683: I Didn’t Want to Melt My Rug

18:42John Siracusa:I would agree with that.

18:43Casey Liss:Well, so before we go on, So obviously, the Neo has an SSD and not a spinning disk. Back when spinning disks existed, random access versus sequential access was a key way to measure performance. Because, as Vito noted, you're doing random access when you're doing most stuff. You're mostly not just copying one giant file from location A to location B. Even that could be random, depending on fragmentation on a spinning disk or whatever. but spinning discs had to move actual disc heads on an arm to get to the track where the data was wait for the arm to settle wait for the this the sector that you want to spin underneath the heads of the track and then do that all over again back and forth and back and forth making all those lovely noises that we remember from the spinning disc days and so random seeks on a spinning disc were murder because you spend most of your time waiting for physical items to travel to be aligned and settled and then a brief reading of some magnetic information and then you start the whole process over again most of your time was burned on overhead ssds on the other hand do not have any moving parts in that way they don't have arms that move they don't have discs that spin they never have to wait for an arm to move to a different section of a disc and they never have to wait for a disc to rotate several more degrees and they never have to wait for the things to settle and so you would think well isn't random access on an ssd basically a constant time operation like it doesn't vary it doesn't care if you're reading address zero or address four million it's it's all just chips well there are things that can affect random access because the chips have to be read in certain size chunks from certain regions at a time and so on and so forth but so that's why you still do random tests on ssds but the difference between random and sequential is not nearly as pronounced as it used to be and what most people feel like they're waiting around when do you feel like you're waiting around for a disk it's when you're copying a big file and you see a big progress bar like you're copying some huge movie from one disc to another or whatever if you're not limited by your internet download speed or you're not limited by the other disc um especially now that with apfs that you get the uh you know the clones like when you duplicate a gigantic file on apfs it's like instant right because it doesn't actually copy the data so that is entirely eliminated but copying to and from multiple volumes or to and from multiple you know physical disc mechanisms that's when people say oh shouldn't this be going faster it's two ssds and that's where you'll see the difference so i agree that random and sequential are not are two separate things but i really think that sequent the reason people show sequential is well first of all it's the number that's going up so it's fun to show benchmarks look how much faster it is uh and then also i think that these days with ssds that's the main time people feel like they're waiting like i wish my ssd was faster because i'm copying this giant video file from this external SSD to my internal one, and I'm looking at a progress bar, and I'm looking at my watch.

21:35John Siracusa:All right. So Vito continues, I've only found random Seq benchmarks in one review, which is Andrew Mark David's review at 11 minutes, 17 seconds. We'll put a timestamp link in the show notes. But the random speeds seem to be on par with what we've seen from the M1 MacBook Air. They also, from what I can tell, don't seem to be to differ much across the entire Apple Silicon lineup.

21:55Casey Liss:So I looked at that, and I think they do differ across the couples can line up so we'll put a link in the show notes to the the benchmark app which i had never heard of but you can download and try it if you want and then i graphed the numbers for the rnd 4k qd64 read and write and rnd 4k qd1 read i don't know what that means i'm assuming random 4k but i don't know what the qd means but anyway two different read and write benchmarks for uh three machines the macbook neo 256 the m1 macbook air 256 and the m5 macbook pro 512 and especially on the rnd 4k qd64 uh read and write tests the macbook pro is way faster it's like twice as fast and these random seats is the neo so i wouldn't say that at random they're all about the same i mean granted when you get down to the the whatever the rnd 4k qd1 right one maybe they're a little bit closer but look at look at those graphs i'm going to say there's still a uh appreciable measured different difference between uh the fastest and the slowest so for example i don't know what these numbers are but they come from the disc benchmarks but the the neo is 582 and the m5 macbook pro is 1180 that's close to double um and similarly on the on the other like the closest benchmark is 31 to 45 still somewhat substantial difference so yeah um i i agree that people should be still testing random not just testing sequential but i think just people especially in this youtube i complain about this all the time because my entire childhood was spent arguing about benchmarks nobody argues about benchmarks anymore we're just youtubers just used geek bench and are like well the number says what the number says and nobody so i i applaud veto to be out there saying these benchmarks are bs you're just measuring sequential there's much more to the story i agree and there's much more to the story than random it's like well random i don't care about your benchmark your benchmark has this problem we need to test the launching of photoshop but not that version of photoshop and yeah uh that's the culture i come from so i applaud veto for calling it out here but i will say that i think random random access still differs between the less expensive and more expensive uh ssd macbook pros or macbooks all right john you went on a field trip yeah i was happened to be in the mall um well i actually i took the trip to the mall i was driving my son there um get his haircut and i the reason i drove him is so i go to the apple store i went to the apple store to look at all the new stuff um and i went right to the macbook neos and i don't know what i was expecting like i had this image in my head of the product obviously i'd seen it on apple's website and we talked about it on the show and i knew all these things about it um i just i didn't i didn't go in with any explanation like i'm just going to go in and look at them and they're going to be exactly like how i thought they would be and they weren't i picked it up and played with it and touched it and i'm like they have pulled off something with this product that is tricky to do which is i mean think think about the laptops what are they they're they're like flat rectangles made of metal especially when they're closed and you're not using them like what is there to the flat rectangle made how many flat rectangles made of metal has apple made since the unibody laptop started all those years ago just so many of them surely they're all the same at this point is there any room within within the flat plank of aluminum to do anything literally uh and i think there is because they've turned i mean i don't know if they did this on purpose or whatever but like one of the things that separates the neo from its more expensive brethren is and we'll get to this in a little bit um this the screen the screen part of it is not as skinny as it is on the other models because it's more expensive to make them thin i guess right it's it's a little bit fatter in the screen part it's a little bit fatter overall like a millimeter and one of the things you can do when the screen part is a little bit fatter than it might be on like the old macbook air that came to like a really sharp like the m1 macbook air comes to a really sharp point at the at the part that you pick up uh like the lid you know the screen lid one of the things you can do when it's a little bit thicker is you can put a bigger corner radius on all of the corners and i think and also by the way this the neo is i forget the exact measures maybe like a quarter inch a half an inch uh less wide and deep you know what i mean like if you if you put this on top of a m5 macbook pro you'd see the m5 macbook pro sticking out around the edges because this is smaller.

26:21Casey Liss:So this is a little bit smaller and it has a bigger corner radius on all the corners. And the result of that is picking this thing up and just handling it as a thing that you tuck it under your arm and carry it to your, you know, I don't know, to the library or to your class or whatever. It feels so good and so solid and so friendly in a way that the more professional laptops do not because the more professional laptops are sharper they're thinner a little bit but they're also sharper like literally sharper on the edges because that's just the way they're designed rounding this thing over makes it feel pleasant and solid and friendly and approachable and i know this sounds so dumb it's like it's a rectangle of aluminum how friendly and approachable is an extra you know millimeter i'm telling you this was my impression upon picking it up i'm like this thing feels great and it feels great in the same way the only analogy i can have is like the the imac g4 with the little like the the metal arm with the floating lcd display on it remember that one that arm looked and felt so good on that machine that you were like i can't believe that if i pay this amount of money i get this and that's the impression i got from the neo that like this thing feels like you're getting more than you paid for you're getting more than your money's worth it feels solid and expensive and nice in a way that i did not expect it to i don't know i don't know if i expected it to feel janky or something but it like i know going on about this you're like so it had rounded corners and you were wowed by that who cares this this is my impression that they really knocked it out of the park that it feels solid and the second part of this is the track pad which i i did know going in i was thinking this track pad's gonna be a little bit janky nope it's it's great like maybe it will get bad over time i don't know this is a floor model on like the first day it came out or the first week it came out feels so good i pressed everywhere on that thing it is pleasant and easy to click everywhere on the thing and it doesn't feel loosey-goosey and wiggly and tilty it feels great so i think if you got somebody one of the a macbook neo they are going to be so happy especially if they've never had a mac before and they've only had pc laptops oh my god this is so much better than i thought it was going to be in terms of fitting to finish and i don't know why i had these these doubts in my mind but i was blown away by it and obviously it's still got eight gigs of ram and a bad screen blah blah but it's like it's 600 so macbook neo i think they knocked it out of the park with this machine coincidentally i

28:56Marco Arment:happened to also go into an apple store yesterday and also for with the goal of like oh like i was literally i was walking past it i'm like oh i should go in and check out all this new stuff the first thing i did was walk over to the macbook neo i must have looked very strange to the staff because i was basically like fondling it like at different edges like trying to figure out like at what point is this going to feel cheap and i did not find that point yeah yeah like it so i was going over all the corners all of the like the the rounded edges the sharp edges the finished i i as I often do in Apple stores with picking up new products, I closed it and I moved it around.

29:37Marco Arment:And I'm like, what is the bottom of it? Are the feet worse?

29:40Casey Liss:I love even the feet. The feet on the MacBook Air are sharp little cylinders. They're not domes like they were on the M1 MacBook Air. The current M2, M3, M4 MacBook Air, the feet are kind of like sharp edge cylinders. The feet on the Neo are rounded and friendly with flat bottoms. Amazing.

29:57Marco Arment:I move my hands over every inch of that thing. and i like i would i opened it up i felt even like the the screen like the interior screen hinge like the like above the keyboard i even felt that like where is the sharp edge where is the sign of cheap manufacturing i could not find one it just feels like any other apple laptop like i even i forget i'm sorry i forget who it was somebody i think i massed on somewhere i said a few days ago like oh you can tell there's like a different like a not as good of a grain pattern I looked I couldn't tell I ran my hands over the flat parts does it feel different no it doesn't I picked it up moved it around is the weight balance off does it does it feel less solid no it just feels and looks great I was shocked I really thought there would be some kind of like noticeable lower quality level about it compared to the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air there isn't I was not able to find one, at least in the Apple store with a good few minutes of it.

31:00Casey Liss:I actually I hope they take some of these decisions and bring them to the MacBook Pro. I'm not saying they need to make it as rounded as this. Like I do like the thin lid on the MacBook Air, Micro Pro, stuff like that. But like some of these decisions are just they're not obviously they're not more costly. In fact, they save money, but they're just better decisions. Like at various times we have complained on this show about exactly how sharp certain edges are on Apple's laptops. and i think the neo shows that if you're willing to round things over a little bit more it makes for a more pleasant to handle machine it also helps that this is smaller and it does look like a little baby because it's not like 11 inch macbook air size it's not you know the macbook adorable macbook one size although that was very sharp as well but the fact that it is a little bit smaller i think is going to make it even more attractive to somebody who doesn't want to spend two grand on a laptop they just want a nice laptop and not spend too much money and this boy is this a nice laptop without spending too much money.

31:53Marco Arment:Yeah, I was blown away. And of course, I opened it up and I did similar tests as John. Knowing how the trackpad works, I was not only clicking the trackpad, but also I tried to click it on the corners, on the edges. Does it feel bad if you click diagonally from a corner? No. Because it used to.

32:13Casey Liss:I have some MacBook Pros with mechanical clicking trackpads that did not feel good and this does not have any of those problems yeah

32:22Marco Arment:it i was shocked and of course you know opening up apps and i even tried like the keyboard and i was like oh the keyboard feels a little bit i thought it felt like a little bit squishier but then i went over to a macbook pro to compare and that felt exactly the same thing no that's that must

32:37Casey Liss:be just in my head i think it's like the same keyboard mechanism so yeah it's it felt like it

32:41Marco Arment:on the colors I thought they all looked pretty good the the yellow and the pink were more pale than I expected my favorite color was actually the blue I thought the blue would be a lot closer to the MacBook Air midnight color which is so dark it's almost black yeah it's lighter than that though it's way lighter than the MacBook Air and it's it's not a light blue it's still it's still like a dark blue but it's it's more like a like a denim jeans color like jeans color yeah Yeah, and I thought the blue Neo was a really nice looking computer. And if I were to need one of these, which I don't, but if I were to need one of these, I would almost certainly go with the blue.

33:18Marco Arment:But I also respect people going for the yellow because it's a really fun color. But the blue is a little more my style. But I was blown away both from just sheer pride in this platform of the Mac that I love so much that so many more people are going to be joining us. It's going to be like finally like all the people who weren't able to afford the other Macs like we're bringing more people into the fold. That's a great thing for the platform as I said. It also made me feel so impressed by both Apple's hardware prowess and also just how great computers are right now. That everything the MacBook Neo can do, all of the high-end pro apps that it can run.

34:05Marco Arment:It might not be as fast as everything else, but it can do it. Your iPhone in your pocket can also do that. What a time to be in computers. Like, yeah, it's not all roses. There's some problems that we need to work out. That's always going to be the case. It always has been the case. But wow, what an amazing time we are in for hardware that not only is it possible to make a laptop like that, that is that good for that price. And it's not like Apple's like not taking any profit on this. You know, Apple doesn't do that. You know, they're making 20 or 30 percent at least margins on this thing. and to also have all that power in our pockets all the time is an incredible resource like we have amazing supercomputers available to us all the time and for not even that much money like that's wonderful and i think this product is a hit and i think this is like when you when you look at what pcs do in this price range apple's gonna kick their butts and it they honestly could use the the butt kicking so this is this is just fantastic i'm blown away by how good the the uh macbook neo was um i also briefly got to handle the iphone 17e it feels great in the hand it's just like you know just like the 16e like you feel it and you're like wow that's really light that's awesome do i want it no but it's but it's great for people who want it um and i walk right out the store and i didn't even realize until today i totally forgot to even look for the studio displays.

35:34Marco Arment:Whoops.

35:34John Siracusa:Oh, come on.

35:36Marco Arment:I was so blown away by the Neo. I was like, all right, mission accomplished. I'm out of here. Walk right out. I didn't forget.

35:43Casey Liss:I looked at the Studio Display XDR, although unlike a Casey store, they had these back to back, so I couldn't see them at the same time. Not that I needed to, but I played with all the settings on it. I was looking for the thing that lets you pick between like the reference mode and whatever, and I couldn't find it in my brief looking there. But honestly, I didn't know where to look. it wasn't i didn't see it in the displays thing um they don't have a lot of well there's two problems the apple store is really bright so it's really tough for even 2000 nits to show you know because the the light sensor the ambient light sensor is going to put the monitor already at pretty high brightness so the best you're going to get is like 2x because if the monitor is at 1000 nits and hdr is 2000 it looks less impressive than if the monitor is at like 300 nits because you're in a dim room and then the hdr comes on at 2000 but anyway their sample photos and the photos app didn't really show off hdr that well so you'd be forgiven casey for not being able to see oh good what's going on um i they also didn't have it in the mode they had it in p3 like the the display profile they didn't have it in the combined p3 and adobe rgb mode i i switched it to that mode and then the screen blinked and then it blinked again and it had switched itself back i'm like well there's some bugs and then i switched it back into the mode again eventually i got it to stick i couldn't see any difference but i just it was interesting that that wasn't the default mode for the stuff but otherwise it looks like a studio display but it has better black levels and it's brighter cool it costs twice as much yeah i mean i did you did you notice the

37:07John Siracusa:refresh rate at all like when you were scrolling a web page or something i mean yeah i could tell

37:10Casey Liss:it's 120 hertz uh for scrolling stuff but i didn't like that's why and i put it put it in adaptive but i didn't know how to really test that but yeah it's it's it's high refresh it's a good monitor it's a good monitor the only the only thing it has going against it is it's not 32 inches in 6k Everything else about it is very good.

37:26John Siracusa:No, the only thing it has going against it is that it's$3 ,000, whatever the heck the price is.

37:30Casey Liss:I mean, proportionally, given the difference in size in pixels, that's not actually that bad compared to the Pro Display XDR.

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39:24John Siracusa:All right, let's talk about MacBook Neo teardowns. First of all, Tech Renew did one where they did fast forward a bit, but effectively they tore the whole thing down in 10 minutes. I think we talked about this briefly last week.

39:35Casey Liss:It was six minutes they had an apartment.

39:36John Siracusa:Oh, okay, there you go. iFixit did a teardown. There's a video as well as a blog post about it. They did some interesting things. They were talking about, hey, how does this weigh what it weighs? In the good way and the bad way, how does it weigh what it does? And so the Neo's bottom case and keyboard is only 8 grams lighter than the MacBook Air's, despite being 6.5 % smaller in a two-dimensional area, 101.3 square inches versus 95.1 square inches. The Neo's screen and lid is 48 grams heavier than the airs and at 86 grams the metal h that's under the trackpad that assists in like the way the trackpad works that's seven percent of the neos total weight

40:20Casey Liss:which is bananas i mean wait wait well spent because that trackpad feels good yeah yeah uh

40:25John Siracusa:the neos full trackpad assembly is almost twice almost exactly twice as heavy as the m3 m3 macbook

40:31Casey Liss:airs and i would not have guessed that because you would think like oh the taptic engine isn't not going to add weight and everything but i guess having moving parts and like those those leaves the steel leaf leaf springs in there and the big heavy metal h it's it's fascinating that where is the weight it's in the screen lid and the trackpad um and metal's heavy i can't i can't tell so it's eight grams lighter the the the bottom casing keyboard is eight grams lighter for 6.5 percent smaller but in their video they had like you couldn't see they put the stuff on a scale with like the ones kitchen scales with a little like non-backlit uh led readout or lcd readout for the weight i couldn't read the weight so i don't know is eight grams lighter at 6.5 smaller is that proportional i need to know the title the total to to do that math but anyway that's they didn't dive too far into it but i would say that most of the weight difference the reason the neo way is exactly the same as the larger macbook air despite having a smaller battery is the trackpad weighs twice as much and the lid of the where the screen is weighs a little more as well.

41:33John Siracusa:Righto. With the trackpad, there's a screw in the center of the trackpad mechanism that lets you adjust the force required to activate the membrane switch that triggers a click, which is pretty cool. So you can, I presume...

41:46Casey Liss:Yeah, I mean, it's not for the user to do. It's, you know, if anyone needs to repair it or if the trackpad ever started feeling wonky or got too loose or got too heavy or whatever, it's nice to know that there's an adjustment screw there. um they also did their usual thing of like doing whatever whatever scanning thing there is that is it a pet scan cat scan i don't know they're doing some kind of scan that shows the insides of the thing it's like an x-ray but like they colorize it and everything and so you you can see the speakers i put in our show you just look at the video you'll see you'll see all the images but in our show notes here i have i'm showing the same speaker from two sides that's the same speaker from the top and from the bottom i know in our notes it looks like it's left and right but that's just the same speaker so you can see how big the speaker actually is everything else and those big black squares that are to the left and the right of the trackpad is not decidedly not speaker and good old i fix it opens it up although they did it so fast in a sped up thing that i had to frame by frame to get these screenshots but they used like essentially a hot knife to cut open those black things and yes the speaker is in i don't know let's say one quarter of it and the rest of it is completely empty air um it's just hollow inside there and i think i know why do you see these pictures here and the bottom one where that wire is dangling that's just like laying on top of that's not there's the wire is not inside there that's just the wire like you know from you see from the top right anyway there's nothing in there it is empty air and it is not air that is channeled to like like a base port to try to like have a tuned length of tube to nope that's not it at all it is just plastic but it is not flat plastic it is plastic with those little uh diagonal ribs for cross bracing and x patterns like there's it's it's separated into little boxes and within each box there is an x all in the box and the x are made of ridges of plastic and then you see the four holes um where screws go in this is what i think these black plastic things are doing and probably also doing the same thing in the ipad these black plastic things are essentially uh stiffness braces because that square of plastic has nothing to do with the speaker but is braced in this way and then screwed at four points into the chassis to make it so the corners of the chassis don't twist and bend it's like for torsional rigidity yep it is a mechanical stiffener that is my theory and i'm sticking to it unless someone from apple's design team tells me that's not what this is for because they're definitely not air pockets to increase base because they wouldn't put those cross bracing in there that's not the inside of any you know base port ever looks like but you do put things like that in to stiffen things so uh macbook neo and possibly also the ipads as well i haven't seen inside their black things has plastic stiffeners bolted to it to make it so the corners aren't floppy which is maybe why it feels so expensive yeah because

44:29Marco Arment:otherwise like if you had like battery in there battery is rigid and and so you know you you probably wouldn't need to add more stiffeners to that but in this case when you don't have enough battery to fill the cavity inside the case yeah that makes a lot of sense so that that's i think that's a very good theory especially looking at these you're right like this you wouldn't design a ported speaker enclosure with that pattern in it i can't even tell if that is open to the air

44:53Casey Liss:like because they didn't do a good job of peeling off all the plastic like this went by really fast in a few frames so but it's just totally separate another thing so uh we just talked about how they take this thing apart and the battery isn't glued in it's screwed in or whatever and there's been some talk about um obviously for repairability you don't want to deal with glue and stuff like that but also like that perhaps uh this makes it less expensive to assemble i don't know a lot about assembly but i'm thinking that 18 screws versus sticky stuff the sticky stuff might be cheaper to assemble because you just put the sticky stuff on and you slap it in there like a machine can do it that much more easily than a machine can do 18 of these tiny precise screws um but i don't know maybe machine does all of them maybe machine does none of it but at any rate 18 tiny screws and also this is another thing that may contribute to the weight the battery in the neo looks like it's in like a metal frame with flanges and those flanges are screwed down with 18 screws and so the when you have the sticky stuff you don't need a metal frame to hold the battery and then because you don't need you're not screwing anything down the battery itself is literally stuck to the chassis with glue or in the case of the iphone that electrically releasing glue thing so i think that metal frame adds weight those 18 screws add weight uh and it is much more repairable but it also might be a little bit heavier and might actually be more expensive to assemble because you got to put in 18 individual screws versus one sticky thing and slap and you're done all right tell me about these main boards yeah just to compare like what what is the macbook neo logic board compared to the macbook air m3 logic board and i mean the neo logic board looks more like an ipad logic board it's a skinny little thing it looks like a an extended phone logic board or you can you can compare it to the uh the iphone 16 pro which has the same soc and And yeah, you can see it's the same SoC, but the iPhone is just massively miniaturized.

46:48Casey Liss:I can't, I think they're just showing two boards. Is that two boards or two sides of the same board? I can't even tell on this iFixit thing, but you can watch the video and see the size comparisons. Suffice it to say that the logic board portion of Apple laptops has just been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking over the decades. And it is now disappearing to the point where now it looks like an iPad logic board. And I wonder if in five or 10 years, it's going to look like a phone logic board.

47:12John Siracusa:the unthinkable happened uh particularly to to marco actually uh airpods max 2 are out that is not the airpods max with usbc that came out a few months ago whenever it was this is an honest to goodness airpods max 2 and john you get to do a victory lap yeah i was just a happenstance that i saw this because some listener said um was asking us to do an ask atp in the future which

47:37Casey Liss:i don't know if we'll do but it's saying like you should list all of your periodic reminders as an after show or a member special or something um and i actually have a reminders category called far future so i don't so those things don't get jumbled up and what do i put in far future stuff like this i went to the far future saying i wonder what's in there these days and the very top item was uh a check if there's an airpods max 2 for the marco bet blah blah blah like whatever i'm like you know what airpods max 2 did come out today so i gathered all the info in atp episode 604 at one hour, three minutes, and eight seconds.

48:10Casey Liss:Marco said, after I had said something about the AirPods Max and a revision, he said, John, I think you're being optimistic. You can make a bet. Add it to your calendar. I don't think there's a chance in hell the AirPods Max will get another update at least for two years. I did add it to my calendar. And there it was. And I added it to my reminders. There it was in my far future reminders. Well, guess what? That was September 12th, 2024. Apple got it just under the line. Although I didn't actually agree to the two-year bet. I actually agreed to take the bet at three years. But either way, I won.

48:41Casey Liss:And the world gets AirPods Max 2, which are so very different from their predecessor. Yes, they're very, very different or something. I mean, they're different in the way everybody wanted. Because when the one with USB-C came out, you're like, that's it? They just added USB-C? Where's the revision? I want one with an H2. Well, guess what?

49:01Marco Arment:I mean, so it's very similar in the approach to the Vision Pro update, which is like, all right, here's this product that immediately upon launch, everybody was like, well, this part's good, but these parts really suck. Here we are, like, you know, many years later, and Apple has released the next version of it. And literally all of the problems people have with it are unaddressed. Totally just left exactly the same. And it's like, all right, if you liked what we shipped before, here's an update. With essentially a spec bump, nothing else has been touched. It's like, okay. Now, the difference between the AirPods Max and the Vision Pro is that people buy the AirPods Max.

49:48Marco Arment:Honestly, the AirPods Max, this is not a product for me just comfort-wise. They are extremely uncomfortable for me because they are so heavy. And they did nothing to change that. They did nothing to change the clamping force. They did nothing to change the annoying, weird case thing that they come with. None of that is different. They didn't change the kind of awkward control scheme on them because they insist on digital crowns and everything they make. They probably do still sound great because the first one sounded great. That part's probably fine. It is nice that they are matching many of the features of the newer AirPods that have come out.

50:23Marco Arment:So that's all great. But if they didn't work for you before, they won't work for you now. If you love the AirPods Max and maybe you have like an older pair where the batteries are starting to wear out. Maybe you're annoyed at the lightning cable or whatever. Then this is a great time to upgrade if you still want to use them. They are also still very expensive. but i see a lot of these out in the wild now maybe just because you know people in new york have a lot of money but like i see a a lot of airpods maxes out there especially on young people like teenagers i'm like your parents bought you a 550 pair of headphones damn but uh but i do see them a lot i do think people are buying them in reasonable numbers not enough you know i'm sure it's nothing compared to like the AirPods Pro or the regular AirPods, but it does seem like it is a successful product that has a market.

51:20Marco Arment:The price and the physical downsides of it keep that market smaller than it could be, but Apple seems to not care. So for the market that Apple has chosen to stick with for this product and seems to have no interest in trying to expand that market, this is an update it's not even a great it's just this is an update okay it takes them from being like embarrassingly far behind the feature lineup to roughly on par with the feature lineup and it solves nothing else but okay they did an update yeah so what changed well now we have the h2 in

51:59John Siracusa:it which means you get adaptive audio you get conversation awareness you get personalized volume, you get live translation, and you get voice isolation. Additionally, you get one and a half times more effective active noise cancellation. You get a new high dynamic range amplifier for even cleaner audio. You get reduced wireless audio latency for game mode and iOS, macOS, and iPadOS, but you get the same color, same price, same case, same not folding headband thing, basically all the same stuff. Yeah.

52:29Casey Liss:I mean, it's good that they just, that's what everyone wanted. There's like, why doesn't it have the H2? It's kind of like when the Vision Pro came out with the M2 and everything else was on the M3. So it's a catch-up thing. It should have the H2. It should have the H2 a long time ago. Now it does, and it's got all the features.

52:44Marco Arment:We are sponsored this episode by 1Password. Now, if you're a small business, it's easy to assume that you might fly under the radar security-wise. But small businesses are being targeted more and more by bad actors because cybercriminals know that lean teams often lack the resources to prevent a breach. So teams of any size can be a target. But even the smallest of teams can foil cybercrime with 1Password. 1Password provides simple security to help small teams manage the number one risk exploited by bad actors, weak passwords. 1Password provides centralized management to make sure your company's logins are secure.

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53:45Marco Arment:Many of them are just for me, and I'm the only person. I still use 1Password for that because it helps me generate all these amazing passwords and keep all the accounts separate. But where it really shines is with my family and with my business that I do with other people. So we have a family share plan where my wife and I and even my son can share passwords and we can assign what's shared and what's not. And then for the business, for the restaurant, we share passwords with the managers and my wife and me, all at different access levels, all super easy to manage. And it's wonderful to have everybody on the same page, to not have to have Post-it notes with passwords written on them, and for all those passwords to be really secure and centrally managed.

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54:46John Siracusa:overcast is shipping in beta in beta overcast is shipping transcripts tell me what the heck is going on here because this sounds pretty freaking great i've been working on this for

54:56Marco Arment:some time apple podcast launched transcripts probably what a year and a half ago now maybe two years ago it's been a while um i knew back then oh crap that's a really good feature and I'm going to have to do that someday. But how am I going to do that? Apple Podcasts operates at a much larger scale than I do with much more resources. And I just had no idea how I could possibly ever match that. Last summer, with the release of the beta of iOS 26. Apple launched a new speech transcription API on iOS. They basically opened up the iOS speech model that is used for iOS's built-in transcription of things like when you speak to Siri, it's that model.

55:46Marco Arment:When you transcribe notes, it's that model. What this meant is that it ran on device. It was very optimized and very fast and very lightweight. Now, I've been looking at different ways to do transcription for a little bit before that, especially once OpenAI's Whisper models had come out. That was a game changer in transcription models because the accuracy was so much higher than what had come before. It was shocking how good Whisper was. But the problem with OpenAI Whisper is that it's a really big model. It's really slow. and so it's great for you know one person using on their computer um or some very specialized app uses but like for the most part it's great if you are transcribing like your own podcast that you make once a week whisper is great um but if i was going to try to offer transcripts and overcast for like all podcasts or many podcasts that wasn't going to scale and there are also you know if you're operating at a smaller scale again like if you if you have like a maybe a podcast hosting company and you want to transcribe audio for your customers that they upload, if you're dealing with maybe that's hundreds of uploads a week or something, that's a very different scale than I'd be operating at.

57:05Marco Arment:So there are things like transcription APIs from the AI providers. So OpenAI has a transcription API. The problem with those is that they're not really designed for podcasts. They usually have audio length limits or size limits that many podcasts would exceed. And just cost-wise, you would be talking about hundreds or thousands of dollars per day at the scale that Overcast would need those to be. And Overcast is not going to take on a thousands of dollars a day API cost. Let's just say that would require me to raise the price of premium higher than most people would be willing to pay. What happened last summer is when Apple released their iOS 26 and all the OS 26s, when they all had this new API in them for Apple's on-device transcription model, I ran some tests.

58:01Marco Arment:It just blew me away how incredibly fast it was. So one thing I noticed, like on a regular M4, like on a Mac, on an M4, I was running this on my laptop and it was able, because I wasn't going to put Tahoe on my main Mac, but so I was doing all this development on my laptop over the summer. And I noticed that it was able to transcribe. If I ran a few jobs in parallel, I could have one M4 Mac transcribe audio at about 200x the audio's playtime. So in other words, about 200 minutes transcribed for every real-time minute that has passed.

58:40John Siracusa:Goodness.

58:41Marco Arment:And that was so much faster than anything else I'd ever tried. I noticed, okay, well, if one Mac can do like, you know, 200X real-time, well, how many podcast minutes are there? Let me see, like, what if I just start transcribing? Let me get like a couple of Mac minis and just have them start transcribing the most popular podcasts. How many can they get through? And I, you know, I have some information of like, I can see what the most popular podcasts are. I can see how many episodes they release per month or whatever. And I can do some division and figure out, usually I can download a copy of what they serve and I can see how long it is and start analyzing things.

59:20Marco Arment:I'm like, okay, let me try, what can a couple of Mac minis do? I was blown away by how effective that was. I'm like, okay, I can't just keep burning these in my house. And let me see what I could do.

59:35Casey Liss:Let's put them next to the water in the closet. It'll be fine. Right, exactly.

59:38Marco Arment:Yeah. So I went to Mac Mini Vault, which is, I think, yeah, their actual name is CyberLink. That's the actual company name, but it's Mac Mini Vault. And because what they are, I think they're the only provider where you can like rent a Mac Mini from them for a hundred bucks a month. But if you buy your own and mail it to them, then they'll host it in their data center for only 50 bucks a month. And I was like, well, it doesn't take that many months to come out ahead if I'm just buying the base model. and it turns out and I analyzed, by the way I don't know if listeners might recall I recently have had strong opinions about the bang for the buck for M4 family chips and what the maximum bang for the buck for processing power is, this is why I did all this analysis last summer and it turned out the base model Mac Mini was like way more bang for the buck for processor performance than any other configuration or any other computer so I got two Mac Minis and I sent them off to Mac Mini Vault in wisconsin and i even i leased one um there's a company called green mini host in the netherlands i'm like if if there's certain podcasts that are like eu region locked that i found a mac mini host in the eu i think the netherlands is in the eu anyway so at least in europe and and uh so i'm like great all right so i had those three and this this required me to learn a bunch of stuff like i First of all, I'm installing the Tahoe betas.

1:01:05Marco Arment:And every single time there's a new beta, the API changes a little bit or some limit is imposed or some limit is released or some bug is fixed. So all summer, I'm updating these Mac minis with the betas. And that was another question I had to first ask Mac mini vault. Can I run betas on your Mac minis? Is there any reason why I couldn't do that? And no, there's no reason. So it's fine. So I'm running the betas. I'm doing everything via remote desktop, like, you know, like VNC, like to to the Mac minis, like from my home computer. And meanwhile, also doing it all like on my laptop locally and updating that every time.

1:01:39Marco Arment:And like this whole thing, I had to had to learn how to basically run Mac servers, which is something I really had not done beyond just occasionally having a Mac mini in my house to be like a NAS or a streaming thing or whatever.

1:01:50Casey Liss:There was just a link that I was going to put in a future episode, but it seems relevant now that I let me see if I can find it. there was like i think in 26.3 or something that file vault um now lets you uh oh yeah yeah yeah unlock the file vault encrypted drive over ssh yeah like before your thing boots that would have been nice i mean i'm presumably these hosting companies will do this for you that's what you're paying them for or whatever but for people who don't have that but yeah apparently we'll put a link in the show notes to the apple support article that even before the os boots when it's just at the thing where it's like hey enter your password to unlock this file vault disk so i can boot the os you can apparently ssh in remotely and enter the file vault password so it will continue

1:02:34Marco Arment:with the boot yeah and i've i've learned so many things about running max remotely like you know all the different like i have a big text document of all the things i have to do you know for a fresh install like to prepare it and everything um because you know every time there's a software update i got to do the whole i got to do all this again go go to all of them and and of course in the summertime, like during the beta period, it's every two weeks. So every two weeks, I'm going and updating all of these, running the tests, like making sure I can still do what I want to do. And meanwhile, I have to also integrate this, you know, this, these three Mac minis into Overcast's infrastructure.

1:03:08Marco Arment:So I have to build in a job queue, performance and health monitoring, like from, from like the Overcast transcription app that I'm running on these Mac minis that integrates with my other performance and health monitoring on the server side. And I have to, you know, building things like, all right, well, if, if the Mac mini takes a job and then crashes, then I have to have some kind of like repeat job queue entry to re queue that after a while and have some other Mac mini handle it. Like it was, it was such a journey, but it was working. I want more coverage. I don't want to just do like the top hundred podcasts.

1:03:38Marco Arment:I want to do, you know, anything with more than X followers to it or X subscribers to it. Great. So I got two more Mac minis in August. So, you know, started out like really, really simple, you know, just the three, like the two that I own and the one I leased in the Netherlands. And then now I'm up, now I'm up to two more, now I'm up to five. And what five could do was great. You know, it was like, okay, all right now. But you know, the cost is starting, you know, now I'm, you know,$250 a month plus the hundred, like it's, you know, it's like, it's starting to get like, okay, this is, this is starting to get to a decent amount of money.

1:04:13Marco Arment:And I thought, okay, let's see how the five do the five. You know, it ramps up pretty much linearly. Okay. How many more podcasts can I cover? And it was, you know, I'm starting to cover like a somewhat reasonable percentage of popular podcasts, but then I'm like, all right, well, I want, I also want to do like some of the back catalog. Like, can I go back like a few months? Can I go back a few years? Like how, how much can I do since I don't really need a lot of like help from the host I'm just running these anywhere I wonder if there's like a local data center that I can co-locate like if I can if I can get like you know people people make these these brackets that hold six mac minis into like a 3u space on a rack and I'm like if I can get let me let me see like what would it cost to host a 3U rack of Mac minis in a data center.

1:05:07Marco Arment:If I can get that for a few hundred bucks a month, then I might, you know, I might be able to come out ahead of what it's going to cost me. If I'm going to, if I'm going to, I was thinking, you know, maybe I'll have like 10 or 12 of these. Like that could like, that could do a lot. If I can, what I was doing with three and then with fives, like if I can get like 12, like, Hmm, this, this could really be something. And so I bought a few more and I'm like, as I'm, as I'm doing this, I'm like, let me see, like, here, I'll paste you in the Slack. This is where this went.

1:05:38John Siracusa:Before you send whatever you're going to send, I would just like to say that I am looking forward to the day that I get a shipment from you padded in Mac Mini.

1:05:47Casey Liss:It's Mac Mini's as packing material when the M5 Mac Mini's come out.

1:05:52John Siracusa:All right. So you've sent two photographs that I will describe. One of them is two Mac Minis with little stickies on them that say, what is that, Scribe 1 and 2? and then a second photograph that has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven Mac minis stood kind of upright, if you will, with a post-it per Mac mini connected to, I guess that's a UPS of some sort.

1:06:12Marco Arment:No, that's a switch on the left and that's an old iPad on the right. Just as basically because, you know, when you run them, they get hot and I didn't want to melt my rug. And so this was my thermal management solution. The one on the right is on the rug though. Yeah. Well, when you just have one, it's not that bad. But when you have seven, you know, it starts to add up. Um, so this was like, all right, now I have a few more and it's going well. And I'm like, okay, I ordered, I'm like, as I'm like looking at different data centers, like I want to know like, you know, what are my situations for, um, you know, for racking these somewhere.

1:06:44Marco Arment:So I got a rack enclosure to see like what it is. And so here's this next photo here. This is six of them in a rack enclosure made for Mac minis. It's a very simple, you know, just metal bracket.

1:06:56John Siracusa:Yeah, it seems like it's a shelf with brackets to mount it on the rack, you know, and very little else. There's not too much here.

1:07:03Marco Arment:Yeah, exactly. And so then, so I started talking to data centers.

1:07:07John Siracusa:Wait, I'm sorry. There are so many Mac mini boxes on the right-hand side of this photograph. You can build a little fort out of them. I mean, it was really getting ridiculous.

1:07:15Marco Arment:Like, because I've now at this point bought seven Mac minis. And, like, it's, you know, it's starting to get, you know, I'm like, do I keep the boxes? Like, what do I do?

1:07:23Casey Liss:Everyone thought it was OpenClaw that was causing the run on the McWinnies. It's really just Marco.

1:07:28John Siracusa:For the record, I'm looking at this rack mount, and I don't know if there's a reason behind this or if this is really the right iteration numbers, but I see Scribe 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.

1:07:39Marco Arment:Well, yeah, because there were already some already in the data centers. Oh, my word. So at that point, 1 through 6 were in the data center. No, 1 through 5 were in the data centers. 6 was that extra one off to the side of the previous photo. that was just one that I just had that was like my beach mac mini like so that was just I I I

1:07:58Casey Liss:conscripted into service for for this purpose you just start looking on ebay for uh m4 mac minis

1:08:04Marco Arment:maybe I'll be I'll be supplying them soon but uh anyway what what is your power bill for the month

1:08:09John Siracusa:or months that these were all in the house holy crap I think all those together are less than my

1:08:13Marco Arment:mac pro oh by that's probably true um it's probably less than your monitor so the the The combined power usage of six Mac minis doing transcription is something like 250 watts.

1:08:25John Siracusa:Oh, that's really not bad at all.

1:08:26Marco Arment:They're not doing much GPU work. And they're all just the base model M4. So the top of the power envelope is not that high. So it's, yeah, it's like, I think it's like about 50-ish watts or 40-ish watts each. It's, yeah, it's like 250 for the whole, for that whole thing. Because I was curious too, I measured it. So that's how I know that. Anyway, so I start talking to data centers. And it was very hard to find any data center that would even take like, you know, just one guy. Because it turns out what I've learned is that most data centers, their business is like big companies or the government.

1:08:59Marco Arment:You know, so it's like they don't have not a lot of data centers willing to talk to one guy. And I found one locally that was it's on Long Island. And it was it was willing, you know, they were willing to talk to me. And I was like, all right. So, you know, I'm looking to I'm looking to get like I'm like what I need would be at minimum like, you know, three you plus whatever I would need for like, you know, networking. gear or router or whatever so like three maybe three or four you of rack space you know 300 watts of continuous power usage and whatever you can give me on the internet side what what would that cost and i learned basically that was too small for this data center to for any data center to care about that like i was i was i've never done anything with data center before so i had no idea what is it like i was picturing like you just rent you know space by the rack unit like by the by the you basically and i thought i could just ask for like for you and like oh how much will that be and like it turns out it's not worth them dealing with that the amount of space that we have on long island is ample um but power and bandwidth are the expensive parts and so i they're like okay well we can give you like maybe we can give you half a cabinet but we mostly just do full cabinets and it's like like like what like the full the whole thing the whole tall rack like the you know 48 or whatever rack use that's in a i'm like that's oh god okay and

1:10:17John Siracusa:i'm like well how much is that you know you need another 15 mac minis then well i'm like i'm like

1:10:23Marco Arment:this is like i don't know how much this is gonna this is gonna be a lot to afford so i'm like all right well that's that's way above what i what i can do right now so i'm like all right let me let Let me figure something else out. And so for most of the fall, I just ran that rack or that enclosure of the six Mac Manis. I had like the six in the data center and then I ran these seven just in my house.

1:10:48Casey Liss:In the water closet. It's calling to you. You know it is. It's the ultimate. Forget about the entire server cabinet. You've already got one. It's got water bottles on the bottom and you just shove this thing in. You close the door.

1:11:00Marco Arment:Well, the good thing, since they're quiet and since they work as a nice little heater also, although not much, I mean, a 250 watt space heater is a very small space heater. But I just had them on top of that file cabinet you see on the right there in that picture. I just had them sitting on top of that for all fall, like the whole, it was just sitting there, just running. And especially because like, you know, as I was coming back on the mainland for the school year, like, well, I have this perfectly good Internet connection over here. It's not going to be used very much all winter. So might as well use it.

1:11:26Marco Arment:and so i'm like all right if i put six of them here maybe i can put another six of them in the restaurant because the restaurant also has an internet connection that is idle all winter long like hmm like this i start i started like scaling it up in my mind i'm like all right if i can if i can make this work like i can put them all over the place like in i i have i have two houses in a restaurant and maybe i can like send some to casey or something like two turntables and a

1:11:52Casey Liss:microphone right i'm just gonna pick up your couch cushions one day casey there'll be some mac minis under there and it will scribe 27 scribe 28 like how oh my word um so anyways so in

1:12:04Marco Arment:i i had you know there have been in in the fall around black friday and there have been a couple times mac minis went on significant sales and i was like well if i can get them for like i did the math and i'm like if i can get them for like 500 or less like their retail price is 600 but if it was like 500 or less, I would look at it. And sometimes you get them for like 450. That's getting pretty like, that's getting pretty good. So there were a couple of times where I'm like, I splurged and I'm like, you know what, if I get six more, I can do a lot more transcripts. Oh my word. And so I would get six more.

1:12:43Marco Arment:And that happened a couple of times. well it it soon became apparent that i i was probably ready for the next level

1:12:52John Siracusa:um and so i called the data center back i'll take a cabinet yeah and it turned out a cabinet was not

1:12:58Marco Arment:that much once you had like 18 mac minis and so i got myself a data center contract oh my word um and i had to learn a lot about how do you host things in a data center i had never even been inside one yeah i've never i had never seen one i was picturing a very different thing than what it was i was picturing everything like black dark like you know loud awful like it wasn't loud it was moderate volume actually it used to be louder let's say i got this contract with this local data center. They were very nice, very helpful because, of course, everyone who works in a data center is a nerd like us.

1:13:37Marco Arment:So, you know, everyone's very helpful and I think they were very happy to see a customer who was not just like a boring, you know, bank or something. So, anyway, things escalated a little bit.

1:13:49John Siracusa:Did they provide networking equipment or did you provide that?

1:13:52Marco Arment:I provided that. So, I'll get to that in a moment. But I will just show you the final state that I have reached.

1:13:58John Siracusa:Oh my god! This is, what, 36 Mac Minis?

1:14:02Marco Arment:um and i still have the six that are in the that are in the beach house and the few that are in the coat the uh mac mini vault i now have 48 mac minis oh my word you have 48 mac did you even

1:14:14Casey Liss:look at like aws graviton arm you know uh like how much did you price out a cloud uh

1:14:22Marco Arment:base thing for this or no not really like i was looking at like apis from the ai providers and stuff, but like actually do like, so what I like about this setup is the recurring cost is almost nothing. When I build Overcast, I build it for the long haul because I've been around the block. I know like anything I sign up for that's going to be like$3 ,000 a month, that really adds up. But this entire thing is like$1 ,000 a month and I have a lot of headroom. I had to pay up front for the Mac minis, obviously, but they're not that expensive. And I was able to get most of them on sale whenever they were.

1:15:02Marco Arment:So I didn't pay that much for this amount of capacity. And each one of these has 16 gigs of RAM, an amazingly capable processor. Now it has professional full-time networking in a data center, power redundancy and everything. So actually, when I compare the processing power I have at my disposal here versus what I'm paying Akamai for since they bought Linode, this destroys anything else I've seen in terms of capability per dollar. This is way better. So I had to learn everything about this. So as you see there, as you mentioned, I have my Ubiquiti light up cables because, of course, I got a Ubiquiti light up switch and Ubiquiti router because I know how to run those.

1:15:47Marco Arment:And like I already have in my Ubiquiti site manager, I already have multiple sites. I have been at the house at the restaurant. So I'm like, I already manage multiple Ubiquiti sites. I know how to do it. Their equipment is rock solid. I had to learn a few other things that were pretty surprising. So number one, I had no idea that power in data centers is 208 volts. Oh. Right? You didn't know either, right? No. So, you know, US, you know, we have the 110 or the 220 or whatever, whatever, 208, whatever it is, like it's the 220. It's the high voltage. Fortunately, like all modern computer equipment has universal power supplies that it can take in anything from like 100 to 240 or whatever.

1:16:29Marco Arment:Like it has a wide range of the power supply levels. But everything else you have to deal with, like, so another thing I learned is that power at a data center is usually provided with two different inputs. And they were great. They took me on a whole tour of the data center, and I saw, like, the entire infrastructure of the place. There's two of everything. Two generators. There's two power regulation sides. There's two HVAC sides. Like, there's two of everything for redundancy. It's a very nice data center. And so everything has to be able to fail over. And when you are connecting to their power, the back of the rack has a whole bunch of plugs.

1:17:10Marco Arment:Oh, and by the way, they're not just like the US NEMA 15 whatever plug. Like what you see on the back of a computer, like the C13 or the C14, they're that. That is what data center plugs are. Here, I'll send this picture and you can see.

1:17:27Casey Liss:this is the back of the rack yeah that's what i wanted to see to see how well you did on cable

1:17:30Marco Arment:routing yeah so the the colorful plugs you see on the back of the rack there's a left bank and a right bank and that's two different power inputs and so at first i was like okay well i'll just plug into one of them because you know if these like these are not serving traffic they're work consumers so if some go offline for a while it's not a big deal like the queue will just build up and then when they come back online they'll just start working through the queue i told the guy who's giving me this problem, I go, that's because all my stuff only has one input. I don't have redundant power supplies in any of this stuff.

1:17:59Marco Arment:And he's like, well, once a year, we like take down an entire side for, you know, a few hours to test things. And so, you don't really want to be plugged into that side during that time. And then, you know, we do the other side. So I'm like, okay, well, I'm like, what do people, how do people solve this problem?

1:18:15Casey Liss:They buy server hardware where they can plug both cables into redundant power supplies.

1:18:19Marco Arment:Well, that too. Or, it turns out there's a device called an ATS, an automatic transfer switch and so you can plug in the ats into both sides and then it it offers you a single set of outlets that is that is renunciately powered basically so you can plug in all your single-ended stuff into the ats and since all of my stuff is single-ended that's what i did so i had i had to learn that like there's so much about this that i just had no idea like this is how servers were like physically run yeah you're really not taking advantage of this rack

1:18:49Casey Liss:Those Mac and Minis are just barely, they're like the size of the faceplate on the old server. And the whole rest of the rack has just empty space. Yeah. Well, it's a lot of space. Yeah, because servers are long. Remember even how long the X-Serve was, which is probably the only rack mount server you may have been familiar with? They're really long.

1:19:04Marco Arment:Yeah, I mean, there's nothing stopping me. If I wanted to, like, I could use both sides of the rack. Like, I could just put a second set of them on the back rack mount holes.

1:19:13Casey Liss:You want the hot side going into the hot aisle. You don't want to be pushing hot air into the middle of your rack.

1:19:17Marco Arment:so yes technically you are correct um in practice like as i walk through the the aisles of the data center there's no heat coming from your mac minis there no there there's some but like in practice like i'm like i walk i walk past you know as i'm walking down the the ostensibly cold aisle some people have installed their servers backwards and are blowing hot air into the cold aisle so like it doesn't seem like it's that you know strictly necessary um at this scale um and yes you're right like the mac minis are just not producing that much heat um you'll see like the big black things i have kind of like at top and midway those are fans um there's a rack mount fans that suck air in from the bottom and blow it out the back because the mac minis are just you know having the having the hot air just go straight up yeah the mac minis are not blowing air out the back of them unfortunately right they're just kind of you know it's wafting upwards from them and so these fans suck it and blow it out the back but even the like i don't think it's that necessary at this scale obviously or honestly but anyway so i had to learn about 220 volt i had to learn about ats's you know they they provide the internet via what they call a dia and i had to of course i'm instantly going to like chat gpt and gemini what the heck is a dia how do i how do i connect whatever that is to whatever i have what should i have what equipment do i need what settings do i use they give you like a yellow fiber wire and they're like here you go i ran it to your cage okay now what do i do and i had to like buy like a little fiber transceiver but it had to be exactly the right kind to go into the sfp port on the ubiquity um whatever router i got um the i think it's the one of the dream machine pro max ultra i don't know uh one of one of the high-end rack mount ones um like i had to learn all this stuff like and this is you know for people who work in data centers i'm sure this is trivial to you because you've been doing it forever but like when you've never seen it before that's all brand new so i had to do a lot of just learning and again thank god for like the ai tools and youtube tutorials here and there for certain things i was able to figure it all out eventually and again data center people were very helpful with the parts they could help with um so it was a really great learning experience it was very fun doing it i don't get a lot of physical projects and like to be able to like wire up a whole bunch of computers and you know run all these network cables bundled together and you know all like have all have everything all organized i even like i i recently set it up so that like if one of the mac minis crashes in a way that i can't reboot it remotely i can now log into the power thing and remotely just kick off an entire bank of them and like have it like have it power cycle an entire set of six.

1:21:59Marco Arment:So I built a manual kicking machine. And it's a lot of fun. I'm so happy I did this. And what this has enabled is Overcast is now transcribing every podcast that has more than one listener.

1:22:17John Siracusa:Every single one?

1:22:19Marco Arment:Every podcast. Well, there are language restrictions. Because I'm using Apple's API, or Apple's you know, models for this. Their models only support English, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, and there's one more. Oh, no, that's it. That's six, yeah. If I actually look at what Overcast top languages are, the one I really want is Dutch. They don't support Dutch yet, and that is one of Overcast's top languages in terms of, like, podcasts being produced that people are listening to. But otherwise, like, that covers most of what most people are listening to. Among those podcasts that I can support with this API based on the language, I am able to transcribe every episode that comes out, easily catching up, every podcast that has more than one listener that is public.

1:23:10Marco Arment:And then I was like, I want to do the back catalog. And so I started kind of raising the numbers of like, all right, let me go back again. Start out, go back a month. go back to my then you know the the you know jobs in the queue would spike up and then they would slowly churn through them and slowly work through them okay that's that's good that's getting there um and then i was like why the number uh i'm just not keeping up like what's there was like a couple of weeks where like i'm just i was not able to keep i'm like what is going on here i i bought 48 mac minis why can i not keep up by the way when i said a few episodes ago that i've seen the Tahoe welcome tour a few times oh gracious this is why I have seen it so many times welcome liquid glass I'm like I would love to never see that screen again but anyway so I was like what is going on and I looked at I built a whole logging feature to see it forever so every server could log every action that was taken on a transcript is like what is going on here and I found after a little while there was a bug that was causing a lot of the transcript jobs to not be deleted afterwards so they would recur after a few hours oh no so i fixed the bug and within a couple hours the queue went to zero and i was like oh i have more capacity than i thought i had

1:24:39John Siracusa:Oh, no.

1:24:42Marco Arment:So then I thought, I wonder what it would take to transcribe private podcasts to, because that's something that Apple Podcasts doesn't do. Wouldn't that be cool if I could do them too? And so I built that. It turns out I'm able to support almost all private podcasts too. So now Overcast is transcribing every public podcast with more than one listener. almost every private podcast like above a certain I forget where I think I set that threshold at something like 10 or something like so if you have a membership that has at least 10 people something like that then you know in Overcast then that will be transcribed as well and all of this is running on these 48 Mac minis

1:25:24John Siracusa:do you really need 48 at this point I'm not trying to snark I'm genuinely asking you like what do you think is your steady state need in order to handle the load that you have

1:25:35Marco Arment:before I fixed the bug that was causing them to repeat themselves, I thought I could never get enough. Now, when I've reached a steady state, I do drop below 100 % use. But what I've been doing is just going back more and doing more back catalog work. Whenever my queue would hit zero, I would just lower the threshold. It's like, all right, now go back five years. Now go back seven years. Now go back 10 years. And every time I would do that, the number of jobs would spike up and then they would slowly churn through them. And they prioritize new releases and they prioritize popular podcasts. So there's not much cost in having the queue be full of a bunch of work to do.

1:26:13Marco Arment:Eventually, I would catch up at the new level because all those back catalogs will have been transcribed. And then I just lower the limits again. The next thing to do is lower it to podcasts that have one listener. Because right now, I'm at like, if you have two or more listeners, again, more than one listener, that's one thing. But if I go to one listener, then that like I think that like doubles the number of podcasts or something that I have to do so that that's its own decent size jump but once I'm done with a lot of the back catalog work I think I will be probably ready for that at this level now I also I realize like I will have a surplus of computational power here before too long so what do I do with that and well I can start moving work to them, first of all.

1:26:58Marco Arment:Things like image resizing that I have right now. My main Linux server is at Akamai. They're doing a lot of that kind of work. I can move that to these. Why not? They're super fast. They have all this great stuff. I even actually tried earlier in the winter. You know how a lot of podcast apps will use the dominant color in artwork to tint the interface in some way? I tried running that on these, like where like one of the jobs they would do, like so one thing they do is language detection. As I look into more like smart transcript features, I can do things in the future that I haven't done this yet, but I can do things like, you know, automatic chapter detection or topic detection or summarization, things like that.

1:27:42Marco Arment:Well, now I have all this computational power I can do that with. And it's not going to be it's not going to be the same as if I was running like, you know, ChatGPT's flagship model or Claude's flagship model. It's not that kind of hardware. but it is basically a whole bunch of computational power that will be almost free to operate over time. And so there's a huge incentive for me to move work to them or to find work they can do that would help the product. So I'm not worried about that. I think I will have plenty of work for them to do over time. And also I had to solve the issue with dynamic ad insertion.

1:28:15Marco Arment:I need transcripts to reach a certain minimum level of functionality for me. one of those is like all right i definitely want them to be time synced you know i don't i don't just want a static transcript that just dumps all the text of one version of this but then the version that you have that has different ads in it doesn't line up everything has to line up and i thought well how do i do that i spent a lot of the summer just trying developing and testing different algorithms to basically make signatures of the audio to analyze the audio to say all right what kind of waveforms are there or what kind of frequency pairings or frequency patterns.

1:28:56Marco Arment:I tried all these different algorithms. Somehow characterize what this audio is so that way when the server transcribes the version that it gets and then you on your phone download your download of that podcast but yours has different ads spliced into it so it might not line up or it might have things inserted or removed. I want my transcript generated from the server to be able to be lined up with what your phone got from its different download of the same podcast. So how do I do that? What actually is like a unique way to identify different parts of the audio? Honestly, I got to say, AI was very helpful in this.

1:29:33Marco Arment:AI did not write the algorithms for me, but it did tell me what kind, like it, you know, I was asking AI models last summer, like, how do different companies solve this problem? Like, what do different apps use for this? What kind of approaches are there? and it was like oh here's what you know shazam uses for its fingerprinting uh here here's how spotify does there here's like they tried to take some guesses on how youtube content id works like there's all these different things like okay this actually very helpful um i was able to over the course of a few months get a signature algorithm that worked that was able to read the same file and i could like you know i was doing tests i would like you know download something from here then download something through the netherlands mac mini that i was renting and like all right we have different ads now um compare these like can the algorithm find the parts that are the same and line them up correctly um can it detect which parts were inserted or removed so i can then adjust the transcript in those areas um and it took months but i finally got there and between the transcript algorithm and the signature algorithm all of those things were just barely fast enough to plausibly run on the iPhone.

1:30:47Marco Arment:And they all used APIs that were built into the iPhone. So I'm like, wouldn't it be great if I was able to offer on-device transcription for any podcast episodes that I didn't do myself, server-side? And so from that point, I was developing the entire pipeline as something that also compiled and ran on iOS. and I'm happy to say I was also able to ship that so that in in the beta today like any podcast that I haven't transcribed you can just hit transcribe on your iPhone and it'll do it it might take like you know a good you know three to five minutes depending on how long it is and it uses the new background the background activity API that introduced in iOS 26 for final cut exports it uses that one where like you can do like the long-running processing task if you start it from the phone or from the app in the foreground and then it puts the progress in the live activity so if you have ios 26 you can transcribe on device too and critically you're making the same transcript like it isn't like the ones you make on your phone are worse than my server ones they're the same it's the same models between the mac and iphone it's the same models with the same quality and running you know all the same process so that i think is another great feature of this but the I gotta say the signatures took the longest by far and I had to learn all sorts of stuff too about like long-running Mac processes you know obviously memory leaks weren't going to be tolerable but that was that was easy to get around or to avoid rather but things like how do I make like what do I do if my process crashes and the answer is launch d like you you basically have like a launch d you know thing that you you create that says like just automatically always make sure this app is running and if it crashes just open it up again um when i was doing the the image color detection that i was saying earlier like detect the dominant color in this image there was a part of that code that kept like seg faulting and a really deep part of the accelerate framework and i could not figure out why it seemed like it's actually part of part of apple sample code and i couldn't it was so deep in the stack it was like i think it's just a bug in the OS about this call that I'm calling, there was no way to avoid this crash.

1:32:58Marco Arment:So I learned XPC, and I made its own little XPC trial process so that when the image detection would crash, it wouldn't crash the whole transcription client. I had to learn things like Apple Remote Desktop, which is how I... Right now, this is how I'm managing all those servers. I literally have... I have a setup script, and I can SSH into all of them. So like when I update the transcription app, I use a script to just SSH, copy it all over and relaunch it. But if I have to like change Mac settings or things like that, I have to like log into the screen of the Mac with remote desktop and do it that way.

1:33:36Marco Arment:I'm sure that Mac like IT admins know of way better tools to do this. I would love to hear about those because this is ridiculous and I don't want to log into 48 Macs to do like OS updates down the road. So I would love to hear about those. But just lots of learning about like how to run fleets of Macs. And Apple does not make that easy. They seem like they don't really spend a lot of time considering that. But it has been running just fine. It is working. One trick I learned for a long time, there's been in like what used to be called Mac OS server, and is now just built in. One of the things in the sharing panel is called content caching.

1:34:18Marco Arment:Content caching basically like Macs detect if there's a content caching server on the network and if there's like a software update that comes through the content cached Mac will download it and then when every other Mac in your house does that software update it'll just pull that copy over your local network instead of you know if you have five Macs instead of each one downloading Mac OS you know 26.2.1 five times you'll download it once the content cache server and then all of your other Macs will download it directly from that one. Well, that matters a lot when you have 48 Macs on a network.

1:34:52Marco Arment:So, you know, I designated a few of them to be content caches and, you know, just little stuff like that. Like it's been a really great overall experience. It's been a massive undertaking. Just like the amount of work this has been on so many levels. The signature algorithm, the transcript algorithm, like building out the whole queue processing system for external servers that aren't in my... my main Linux server network, the health monitoring, the remote desktop, like there's so much here. And then serving the transcripts, using them in the app, lining them up. Like when you do get a different signature, like how do you line up that signature with the one that the transcript has?

1:35:31Marco Arment:There is so much work behind this. But where I've gotten is I got to learn a bunch of cool server stuff. I got to do some really tricky programming problems, which that's always fun for a programmer. If we're honest, we love tricky problems, even when they're frustrating and take months to figure out. But we do love when we finally do figure them out. And now I have a very capable computational cluster that I can throw a bunch of work at and it gets it done very cheaply. And I believe I am the only podcast app to do private podcasts, at least server side. I also believe I'm the only one where you can do it on device if they don't have it I'm certainly the only one besides Apple that's going to do it for free but but that's I think this is all worth it and the feature is great and will only get greater over time right now it's again it's very basic right now it's you know you can view the transcript and you can tap around you know it automatically scrolls with the audio it highlights what's being said you can tap anywhere in it You can scroll around, tap anywhere in it to seek to that point.

1:36:42Marco Arment:There's a lot of kind of obvious features that like, well, once you have transcripts, you will obviously also want X. Things like transcript search. That's an obvious like number one. Like, yeah, you should be able to search transcripts. I'll get there. Chapterization, summaries of sections. There's a lot of that kind of thing. Like, yeah, that I should do that. Clip sharing where you can share a clip like, yeah, that should be transcript based and the output to include the transcript. Yes, I agree. Like there is so much that now follows from this, but this has taken me almost a year and I wanted to get this like I got to ship something.

1:37:18Marco Arment:I got to get this out there. And even this like there were a couple of days last week where I broke the build on my own phone. I broke its ability to use transcripts. So for a couple of days after I had been using them for a while, for a couple of days, I couldn't use them. And I hated it. Like I noticed immediately because what, you know, what I do is like I swipe over to the transcript view. Like whenever I'm listening to a big show that has stupid DAI ads, like I'll hear of great. Another ad for the Apple card. Awesome. Oh, another ad for pure leaf iced tea. Okay. And I can, I can go over the transcript and I can skim, skim, skim and just tap right after it.

1:37:54Marco Arment:It's very obvious where the ad ends. That's great. like features like that you get used to that or even just like a what did they say if you're listening to a podcast and a bus drives by and you miss a couple of words you don't have to seek back and repeat the whole 20-30 seconds you can just swipe swipe swipe and see oh that's what they said okay like stuff like that it's really great for that kind of thing it's also really great for like you know if there's like if there's a podcast that like oh i know somewhere in here they mention something like this you can quickly skim around and find it or if it's like oh I gotta listen to this episode before tonight but I don't have that much time but there's information in it that I would like to know generally what they talked about that's all you can skim the text of what they are talking about faster than you could hear it so if they're talking about baseball you can skip it you know so there's like there's all sorts of little benefits like that.

1:38:51Marco Arment:Much of the benefits of chapters in podcasts that do it, but just applied to all podcasts. It's a great experience. And it is very clear to me, having developed this and now using it, it is extremely clear to me that this feature is table stakes. That all podcast apps need transcripts and once you are used to navigating a podcast with transcripts. Using seek forward and seek back buttons feels like you're a dinosaur. So it is very obvious to me that podcast listening and podcast navigation require this. For any app that wants to be like a serious podcast experience, you know, to be a good listening experience, you need robust transcript features now.

1:39:42Marco Arment:And that will only get more so over time as we kind of evolve our uis and our playback experiences to use them more and to offer more you know offer more utility that's powered by transcripts so i think this is you know i don't i don't always arrive to the party on time with this kind of thing but i'm i'm here now and i'm very glad to be here and it was a long road to get here it was a ton of work and a ridiculous amount of unboxing Mac minis. But I'm really glad that I'm finally here.

1:40:16John Siracusa:This does sound really incredible, and it sounds like it was an astonishing amount of work and expense to a not small degree. One of the things I keep wondering as you talk about this, to the degree you are willing and capable of sharing, how are you storing the transcripts?

1:40:33Casey Liss:Because, you know, the obvious answer is, oh, it's just a bunch of text.

1:40:38John Siracusa:Well, no, it's not because then you have timestamps. And well.

1:40:42Casey Liss:But I mean, where is he storing it? Well, that too. Yeah. The cloud, obviously.

1:40:47John Siracusa:Of course.

1:40:47Marco Arment:Of course.

1:40:48Casey Liss:Yeah. But like where, where?

1:40:49John Siracusa:R2. Cloudflare R2. Okay. And what is the data type? I know some of this is special sauce, so you don't want to get too specific. But to the degree you're willing to share, like what is being stored for each of these transcripts?

1:41:02Marco Arment:Well, you know me. Of course, it's a custom format. Of course.

1:41:07Casey Liss:I was going to say.

1:41:08Marco Arment:It would normally be JSON, but knowing Marco is not going to be JSON. There is JSON under there somewhere. But of course, I'm like, well, if I customize it, I can compress it to be a lot smaller than that. And so, yeah, there's compression, there's shorthand, there's like, you know, delta encoding.

1:41:24Casey Liss:The total storage space for all the transcripts of all the podcasts in the world in text form, gzipped, can't possibly be that big.

1:41:30Marco Arment:No, well, I wasn't always storing them on R3. I started out storing them in a database and like that was stupid. R2, not R3.

1:41:38Casey Liss:I think your problem is going to be that the minimum block size of R2 is probably bigger than all your transcript files. So it might actually behoove you to combine them into multiple files if you cared about storage, which you don't.

1:41:49Marco Arment:Well, but keep in mind also that these transcripts, so right now in the UI in Overcast, it is displaying each kind of line of text, so to speak. It's roughly like one to two sentences maybe. It's displaying them like a series of short paragraphs. when it is highlighting whatever is being spoken. It highlights the entire paragraph at once. But I actually have word-level timing. Oh, gracious. That was my next question. The actual data I have is much more precise than what's showing. I have word-level timing and word-level confidence. So I'm actually storing a good amount of data for each transfer.

1:42:24Marco Arment:I knew if the API is going to give me this information, I'm going to store it. And I might not necessarily use it for anything. Maybe I won't use it now, but maybe down the road I will. Like, for instance, if you're doing clip sharing, you know, if you look at what, like there's other apps out there that will export videos that have like live captions of what's being said. That tends to look a lot better if you highlight word by word. Or if you're doing something where it's exporting a video or a picture and say like the block, the current block of text is just too long to fit like in the frame, you'd want to be able to shorten it.

1:43:02Marco Arment:And so you would need, you know, sub frame precision for that. So I'm like, if the API is giving me word level timing, I'm going to store it. I don't store everything like there's some of it. It will give you like alternate transcription options. If it's like if it's not too confident what was said, it'll say like, well, I think it's 60 percent sure it's this, but 40 percent sure it might be this. i did experiment with those at first but i found that the the alternatives that it was suggesting they were such low confidence most of the time it wasn't worth storing so i mostly did not store

1:43:35Casey Liss:on that front by the way that's another one of my questions so you've you've got all these text transcripts now and as you noted you're using models optimized for the fact that they can run on the phone and they're inexpensive to run on the server and so on and so forth and they're not going to be up to the standards of the gigantic models that you know that you could run in the cloud or whatever right um but once you have the text like as i was looking i was testing this feature earlier today and i looked at the uh part of the previous episode where someone sang a line about uh someone walking the length of the city um and the transcription was they say he walks the lake l-a-k-e of the city because length and lake sound similar but what i was wondering is could Could you do a post-processing pass with some LM thing where you feed it the text?

1:44:28Casey Liss:Because I think any kind of good model would say the lake of the city doesn't make as much sense as walking the length of the city. Like it could figure out from context clues in the English language sentence structure that lake is the wrong word choice there. And especially if you have stored alternatives, it doesn't have to hear the audio. It's not correcting the transcription saying, oh, I'm going to use it more properly. Because obviously then you're just doing transcription twice. but i do wonder if doing like essentially text grammar correction or best guess correction with like a system prompt that says um you know like if you have like a summary description of the podcast from the description in the feed this is a technology podcast i don't know if that would help with length of the city but anyway just a world knowledge model would pick out those lyrics and and correct them and put in length i do wonder again for maybe for the top 100 most popular podcast in the most recent episodes that doing a second pass and saying this is my transcribed thing by my little models and then chucking the text to another model and saying fix this up and make it so it doesn't say lake of the city that is something i've thought about um and and look

1:45:32Marco Arment:the accuracy of the on-device model is fine but not amazing you've got you had to do the thing

1:45:37Casey Liss:that everybody does which is you put a big warning at the top and say you know this is auto generated

1:45:41Marco Arment:there might be errors i said there are probably errors because they are there are probably errors Yes. You know, because, you know, in my testing, it is good enough to know what's going on. It's good enough to to have a have an idea of what's being said to get most of it and to be to figure out a lot of that stuff. It is not perfect enough to be like a document that you're going to show somebody or especially with like proper nouns and stuff like that, where it's going to struggle. Right. Exactly. Like it again, like it's it's the iPhone dictation model, I think, or, you know, roughly.

1:46:13Casey Liss:it's not there's not like a world knowledge model that's going to be like oh i know the name of that because that's the name of a country and the capital of that country is

1:46:20Marco Arment:no it's not doing that right like whisper is better at that parakeet seems in most people's testing um parakeet seems like it is a little bit better at that so that's why i'm going to look at that soon but um it's not like massively better because that that is mostly just down to

1:46:34Casey Liss:like model size and complexity are you are you resigned to redoing all of your transcripts on m7s with the more powerful model in a few years i can so there is a versioning system in the transcript data so yeah no i'm just saying like are you are you already setting up to say like i know i'm doing all this work but at some point in the future i'm gonna have to redo it all like all the whole back catalog again because the models will have gotten that much better and

1:46:56Marco Arment:because the m7 will be that much more powerful i mean yeah so like i expect over time this will get better but like so going back to like you know if i like you know using like a big model somewhere to clean up the transcripts that is on my list to investigate i think the costs would be prohibitive to do it for everything but as you said like if you if i just do it the same way like do have like a a popularity minimum i do it for everything over this yeah i do wonder like

1:47:24Casey Liss:because it's not transcribing audio it's just text i wonder if it would just be trivial for it you know because like how much text is there honestly it's a tight such a tight it's like forget about Like the text would fit in one thousandth of the context window of these giant things these days. It's just it's so much easier than transcribing audio, you know?

1:47:40Marco Arment:Yeah. So like what I'm going to look at next, well, maybe not exactly next, but what I'm going to look at soon. Now that I have the transcripts, what smart things can I do with them? And again, that would be things like finding like topic changes and trying to make like a table of contents, you know, make chapters that aren't that, you know, if podcasts don't have them themselves. you know summarization of chapters maybe so i could say okay at this part they're talking about volleyball you know like that's the kind of thing i want to be able to offer and my my plan in my mind which i have not tested anything yet but my plan has been to evaluate like that's when i go to the big api company or the big ai companies and use their apis so i would use the open ai or the Gemini or the Claude API to say like, all right, here's this block of text.

1:48:28Marco Arment:Find me where the topics are. Clean up any errors that you see that are probably unlikely to be what the person actually said. You know, stuff like that. That is the next big step in making transcripts better. I'm not ready to do that yet. Like I had to get this part out first.

1:48:42Casey Liss:Can you use private cloud compute or is that only allowed to do like by users from shortcuts? Like I'm wondering if you could. Yeah.

1:48:48Marco Arment:So I could theoretically write a shortcut and shell it out to private cloud compute. but i think i would get throttled really quickly yeah yeah yeah there is a limit on that now i mean

1:48:59Casey Liss:i'm thinking about like on device like because you mentioned obviously like transcript search and yeah you know you full text search of transcripts blah blah you know you can do that all on device again it's not it's not that much text you're searching through one podcast's worth of stuff probably even if you do all podcasts whatever but i also think there's a place for you to be able to do essentially lm powered search where you just chuck the whole transcript into the context window and let the person ask a question and it finds the part. You know what I mean?

1:49:25Marco Arment:So for one episode, that's easy. Yeah. Doing it on device, doing that on the iPhone, the context window is only 4 ,000 tokens. So it's pretty tough. Oh, yeah.

1:49:36Casey Liss:All right. Well, that's what I was asking about private account compute. If you could just chuck the whole thing up to a cloud model, I feel like it would fit in the context window of a big cloud model.

1:49:43Marco Arment:It would absolutely fit. Like if I wanted to offer that like with a big cloud model through an API, like I could offer that that way. Yeah, bring your own API key or whatever. that's gross. I would find a way to do it cheaply. I would see what can I do for nothing or for near nothing. A lot of this, I mean first of all API costs for high end models are only going down over time and it's only going to continue and what I'm asking for is not that complex. This wouldn't require a really high end thinking and logic reasoning model it wouldn't require that level.

1:50:17Casey Liss:You could run this on your Mac minis with some like open weights like llama model thing because you're really just doing fuzzier full text search essentially you know and i'm not saying you should do this first you should just do plain full text first search first because no no ai no anything just full text search when people type in words and you match and blah blah blah but because it is just text any kind of remotely reasonable small lm powered thing that you can fit the transcript into the context window and then just ask questions about it and get a get a time stamp out of it that would be amazing because as someone who spends a surprising amount of time searching for transcripts like when i tried to find the year the quote that i just read about the uh airpods pro max thing i foolishly didn't put that information in the reminder so i'm like oh sometime in the past we talked about airpods and marco said something and i said something and i had to go find that um just a little bit just a little tiny bit of fuzziness helps go it goes a long way because and especially for like are the transcripts going to get airpods max is it going to get airbods no that's i guess air and pods are two words and you have to think about soundalikes and stuff and so i think any any little bit you can do to help pass the the sort of very simple uh full text you know non-ai full text search will really make this feature more powerful yeah and i think like that's that's

1:51:40Marco Arment:something to look at like you know in in time as all these things get cheap and i can run more of them locally like you know one limitation is that all these mac minis are just again they're the base model they're the 16 gig of ram you know base model so there's only so much i can do on device when you start talking about bigger models that being said there's nothing stopping me from say adding a couple of high ram mac studios to this and then you know they would take on a certain type of job. Like, I could do that. What do you think Apple's using for its transcripts? Are they using their M2 Ultra base servers?

1:52:15Marco Arment:Probably. Yeah, because whatever Apple Podcast is doing, yeah. Or they could, they might have also done the same calculation and figured it's actually cheaper to just do a whole bunch of base Mac minis. Because, you know, it is. Like, when you look at, like, number of transcription minutes per minute that you can get on the base model Mac mini versus if you get, like, the highest end M4 max, or I guess it's an M4 Pro in the Mac mini. So the highest end M4 Pro, it's not twice, or I think it's like it's about twice as much at the most, but it's like four times the cost, so it's not worth it. I have to imagine that they're using AWS servers

1:52:52Casey Liss:to do their transcriptions, probably with Parakeet Miles, but I don't know. Someone from Apple write in and tell us, are you actually using Macs to do a podcast transcription, or is this all farmed out to AWS? I mean, with Apple, it could go either way. They have different deals than you would get with AWS in terms of pricing.

1:53:08Marco Arment:Yeah, of course. going through any, like doing all of this, like any answer that begins with, why don't you just, like, why don't you just use AWS? Why don't you just use OpenAI, whatever it is? Well, I just asked if you had priced it out. I think what you ended up doing would be cheaper. Yeah, and the answer is thousands of dollars a day

1:53:21Casey Liss:is what that costs. Well, and you would also have to learn an entirely different set of things than you learned for this project.

1:53:29Marco Arment:True, yes. And one thing I also really like about the way I've built this, I can run all the same code that I've already written. So first of all, there's an advantage of Apple's APIs are really good for a lot of this stuff. So for example, the music detection I'm doing, that's using Apple's built-in audio classifier. It can do stuff like detect when dogs are barking. I'm not using that part of it, but I could. That's all just really easy. It's using platforms and languages, tools, and all of these things that I'm already familiar with, that I already am using, I'm already deploying, I'm already in it.

1:54:06Marco Arment:in this case running these transcripts is using overcast code the same code is running on the servers and in the app I only write that code once I'm able to use Swift instead of like PHP or whatever else I would use on the server there's all sorts of benefits to having this just be one code base and like as I am as I'm you know getting older in my career and as the world is getting more and more like there's more and more in the tech business no one can keep track of all of it there's high value in specializing. And so in my case, like if I can write really good Swift code, or if I, I mean, to the extent that we're still writing code in a few years, who knows?

1:54:47Marco Arment:But like, if, if I can write really good Swift code and I'm really familiar with Apple's platforms and Apple's APIs and Apple's like infrastructure and how to, how to run all that stuff, I can be, it's easier for me to become an expert in that and to keep that up to date rather than like, I'm already falling way behind on my Linux server-side knowledge just because I don't do that much of it anymore. Obviously, I still run a lot of servers for Overcast, but they're not changing that much. I'm not getting much of new ones all the time. I'm not keeping up with all the most modern toolkits and things that everyone's using these days.

1:55:23Marco Arment:So specialization, I think, is high value to me. The fact that I can just run, like I can do all this cool stuff using Apple's tools and using the languages I already know and everything I run on the server can run on the phone. That's amazing. And then down the road, if I'm still running Overcast in 10 more years, at that point, the phones will be so fast I won't need these Mac Mac Macs anymore. My guess is I will probably never replace these. By the time there would be like a major upgrade in performance that would be worth replacing M4s, i don't even know if i'll need these anymore because the phones will be so fast they might be able to do everything on device and i'm like there might be no reason to have all this work

1:56:05Casey Liss:farmed out to these mac minis then you'll need a coordinate server so that it knows um you know this person a has already started transcribing the latest uh episode of the daily so everybody else just hold off and wait for that don't bother burning your batteries maybe let two people do it

1:56:20Marco Arment:just as a backup or three yeah i mean right now i already have that infrastructure in place like right now the code is already there for the iphone app to be a transcript worker i'm just not activating that because there's not much that an iphone can do in like the like there there's a type of background process uh there's a type of background refresh task um not the one that was introduced in ios 26 where you can like do the final code export with live activity not that there's a previous one called a background processing task and you can you can request the system, wake up your app in the background and give you a block of high CPU time when it is charging.

1:57:02Marco Arment:So that way you can burn some battery power and you're not doing a disservice to the user because it's charging. So usually that'll run when your phone is charging overnight. So I could use that time on everyone's phones to do some work. I'm not because that kind of feels a little wrong because that kind of feels like I'm stealing resources from people. and the amount of work you can get done on an iPhone in that time slice, they give you like three minutes or something. It's not enough to even transcribe one episode of most things. So I'm doing all this work myself. But in five or 10 years, when the phones are a lot faster, some of that math changes.

1:57:41Marco Arment:Maybe I can just do all of the work during people's overnight charging if I wake up everyone's phone for one minute and they can all do all the work. Like maybe, I don't know, maybe people can opt into it. I have no idea. but keeping all the code in Swift in the iOS code base or at least compatible with the iOS code base even if I never do that scheme it still allows me to do things like you can on demand hit the transcribe button and transcribe a podcast I didn't get to yet or that I won't get to so there's all sorts of benefits to doing it this way so anyway that's it

1:58:15John Siracusa:I'm looking forward to you reinventing BitTorrent when you go the route of having all these phones do like a minute worth of transcription at a time I can just see it now.

1:58:24Casey Liss:I wasn't thinking of using them as a transcription farm, but rather instead on demand. Because obviously the phone is already downloading an episode because you subscribe to a particular podcast, the RSS feed updates, the new episode downloads, all that stuff happens on people's phones. And it's happening because it's not like, oh, someone's using my phone to download podcasts. No, it's because you subscribe to it. You control that. The user subscribes to a podcast and they want it to download the latest episode when it comes out so that when they open overcast and hit play the episode is hopefully already there that's already happening And I feel like part of that process could be, oh, and in addition to me downloading the episode, I'll also transcribe it for you or queue it up to transcribe that as soon as the overcast is in the foreground or whatever.

1:59:08Casey Liss:And I was saying in that type of scenario, you don't want 70 ,000 people transcribing the new episode of the daily, right, when it comes out, because there's a waste for all those phones to be doing the same work. but rather you just pick well these 10 everyone who wants to do it talks to a coordinate server and says hey i'm about to transcribe this episode are there any other phones out there already transcribing because there is i'll just wait till they're done because they'll transcribe they'll upload the text and i'll download the text and you know that type of sort of energy saving type thing but yeah that's definitely down the road when you have the computing power to do that basically with the consent that it currently downloads you know what i mean like it's downloading because they subscribed i think people will be fine saying and also when you download an episode for me transcribe it too and they don't care how it happens they just don't want it to hurt their battery they just want it to magically be there and it's not really possible to do that now but like you said in a few years i feel like if you did that that would people would accept that perfectly they would accept it the same way they accept the fact that overcast

2:00:03Marco Arment:downloaded the episode for them right exactly and like there's already like right now i'm already i'm already doing what i can to share work where appropriate so like for instance the signature the audio signature that like analyzes the audio and tries to line up with dai that is the same if the copy of the file you have is the same it's a little bit heavy it runs at like 600x or so real time so you know it might take a couple of minutes or it might take a minute for for a podcast episode or something um and that does run on the phone and it has it has to because like the phone knows what it downloaded i don't know what the phone downloaded you do you

2:00:40Casey Liss:do a content hash before you even bother on the signature just to see if it's literally the same file or do you not bother yes so first i do like basically md5 do you get the deprecation warnings from the stupid md5 library yelling at you that it's a broken algorithm and you don't care it

2:00:54Marco Arment:isn't i think it's it's one of the shah families but it's one of the fast shah ones okay i'm still

2:00:58Casey Liss:i'm still using md5 and xcode yeah i know there's a way to change it that you can use a different api to get at the same thing but a different api is slightly slower and i'm like screw you i'm just

2:01:06Marco Arment:going to use this api forever anyway go yeah anyway so yeah i first do like a file hash just to see and then i and i go to the server and i say do you have the signature for this file hash right so everyone who downloads atp since we don't use dynamic ad insertion only one person is ever going to generate that signature and it's probably going to be the transcript servers that do it um because they're also embedding the signature that they get in the transcripts so for podcasts that don't use dai the phones don't have to do this work at all you need to

2:01:35Casey Liss:add a button to the atp cms that i can click that uh that forces immediate transcription of the

2:01:39Marco Arment:latest atp episode we don't need to it's it's a popular podcast on overcast so it'll be it'll be

2:01:45Casey Liss:prioritized uh i know you have the the ping feeds api that people use i'm just asking for the equivalent of that for transcription yeah well no it's not gonna happen not a public one just for

2:01:55Marco Arment:us no i don't i don't need to all right we'll see yeah or you can download the episode onto your phone and transcribe it for everybody but yeah so the signature thing yeah it's like it checks that it hashes the file first and in the fast way ask the server hey do we know what the signature of this hash is yet for most podcasts most of the time they'll have that the only reason you would have to transcribe you would have to use the signature yourself or generate yourself is if the version of the file that you got has different ads than anybody else has gotten then your phone will generate the signature for that hash and submit it to the servers So I am doing work sharing as much as possible there.

2:02:34Marco Arment:So the work for the signatures isn't being duplicated. The work for the transcripts isn't being duplicated. But it still has to happen sometime. But yeah, usually you're not facing that on your phone.

2:02:45John Siracusa:So if I get a copy of 99PI that's got local Richmond ads and nobody else has seen these ads yet, how are you making the transcript from that? Like, are you uploading my MP3 to your server to churn on it?

2:03:02Marco Arment:Oh, God, no. No, I mean, that would be impossible. So in that context, what would happen is your phone would download the transcript that Overcast already has for that episode. The transcript would be, as you mentioned, for like a different set of ads that was injected in the copy that my servers got. And your phone would generate its signature for the file it has. and then it would look at its signature and the transcript signature and it would like find the common ranges between them. Like where, so basically like whatever is not different between the two copies, it finds those, aligns the server-side transcript to those on your local copy.

2:03:39Marco Arment:And then any ranges in your local copy that were not on the server copy, it just doesn't transcribe those. So you'll see gaps in the transcript with like an ellipsis there, which I believe is the same thing that Apple Podcasts does on their transcript. Anyway, so your phone is doing the bare minimum work it needs to do to figure out what audio was it served, and then how does it line up the transcript to that audio? Gotcha.

2:04:02Casey Liss:You can do a local transcription of just the ads.

2:04:04Marco Arment:I could. I mean, why? Yeah. We're sponsored by True Leaf Iced Tea or whatever it is. Say that over and over again.

2:04:14Casey Liss:I'm just so glad I don't listen to shows that have the dynamic ad in search because I hear everyone talking about it. and it's, I mean, I guess I've heard a few of them and it's not great, but yeah.

2:04:22Marco Arment:Yeah, I signed up for the Verge's paid thing, which has ad-free podcasts finally, thank God.

2:04:27Casey Liss:But they still have the ad bumper, so it's weird. I mean, I know we have the ad bumpers too, but I feel like it's incorporated in a way that you wouldn't know. It just sounds like a segment break, but their thing totally sounds like places where ads should go. I'm also a Verge subscriber.

2:04:39Marco Arment:Yeah, like I have like the paid search engine podcast one and their ad bumper is like 45 seconds long. it's a huge musical I have to like skip forward past it every time even though I have the Verge membership I've been still keeping the Verge cast public feed so I could test how my transcript handled DAI and I've heard the same ad so many times between that and like Trevor Noah is probably the biggest like the most popular podcast I've probably listened to I think and that of course is full of DAI all the big shows are full of DAI and I'm kind of looking forward to having this finally be out there and having the signature stuff be I think done so I can stop listening to all these ads and just go back to the membership versions

2:05:26Casey Liss:one final quick feature request for the olds in the audience you need to make that text bigger or at least an option to make the text bigger on the transcripts and also make the margins fatter

2:05:35Marco Arment:it is following the body text size that you set so it scales up with dynamic text there needs to be a separate setting for that

2:05:43Casey Liss:I mean, I think just I I'm thinking of like the lyrics and Apple Music, how huge they are. I'd be happy if they were that big. But I understand music lyrics tend to be shorter than podcasts. So maybe there are some limits there. But my old eyes say, why is this text so small? And also maybe do bold for the current section instead of regular for the current section and faded gray for the other ones. Anyway, those are my two quick feature requests.

2:06:04Marco Arment:Yeah, I the the UI for it is very much like a 1.0 version of this UI. Yeah. And bold, bold the current word since you have that info. You know, they'll do. Well, the reason I didn't do bold is that bold causes the text to change width and therefore reflow.

2:06:19Casey Liss:There's no San Francisco variant that doesn't do that?

2:06:22Marco Arment:Actually, I don't know.

2:06:24Casey Liss:I don't know. I mean, obviously, there's monospace numerals, but I do wonder if there's a variant that does not change metrics when you bold it. I don't think. I will check. Then just change the color of the current word because you've got the info. that was that'll really help like the read along type thing of seeing the word like the little blue word or whatever color you make up that'll be great yeah well and like and what apple does

2:06:47Marco Arment:with their transcripts um is they like the whole thing it's almost like the um the genie effect or the um what's the zoom effect on the dock when you hover over things in the scale i thought it was genie genie is when the minimize window comes out in little oh sorry yes yes yes yes sorry

2:07:01Casey Liss:magnification is what you're thinking of on the dock when the icons get bigger like yeah when you

2:07:05Marco Arment:scroll your cursor over the dock icons and the one you're on grows up in size and the other one shrinks around it. They do that with their transcript text. So the current line of the transcript is bigger and bolder and the rest kind of like fade into smallness and into the sides. That's not great. It does solve some problems. I think it creates others. But you know so I will play with the UI. There's a lot of iteration to be had here. But gotta start somewhere.

2:07:35John Siracusa:This looks incredible. You should be very proud. I know this was a lot of work.

2:07:39Marco Arment:I can't believe you're announcing it when it's beta, though, because now everyone's like, when is this going to be released? Yeah, that's true. Well, the good thing is, like, I mean, honestly, it's a big enough deal. I considered skipping the beta and just going directly to the public. Not a good idea. Yeah, I realized that was not wise. I know you're anxious to get it out.

2:07:54Casey Liss:Do the beta.

2:07:55Marco Arment:But I don't, honestly, I don't expect this to be in beta for very long. Because my goal here is not to revamp the whole feature with beta feedback. My goal here is make sure it works to the level, like to the 1.0 level, and then get it to everybody. So we will see.

2:08:12John Siracusa:All right. You said it would be half an hour. It was 70, 82 minutes.

2:08:17Casey Liss:That's it. Pretty accurate if you add the macro multiplication factor.

2:08:21Marco Arment:That's true. I mean, I thought I was going to have this done by the fall. So, you know. There. Thanks to our sponsors this week, 1Password, Zapier and Lisa. And thanks to our members who support us directly. you can join us at atv.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about goals and features and the future of liquid glass in Apple's 27 series OSs coming out this summer and fall. That'll be fun. I'm looking forward to that. There have been a couple of rumors recently on that, so we will talk about that in Overtime.

2:08:55Marco Arment:atv.fm slash join to join us to hear that. Thank you so much, everybody. We'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental.

2:09:21Casey Liss:Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

2:09:39Marco Arment:So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, Antti, Marco, Armin, S-I-R-A-C, USA, Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. All right.

2:10:06John Siracusa:So there is new news that broke. It was spoiled, I think, yesterday as we record and is officially news, I believe, today. The BMW i3 reveal has happened. This is not the little ne-ne-ne-ne-ne-ne-ne-ne-ne car that Marco has. Yeah, not Tiff's car. Is that the sound it makes? Yep, that's right. Well, only one that range extenders on.

2:10:27Marco Arment:No, actually, the old BMW i3 was before EVs were required to make all those noises, so it actually makes no noise.

2:10:36John Siracusa:In any case, the i3 has been announced. So this is the Neue Klasse or something like that. I'm sorry, Germans. That is basically, let's make an EV from the ground up rather than taking the petrol cars, the gasoline cars and retrofitting an EV into them. Even though, I mean, again, I'm an apologist for the i4 because I thought it was incredible. But this is from the ground up. Let's make an EV. And so reading from a couple of sites starting with The Verge, Sebastian Crows, BMW's head of interior design for the Neue Klasse cars, told me that the iX3 was designed with an emphasis on verticality to make it look taller.

2:11:14John Siracusa:The i3, on the other hand, has an emphasis on a horizontality. I don't think I'm pronouncing those words right. I don't think they're words either, but I'm doing the best I can.

2:11:22Casey Liss:If you're a German designer, it is. This is design ease.

2:11:25John Siracusa:Yeah. Most directly seen in the series of lights that span virtually the sedan's entire nose. The company hasn't quoted a formal capacity for the i3, but I'd expect it to fall somewhere around the 109 kilowatt hour usable battery capacity of the iX3 SUV. Enough for what BMW says is 440 miles on a charge. and 400 kilowatt charging should mean that adding over 200 miles of range happens in about 10 minutes. Neither of the two motors in this car uses permanent magnets, which has a few advantages. First, you'll find no rare earths here. Secondly, the i3 can disable its motors and coast without needing a disconnect system, unlike the Mercedes, which apparently does.

2:12:06John Siracusa:From Ars Technica, weight distribution is close to 50-50 with a low center of gravity, thanks to the battery pack, and torque delivery is rear-biased out of corners and under regenerative braking, the rear axle regens more than the front at first to stabilize the car. So technology-wise, this looks really, really good. Like this looks incredibly impressive. Visually, I'm not as convinced. So to my eyes, the profile is excellent. The front is a vast improvement from the pig nose of the i4. You know, when I told you I loved the i4, I said that while just ignoring the fact that the kidneys took up the entire front of the car.

2:12:49John Siracusa:This is better. It's a little weird, but it's better. I don't think I like the back at all. And the interior, I am not here for the vertical braces on the steering wheel. You're just going to have to see to understand. And I'm not here for the trapezoidal center screen thing. However, on the whole, this looks really good.

2:13:08Casey Liss:well you mentioned this being the this being spoiled yesterday or whatever well the way bmw has rolled this out has been i mean you know obviously they had the original like concept cars the noia class of whatever however many years ago those came out and then obviously the ix3 is out and you can buy and is the first car on this platform although it's not a sedan obviously but this car this exact car the i3 um they've been doing the thing for i think maybe a year at least six months or so where um they've been allowing journalists to see and show the car quote-unquote disguised and if you're in the car world you know the normal way you disguise cars is you put a bunch of things on the car that use like black and white like dazzle camouflage with just all sorts of weird swirly black and white patterns to make it so you can't get a read for what shape the car really is often they'll be kind of like a bra over the front and rear so You can't see what the front grill looks like.

2:14:06Casey Liss:And sometimes they put other panels on it of like cardboard or wood or whatever to just hide the shape of the car. But this car, the i3, has been shown to journalists with essentially a wrap on it. Meaning like if you put a red wrap on your car, people think your car is painted red. Just a complete, just a wrap. But instead of the wrap being red, the wrap is dazzle candle. So it's like how much of this car are you hiding when you just essentially put a wrap on it? where you can see the whole car and yet it's maybe a little bit harder to see what shape it is but there's the car there's nothing disguising it except for an ugly paint job essentially but still i was holding out hope that when i saw the finished version of it it would not be as homely as the camouflaged cars they've been showing to the press i mean they would let them drive them in the snow and do all this stuff but that's the car and anyway uh there's not much that can be done to save this i was hoping that they could de-emphasize those giant uh you know headlights on the front uh with styling that was not apparent with the wrap on it but nope they're there they're big i don't like them and also in general even though they said this car emphasized horizontality or whatever it looks tall especially compared to the existing i4 i think the existing i4 like did they make a coupe of this whatever whatever i4 i've seen on the road i've taken pictures of it before the current i4 body shape and back looks so good and so yeah it really does pretty and athletic and nice and then you get to the front and it's got big beaver teeth i understand i'm not a fan of the front but if you never see the front and you just see it from the side and the back it looks amazing this car looks tall and squat from the side this car has ugly taillights and an ugly rear and this car's front i think is not actually an improvement over the buck teeth it's just ugly in a different way you are so wrong sir as for casey's steering wheel that he doesn't like i think i could post this on our little slack channel i think if you get the m sport steering wheel those spokes are hard i've put a picture of it into our slack those spokes are horizontal not vertical which helps it a little bit but i am also dubious about the comfort of the steering wheel because of the way that they've it's not like a tube around it they've really done these big cutouts and like these strange sort of you have to look to see it's it's a strange steering wheel i'll give them credit for making the squircle a little bit more urkley than squir i mean it's not it's not a circle because you can't put circles on the on car wheels anymore because it's against the law but it's not as bad as like say the corvette wheel which is just really weird hexagon thing um i do like that they've updated their architecture this is basically the same thing same architecture as the ix3 so it's good uh i think they went to 800 volt with this so i'm sure it'll be a great car but just the styling problems happening over there in germany continue to be dire i mean not all in germany because i feel like porsche styling has still been pretty good and i'm mostly on board with it and mercedes styling and a bmw styling they've been they've been in a rut for what two or three decades now uh i i don't think it's near

2:17:03John Siracusa:as bad certainly this doesn't look near as bad to me as it does to you and i don't think it's been two decades. It's probably been one-ish.

2:17:12Casey Liss:No, you start with the Bengal butt. That's the 90s, right? Or was that 2000?

2:17:15John Siracusa:No, that was early to mid-2000s, I believe. And even, I don't know. And it wasn't all of the cars. It was some of the cars. I don't know. Like, the 3 Series has mostly been good with, like, the E90 that I had was good. The F10 was most, or no, that's the 5 Series. F30 is what I'm thinking of. F30 was all right. And then it got ugly after that.

2:17:35Casey Liss:We just didn't know what was going to happen. So you look back on the F30 and you're like, wow, that was nice. yeah that's fair and it's got dump store handle it's got basically tesla door handles in 2026 2027 model year you're going to do tesla they're not exactly the same because there is a mechanical pull on them i believe but i think they might still have to redo them for china you know we did that story about china banning uh electronic door handles i think they might still have to redo them for china just because the electronic mechanism makes it come out like the model s handles so it doesn't matter that there's a mechanical pull if you can't actually get your fingers behind the thing because they made it like why why as you noted casey the i4 has flush door handles that you just put your fingers under and pull and i don't even know if those are mechanical those might be metal uh what do you call it electronic switches but the point is they could be mechanical because you don't need anything to happen you just walk up to the car stick your fingers underneath the handle and pull like it's i sent you the video of like the honda prelude thing whatever that was like 1995 honda prelude flush door handles 100 mechanical you just put your fingers underneath it and you pull and the door opens but no not on the bmw i3 they have to electronically come out like it's 2012 and you're a model s so dumb with the exception of the door

2:18:45Marco Arment:handles i think both the ix3 and the new i3 look probably like incredible cars like yeah i agree

2:18:54Casey Liss:yeah i think these are going to be hits i i think they're good cars i just don't like the styling and i don't like the shape of the steering wheel i also don't like the trapezoid screen but i do like the the the uh the like distant dashboard that stripe thing i think that's actually a good idea lots of other cars have done that i mean Toyota Prius famously started this trend i think of like putting things farther away than you think they would be and i think it does work um yeah and it might be a little tight in the back seat i'll have to wait till i see some tall youtubers get into this thing but um it's nice that they updated their platform i think they have a bright future because they're they're they're as you've noted with the i4 their previous platform which was hacked into their gas car platform was already pretty good and presumably they've learned things since then so i think this this car will be a great car as long as you can you know stay inside it so you don't have to see the outside honestly i the the i3 looks

2:19:44Marco Arment:incredible to me overall like i don't share how much you hate it i think it looks great and i would be very happy to drive that car around i think the like as as i think of like what will my next car be? My current lease has about a year and a half on it. I think I'm going to look very hard at the i3 and the iX3. The i3, it still doesn't have a hatchback, right? It's still like a regular trunk.

2:20:09John Siracusa:Although they apparently showed a touring version, which to us is a wagon. Probably not going to be

2:20:13Marco Arment:in this country.

2:20:14John Siracusa:Probably not here. But it will exist somewhere, allegedly.

2:20:18Marco Arment:Yeah, they always get better models in Europe. But yeah, the iX3 looks just smaller and sleeker enough compared to my ix that it might be nice um but it still has like the utility of the the big lift back trunk which i i do like and use all the time i think even even though i would love to have like one of these regular sedan i3s to drive around most of the time i think i would really hate not having a lift back trunk now because i got so like ever since the model s like i'm so spoiled by having the a big trunk opening it's so useful it's so good i don't think i can really have a car without it anymore and i'm i'm hoping that like whatever the next gen of the i4 maybe we start to see what that starts to look like um because that could be a good future car for me as well but i think this thing looks great yeah i don't know why more people don't

2:21:10Casey Liss:copy what uh tesla did with the s just like the lift back on a sedan is such a good idea everyone should be doing it. I think, who does it? Audi does it. Audi does it. Porsche has, well, they have the weird, the ugly Taycan with the wagon thing.

2:21:26John Siracusa:I mean, the i4 was, the i4 was a liftback, you know, because it's an i4 Grand Coupe.

2:21:31Casey Liss:I think they mostly do it because of NVH, like it's harder to like isolate the cabin and people want a luxury car and yada yada, but it can be done. I just think people, more people should copy it. Yeah, it's a massive advantage. Don't copy the door handles, copy the liftback.

2:21:44John Siracusa:Right, exactly. You