what they do announce. I'm starting to get a little bit of the itch to replace my M3 MacBook Pro and my M3 Max MacBook Pro. Only a teeny bit because it's really an incredible computer and I have nothing to complain about. See also my car. But I'm starting to get a little bit of the itch. So I'm starting to kind of think to myself, well, maybe, and I don't think this is happening next week.

1:07:42John Siracusa:but when the like OLED touchscreen allegedly launches, I think German has most recently said at the end of the year, maybe I'll do something then so I can try the touchscreen, even though I don't think there's anything about that, that like, I don't want a touchscreen MacBook Pro, but I feel like for the show, if nothing else, I need to get one and try it. So we'll see what happens, but I'm very excited for next weekend to see, even if it's, you know, kind of silly stuff that is just press releases or whatever, I'm still excited to see what Apple has to say. So we'll see.

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1:10:10John Siracusa:All right, moving on. Apple apparently has been planning to and continues to plan to make some Mac minis in the United States. They put up a newsroom post about this as we record this thing yesterday, the day before yesterday. Yeah, yesterday. So Apple on February 24th announced a significant expansion of factory operations in Houston. Sorry, I'm reading from the newsroom post, bringing the future production of Mac mini to the U S for the first time. The company will also expand advanced AI server manufacturing at the factory and provide hands-on training at its new advanced manufacturing center beginning later this year.

1:10:44John Siracusa:This newsroom post was mostly unremarkable. Basically, Hey, some of the Mac minis are going to build here, which ones who knows, but it's going to happen. Um, but John, you had found, and maybe somebody pointed pointed it to you i don't know but you had found a wall street journal video that i think was like eight to ten minutes somewhere in that neck of the woods there's also an article we'll put a link to the article in the video in the show notes but the video was fascinating can you tell me about

1:11:05Casey Liss:this yeah so this is clearly like apple invited wall street journal to come you know to pair with their press release and again the press releases we're going to be making some mac minis in the u.s eventually um just before we get to the video just to talk about that uh obviously you look at that through the lens of like you know appeasement to the trump administration or whatever But setting all that aside, it's a good idea in general for Apple to try to make some stuff in places other than China. They're increasing their manufacturing in India a lot. And there's some tension on that with China trying to do things that stops Apple from increasing their manufacturing in India.

1:11:39Casey Liss:And yes, manufacturing in the U.S. is much more difficult for a variety of reasons. But it is a good idea for Apple to try. And historically, it has always been paired with this distasteful appeasement of the Trump administration. But setting that aside, no matter who is president, I think it's a good idea for Apple to try this. They can only do it for really low volume, simple to manufacture products, yada, yada. But you're never going to get anywhere if you don't start somewhere. So, yes, do make trash can Mac Pros in Texas or the bigger Mac Pros, which was also in Texas. I guess they do everything in Texas, probably for tax reasons.

1:12:18Casey Liss:Yes, do try to make some Mac Minis here. Not all the Mac Minis, but just some of them. I think it's a thing they should do. And this video is part of their PR push for this. And so like, I don't poo poo this just because it's a, it's a, also a bonus appeasement of the Trump administration. I think it's a good idea. Please do try to do this, figure out, it's not a good position for us to be in where all the manufacturing is concentrated in one place. And it's not a good position to remove all the manufacturing from our own country. These are some skills we should have. presumably these can, you know.

1:12:50Casey Liss:Anyway, that's my position on the manufacturing angle, which is what Apple's promoting. But the video is interesting for many different reasons.

1:12:58John Siracusa:Very quickly, before we get to the video, I'm sorry. A friend of mine pointed out to me an Apple Insider article from, I guess, yesterday as well, which says I didn't prep for this for the show, and I apologize, but my recollection is that it said basically this was planned during the Biden administration. Now, obviously, they're really ramping all the rhetoric up because of the idiot in charge but this is this has been in the works for a fair bit of time yeah like these

1:13:22Casey Liss:things don't happen over and like it's in general it's a good idea like to to start moving down this path to try to do more manufacturing here and yeah the fact that they're taking their pr wins for it or whatever and making as a political advantage like it's the least of the least of the bad things they're doing but i think this is a good idea please do try to make stuff in the u.s figure out where the gaps are and we'll talk about that in overtime and let's shore up our ability to do things that we think you know manufacture things that you know we think we should be able to manufacture here um the video is you know it's it's a companion to the to the press release let's invite the wall street journal and let's just take them on a little tour of a bunch of stuff and it doesn't just cover what apple is doing it covers a bunch of stuff um in the region of like tech high tech manufacturing stuff and as some people put in the chat room this is mostly like final assembly and stuff but there but not entirely like so um one of the things they talk about is a silicon wafer factory in texas that makes the if you've ever seen this process it's not as cool as the asml machines that we talked about before but still when they get these big discs that they print the chips onto those silicon wafers how do they get the wafer and the process is delightfully analog in that they melt down a bunch of silicon and then goop it out into a big cylinder and it ends with like a little like soft serve tip on the top of it it's molten you know when you get soft serve and they turn off the machine and it makes that little tip yeah It does that, but with silicon.

1:14:45Casey Liss:It's fascinating to look at. It's like the most imprecise, wavy, lumpy thing you've ever seen to make the most precise things that human beings make on top of it. So that's fun. And the Apple angle there, so there's this company, what is it called? Global Wafers, no space, capital G, capital W. It's a Taiwan-based company, but they have manufacturing facilities in Texas. And Apple, I forget, I didn't get the details. I put scare quotes. Apple encourages its suppliers to buy wafers from the global wafer manufacturing facility in Texas. Again, this is not a U.S. company. This is a Taiwan-based company.

1:15:21Casey Liss:But they do manufacture the wafers in Texas. So Apple gets TSMC to buy their wafers from global wafers in Texas. So they ship the wafers from Texas to Taiwan. And then TSMC with its machines from ASML and wherever they were. It was the Netherlands, I think. Anyway, it's a global operation. but like apple is doing this because they're trying to build up more of a manufacturing base in the u.s and they really are global wafers really is manufacturing these wafers in texas like they're not just final assembly or anything same thing with the tsmc arizona plants which i've had stuff in the show notes for i think it's probably over a year now maybe we'll get to it eventually but suffice it to say tsmc another taiwanese company is building huge plants in arizona to make stuff that it's just not cutting edge like they're building the a16 there and a bunch of other stuff that's on older processes um but anyway this is what apple is they're they're throwing their weight around to try to do things like tsmc would otherwise not be motivated to buy wafers from texas it's far away from taiwan why would we buy wafers from you if there's someplace closer where we can get them probably for cheaper why wouldn't we do that but apple through its deals apparently is using its weight to make that happen so that's interesting another thing that is in this video thrown out as a fact with no sourcing but it's a wall street journal video but just saying like they didn't even say like apple told us or whatever they just said flat out apple sells fewer than 1 million mac minis per year like does apple know you're saying that because apple never tells you how much they sell of anything anymore they used to years and years ago in earnings calls tell you like break down their product lines and they said why are we doing that we're not going to tell you we're not going to tell you anything about how we can try to back solve good luck but we're never going to tell you how many macbook airs how many macbook pros how many you know like they do not break down their stuff like that but i found it fascinating like because that's a small number of macs i obviously max don't sell as many as iphones but less than a million first of all that could be 10 that could be 900 000 less than a million but like were you both any of you shocked by this number i i would have put the number of mac minis at way higher than that yeah i was surprised by that i mean i don't know if this this keeps uh this uh includes the current uh open claw like surge in mac mini sales yeah right but but yeah that's that's not a lot of mac minis another thing that i found exciting in this video is when they so like there's this press release oh we're going to be making mac minis or whatever and they do on these tours they did a tour of like uh the global wafers factory and they they show video of the arizona tsmc stuff and then they also go into the place where they'll be manufacturing the mac minis and it's a giant empty warehouse because nothing is there and it really undercuts the press release it's like we're going to be making some mac minis in the u.s and here's where we're going to do it like oh in this big empty room it's like well it won't be empty eventually but suffice it to say it's not like the tomorrow they're going to put the lever and mac minis will start coming out it's a giant empty building so still they have to put the stuff in that building and hire the people who work in the building to make some of the one million mac minis that they sell per year less than one million mac minis that they sell per year so i feel like that part of their press tour was ill considered don't show me the empty factory for the thing you just announced um but the most exciting part for me uh and the part that of course they talked about the least was and they mentioned in this press release of like uh where did it say in the press release like they were also increasing their uh ai server manufacturing at the factory they're already doing this like this is rumored and apple's we we build ai servers that run you know private cloud compute presumably or whatever but like they're calling them ai servers not just servers right so they're built why would apple ever build its own servers well the rumor was they were putting m2 ultras in them to run ai workloads and that was their private cloud compute thing or whatever and everyone was like what are these apple servers like what what you know we know nothing about them other than they supposedly exist even apple wouldn't tell us what they're running i don't think they ever mentioned anything it was just rumors about what what's in them this video shows you apple servers being assembled at this factory and so i'm going through the video and freeze framing and like the whole street journal articles of the press things i'm like what are these things what is in an apple server do they look like apple hardware and um i have a bunch of images in the show notes but just go watch the video we're just gonna like the video because these are all essentially screen captures from the video all the world or the wall street

1:19:32John Siracusa:journal oracle john went full zipruder or however you pronounce it on this it's hilarious and by the

1:19:37Marco Arment:way it looks like the answer is they have eight ultra chips in each one in about it looks like about a three or four u tall case uh two u maybe that might be two yeah and also the answer the

1:19:47Casey Liss:question of whether this looks like uh an x serve no no it is not a beautiful apple piece of

1:19:53Marco Arment:machinery like i maybe it's but you know what what's funny about it though is like it like have you seen other servers like if you compare this to like a super micro or whatever this is way prettier than those everything is symmetrical everything lines up everything is like centered

1:20:07Casey Liss:and a lot it's like it's not it's not outside the realm but there are some i've seen servers that look equivalently good but the point is it is not the x serve the x serve was styled by apple's industrial design group to look nicer than any other server you've ever seen this looks like basically slightly better than average rack mount system so to give you an example oh this is way better than the ones i've seen it has holes for ventilation on the front and the back as servers do because they bring in the cold air from one side and they shoot out hot air on the other side you got the hot aisles and the cold aisles and the holes are just it's a flat piece of metal with holes in it.

1:20:41Casey Liss:Apple doesn't do that anymore. Every hole that Apple makes has to be, they're completely hidden. Like it is on like the, the studios or whatever, or like carefully machined and made aesthetically. Nope. These are just the normal holes you would see. Like there's no real branding or styling of it at all. It just was like bent pieces of metal as it should, because it's a serve. I'm not saying it should be fancy looking, but it's fascinating to see that when Apple makes stuff for their own internal use, they don't necessarily deploy the full force of their hardware design group to make them beautiful for such a utilitarian thing but then yeah as marco pointed out you get to see what's inside them and there's very clearly eight little things in there that look like presumably each one of those eight things is like a computer unit of

1:21:22Marco Arment:some kind maybe each one there they're eight giant heat sinks and it looks like heat sinks for

1:21:28Casey Liss:ultra class chips yeah they look they're big like they're the heat sinks are large like if you look

1:21:32Marco Arment:at the guts of a mac pro with the ultra chip in it like it's kind of kind of looks like that i do

1:21:36Casey Liss:wonder if it's not two chips under each one of them because they're kind of split in the middle but uh but yeah it's it's weird that they allowed video crews because you can see them assembling you see them sticking things into it you can see like the presumably redundant power supplies and all like you know how how large the things are and them sliding into the racks and all this other stuff uh and you know of course the wall street journal people have no interest in this this is totally only of uh interest to like uh you know uh hardware nerds who are interested like what kind of things is apple making for itself especially if you were like an x-serve fan when apple stopped making for people who don't remember this long ago apple used to sell rack mount server hardware that they made themselves and advertised on their website um and they stopped they got out of that business but now they're back into making hardware just for their own because you can't buy these no one is buying these i mean they're just apple manufactures them for itself to put in its own data centers and as marco talked about in the earlier episode we'll see how long that lasts with the with the google deal and them running on the google's tpus and everything like that but here they are in the flesh running off the assembly line and apple says it's expanding this manufacturing so for for right now anyway they're building more and more of these things and i think they're fascinating especially since like if you got one of these if it really has eight ultras inside it first of all it's an expensive computer obviously and second of all how do you address those eight ultras does it present as eight individual addressable like is it running eight copies of the os or is there's one copy of some of os that's running the that's powering all like i just would love to know everything about these are they running linux against the the ultras oh i

1:23:12Marco Arment:bet that's all my best guess is that each one of these eight units is basically like a mac studio with an ultra like re-engineered to fit into this enclosure and they're just eight individual

1:23:25Casey Liss:computers and they're just addressable like how like how are they addressed like what is the kvm like interface into situation like are they are they completely controlled from the command line is there a virtual display thing running on them like like because you know as marco will talk about in some future episode i'm sure like even though apple makes lots of things that people like put in racks like the little mac minis and everything they're not really designed to be headless computers there's lots of affordances to make you be able to use them that way but when you have like a rack mount linux server like at no point are you bringing up like a virtual screen on the thing to do anything like you don't even bring up the console these days unless you're like really in deep doo-doo trying to debug something in the data center um so i've just loved how i know how they manage fleets of these things when every like what is this like a two or three u uh rack mount thing with eight individual virtual mac studios like how do they present themselves like what are their you know what os do they run are they running a custom variant anyway um if If you want to stare at the frames in the video and see if you can discern anything, check out the Wall Street Journal video.

1:24:25Casey Liss:Fascinating brief glimpse into the inside world of Apple hardware that no one can ever buy.

1:24:30Marco Arment:I mean, OS, I'm sure it's probably just running the private cloud compute, you know, OS, whatever that is.

1:24:37Casey Liss:Well, I know they gave that to security researchers, but I don't know how security researchers like run it. Like, is that entirely headless? Do they run it? I don't understand that whole situation.

1:24:49John Siracusa:well if you have insider information please feel free to reach out we're good for it i promise yeah

1:24:53Casey Liss:there's seven people who know how apple's rack mat ai servers work please tell us you never know

1:24:57Marco Arment:normally our beat is we get rumors about like usb ports and stuff like this this is uh this is a

1:25:03Casey Liss:little outside of that but i'm still curious yeah we don't even know the right questions to ask about

1:25:07John Siracusa:these that's the problem all right speaking of questions let's do some ask atp and cigar patel writes can you talk about your current phone setups on ios 26 i'm curious to see your home screens, lock screens, and widgets, etc. We did a member special about this way back in the olden days of July 2024. ATP Insider roasts my home screen. I have put my home screen and lock screen in the show notes. John has put his home screen and lock screen in the show notes. I don't believe in homework. Marco Arment has yet to do so, but it's okay.

1:25:34Casey Liss:He doesn't get reminded about it five times because he's not the one with his app yet.

1:25:36Marco Arment:I uploaded it, though. It's in the CMS.

1:25:39Casey Liss:You need to give us the link to it.

1:25:42John Siracusa:Let's start with John, and let's start with your lock screen so we will take a look at that first i'm seeing what appears to be a very very cute picture of your dog daisy uh you have the flashlight in the bottom left as you should the camera in the bottom right which i also concur with and no widgets whatsoever i'm a little

1:26:01Casey Liss:surprised by that yeah so my my lock screen is a picture rotation thing i have this same i have a collection of photos that i have made for myself to be nice vertical uh lock screen images and that apple tries so hard every time they have to do it the os to destroy and it's successful a lot of the time to destroy i i make these images i carefully align and crop them and every new version of ios is like i know you carefully in line and crop these but i don't care what you did i'm screwing up all the crops good luck getting him back with this interface where you have to like touch and drag with two fingers but not zoom but just drag with two it's the worst interface

1:26:38John Siracusa:in the world when you're trying to like let's talk about workouts on the watch well anyway

1:26:42Casey Liss:trying trying to align these the crops of these images with pixel precise you know being pixel precise on with on a phone the way they make you do it on this thing is maddening i just noticed recently they screw up a crop on another one of mine so they do not respect the work i do to try to make well composed lock screens but i do i there's like i don't know seven or ten pictures it's mostly my wife my kids my dog that's that's what it is that's that's what i have pictures of so i didn't want to put any of my kids in my way up here this is one of the many pictures of my dog that is my lock screen i do no customization lock screen other than i think i'm i've changed the like the the numerals and the clock to be a little bit bolder than default and um and it's not the liquid glassy like i turned off the you know that you'd notice they're just like white things um they're opaque they're not glassy but no no widgets uh no changes to any of the other the default stuff that's my lock screen it's very boring and my home screen will also be boring again not everyone has heard or can hear the member special because not everyone's a member but we go over the lock screen in detail on that and i can tell you it has essentially not changed since 2024 which honestly some things about it probably should change i think in that 2024 special uh you guys both asked about a google authenticator being on the home screen i'm like well i'm transitioning away from it and the transition is not done the transition is done it's still on my home screen it's in a place that is very difficult for me to reach the way i hold my phone kind of like calendar which as i discussed in the member special i never use apple calendar it is purely there so i can see the words tuesday and 24 on my home screen that's it it is a graphic display that shows the date but i never tap it uh and authenticator is right next to it and it's really hard for me to reach i basically never tap it i should evict that and put something else there but if i'm going to put something there it has to be something that i don't ever want to tap and so I'm not sure what would go there.

1:28:34Casey Liss:So Authenticator is still there. All my other apps are basically the same. If you want to understand the logic of them, picture me holding my phone with my right hand, with my thumb sweeping across from my thumb sort of coming from the lower right corner and sweeping in a radius across. And you'll see that it is easy for my thumb to find messages, Overcast, Ivory, YouTube, Slack, Instagram, Find My, Calendar, Reminders. Those are the hot items. Those are the items. And I guess Gmail I can reach a little bit too. those are the hot items that i am reaching all the time instapaper probably shouldn't be there i do use instapaper a lot but i don't access it i mostly add things to it i don't access it that much but again it's been in that spot on the home screen for ages so i tend not to move it and i'm not sure what i would replace it with and also part of it is aesthetic uh you know i know there's no like i don't have widgets and my background is 100 pure black as it has always been so i'm not doing anything styling wise there but the the way the icons sort of form a complete thing like I for example put it this way I wouldn't want an icon on this home screen that like stands out and doesn't fit in with the other ones in a way that I find ugly and so instapaper with it's just you know a black eye and a white background is inoffensive and doesn't really upset the bounce so it continues to stay there I do still have twitterific in the dock I find the dock incredibly difficult to reach the way I hold my phone so I never hit those are items there that I essentially never tap um and twitterific when you launch it now just says twitterific is gone sorry about that try this app i'm leaving it there as essentially a tombstone a memorial a place of honor i love this so much for my most used iphone i mean it's going to be it's going to be another decade before some other app replaces this as my most used ios app but twitterific was before it was discontinued before twitter was destroyed was by far my most used ios app uh these days it's probably ivory which is essentially replaced twitter for me so it's down there and it's a little place of honor everything else is there's nothing interesting there's maps and google maps because i tend to use both there's camera in the camera spot facetime app store the kindle app when i read stuff like you know it's not it's not exciting google home i guess replacing nest i think i might have had nest there at some point before nest the nest app went away and got replaced by google home but yeah

1:30:45John Siracusa:it's my home screen all right so uh for me i have a very similar story with regard to my lock screen this is a rotation and it just so happened that a picture of penny came up in the rotation to be clear i don't have any particular album or anything like that i have faces that i say whatever you want apple just pick photos that are either aaron or the kids or penny not carefully composed individually no goodness no ain't nobody got time for that i have time for it yeah yeah so anyway so i do have a couple of widgets uh on the bottom left i have carrot weather showing me the next several hours of weather.

1:31:23John Siracusa:And then on the bottom right is my calendar. You see here that there's a notification that the price is right would be recording from 10.59 a.m. to 12 p.m.

1:31:31Marco Arment:That's adorable. Why is that on your calendar?

1:31:34John Siracusa:Because one of the many calendars I have is that channels emits an iCal set of calendar entries for the things it's recording. And it just so happened when I took this picture that that was the next thing on my calendar because I work for myself.

1:31:46Casey Liss:I should actually put a weather widget down there. I'm not opposed to having widgets. I just don't, I don't know. I like the fact that the carrot weather thing is fairly unobtrusive. Yeah. And like lightweight and doesn't take up a lot of room, although it probably would mess up some of my composition. So I'll think about that. But I would definitely never put a calendar thing that would show me what my DVR is recording.

1:32:06John Siracusa:Yeah, I mean, this is me. I like to be informed about these sorts of things. Do I need to be? No. Do I ever take any action on it? Nope. But I don't know. I like having, I like knowing. You like the glassy digits? Yeah, I don't mind them. I mean, I never really thought about it until you said something a minute ago.

1:32:20Casey Liss:I just found them physically hard to see, like contrast-wise. That's why I changed it.

1:32:25John Siracusa:Yeah, that's fair.

1:32:26Casey Liss:I like the look. To be clear, I think the numerals, this glassy sort of smoked glass look, I think it does look very attractive. I just found it harder to read. Yeah.

1:32:34John Siracusa:All right, then my home screen. I don't think this has changed in a couple of years with the exception of maybe Home Assistant. I think Home Assistant was already there. I have adopted a two screen approach for my launcher. It used to be I had like four or five pages and I curated where everything was, particularly in the first two. And then the third and fourth, I still curated where things were, but to a lesser degree. Now I have just two pages and you're only seeing the first one here. And there's a giant carrot forecast widget at the top. That's a two row tall widget. So it shoves my icons down.

1:33:12Casey Liss:So let's pause here. So you have on your lock screen, you've got the carrot weather widget. And then on your home screen, fully a third of the icons is taken up by another weather widget. For someone who never leaves their house, how much do you need to know about the weather?

1:33:27John Siracusa:Partially, the problem is I never look at it on the lock screen, even though it's there. And I know it's there. I just never look at it there. And so I more often look at it on the home screen. I mean, nothing you're saying is unreasonable whatsoever. You're completely right. But I don't know. It's just the way I like it.

1:33:39Casey Liss:You're just a weather enthusiast? No, not really. Are you consulting it to be like, how should I dress when I go out to pick up the kids or something?

1:33:46John Siracusa:Yeah. What is it going to be like if I leave the house? But to your point, do I leave the house every day? No, I don't. I have no logical explanation for this whatsoever. So if you're seeking one, you will not find it.

1:33:55Casey Liss:I'm just saying it's a lot of real estate for that. In my life, what I've found is that I actually use either my thermostat has the outdoor weather on it or my e-ink display thing I have hanging on the wall because that's near the door. And so then I'm deciding what coat should I wear. And so I'll just glance at that and see like, what is the temperature this morning or whatever. But yeah, it's a lot of, I'm saying it's a lot of, it is an area that I imagine you would find hard to reach. It's at the top. So it's not like you're sacrificing things, but anyway, it's a lot of, it's a lot of space for the weather.

1:34:26John Siracusa:Again, you are not saying anything I disagree with. Nothing you're saying is unreasonable. It's just the way I like it.

1:34:31Casey Liss:Is that a smart widget? Like, can you swipe that up and there's more stuff besides weather?

1:34:34John Siracusa:You're looking for, the word you're looking for is stack. And no, it is deliberately not because I always want the weather there because I just, if I want to see the weather, I want it to be right there. And yes, I, again, I know it's on the lock screen, but I very rarely look at it there. The other thing I will note is that this is, um, I think it's called the forecast widget on carat weather. And what that does is depending on what's about to happen, it will be, it can look very different than what you see there. So it'll show like rainfall expectations if it's about to rain or snow or whatever.

1:35:01John Siracusa:Sorry, trigger warning YouTube. But anyway, it'll show vastly different things depending on like time of day. So for example, now that it's late. I took this this morning, but now that it's late in the day, it shows me the current temperature on like the left half of that same widget, the current temperature, what today's high and low were, and then the right half of it, it shows the next five days worth of weather, right? Because it's late in the day. So today's weather has basically already happened. It's very, very cool if you're a carrot weather person, which you should be. Like I said, this, I think it's called the forecast widget.

1:35:30John Siracusa:It'll rejigger itself in order to do what it thinks is best to show you. Uh, but anyways, on the home screen, uh, a home assistant may or may not have been there when we last did the, uh, discussion in 2024. That's in my same spot as Google home was for you. Uh, the only other highlight that I think might've changed is, um, a couple of friends of ours, uh, Ben and Aaron are working on a app called Indigo, which they're kind of sort of talked about a little bit. And what that basically is, is a, um, Mastodon and blue sky, uh, like joint app and i don't think i should probably say too much more than that they knew i was going to

1:36:06Casey Liss:talk about it a little bit today i was going to say like why doesn't it have a dot next to it but

1:36:09John Siracusa:you have the titles hidden on your i correct correct uh so it is it is very good i don't know when it's going to be out but i think soonish um and it has replaced ivory for me on my home screens and on my mac um it is it there it is not a hundred percent the same as ivy or as ivory there are definitely some some places that there needs to be a little bit of work but It's a beta, but it's really good. So I think they have, I'll see if I can remember to put a link in the show notes, but I think they have a place where you can sign up for like a little mailing list about release. But you should definitely check it out once it is out.

1:36:38John Siracusa:It's really good. It's the same folks that -

1:36:40Marco Arment:Maybe they'll finally remember to use Blue Sky that way.

1:36:42John Siracusa:Right, exactly. They're the same folks that did Croissant, which is the app that lets you cross post. And it doesn't let you, the Croissant doesn't let you read anything. It just lets you cross post. And so that's what that is there. But otherwise, I think it's all basically the same as it's been for at least a couple of years now.

1:36:56Casey Liss:Yeah, can you say in your home screen, casey which icon i would find unharmonious probably the sonos one right because it's all black you got it it's big black hole punched right now i know you're gonna use it because you frequently use that but yeah that's what i mean about like if i was in that situation it would be tough decision for me because like look it's a frequently used app i want it to be my home screen but it doesn't fit in aesthetically uh and the other question for you is what is your what is your background is that one of the apple supplied ones like a gradient uh i think i it is a gradient and i think

1:37:23John Siracusa:I just tweaked it. Like it's not an image, you know, it's just like I messed with sliders. I did it so long ago, I don't even remember.

1:37:30Casey Liss:But there's a built-in Apple thing where you just pick it and then can mess with it.

1:37:33John Siracusa:Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least to the best I can recall, I set that up forever ago, like years ago. But yeah, I mean, there's nothing too remarkable here. I should go, to your point, I should go and see if there's a different Sonos icon available. I really truly have no idea if they offer an alternative icon.

1:37:47Casey Liss:I couldn't believe I got a Sonos Roam 2 a while back and I could not believe they de-emphasized one of the only cool hardware things they have going for them which is that their their logo is the same right side up or upside yeah yeah yeah and so on the the sonos rome it used to i would get it in black and it would come with the white sonos embossed on it but like the little letters that stood out from it and you can look it works both ways no matter which way you put it it works uh and then they on the the current black sonos rome 2 they made the sonos logo also black

1:38:12John Siracusa:so you can't see it anymore yeah the same thing with the arc ultra what are you doing it's the

1:38:17Casey Liss:one cool thing you have aesthetic anyway the icon is uh it's not a bad icon because the logo is cool but it does not fit with the rest of the icons on your home screen yep no no argument there but uh

1:38:29John Siracusa:i mean this is this is my home screen there are many like it but this one is mine uh all right marco let's start with your lock screen please sure um i use the built-in weather lock screen

1:38:40Marco Arment:from apple so it's a constantly changing like animation of my current weather conditions as you can see when i took this screenshot this morning or last night it was gray and cloudy because it's new york in the winter we get a lot of that um it's oh and you can also see i was i took this on a train and as a result then i had one bar of 5g plus whatever that means an at &t turbo turbo what is that at &t has all these different modes that they advertise their service to be. There was the 5GE that still exists in some places. There's 5G actual. There's 5G plus. I think there's a 5G ultra. Who knows?

1:39:21Marco Arment:They have a lot of branding of their various service levels. But on this train corridor, I was in a spot where no matter what it is, it's one bar.

1:39:29Casey Liss:I just realized this. Never mind. It's fine. I was like, why do you have... Casey has Verizon spelled out on his lock screen. I have VZW use space Wi-Fi.

1:39:41John Siracusa:That's because I wasn't at home at the time.

1:39:43Casey Liss:Because I was home, right. Okay. And then you've got AT &T Turbo.

1:39:47Marco Arment:Yeah, whatever that is. So yeah, so it's a fairly boring lock screen. I use the top widget, so to speak, to be the calendar thing. So it normally shows the date and then the next reminder or calendar entry. I have the non-glass, like plain old white flat digits clock. below that i have the three overcast lock screen widgets um like the medium-sized one uh the small playlist specific one and then just a second one for my my two different main playlists what is

1:40:19Casey Liss:that overcast widget trying to tell me resume comma 54m ellipsis what is that trying to tell

1:40:23Marco Arment:me it's 54 minutes left of what that podcast why is what's the ellipsis telling me is there's more text off after the 54 minutes i it was cut off i don't know man i should probably Yeah, I should probably like redesign that so it doesn't get cut off.

1:40:41Casey Liss:But when you see that, like when you parse it, you're saying there's 54 minutes left of what I was listening to. Is what you were listening to what now with something or other?

1:40:49Marco Arment:Yes, with Trevor Noah. And then Prime Minister is the title of the episode. Okay. All right. So it's like it's, you know, it's new versus resume time left podcast title episode title.

1:40:59Casey Liss:Yeah. I mean, it's difficult to put, you know, arbitrary length podcast information to a widget of that size. I was just asking if you could parse it.

1:41:06Marco Arment:Yeah. that's it like when it's when it's a show that you have been listening to you know what that is right you know so like if the second line said accidental detect pop you know you would have figured it out you know anyway um and the other two are just playlist selectors and then um for the bottom two like what used to be like flashlight and camera um i don't need either of those anymore to be those things because flashlight i assigned to the lock button or the sorry the action button

1:41:30John Siracusa:so did i but yet my my flashlight still remains on the bottom left for no reason i never use it but I don't know what else to put there. Yeah.

1:41:38Marco Arment:So, yeah. So I have flashlight as the action button. And now that we have the camera control as a camera launcher, I don't use either of those anymore. So for the left, I put the magnifier.

1:41:49John Siracusa:Such an old man thing to do. And I might do the same thing. I keep forgetting that I have that there.

1:41:54Marco Arment:I'll tell you what, like, so we went on vacation last week. And at one point, you know, we were going to like sit by the pool at the hotel. And so it's out in the sun. It's like, I want to bring, I want to wear sunglasses. and I have not yet gotten myself a pair of progressive sunglasses. I don't have any kind of reading glasses ability in my regular sunglasses, so I can't see anything up close with my regular sunglasses. So I either have sun on my face and wear my regular progressive reading glasses or wear sunglasses and not see anything. So I thought as I'm sitting out by this pool on vacation, you know what?

1:42:27Marco Arment:I don't really need to bring my reading glasses. I'm just going to hang out. And well, that was short-lived. and I very quickly need it. So I'm like, now I want to use my phone. I don't want to go all the way back to the room, you know, substantial walk away. So I'm just going to increase the font size on my phone. And I tried different ways to do this. What I found the best was actually to turn on display zoom, which still exists. And display zoom, that was the feature when I believe, was it when the iPhone 6 came out? When they first made the screen substantially bigger?

1:43:03Casey Liss:I think it was when it got wider, not just taller.

1:43:06Marco Arment:Yeah, DisplayZoom was a feature where you could basically make your phone have the display layout of the next size phone down from it. So when the 6 came out, you could simulate the look of the iPhone 5 screen or something like that, whichever one introduced it. You can increase the font size regularly in accessibility, but that doesn't increase the size of everything. It increases the size of text in many but not all places. but I was having trouble like seeing the keyboard very well and stuff like this. I'm like, let me just increase. And like I was trying to like type emoji in certain text fields.

1:43:40Marco Arment:And I'm like, and that was hard to do even with the bigger text size. So display zoom was actually better. And this, by the way, I still go back to the Apple watch. I still wish they would add display zoom to the larger sizes of the Apple watch because the font size accessibility on the Apple watch is terrible compared to the phone. it has the same like dynamic type apis but way fewer things use it on the watch compared to the phone so if you need a bigger than usual tech size on the apple watch you're mostly out of luck it doesn't do a very good job of it again you can see it in some places but not nearly as many as you would want especially like the watch faces themselves no luck and so what i really think would be a very good accessibility option for the Apple Watch is if you have either of the two large screen models, the Ultra or the 40, whatever it is, 47 now, whatever that is, if you have either of those, display zoom could could render the the interface of the smaller, the 42 or 41, whatever, it could render that interface size and blow it up to the bigger screen size.

1:44:48Marco Arment:That would be a great accessibility feature on the Apple Watch larger sizes. And why they haven't done it yet, honestly, is baffling. Because again, Apple usually is very good with accessibility options, especially visual and text size options are usually very good at that. And the Apple Watch is just a giant black hole of text accessibility where it's just terrible. Anyway, all this is to say, I need magnification sometimes when I'm not wearing glasses. And so that's why I have the magnifier on that left thing, which I keep forgetting is there. And then on the right, I recently put the Google Gemini shortcut.

1:45:23Marco Arment:I also tend to forget that's there. I've only used it a couple of times so far. But that is a quick way to launch into Gemini and ask an AI question.

1:45:32John Siracusa:Before we move on, a real-time follow-up from Dr. Calhoun in the chat. AT &T has a new optional feature for some of its plans. It's called Turbo, and for$7 per month, it provides, quote, better speed and stability, quote, for a line of service by upgrading your data plan to quote performance data.

1:45:46Marco Arment:So I'm paying$7 a month for whatever that is. That's what I'm hearing.

1:45:49Casey Liss:It's just for the word. Displaying that word. It's like when you get one of those badges on your car that doesn't change any feature of the car it just adds a badge.

1:45:56Marco Arment:And I'm sure I'm sure performance data I'm sure they must have added something new. I'm sure it wasn't them just downrating everybody else's data.

1:46:05Casey Liss:No, no. Your ones and zeros go fast.

1:46:08Marco Arment:Yeah, I'm sure.

1:46:09John Siracusa:All right. Your home screen, please.

1:46:11Marco Arment:All right. My home screen. It's as home screens go, it's like a boomer home screen. It's pretty boring. There's a lot of stock Apple apps in their default places. You know, like all the regular ones that you that like are the top two rows. I have never touched that camera icon in years. And so I should probably replace the camera icon with anything else. Maybe I'll do that soon. Otherwise, you know, compared to what we did a couple of years back or a year back in the member special, Waze, the navigation app has been replaced by google maps apple maps is nowhere um as i mentioned a couple episodes ago i'm all in on google maps for for the time being um and that's been going fine by the way otherwise i have like you know my car app i have a folder full of some games that i occasionally will i don't remember the games being thing being there last time i think that might have been on page two

1:46:59Casey Liss:last time i think i might have promoted it when i was the page are you playing more ios games lately no i just have a spot that i wanted to fill that's what i see in there i see threes watermelon

1:47:10Marco Arment:Yeah, the Suica game is the watermelon. Hold Down is the little blue one. Threes, and then like the eight ball is like that. Zach Gage's billiards game. I haven't launched most of these games in a pretty long time.

1:47:22Casey Liss:Oh, yeah. Golf on Mars or Desert Golf, one of those two.

1:47:25Marco Arment:Yeah, Desert Golfing, Flip Flop Solitaire. A lot of Zach Gage being represented there. Anyway, yeah, so Unread is my RSS reader.

1:47:33John Siracusa:It's, I kind of. Unread is this entire f***ing home screen because you've got 37 unanswered phone issues, two Slack messages, 15 text messages. Unread is the summary for this entire home screen.

1:47:46Casey Liss:Yeah, that's my life. That's because he's not showing the unread count on mail anymore. I think he was last time and it was like thousands.

1:47:54Marco Arment:It's currently 221 on my desktop if you're curious. Good God. Anyway, yeah. So yeah, Slack, WhatsApp, train time is the Long Island Railroad thing. Audible, Amazon, Gemini, basically quick access stuff. So I also use the Carat Weather widget. I use a different one than you, Casey, but the way you were describing yours sounds interesting. I might switch to that one with the dynamic changing mode.

1:48:17John Siracusa:I think it has to be full width, though. It's the same height as what you've got there. I think it has to be full width, but double-check my math on that.

1:48:23Marco Arment:I'll see. One thing, so I do the smallest widget size, which is in Icon Grid measurements 2x2. I wish there would be a 2x1 widget size. like because i i would like to use more widgets they just are so big i don't have room for them yeah so you're saying two wide one tall yes exactly like that way you could stack two on top of each other but you that would still give you a wide canvas to display information on like i think a lot of apps could do a lot of good with that size which by the way that's about the same size as what you get on the lock screen yeah like if you if you go to the lock screen you have like those two wide, those double wide lock screen slots.

1:49:02Marco Arment:It's about that size. And I think you could do a lot with that. You can see people do a lot with it. I would love to have that available on the phone home screen as well, because I would love, again, I'd love to use more widgets, but they're just too big. So yeah, please, Apple, two by one size, please. Otherwise I have flighty there because I had just taken a flight and I haven't moved it off yet. And Reminder, which is my Vibe code of Reminders app. And that's it.

1:49:27John Siracusa:Are you reading that much using Audible?

1:49:29Marco Arment:what is audible therefore it's mostly like if i'm going through an audiobook i want i don't want to forget that about it like i want it to be kind of in my face so i so i'm like i remember to go play it basically so i'm not using audible frequently but when i am using it i want it to

1:49:45John Siracusa:be very visible fair enough i don't know john any any complaints about this no i'm glad to hear that

1:49:52Casey Liss:flighty was just there for the flight because i was like really you're taking flights that much you have flighty up there but apparently it's a you're you're a swap certain things onto the home screen when traveling and then swap them back out when you're yeah it's especially like in in those

1:50:04Marco Arment:bottom slots like reminder has just been there for a day so you know that's who knows where that's going to end up um but like usually those bottom two slots rotate out a lot so like you know like i was flying on a certain airline i might put the airlines app there during the trip uh or you know if if i'm on any kind of trip if there's like a specific app that is very relevant to that trip usually i have one or two open spots at the bottom of that home screen that i'll put that i'll put that app there um but it's not that interesting i presume neither of you mess with the custom

1:50:33John Siracusa:home screens for a focus mode thing do you know what i'm talking about no honestly that whole

1:50:38Marco Arment:system i find very convoluted and it is it is and i think it's it's a whole system designed for like cgp gray to optimize his every moment of everything and i i respect that kind of desire and system building, but I don't do that myself. I don't build that complex of a system for myself generally. I use a lot of things in their basically default ways. I use a lot of things very unstructured or very loosey-goosey, much to my detriment sometimes. But I don't have that level of structure and discipline to my process most of the time. So I don't use almost any of that stuff. I use the sleep mode at night just because I don't want my screens turning on and being bright in my face, like next to my bed as I charge.

1:51:23Marco Arment:But that's about it. Like I don't really do any of that stuff.

1:51:26John Siracusa:The reason I ask is because I have embraced it for when I'm working out because I have like just a couple of apps there that I use in various different reasons, but most especially for travel. So when I engage the travel focus mode, I have a bespoke travel home screen that has like Lyft and Uber in the last airline I took was Delta. So the Delta app is there. The flighty widget is there. My Apple Wallet app is there, so it's even easier access than double-clicking the lock button. You know, stuff like that that I have just for travel. Overall, I agree with your approach that it's just one home screen to rule them all.

1:52:03John Siracusa:But for travel and for working out, for whatever reason, I find that I really enjoy having a different home screen set up for those two.

1:52:11Casey Liss:What is clock there for? Is that for alarms?

1:52:14Marco Arment:Yeah, alarms, timers, you know, whatever.

1:52:16Casey Liss:and uh was uh is that reminders icon also ai generated no one thing i have found is that ai

1:52:23Marco Arment:sucks at making app icons it's terrible i tried it is so bad but i actually i'll tell you i spent more time designing that icon than i spent writing code for the app because i went through a bunch of different like i kept basically recreating the reminders icon like i was like oh i want to represent reminders i mean it is kind of the obvious cycle well but it and so yeah basically every iteration i came to like oh those circles are too big oh those lines are too bold and then i just kept reverting just to be closer and closer to the reminders icon and i'm like okay that's not going to work so also i'm trying to call the app reminder and i think if the icon is that similar to apple's icon it's going to increase the odds they're going

1:53:06Casey Liss:to reject it i think you mean reminder colon marco's app for his thing right right reminds you. Well, yes.

1:53:11Marco Arment:It's, you know, reminder colon something like, you know, never forget a note or whatever. There's already a colon in App Store Connect because I couldn't create it without it. So the icon represents the look of a list of somebody who manages their tasks like I do with a bunch of overdue tasks. That's what the red lines are because when you have an overdue deadline in reminders, that's what it looks like. So it's my like abstract representation of a list of a bunch of overdue tasks. Um, so yeah, I tried, I tried a bunch of different concepts. I tried like using a check Mark and I tried like creating the shape of a notification in the corner of, but like that, that was on the wrong side for the check Mark.

1:53:51Marco Arment:I, I tried a bunch of different concepts. I, this is what, this is what I was doing on the plane on the, on the way home from, from the trip. It's like, like the wifi died. So I couldn't use the coding agent anymore. So I'm like, all right, let me do some icon design and paint code. So this is what I was iterating on. And I must've spent a cumulative total of maybe three hours building the app and probably four hours making the icon.

1:54:12John Siracusa:Nice. A couple of complaints about this, which, I mean, honestly, if this works for you, that's all that really matters, but I really hate the My BMW icon. Like, just make it the roundel. What are you doing with this cursive My in front of the BMW roundel?

1:54:26Casey Liss:The worst part is like, compositionally, it's just Oh, it's just bad. They just like, well, take this and put it in the square somewhere, I guess.

1:54:34Marco Arment:Yeah. And you're right, like BMW, as discussed, has a great logo. Why couldn't they just do that? It's really bad.

1:54:43John Siracusa:And then having the folder on there kind of irks me because everything else is so nice and flat. And then you have this folder of games. I don't love that. But again, if it works for you, that's all that matters.

1:54:52Marco Arment:I mean, I'm not that aesthetic. I'll tell you what, though. I was just marveling the other day. The New York Long Island Railroad MTA Train Time app.

1:55:02John Siracusa:That's a pretty good icon.

1:55:03Marco Arment:It's a great icon. I hate that icon.

1:55:05John Siracusa:Oh, no. It's pretty good.

1:55:06Casey Liss:I hate it so much. I think that's my least favorite icon on this home screen.

1:55:11Marco Arment:Honestly, I was just saying, like, what a great job they did with that icon. And I'll tell you, the MTA Train Time app is excellent. It is one of the best apps on my phone. And you would expect, like, a transit app for, like, the commuter rail. You would not expect that to be a good app. It's a fantastic app. The design of it is excellent. It's highly functional. Like, I'm so impressed by the MTA Train Time app. it is way better than both it needs to be and that you would expect it to be.

1:55:41John Siracusa:Agreed. Real-time follow-up, the forecast carat weather widget, it is available in the 2x2 size after all. I was incorrect about that. Okay. Yeah, maybe I'll try that. All right. I think we're good on home screens then, right, and lock screens?

1:55:54Casey Liss:If you want to hear an even longer discussion, even though it was two years ago, not that much has changed, but it's in the member special.

1:56:00John Siracusa:Yep. All right. Zipline writes, Listening to the conversation about Fender Mix modular headphones in the overtime for ATP 675, it brought a question to mind. What's your current desktop headphone setup, and how recently has it changed? I'll start. If I'm following the question literally, what is my headphone setup when sitting at my desk at this computer, it's one of two things. It's either AirPods Pro 3 or Bear Dynamics DT770 Pro 32-ohm, which is what I'm using as I speak to you right now. But in the spirit of the question, which is what are you using to listen to things at your computer, I think we've talked about this a few times, but I was able to score a really good deal on some Sonos stuff.

1:56:45John Siracusa:So I have two Aero 100s, which are not the ginormous things that Marco has somewhere in his house, but the more reasonably sized, like kind of vertical cones, if you will, or tubes that are sitting on the corners of the desk in a sub mini, which made a world of difference to make everything sound excellent. And then one of the two Arrow 100s is plugged in via the Sonos combo adapter. So that gives it Ethernet and a line in. And that line in is then attached to my Calgit TS5+. There is a little bit of audio delay when music first starts. But other than that, like I've watched videos a million times.

1:57:21John Siracusa:I don't notice any latency. It works out really well for me. More discerning individuals that both of you probably would hate this setup. And I think, Marco, you've talked about having a similar setup in the past and didn't care for it. But for me, it works pretty well. John, I think you'll have fewer opinions about this. Let's go to you and then have Marco finish this off.

1:57:39Casey Liss:First, I'm going to say that I think describing your speaker setup is not in the spirit of a question about your desktop headphone setup. Yes, it is. It says headphones specifically. this is in the context of the of the fender mix modular headphones this is a headphone question

1:57:51John Siracusa:but i almost never use headphones at my desk so it's boring all right well you can say that but i just feel like your speaker setup is not relevant all right fine anyway um when i worked

1:58:00Casey Liss:at my jobby job i had uh various headphones that i would bring with me to work so i could listen to music while doing coding stuff or sometimes just use them as if i was on a plane because that's what you have to do in the office sometimes where there's nothing actually playing they just have the noise canceling turned on so i can actually get stuff done in the harsh cubicle environment of jobby jobs um and that was i don't even remember what i used to use there but that was probably a more interesting setup as things rotated through the years my home setup is that the only time i ever use headphones when sitting in front of my computer is when i'm podcasting yeah and i am using the sony headphones whose name i can't remember and i didn't want to take them off to look at it marco they are the mdr 7506 sony mdr 7506 i use them when i'm podcasting uh i bought them ages ago uh i have replaced the ear cups several times but that's basically it i don't even know how they sound for music because i don't think i've ever played music through them presumably they don't sound good that is my desktop headphone setup i don't

1:59:01John Siracusa:use them except when i'm podcasting all right marco let us have it this is actually probably

1:59:06Marco Arment:going to disappoint you um i also for for podcasting what i'm wearing right now is for what i've used for a very long time the bear dynamic dt 770 um i i use the 250 ohm version because it comes with a coiled cable and i find coiled cables for desk use are far superior to straight cables because you don't have a whole bunch of excess dangling everywhere that's the whole point of the coil is like you know you can be like close to the thing and it just rests on the desk but if you want to like you need to like lean back or turn around and get something behind you the coil will just stretch a little bit and then go back that's why phone cords back in the day were all coiled because it's it it allows you movement flexibility without having a whole bunch of excess dangling all the time so at a desk i find that very valuable and by the way the sony's also have

1:59:53Casey Liss:a coiled one and speaking of the 770s i also have a pair of those same 770s that i got at one point where like you know i should upgrade my desk headphones to be something better so i bought a pair of those and i tried them and i bought alternate ear cups for them and i just i just went back to the sony's like i they just didn't fit my head like they have circular ear cups like literally circles right and they just don't sit on my head right which is weird because the reason i was interested in buying them is because these stupid sony ones they're so old i like the design is very old and the ear things are smaller than modern things and they're too small for my ear so i'm like let me get one with bigger you know you everyone recommended the 770s and i think i I got the one with the cold cord and I don't, right.

2:00:34Casey Liss:But I just did not find them comfortable on my head. And that's a fact of life with like with AirPods or even with over your headphones. If they don't feel comfortable sitting on your head for a long time, you're just not going to like them. So they're currently sitting in my attic. I'll probably have given them one of my kids or something when they want them. But I do have 770s. I just don't use them.

2:00:53Marco Arment:Yeah. They, you know, with desktop headphones, everything is very comfort dependent and it varies by person. Like, you know, different shaped heads, different preferences, you know, whether you wear glasses or not. And this gets me to my other point in a minute. But I just to be clear, I love the general like the old bear dynamic shape, which was the 770s, the 880s, the 990s. they all use the like the same yoke the same kind of driver ear cup shape um like they all use and and it fits me very well and i find it very comfortable for long spans that being said these are not headphones that i enjoy a lot of music on because frankly they're they they were great for the time that they came out which is a very long time ago but we've gotten a lot better since this like headphone design has gotten way more sophisticated headphone drivers have gotten way more detailed way nicer so these like for the time they came out and for their relatively inexpensive like 150 ish dollar cost most of the time they sound great for that but we can do a lot better now and we have so they don't sound good enough for music for me so i don't listen to music on these um i also for my podcasting use i much prefer a different pair of earpads that actually they come with the dt 1770 which is a newer model that i really did not like but i love their earpads and you can buy them separately so you can you can order from germany the very dynamic edt 1770d earpads which are like a memory foam pleather kind of thing and i find they are a substantial upgrade to the 770s in both comfort and a little bit in sound quality

2:02:32Casey Liss:so I use these and I got these earpads as well on Marco's recommendation they did not help my comfort level but uh but yeah there this is one of the good things about headphones that you can mix and match pieces pieces of them to try different stuff out yeah because especially

2:02:44Marco Arment:you know like this this was like Bear Dynamics like standard round earpad they've made a lot of different headphone models over the years that have that exact ear cup shape so there's a lot of like aftermarket and different earpads you can put on and everything so that's what I do for podcasting for music my main music headphone when i'm at my desk is still the hi-fi man he6 which is positively ancient by today's standards i think it came out in like i don't know 2011 or something it's a very old headphone at this point i've not found anything that i like more there are a lot of high-end headphones these days that are that cost way more like i think it was about 1100 or a thousand dollars when it was new modern flagship headphones are well above three thousand dollars now.

2:03:23Marco Arment:I have never found anything in that range that I liked better than these. That being said, I haven't looked in a long time. So that's my high-end music headphone. However... I really hardly ever wear them anymore because I usually am using speakers listening to music at my desk these days. When we moved, I no longer shared an office with TIFF. I had my own office. So I can play music out loud without bothering anybody else with my terrible jam bands. And so I do that a lot more often now. And also, I have recently crossed the threshold of needing reading glasses at my computer desk. um so they're all i'm still i i use a pair of 0.5 magnification glasses for my computer desk but i do need those for clear vision of the screen so now that now that i'm wearing glasses at my desk full-time it is a little less comfortable to wear headphones full-time and i you know i have like very like thin framed like thin metal templed glasses like i've optimized them as much as i can but it's still not as nice as not wearing headphones so i now greatly prefer speakers and my speaker setup at my desk is a pair of kef or kef i still don't know how i'm supposed to pronounce that brand but a pair of kef at the beach q150s and here in the long island house the lsx2s which are very expensive they they used to be less expensive before all the tariff bs and all the recent inflation and stuff.

2:04:52Marco Arment:They were never cheap, but now they're more. And I have the KC62 subwoofer, which is, again, very expensive, like$1 ,700 now. It was, I think,$1 ,200 when I got it, which I thought was obscene then. But this is not a cheap setup. I think, frankly, I think the Q150s sound better than the LSX2s, but they are just much larger. and for a desk, they are kind of an imposing size for a desk. I would say if you don't mind the size, the Q150s, which are actually not made anymore, but you can probably still find them, are by far my favorite desktop speakers I've ever had. They're just massive, but they sound amazing.

2:05:35Marco Arment:They really could use a subwoofer though. And the KC62 does work really well. It's really good. It's a shame it's so expensive. It does work really well. But really any desktop subwoofer would be fine for most people.

2:05:47John Siracusa:is there a kc62 in both houses or just one in both houses oh good for you i bet that sounds

2:05:54Marco Arment:incredible but woof i feel bad for your wallet it does and i did for you know i did the sonos thing you were saying i i tried it with you know i had mentioned i had bought a pair of era 300s for a different role in the house and i just hadn't installed them for a few months and i kind of borrowed them from my office for a few months and a pair of era 300s with the sonos sub is also an incredible sounding setup and costs less than this. The main problem I had with it was you mentioned briefly the brief turn-on delay and the latency. The latency is bad enough that you really don't want to use Sonos speakers as desktop speakers for anything where real-time sound alignment matters.

2:06:33Marco Arment:Things like watching videos or playing games. I find it really annoying.

2:06:36John Siracusa:You see, I don't have that problem. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm not saying you're wrong. But for me, I've never had that issue. but I cannot sit here and in good conscience say, oh, it's perfect because there is like the one that actually has the physical line in connected to it will turn on and then there's like a beat probably between a half a second and a second before the other channel turns on. I've gotten used to it. It doesn't really bother me generally speaking, but for more discerning individuals, and I'm not going to be snarky about it this time, that may not work for you. But let me tell you, even the Arrow 100s, which are like half the size of 300s, even those with a subwoofer sound freaking incredible the 300s which are freaking massive i'm sure those sounded just astonishing oh they were amazing i was so happy with those

2:07:23Marco Arment:um but but yeah ultimately like that that weird startup delay like i hate when things i hate when speakers auto sleep after a while yeah and then when i try to play sound it doesn't play because they're still asleep and they're still waking up for the first second or two and then so i miss sound effects or I miss the first part of music or I miss the first few words of a video. Like it's I find that very annoying. That's what I do like at the beach where I have the the KEF Q150s. Those are passive speakers like regular old speakers that you plug into a powered amp and the amp I have I forget I'll maybe I'll dig it up in the show.

2:07:56Marco Arment:It's one of the many 60 ish dollar Amazon class D digital switch amps. Then I think it's from topping or one of those brands like there's a there's a handful of brands on Amazon or SMSL. There's a handful of brands that make a whole bunch of these like 60-ish dollar power amps that are very small, like, you know, the size of a few decks of cards and produce certainly enough power for desktop speakers. And usually you have to get one with a subwoofer output if you're going to have a subwoofer. But like these, it's a whole class of very good products that don't cost a lot of money. And it's just on.

2:08:28Marco Arment:So my computer, when it plays sound, it just plays. There's no latency. It works 100 % of the time. It just plays. And I love that about that setup. It's one of those things where as technology has gotten more sophisticated, certain things have gotten worse. You get more features, more flexibility, whatever it is, but certain things are worse. One of the common things that I hear our friends talk about, like John Gruber talked about this a lot, is when you turn on a TV now and switch channels, there's so much delay and everything is laggy and you have to wait for things to boot or wait for things to sync up digitally.

2:09:02Marco Arment:And it's so much less responsive than it used to be, even though we have all these new features and capabilities these days. To me, speakers largely have not benefited from becoming more digital. If you want things like to be able to connect AirPlay or Bluetooth to them, you can do that with these little, you know, amps or desktop input kind of products and still just feed regular passive speakers through a regular passive amp. And that's usually better. And in all these little tiny ways, like I don't like all these paper cuts with the new with the new products when they go to sleep or you know have latency or whatever like to me that just makes that that makes it work worse and it is it's a constant irritation to me and as much as i loved how the the sonos speakers sounded on my desk like the a pair of era 300s on a desk i've never found anything that sounded that good in for in most ways um but it was just too annoying and there was no like i even got the little adapter for both of them so they both had ethernet in they like i was like i had it on the lowest latency settings it just it was still too much latency and still too irritating with the stupid auto sleep and auto wake up thing um all right and then as for the actual headphone amp going back to the question that we were actually asked uh sorry zipline for being this far um i use uh the brand um i i'm a big fan of their products and i use the uh well i'll the the way it's said by americans is the jottenheim 2 i believe they're now up to the Jotunheim 3.

2:10:29Marco Arment:What Americans say that?

2:10:30Casey Liss:No one says Jotunheim?

2:10:32Marco Arment:I mean, not no one, but certainly no one in New York probably.

2:10:36Casey Liss:Also, I'm just going to say that the YouTube channels that I watch always say KEF and not KEF.

2:10:40Marco Arment:Okay, there you go. So it's probably KEF, but I love KEF speakers. Anyway, yeah, so I use the Jotunheim headphone amp, and the reason I use that one, not only does it have enough power to power the HE6, which the vast majority of headphone amps do not. But also it has a really nice little switch input thing and volume knob on it. So as I'm doing things like switching between podcasting input and computer input or switching between speakers and headphones, the front panel controls on the Jottenheim are very nice for that. And it has a nice big analog metal volume knob that I like a lot. So it's a great little amp.

2:11:18Marco Arment:I have over time, I've owned a lot of gear from shit. It is a little bit buggy sometimes like The USB sometimes will flake out and I have to turn it off and turn it on again to get the USB to work again. Or sometimes you'll get a little bit of noise being picked up if your phone's too close to it. It's not something I can recommend without conditions, but it is still what I choose to use because I like it the most.

2:11:41Casey Liss:You want to spell the name of that brand?

2:11:43Marco Arment:S-C-H-I-T-T or I-I-T? I-I-T.

2:11:47Casey Liss:I love how you always bleep out Casey's curses, but every time you talk about your amplifier, it just goes out there. It's spelled differently.

2:11:53Marco Arment:That's how they look. They're a California company run by a bunch of nerdy guys. They know what they're doing. It wasn't like an accident. It's fun. They have fun with their name, and I like that. And they make good products. I've had many of them over the years. And they're overall still my favorite products for this category.

2:12:12John Siracusa:So you've had some good s***.

2:12:14Casey Liss:I've had some good s***. Good deal. Since you two insisted on talking about your speakers, I will just point out that I'm using the Kanto Aura 4s, which I talked about on ATP episode 630 a year ago. If you want to hear more about them, listen to that episode. My update is that I still like them. So everything I said there, they've worked out great. As you'll hear in the episode, I don't really use speakers at my desk, but for the purposes that I want, they're great. And kind of what Marco was saying, like, you turn them on, they play sound, there's no latency, they're directly connected to USB audio, they're just very simple.

2:12:43Marco Arment:Yeah, and I would say, like, for most people, that is probably a better setup for most people. that being said i've heard those speakers they sound okay it is nothing compared to the q150

2:12:56Casey Liss:i'm sure i mean they're they're an eighth of the size but like i keep them powered off most of the time which tells you how important speakers are on my desk yeah and like and the the lsx2 the

2:13:04Marco Arment:reason i have the lsx2 here is because i as i described i think two years ago when i bought them i don't need or use any of like the wireless features it was more of an aesthetic choice that like the way this desk is set up in the room it's it's kind of floating in the middle of the room having the full-size Q150s on this desk would look ridiculous. And so I got the LSXs to be smaller. And they do sound close to the Q150s. And they are way smaller and way nicer looking. So it did solve that need for me. But you don't need these if you can tolerate larger speakers on your desk and you want the amazing sound quality of these amazing drivers that Kef makes.

2:13:44Marco Arment:you don't need the LSXs if you can get something bigger. All right. Thank you to our sponsors. This episode, Squarespace, Aura Frames, and Delete Me. 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. Every time I say this, I make like jazz hands. Like with each word, weekly bonus topic.

2:14:08Casey Liss:I think that three word phrase is actually very good that you eventually came up. The weekly bonus topic does accurately describe it, and I don't think you need to characterize the length at all. Okay.

2:14:17Marco Arment:Well, anyway, it is usually a length of additional content that we put at the end of the show for members. You get an entire additional topic that we talk about every week. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about skill shortages, Apple Silicon, and AI, and how those things are related to each other right now. So join atb.fm slash join to hear it this week. And you can hear all of our other wonderful exclusive content as well, member specials, everything like that. Thank you very much for listening, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin.

2:14:52Marco Arment:Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

2:15:03Casey Liss:Because it was accidental.

2:15:05Marco Arment:Accidental.

2:15:06Casey Liss:Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them at

2:15:19Marco Arment:C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's K-C-L-I-S-S M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M And T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-S-Y-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long. All right.

2:15:50John Siracusa:So I have what I think is the conclusion of my scratching of an automotive itch. Oh. I went, per your recommendation, actually, Marco, I went to a dealership that's like half an hour away from me. that has what I consider to be an astonishing collection of used electric cars. There was Lucid. I didn't even see it. I'm sorry, John. I ran out of time. There were a couple of Audi e-tron GTs, which is basically a Taycan by another name. I think there was a Taycan or two. I don't recall if I saw them or not now that I think about it, but I believe there is a couple of those there. But more importantly than anything else, Marco, ask me what was there.

2:16:32Marco Arment:Was there a BMW i4?

2:16:34John Siracusa:Not only was there an i4, but there was an i4 M50, two of them, in fact.

2:16:38Marco Arment:Oh, the fast one. Really, the faster one.

2:16:41John Siracusa:Indeed. So I went down there, and I was very clear about my intentions, and the gentleman I was working with was very, very nice and very patient with me. And we took, like, I don't know, a 15, 20-minute test drive. And let me tell you, I so desperately wanted to get rid of my beloved 335 when I got rid of it in 2018. It was a 2011 335i X-Drive M Sport 6-speed. And I loved that car for the 10 minutes it was working, but it was constantly broken. Go back to like six years of ATP to hear my sob stories about this car. I loved that car, though, when it did work. And even though BMW has changed quite a bit since 2011, and particularly the front of modern BMWs is, generally speaking, pretty homely.

2:17:32John Siracusa:Like, the kidneys are just obscenely, just too big, too much.

2:17:37Marco Arment:It's too much. This is not a good era for the front of most car designs, honestly.

2:17:40John Siracusa:No. But nevertheless, I sat in that car and a little part of me was like, you're home. This is where you were supposed to be. And then I drove the car and it got worse because, oh my God, that thing is so nice.

2:17:55Marco Arment:it's so nice i told you i've never even been in one but i'm like obviously this is the right car

2:18:01John Siracusa:for you it's so nice and so fast it's ridiculous oh my word like i've been in fast electric cars i've driven fast electric cars one of the things that i personally love about rivians particularly the the launch edition ones whatever it was that had the three motors set up is that they're stunningly fast in things that are as big as a house, like you're breaking physics. Physics is bending to your will at that point. I absolutely loved it. I thought it was incredible. There's a lot of things that, that BEV drivers that, that, you know, people who've been driving full electric cars for a while find deeply distasteful about this car.

2:18:43John Siracusa:They, the electric car snobs, which is basically everyone who drives an electric car, would tell you that it's garbage that this was originally a chassis and drivetrain and platform designed for a gasoline car, and then it was retrofit for a battery situation. Can you believe there's still a transmission tunnel? Exactly. That is exactly what I was going to say.

2:19:06Casey Liss:I mean, that is kind of a big deal if you care about the backseat space. Obviously, from the driver's seat, you don't care, but the fact that there is a giant hump in the back seat that serves no purpose is annoying if you're in the

2:19:16John Siracusa:back seat this is true but i mean when are you really ever putting three adults in the back of

2:19:21Casey Liss:a sedan it's not often that that's even even for a kid it's a big transmission tunnel and also the other one is that obviously no frunk right which is it's just a kind of like and there's not much the worst part is that there's not actually that much stuff in the front of this car it's just that it's arranged in such a way that it precludes having a front like if you take off there's more than you think if you take off the plastic cover you'll see that's lots of there's lots of cooling lines running here and there but it's like if you take the same amount of stuff and just shoved it to the sides you could have had a frunk but they were like nah i mean to be clear

2:19:51Marco Arment:like my my ix which was designed from the start to be electric doesn't have a frunk either that's

2:19:56Casey Liss:lots of car companies are sort of anti-frunk these days mostly because i think people just don't use it or whatever but like for because the back seat is so small on the i4 like i understand What you're saying on like the, the, the purists are like, not like, like those are compromises in this car. The compromises are that it's a, it's a internal combustion chassis and they didn't bother trying to give you a frunk. Uh, but if you're in the driver's seat, none of those things really matter.

2:20:19John Siracusa:Exactly. And, and the other thing is you have to consider what my priors are. My priors are gasoline cars or plug in hybrid gasoline cars. And so not having a frunk. Okay. And like, that doesn't offend me. like it offends people who are like all in on BEVs. There was another, like a lot of people wrote in and some of them were former Tesla people or current Tesla people. And they're like deeply offended. Sometimes they're Tesla people who went to M50s or excuse me, I4s. And they're like offended that the garage door doesn't automatically open based on geographic proximity to your house. Okay. Like,

2:20:59Marco Arment:I think only Tesla has that feature. I don't think I've seen that with anybody else. You could probably do something with home assistant there. I mean, mine just has a button.

2:21:06John Siracusa:Right. Well, this is my point, right?

2:21:08Marco Arment:Like I had that feature on Tesla's for a while. It was kind of fun, but also now I have a button in it. That's also fine.

2:21:13Casey Liss:My garage door raises when I pick it up with my hand.

2:21:17John Siracusa:Of course, John. Of course. But no, this is what I'm saying, right? Is that my priors are regular old cars. And so for me, it's like, I don't have a frunk. Okay. What have I lost? Nothing. Who cares? priors i i not to say that these people are wrong but like again given my priors i know i've said

2:21:37Casey Liss:it like four times not to say that they're wrong but they're a little wrong i guess it depends on what you use it like i said that's the trend the trend is anti-frunk like the trend in all especially fancy evs is like we're not gonna bother but like it is you know it does seem like it's kind of a shame especially when they make the the back trunk things i don't know if you looked at this when you were there but like did you open up the back and feel like that was gonna to fit all your stuff because it's nothing it's going to be nothing compared to your volvo but

2:22:04John Siracusa:probably also smaller than your golf maybe i think it's probably roughly equivalent because it's certainly squatter vertically but i think there's more depth there actually probably a fair bit more depth now that i think about it and it did have like a gully where you can put the

2:22:16Casey Liss:charging cable and all that yeah that's that's really what you need like that's why people get away with not doing the front is the little like lift the the false floor in your trunk and there's some little thing there because they take away the spare tire for you to put your charging cables in um yeah yeah i just i guess also on the i4 like it's a long hood like it it fits an internal combustion engine it's like that's such a long hood like i understand the test people are coming from they're saying well this is what i'm used to and so i'm not going to go somewhere where i don't have this because i've become used to it but to your point you have never become used to it so

2:22:47John Siracusa:you're not missing out on anything exactly uh i don't think there's that much more to say about it truth be told it it was an astonishing car i loved it i i threw up a couple trial balloons with Erin about what she thought about me going back to a BMW. And the answer in summary was basically, if this is what you want, then so be it.

2:23:08Casey Liss:That's the end of a conversation where it's basically like a angry resignation more than an endorsement.

2:23:15John Siracusa:Exactly. And so I left that test drive. Oh, well, I skipped a step. So I pretty much immediately fell in love with the M50. It is, it is, I think, the perfect electric car for me today. Not to say it's a perfect car, but it's the perfect electric car for me today.

2:23:32Casey Liss:I forgot to mention the other downside that everyone complains about that you haven't mentioned yet. Crappy range.

2:23:38John Siracusa:Oh, yes. But I mean, again, so I mentioned earlier that I had lunch with John from Channels, and he drives an R1S, and we were discussing this whole experience. And what I was saying to him is, in the almost eight years that I've owned my Volkswagen, I think I can count on, I know I can count on one hand, and I think I can count on one finger the amount of times that car has been more than an hour away from my house because it never has the need to. It has 30 some thousand miles on it in eight years, almost eight years. And one time I took it to my alma mater, which is like three and a half hours away from home.

2:24:15John Siracusa:Other than that, A, I don't think it's ever left Virginia, period. And I don't think i've ever been more than charlottesville away which is an hour away since i've owned the car so for me i need what is that like 60 miles range you know what i mean like i don't need a 400 mile range car so i think this is like and the the range on the m50 i think depending on which wheels you get is somewhere between 200 and 230 ish miles no it's like 300 almost like but still like

2:24:42Casey Liss:the reason people complain is not if it doesn't matter for casey's purposes because if he's never leaving you know he's never going far away who cares but the thing is like for the size of battery that it has like its range is not it doesn't have a lot of range and also i believe it is still 400 volt architecture so it charges more slowly as well and so again for the not i wouldn't say ev purist but for the ev enthusiast this is not a a state-of-the-art ev but for jacy's purposes i never go far away i don't care what the range is i just want something that's fun to drive like this it fits for your needs but these are the complaints about the car that it is not like as compared to, for example, the, you know, the Lucid, which is, has a fantastical range and it has more EV friendly features than a huge frunk and all this other stuff.

2:25:21Casey Liss:But, but that's not obviously not a, that's a no go for Casey because he doesn't live anywhere near a Lucid dealer. And they'll probably be out of business soon anyway.

2:25:28John Siracusa:Allegedly the, the mobile repair people are a couple of towns over from me.

2:25:32Casey Liss:Yeah, I would not rely on that.

2:25:34John Siracusa:Agreed. Agreed. So anyway, so I drove, I drove the i4 M50, freaking loved it. And then I very quickly, I said to the gentleman I was working with, look, I've already driven a Taycan. I'd love it if you wouldn't mind. If we could go, you know, we took like a 20-minute test drive in the i4 M50. Can I do like five minutes in an e-tron GT just to really verify that I really don't like it? And I got in. It's unquestionably a nice car. Unquestionably not for me. I just cannot get past the fact that the view from behind is a slit. I just, I can't abide it.

2:26:08Casey Liss:And so I was going to get you a Ferrari, but now I guess I'll just cancel that order. And you don't like the view out the back. It's just not good for you. Yeah.

2:26:15John Siracusa:Well, I mean, obviously in a Ferrari, I would make exceptions.

2:26:18Casey Liss:I'll get you the Ferrari SUV.

2:26:21John Siracusa:In a Ferrari or get me the, what is it, the Luce or whatever's coming out?

2:26:25Casey Liss:Pure Sangue is their existing SUV.

2:26:28John Siracusa:Either way. But I mean, in a Ferrari, I would make do. But for a regular car.

2:26:34Casey Liss:I don't think you would. I think you're like, cause the Taycan is, I mean, the e-tron, I don't like either, but the Taycan is a really nice car, but you can't get over the view out the back.

2:26:42John Siracusa:And that's going to be true of every low slung, you know, oh, and I did briefly put it from what did the Audi call it? I think from like regular to dynamic, if I'm not mistaken.

2:26:53Casey Liss:I know. I would say that like the, uh, the settings in the Audi are probably not the same as the settings in the Porsche. Just keep that in mind.

2:27:01John Siracusa:Yes, but moving from normal or comfort or whatever the default is to dynamic definitely did exactly what I expected. And what I thought I remembered from the Taycan when I put it in Sport Plus, which is it made the transmission situation way better. But I still just freaking hate the fact that it's there. I get it. I'm not saying it's wrong. It's just not for me. So the Taycan, the e-tron, both off the table. And I'm back thinking about the M50, and I'm driving away from that test drive, and I'm thinking to myself, this is a phenomenal car that is not cheap, but it's like half off MSRP for a two - or three-year-old car.

2:27:38John Siracusa:I could afford it, but rather than dropping something like 15 or 20 grand on a car that I don't need, what if I just took the family on a vacation or two or three or four instead with that money? And that's where I'm currently leaning. And I'm pretty sure that is my final answer. But with me, you never know. I'll concede. But I don't need a new car right now, a new-to-me car right now. My car is in great shape as far as I'm aware as I knock on wood. I can't get around. I'm solving a problem that I don't have just because I'm being me. And I think my final answer, play this back to me in like a week when I end up driving one home, but I think my final answer is it's just not something I need and it's just not worth it.

2:28:26John Siracusa:Like I'd rather do other stuff with that money rather than – or well, I mean whether I finance or whatever, I think of it as having that money, right? And so I don't think of that as a useful use of money. And I think I'd be much better off doing things with the family than getting a car I don't need.

2:28:42Casey Liss:Experiences versus possessions. Obviously, there are also experiences in having a possession. You get the experience of driving it. But still, I think a family vacation is probably a better choice. And also, I will add that, you know, the 2030 i4 that you used in 2032 when your Golf finally dies is going to be way better than this car.

2:28:59John Siracusa:It is. You're right. Maybe also uglier, but just, you know. Also true. Also true.

2:29:04Marco Arment:Yeah. Because, like, you know, because what's coming also, like, you know, the Neue Klasse, however you pronounce that, the new class of BMW electric vehicles coming online, like, you know, over the next couple of years. and you know the i3 version like not the i3 is tiff's car and that's a very weird little thing that they haven't made in a few years the new thing that they're going to be apparently using the name i3 for um is like the three series version of the new platform and whether and you know presumably there will be an i4 updated to that you know that platform probably you know a year or two in or something like that.

2:29:42Marco Arment:That is going to have some pretty substantial upgrades to the electric powertrain. It's going to be, first of all, designed for electric from the start. So maybe you get rid of the transmission tunnel. There would probably also be, it's an 800 volt battery system. It's higher battery capacities, higher ranges. So that platform is going to be a pretty substantial upgrade to the cars so you can get one now um you know get you know get one of the used i4s or get a new one now like you could do that but if you don't need it now and if you're willing to wait you know three more years maybe there would there would probably be more options on the market and either you will want those options or they will depress the price of these options.

2:30:31Marco Arment:And so, you know, if you don't need it right this second, you can make a pretty clear argument like you are better off probably waiting if you can. But, you know, I still stand by, and this is not going to help you at all, I still stand by that, you know, you are a working professional and this is a thing you're very passionate about. And so I don't think you should feel guilty about wanting to indulge this to a degree. But I also think it's very wise of you to consider like total enjoyment for the dollar, you know, bring your family on some nice vacations is probably higher, you know, for that.

2:31:08John Siracusa:And I mean, obviously, you know, you can spend thousands of dollars on a vacation or on a vacation or many vacations. It's all depending on where you're going and what you're doing and so on. But it just, and I'm not even saying that it's like a one-for-one trade between a car and vacation, but it just feels that way. You know what I mean? And so I really feel like it's a silly waste of money that I probably shouldn't do. So when I drive one home in a week, you can just help me forget that I ever had this conversation. But let me tell you, incredible car, though. I really think of all the things that I've been interested in and driven so far, far and away my favorite, not even close.

2:31:43John Siracusa:And I would have one tomorrow if John was buying.

2:31:46Marco Arment:So I was right?

2:31:48John Siracusa:Yeah. Oh, no, I think you were right. Very much so.

2:31:50Marco Arment:Oh, what a surprise. Oh, relax.

2:31:53John Siracusa:All right, simmer down.

2:31:55Casey Liss:Maybe he's a wait for Marco to drive one and find out he hates it.

2:31:57John Siracusa:right actually it could be very well could be that would be funny you should drive one just

2:32:02Marco Arment:for grins and gigs but whatever so for for our vacation um we rented a car we were driving it around for like a week um and it was it was a hyundai uh sonata because i you know i i would go to the rental and i'm like give me a full-size sedan i love a full-size sedan those don't exist anymore sorry well they do um it's the hyundai sonata unfortunately and it was i mean in every possible way really mediocre but like it was fine um and because because i've been driving suvs for the last few years i wasn't sure like can i am i still going to be comfortable in a regular car shaped car for my because my plan has been whatever i buy next after this lease is over in a year and a half um my plan was to go back to cars again like not suvs anymore um and but i was i was worried like you know am i still able to sit in a car comfortably without like irritating my weird like leg and knee problems i've been developing slowly over the years um you know or or you know am i still able to like see at night without too much distraction from headlights and stuff like that like you know stuff that happened to get older and so i was worried like you know can i still get a car basically and we did a lot of driving in the sonata and it's not a great fit for me in terms of like its seats were not really super comfortable i couldn't really adjust it the way I wanted and it was fine it was totally fine I loved being in a car shaped car again and there I had no problems with my knee or anything like that um so it was fine so I think I am still car compatible and I look forward to uh you know in you know a year and a half when I get to uh figure out what to do next and and I'm looking hard at possibly the new BMW i3 if it's any good um even maybe the i3x because like i was comparing like you know it is still an suv but it's like it's their smaller one um i don't think we're gonna get the there's like a there's like a one series uh version of their sedan or of their suvs like the the ix1 i think um that is not available in the u.s i don't think will be available in the u.s um but all the europeans who have it say it's amazing.

2:34:13Marco Arment:I think, if I remember correctly. Anyway, the iX3 is a very possible thing because it is smaller than the iX, but it still has big cargo capacity, which I do enjoy. But I look forward to being able to look at these options in a year and a half and see what they are.