684: It’s Not What Young People Do

18:02Marco Arment:So that's why I do a lot of this stuff like the boring old way with a few simple processes running on some Linux servers that don't need that much from me. It is not cool. It is not sexy. It is not trendy. It is not what young people do. And none of those things matter to me because it works really well for me.

18:20John Siracusa:Now, with that said, you did do a Marco thing. Well, you did more Marco things, I should say, because... It's what I do best. I looked up for the show notes, the Beanstalk D website. And it is exactly the kind of website you would expect for a thing that's been around since the beginning of time. So, yeah, this tracks. But you did another Marco thing, which is you wrote yourself a little app to manage stuff. I did? Yes. Or at least it sure looks like you did. You posted on Mastodon a screenshot of something that says Overcast. Yeah, the Overcast Transcriber.

18:52Marco Arment:Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is the actual thing that is running on the Mac minis. like this is the app that transcribes things that pulls the jobs from the servers and actually you

19:02John Siracusa:know transcribes them oh interesting i'm sorry so this is the app that's actually doing the work oh my mistake no wonder we were confused my apologies yeah one copy runs on every mac mini

19:11Marco Arment:i select i assign each one like which because the the apple speaks transcription api only supports three languages being installed at once on the system for reasons i don't know maybe that made sense on the iPhone. For some reason, it's also enforced on the Mac. But anyway, so it supports six languages, but only supports three of them being installed at once. So I have a simple picker on top to choose which three languages. They all do English, and then they all kind of split the other five languages because there's just there's way more English than any other ones. So that's what that is. And I pick how many jobs I want and I run them.

19:44Marco Arment:And whenever this if this app ever crashes or if the computer reboots, no problem. Launch G just starts it back up again. And it's totally fine and then this app checks in with my server with my main servers each one of these checks in like you know once a minute or something like that and it reports its stats of how many jobs it has done uh in the last minute or whatever um you know so that way how many minutes of podcasts has it transcribed that way the servers can then kind of watch out for anomalies so if for instance one of the mac minis doesn't respond at all it will alert me and i can go reboot it or something that doesn't happen very often but also if one of the mac minis is reporting like a suspiciously high or suspiciously low job count per minute or or transcription minute rate per minute i can then go look take a look and see like something might be wrong there and then the app itself that the overcast transcriber app that you see here that app also tries to monitor itself so if for instance it can't get jobs for a long time for more than a few minutes or if a job never completes and it never refills its jobs after a certain amount of time, it will quit itself and let Longstreet restart it.

20:54Marco Arment:If something weird has gotten wedged somewhere, this kind of thing doesn't happen at very high rates, but when you're running 48 instances of them 24-7 for months, they do occasionally need weird things that sometimes happen. So anyway, that's what that app is.

21:12John Siracusa:That's very cool. And I'm glad you provided a screenshot, which we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Aaron Dibner wrote, given that Marco now has a 48 Mac mini cluster, while they each only have 16 gigs of RAM, it is possible to spread LLMs over multiple Macs these days. We've all probably seen the videos of four Mac studios clustered over Thunderbolt, but you can also do it over Ethernet just a bit slower. And so I presume, John, you put in a link in the show notes to a Beowulf cluster. Can you explain that, please? Oh, that's just the old slash dot thing. Marco remembers this, right? i heard about them i don't think i ever actually have seen one uh the meme was and i'm surprised there was not a like know your meme uh page for this i guess it's so old it's such an old meme that like it's not worth documenting as a meme on the internet but uh beowulf was uh like a we'll put a link to the wikipedia page it was a system where you just take a bunch of commodity servers and then distribute a job across them and you say you'd run linux on these random pcs and you'd be like but now i have five pcs and if i have a job and i can break it up into five pieces these five PCs can work on it and so all the Slashdot nerds back in the 90s were like oh Linux is awesome and Beowulf was awesome and anytime there was any kind of hardware story on Slashdot I don't know when it started but people started posting imagine a Beowulf cluster of these and that just became a meme where people would say it about things that are not computers or whatever uh it was started half serious and became a meme and so Aaron Dippner basically just wrote imagine a Beowulf cluster of these about your mac minis like you could take one job and distribute it to all 48 and they'd all work on it at the same time um and what he's referring to we'll put a link to this in the show notes is uh this thing where apple gave a bunch of youtubers a stack of mac studios you've probably seen them in the thumbnails i think it was like four mac studios with like a little little miniature little cute little uh mac studio rack kind of um and it's to promote their rdma over thunderbolt technology that was added in mac os 26.2 uh we'll link to apple's developer site uh about that tech um what they say about it is rdma over thunderbolt enables low latency communication between thunderbolt 5 hosts for use cases including distributed ai inference using mox and so what the youtubers did with this stack was they got like the biggest model that they could get that wouldn't run on a single mac studio because it didn't have enough ram and they would run it on the four mac studios combining their ram and you know do performance numbers or whatever we'll put links in the show notes to two videos one from alex ziskind uh the title of his video is i ran a trillion parameter ai on a mac and then jeff geerling also has one that says apple didn't have to go this hard but there were others many youtubers got this so if you want to see an example of a technology that aaron is talking about imagine a beowulf cluster of these and it's the same type of deal it's like can you distribute something across multiple computers that wouldn't fit on one and can you do that quickly and obviously doing it over thunderbolt five with machines that are right next to each other is really fast doing it over ethernet is probably a little bit slower but that's what he's pitching here yeah and so the main the main

24:08Marco Arment:downside of this for my use case is that um yes as john said speed of the communication is everything and you know ethernet between these mac minis is just one gigabit because these are the base models so they don't have 10 gigabit ports i also don't have don't have a giant 10 gigabit switch there but you know that could be remedied um but they don't they only have one gigabit ports and these mac minis only have thunderbolt 4 because thunderbolt 5 on the mac mini currently requires the m4 pro chip which like triples the price of the mac mini and does not triple the performance for my use case so i didn't get them so because i have the base models i could only do it over ethernet and that would be probably slow enough that would probably not be worth doing and the pitch for this is that you would use a somehow use some bigger model than what you're using because the model you're using now runs on your mac minis it fits in 16 gigs of ram it's you know runs on the phone like the pitches well what if you wanted to run some more sophisticated model um that wouldn't fit in the ram of a single one you could you could take lop off a portion of your 48 and say this is like this cluster of four is the the big beefy uh transcriber for the top 10 most popular podcasts and we run a bigger model there yeah exactly but right now um this is something that like i'm i'm going to look at these kind of uses in the future especially because like once i'm done transcribing the back catalog for as many podcasts as i can these are going to be at like you know a third to half capacity so i'm going to have a lot of extra computing power and i mentioned before i'm i would definitely want to move some of my heavier tasks from the main servers that are, you know, the main Linux servers, I'd love to move a lot of those tasks to these, you know, to whatever degree that's reasonably possible.

25:57Marco Arment:But that's not going to work for everything. So I'm still going to need a bunch of servers. So I will have to maybe get creative on like, what do I do with this computing power that I have here? And, you know, ideally, like things that can stay within one machine are better because I, you know, it's easier to scale that. it's easier to share code between the iPhone and the servers. So ideally, I would just keep doing more things with Apple's foundation models. And we'll see this summer at WBDC, there might be updates to the foundation models. And maybe they get things like larger context windows, which would make them more useful and a lot of ideas I have on how to use them.

26:35Marco Arment:So we'll see how these go in the future. Right now, they are being criminally underused in the sense that they... Let's see, my current, my memory use, I just pulled one of them up here. One of them that's under like, you know, full transcription load right now is using about seven gigs of its memory of its 16 gigs. So I have about half the memory that I could play with. Also, they are really not using their GPUs much at all. That will change once I move image resizing to them, but it won't change that much. So I think I'm going to have a lot of CPU or a lot of GPU capacity that I could use. and a decent amount of RAM.

27:16Marco Arment:So we'll see how I can play with that over time. But right now, I'm still going through back catalogs. Maybe we'll see what the summer brings.

27:23John Siracusa:John, I would be remiss not to mention SystemX. Do you remember this? Hmm. Give me more context. This is a zillion, I believe it was XSERVs all networked together to be a very impressive. Oh, the Virginia Tech thing? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I didn't know that. I forgot that was the name of it. Is that considered a Beowulf cluster in your mind? Yeah, no, it's exactly the same thing. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. I mean, obviously, Beowulf is a specific piece of software, but it just became a meme of whenever you take a bunch of stuff and connect it together and make it do something that no individual part of it could do.

27:53John Siracusa:Coming all the way back around to Aaron Dibner, who started this whole conversation, Aaron writes, This Apple Insider article is a bit outdated, but the idea is there. It's totally doable for a setup of your kind. And this was, I believe, pre the thing where you can chain them over Thunderbolt. I think this was done via Ethernet, if I'm not mistaken, but you can look and we'll put a link in the show notes. You can look at it for yourself.

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30:17Marco Arment:Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.

30:24John Siracusa:the entire internet wrote in to tell marco about back fleet management advice i did ask for it yeah no well first of all you asked for it second of all it was helpful and i don't think i saw any of them being like man how did you not know everyone was very helpful and very kind so even on marco's behalf i was fascinated reading it i'm sure marco was too and we appreciate it uh but uh apparently there are many many different ways of approaching this i'd like to leave aside the announcement from today, yesterday, whenever it was, for just a moment. But based on what you have read, or maybe you haven't had the time to read anything, what would you say is your summarization of what you've learned?

31:02Marco Arment:So what companies do that have to manage large fleets of Macs, of course, is not setting them all up one by one like I did here. No one does this. No one should do this. What companies do is they have this thing through what I believe, until yesterday was called Apple Business Manager or something like that. There's a lot of words that all sound very similar. But Apple has a business API. You can configure machines to be set up for your business and locked to your business with MDM, which is the framework they use to manage corporate iPhones and iOS devices and Macs. You can buy these things through your Apple business rep, through Apple's business channels, or through certain authorized resellers, and have the machine's serial numbers automatically enroll to your company when they connect to the internet for the first time.

31:51Marco Arment:So you can, they call it like zero touch deployment, I think, so that you can like ship a laptop to a remote employee. And when they plug it in and set it up, it gets activated to the company's management system through Apple.

32:04John Siracusa:That is very cool.

32:05Marco Arment:And gets all the stuff it needs to get right from there, which is very cool. And once you are in these systems, you have full management over them. So you can do things like push software updates and stuff like that. and you can run programs, you can change settings, whatever it is, you can have all that centrally managed. So that is basically what I want. And the only downside is when you already have the machines pre-existing, like I do here, everyone said in order to enroll them into this kind of management, you need to wipe them and you need physical access. So it would be a process of, I would go to the data center one day, bring a big cup of coffee, keep it below the Mac minis, John.

32:46Marco Arment:and just go through like one by one. All right, reset this one, reset this. You know, just take them down one by one, reset them, wipe them, put them in the thing. But before this announcement of Apple Business, which happened yesterday, the day before, yesterday, before this announcement, there was like the second part of it, which was, okay, Apple Business Manager would have like the component of like registering the serial numbers, associating them to a business that had an MDM thing. but then what everyone else did was have their own MDM providers through companies like Jamf, former sponsor of the show a long time ago.

33:24Marco Arment:This is what most big businesses do is they have one of these MDM apps that the problem with those from my use case, and they provide a huge amount of functionality because usually it's not only providing the basics of MDM configuration and stuff like that, but they also usually have additional services they layer on top of it like security packages, stuff like that. The problem is that all of those MDMs, or at least most of them, you're paying something like$6 to$12 per Mac per month. And again, you have 48 Mac minis that literally don't have users. That's not a great selling proposition for me.

34:05Marco Arment:like all of the features of these MDMs that do like, you know, user security management, making sure your users have good passwords and making sure they don't browse weird things on the internet. Like that's all stuff that businesses do need for their computers, but I don't need for these computers. These computers have no user. They run one app. You've seen it now. Like they, it's a very simple arrangement. And what I'm doing right now to keep them up to date their their software i don't really keep up to date yet because that hasn't really had a need yet i guess i'll get there and that's that's why i'm looking at something like like an mdm mainly for os updates but there's one other software package that i use on them that's pretty important casey you're gonna love this it's tail scale also former sponsor maybe current sponsor i don't know um so the way i access these machines because they're all behind the router at the data center.

35:02Marco Arment:So they all run tail scale. And that allows me to say, you know, SSH, you know, into scribe 23. And it just gets me there. So what I do now when I have to update my transcriber app is I do, you know, an archive build on Xcode and I export the binary after it's signed. And I just use SSH to SCP it over to each of these Macs. And part of the SSH script is like, you know, have LaunchD stop the app, SSH the new one into place, have LaunchD start the app again. And it just goes through the 48 servers and just does that to each one in succession. And I can push an app update to all of them in about 30 seconds.

35:46Marco Arment:So I've kind of already built a lot of what an MDM would give me and in a more nerdy way. but what would be even better is if I didn't have to run tailscale on all of these so if the MDM situation can do things like remote desktop or remote viewing remote control if it can do those things and give me network access to them directly without me having to run something like tailscale on them that's great, I don't know that it can do that yet maybe some of them can I haven't had time to look that much but for the most part most of the features that the MDMs offer are mostly things I don't really need.

36:25Marco Arment:So it's not really worth me paying a lot for one of these services. But there are some like really cheap ones. And getting to the announcement now, coincidentally, Apple announced yesterday that they've merged all of their various like business backend services into the new thing just called Apple Business.

36:44John Siracusa:Yeah, so Apple Business is apparently a thing where they're, I guess, doing their own MDM or providing their own sort of solution. I'm a bit fuzzy on it, but let me read a couple of things that John was kind enough to pull out of the newsroom announcement. Apple Today on March 24th announced Apple Business, a new all-in-one platform that includes key services companies need to effortlessly manage devices, reach more customers, equip team members with essential apps and tools, and get support. Apple Business will be available on April 14th as a free service in the U.S. and 200 other countries. Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect.

37:17John Siracusa:Those will no longer be available once Apple Business launches. It's kind of slurping all those up and making one unified interface. It sure seems to me like if I were you, I would at least kick the tires on this first and see what it's got. And then if you need to go the route of like Jamf or something else, then so be it.

37:33Marco Arment:Yeah, that's my current plan is like now that Apple is about to launch. I think they said April 14th. Now that they're about to launch their own first party, like better, more featured version of this, I would rather just use that. and so I will look at that when it comes out. In the meantime, my pile of hacks is fine but I will look at this especially as I approach this summer's beta season. If I do end up wanting to run betas on some or all of these, that's going to be a burden. So having centralized software management will be a lot nicer. So we'll see when the time comes. One suggestion and a lot of other people wrote in my suggestion as well It does seem like you need something probably from Apple that can handle OS updates and stuff like that.

38:23Although the various reports we got about the quality of Apple's previous Apple Business Manager software and their MDM stuff is not all glowing. But, you know, and this is a new product, Apple Business, supposedly. So there might be some growing pains there. But the other part of it, the part where you're SCPing a file onto a bunch of Macs, like everyone. this is where the second piece of advice we got is like unix nerds are saying there's a million you know free open source command line packages for uh configuring a whole bunch of unix servers and yes they're not you know it's a mac but it's also a unix server and if all you have to do with if all you're doing is essentially something that you can do with scp now rather than doing scp in of loop and dealing with that and everything there's a million software packages most of which probably run on the mac that you can try a lot of people suggested ansible there's also cf engine back in the day there was puppet i don't know if it still exists a lot of those things do have a way to run on the mac they're you know they're unix command line things and you have to figure out how to get that installed on the macs but if if you're the only job of that part of the system is oh and by the way there's something that uh that i want to do that i can do from like a shell script or whatever just you can do that outside of apple things and the reason i worry about it having not use these products is like you have a new version of the transcription app that we just talked about before you want to get that to all the machines i'm sure apple business manager has a way to get the new version of your transcription app to all the machines i'm also guessing that it takes its time because in a business environment everyone needs the new version of outlook it rolls out when it rolls out there's no like i want it to go to all 48 machines now now now

40:09Marco Arment:yeah i can't imagine it's taking 30 seconds i i yeah even if they offer that as an option it's just like that's not what those things are made for like you you probably never even want that in a situation where you're deploying to 2000 max you don't want them to all instantly get the new version of outlook you wanted to roll it out so maybe depending on if apple business manager or whatever if apple business has some gaps rather than saying oh now i need one of those commercial MDMs that charges me an amount per Mac per month at least look at like Ansible and some of the other Unixy stuff that basically are a fancy distributed way for you to run Unix commands on a fleet of servers without you having to like deal with the plumbing I mean so my argument so that would be though like I already built that with SSH and a shell script like it's you know but like it's just you know how good is your error checking and how how parallelized is it how fast can it do all 48 machines yada yada like there's a reason these things exist people things like puppet sprang into existence because people used to write scripts that would loop over things and distribute tar balls and untar them and do you know like they and then they made products out of that because doing it manually kind of sucks yeah i mean and again like this is the kind of thing like what your needs are determines a lot about what the you know what the solution here should be my needs are so simple here that if all it's going to save me doing is like you know right now like i i have just a simple you know text file that's about 30 lines long that is my instructions for setting up a new mac mini and there's not much it's not that hard you know it's like i said i changed like five settings and you know mostly about power management like stay on really stay on no really always stay on and and you know give it my ssh public key and say all all right, accept anything from this, go.

41:59Marco Arment:Oh, and turn on a remote desktop. That's about it. That's roughly all I do. If something is like, well, you can have more control over it by installing this different product. Okay, but right now I install no different products and I have all the control I need. So to me, I would say that additional complexity, even if the product is free, setting aside any kind of cost, The additional complexity of having another thing being involved, that's another moving part, that's another company that can go out of business or another thing I have to keep updated or that might break in three years with new OS update that Apple gives or whatever.

42:38Marco Arment:Every one of those moving pieces I evaluate, like, is this giving me enough benefit over my current situation to be worth its additional risks and complexity? and because my needs for these are so simple the answer to that for a lot of these things is no now not for everything and again like software updates are the big thing that that i definitely would like to be automated better but any adding any other layers any other packages any other products they all have to pass that test before they're gonna be worth it for me and they're gonna be worth it for a lot of businesses before they're gonna be worth it for me yeah i wasn't suggesting you get rid of your little 30 line thing that you run i was suggesting you just get something else to be the plumbing to run your 30 line thing that's it because you know again if you just it'll do it more in parallel they can monitor if it's been successfully done on all the machines if you update the machines it will immediately redo it because it'll see that it hasn't been done that type of thing that's that's what you're getting it's just the plumbing it's basically a fancy uh remotely run a bunch of commands on a bunch of machines for me and make sure that uh if they have those settings ever get changed or if anything changes in the machines that you set them back to the way they were and it's also a fancy plumbing way to say oh and if there's some files you want to be on those machines like your app uh just tell me where it is and i'll make sure it's so the latest version is always on all the machines and that's what you'd be getting i haven't actually used ansible myself i have used puppet and i hated it so there is you know like there's there's something to be said for doing it all yourself but uh if it turns out to be tedious and you're spending a lot of time dealing with that uh those unique i would what i'm saying is I would look at those unique things before I would look at one of the fancier MDMs.

44:14All right.

44:15John Siracusa:Anything else with regard to Overcast?

44:18Marco Arment:No, I think I'm just, I'm working through all the, you know, bugs and reports and feed. The other thing is I said that, you know, that I was, I had spent a huge amount of time last summer getting an algorithm to fingerprint the audio so that I can align it around dynamic ad insertion. I did not realize that ShazamKit was an API and it offers exactly that functionality. Oh no. So I haven't actually, like I am going to try it. I'm going to see like, you know, is their signature better than mine? Like, is there fingerprinting? Is it better? I don't actually know. So I'm going to experiment. I'm not going to do that like this week or anything, but sometime soon I'm going to experiment with that to see like, should I basically start using their alignment instead or in addition to mine.

45:08Marco Arment:But that was kind of a little bit like, oh no, did I spend months doing something from scratch that Apple has an API to do? We'll see.

45:18John Siracusa:I know Guy Rambeau had reached out to us to tell us about Shazam Kid. Perhaps you heard it from others as well.

45:24Marco Arment:Yes, that's right. It was from Guy. That is indeed where I heard about it. I'm like, oh no. But we'll see. So part of my fingerprinting algorithm is it has to be very low granularity of time. Like if the block size it's working on is like a 10 or 15 second chunk, that might not be good enough for what I'm doing here. Like what my fingerprinting, the sample resolution for it is something like a quarter of a second. and it also has to be a small enough data set that like whatever the fingerprint that you generate for an entire podcast, it has to be a reasonable size. It can't be like many megabytes of data if you're going to do that resolution across a three-hour show, you know.

46:15Marco Arment:So I'll see, you know, I don't know what exactly their data is stored and what resolution it is. So that's all going to be part of the experimentation phase and see like, you know, should I switch to that or not? We'll depend on things like that.

46:27John Siracusa:and in a final piece of follow-up for today airpods max in their popularity in new york you had commented that everyone and their mom has a airpods max in the new york metro area these days uh how is that possible especially when some of these people are kids that you know like 15 16 year old kids or whatever uh apparently all of them or maybe most of them anyway are fakes which

46:48Marco Arment:i did not know yeah i so many people have written in to say either they either they suspect they're fakes or like they live in manhattan and they see that they're fakes and i can i can verify when i'm in manhattan about about once a week uh i do see like the you know the guys on the streets that sell all like the fake luxury goods on those little tables yeah there's always airpods max lookalikes on those tables too and every like all like the store windows that are like the like the random little electronic stores there you look and you're like i bet most of the stuff in there is probably knockoffs like you know they also all have airpods max look alike headphones so i'm sure many airpods max looking fakes are sold um but i i'll tell you i'll be damned if i can spot one like people say like oh you can you can tell they look cheaper their finish is wrong they have a plastic crown like different different things people have told us to like try to spot them but at the distances that you know i'm not going to like you know hover over someone's shoulder and start eyeing the details of their digital crown to see like, hey, is that plastic or metal?

47:53Marco Arment:Can I tap that for a second? You know, like I'm not going to, you know, at regular distances, I can't tell. So I assume, I'm sure lots of them are fakes, but I also think a lot of people are probably buying them because they are like visually iconic and Apple is still selling them. And, you know, if Apple wasn't selling these, you know, in any meaningful quantity, they wouldn't have even given them the two half-butted updates they did give them. They would have had no update forever. So someone's buying them. But yeah, I bet a bunch of them are fake.

48:28John Siracusa:We are sponsored this week by Babble On. So if you've ever shipped an app internationally, you know that localization pretty much goes one or two ways. You can ship your localizations via strings or, God help you, a spreadsheet to some faceless company that has 80 million salespeople and three translators. And then forever later, you get translations that sound, I don't know, something like an office printer's mad at you. But hey, at least they're in Japanese. Or option two, and you're probably going to want to go with option two. You work with Babylon. They're a small, dedicated localization team.

49:01John Siracusa:You can talk to them in Slack, deliver strings during a sprint, and get answers quickly when something in your UI breaks. So I've been working with Babylon, and that's Babel-on. Get it? Very well done. I've been working with them to do localization for call sheet for Korean and Japanese. And it's been really, really great. I said to them, hey, I've already got all my localization files in this public GitHub repo. Do you want me to send them to you myself? Or can you just slurp those up? And they said, no problem. We'll slurp them up. And they even offered to jump in Slack with me. And I said, OK, that sounds great.

49:31John Siracusa:And I figured, to be honest with you, that I was getting the white glove treatment because of the whole ad read that we're in the middle of and all that. But no, they assured me this is their normal operating procedure. And not only that, when they started looking at these translations in the context of the test flight, after I added them, of course, there were a handful of times that they said, oh, you know what? Now that we see this in context, I don't think we gave you the best possible option. Let's go back and redo this one or that one. It's been really, really great to work with them. And my Japanese and Korean localizations should be excellent now.

50:02John Siracusa:So Babylon has 150 professional translators that only do localization. You pay per word. Everything else is included free, including their hosting and backend. You can sync your xlifts, schlifts, schlifts, I don't know what you call these things, with GitHub or any other repo. They'll QA some stuff. They'll work with you on Slack. They've been doing this for 22 years. So if your app is ready to go global, or if you're tired of fixing translations after the fact, Babble On will help you ship localizations that won't make your international users feel gross. Visit iBabbleOn.com slash ATP for 10 % off your translations forever.

50:33John Siracusa:That's I-B-A-B-B-L-E-O-N.com slash ATP for 10 % off your translations forever. Thank you to Babylon for sponsoring the show.

50:45John Siracusa:WWDC 2026 has been announced. It is June 8th through 12th, so happy birthday, Marco. Anyways, suffice to say, June 8th through 12th, apparently in episode 673 back in January, which for my purposes is like 700 years ago, we talked about what we were looking forward to in 26th. I have zero recollection of what I said, but um i i don't know i'm sure there are things i mean there are definitely things i'm looking forward to but nothing is like leaping out at me at right this moment so john other than the mac pro i'm not looking forward to that there's nothing to look forward to no i i think best

51:23Marco Arment:case scenario the mac pro gets killed wbc yeah i mean i don't understand why they haven't killed yet i don't know what they're waiting for but anyway well they're waiting for the mac studio like that's but it's by far the most likely scenario that like the mac the mac studio will be updated at some point in the future and at that time they will just continue the mac pro like that i think that is the most likely way this goes yeah i don't understand why they're waiting though it's not as if the mac pro is filling some need waiting for the the mac studio to replace it like you know what i mean it just doesn't make any anyway yeah i what i remember from the january episode is we were talking about like thing tech things for the entire year narrowing it to wwdc i think the subset of things that i talked about on that episode are still basically the same i'm still looking forward to m5 ultra or whatever whatever new chip that they haven't yet announced and presumably that will be in a max studio and i'm looking forward to both because i'm interested and also because i'm probably going to buy one so i'm kind of you know was looking forward to it now kind of a little bit scared about how much it's going to cost to get that eight terabyte ssd and the amount of ram we're going to want we'll see how that goes and then the other thing that i also talked about i think in the january episode was um let's see how apple does with their ai stuff like they were supposed to like roll out a bunch of new series stuff in supposedly 26.4 which was just released but notice it didn't arrive in 26.4 in fact we had an item in the show notes that just kept getting pushed off forever that was basically like hey remember apple's dates that it set for itself that they were going to do some serious stuff in 26 point something and then more in 27 well it looks like they're missing the 26 something date uh and so maybe it's just we're just waiting for wwc for siri not to suck as bad um so that's it uh if siri can get any better and uh m5 ultra max studio hell even m5 max max studio even if it's not if there's no ultra at all just the m5 max max studio and see how that's priced and for me to figure out what i'm going to get that's that's what i'm looking forward to slash dreading i i feel like the the obvious answer here is okay

53:14John Siracusa:what is the ai story i mean that's the the elephant in the room right and i don't know on the one side i'm i'm not sure what it is that i want them to tell me with regard to the ai story But then again, Apple is so very good at telling me, oh, you never know. You needed blank, but you did. And then I say, yes, you're right. I absolutely did. What you want them to tell you is Siri doesn't suck anymore. That's what we're all waiting for is just because almost I always feel like everything else, like the world is passing them by and all the other areas. Like it doesn't need Apple's help to do any stuff.

53:46People are doing it anyway. But Siri is the one thing that the world can't make better. Only Apple can. Only Apple in the way that they never mean it. only Apple can do that, which is we're all stuck with Siri until Apple fixes it.

53:59John Siracusa:It's so true. With regard to development tools and things like that, I think there's a couple of things that I'd really look forward to, but I'm skeptical that any or all of these will happen. Number one, I would love them to start really leaning into documentation even more. They've been doing better. No, no, they've been doing better. They really have. You make fun of me with Mac Pro Hope. Geez. That's true. You're right. You are not wrong about that, John. I really want to argue with you, but you are 100 % correct.

54:30Marco Arment:That's like hoping for lower app store fees. Good luck.

54:33John Siracusa:You're both right. You're both right. I cannot argue. But a man can dream. So, yeah. So, I mean, I'd love them. I mean, I don't think they would ever come out and say, hey, we're actually going to write documentation now. But it would be cool if they, you know, just did a better job. And again, in their defense, they've been getting better and better over the years. But there's still a long way to go.

54:51Marco Arment:Yeah, getting better isn't better. Right, exactly. Getting better is a direction, but it does not express the position. Yeah, speaking of documentation, just one of the things that's been bothering me lately, because I've been really sort of digging down to some really minor stuff in my apps, because I'm not adding major features and just looking for really obscure bugs and stuff. Can you imagine if Apple wrote in its documentation what threads things happen on in the functions that they provide and the APIs they provide. Oh my God. Because it's really important for me to know, hey, hey, what thread is that callback going to be called on?

55:28Hey, when this block gets called, what thread, what thread is it? And you can guess and you can check, but if you check at runtime, it's like, it seems like this is always called on the main thread. Is that always going to be called on the main thread? Am I just getting lucky? That would be an example of where you would add documentation or give us a source code, one or the other, please, Apple.

55:46John Siracusa:Yeah, definitely. Another thing I'd like is, please, Apple, please, for the love of all that is good and holy in the world, can you make tab management in Xcode make any f***ing sense whatsoever? No, that's not possible. Any sense. Any amount of sense. It has never made sense to me. Please, for the love of God, anything would work other than what you've got right now and the seven tries you made before it because, oh my God, tabs in Xcode, they're the bane of my existence. Maybe I'm a moron. I don't know. I don't think a lot of people are very enthusiastic about this, but it drives me nuts literally every time I do my job.

56:22It's just ignore the tabs and pretend they don't exist. I have tab blindness in Xcode. I just ignore them. I don't even see that strip of the UI. I don't interact with it. It is dead to me.

56:31Marco Arment:If only. Yeah, because I've never once learned how to navigate via tab. So I just don't. I navigate from the sidebar only. Yeah. The only thing I do with tabs is I have my own custom keyboard shortcut, which I'm really regretting because they have no way to sync these. But anyway, I have my own custom keyboard shortcut that I have to constantly change as they mess with the tab system, which adds a second pane with the same file that I'm editing to my right. And then I use the X to close it. That's my only interaction with that bar.

56:58John Siracusa:Yeah, well, make it make sense, Apple, please. And then, you know, obviously, just in general, new APIs are fun, especially if they're, you know, mostly fully fleshed out. But that being said, I would also love for Apple to just tell us, you know what, we've gone through and we have improved all the existing APIs. The things that aren't async await friendly already now are. I would love the proverbial snow leopard year for APIs as well. But again, I'm barking up a tree that they'll never commit to this. But we'll see. I don't know. What do you think, Marco?

57:31Marco Arment:For me, I really just want to see the AI tools keep going.

57:38John Siracusa:Yes, that's a good call.

57:40Marco Arment:What they added last year, the first year of, quote, Apple intelligence was for developers, Nothing. Like, we had nothing that we could possibly do for iOS 18. Last year with iOS 26, they gave us a lot of APIs that I think overall look pretty good. Most developers I know have not had a ton of time to build with them, and I certainly haven't for the most part, because Liquid Glass really took up a lot of our resources and a lot of our time. And, you know, the one big one, obviously, that I did use was the speech transcriber API, which is great. you know a couple of weird little things here like if you've if you've seen a podcast that uses the word billion in a sentence how how the speech transcriber transcribes the word billion is one zero zero zero zero zero zero zero like whatever whatever the number it's like a one follow by like nine that's how it that's and so you see this with no commas no thousand separators so you see this one giant you know this one followed by nine zeros in the middle of a sentence it's hilarious i just got a notification today that said you're getting a call from one billion two hundred thousand it read out a phone number as a just a long integer yeah that's actually that's one of my long-standing gripes is like you know oftentimes i'm wearing airpods when a message comes in and it will announce the message and it never knows what numbers are even like it'll be reading an address to me and it'll read the zip code as like 1 ,005 but the best is when it reads out tracking numbers from shipment notifications to you.

59:20Marco Arment:Oh yeah, those are long. It'll read through the whole thing. Oh my god. Anyway, whatever part of machine learning or Siri is being used to announce messages to you in AirPods is really primitive and I would love for that to get better. That's separate. This is a diversion from my other main topic because whatever that API is that's generating that speech is really dumb and also unreliable. Like still, I will still like I'll have a message, you know, voodoo, so-and-so has sent you a message, but I can't read it. And I go and look and it's like a regular sentence. I'm like, why? You couldn't read that?

1:00:00Marco Arment:What something broke? Or it'll say, so-and-so sent you a message and it'll start reading it and it'll just stop. like halfway through a sentence and just fail okay thanks i guess anyway that that area needs attention it's needed for a long time anyway but what i'm what i'm looking forward to for wbc continued progress on the ai related apis for developers last year was a great start we still are nowhere near the vision of apple intelligence originally with like the app intent powered system to do all that stuff that we are we are constantly rumored to get it it's like next year is going to be the year of linux on the desktop next year is going to be finally the the os release that we get the app intent based siri intelligence system we'll see if that comes out i you know there's a lot still to do in terms of So integrating AI with the system, giving developers ways to integrate AI into our own apps, and making the AI that's tying all this together better.

1:01:03Marco Arment:We are in the infancy of that process on Apple's platforms. so as that gets better we are going to be able to make much better apps and our customers will be able to have much better experiences and our apps will be able to do better things with the system and with other apps through AI integrations and everything but right now we are almost nowhere along that path so that's what I really want to see give me the next step on that path what else can we now do with AI on Apple's platforms without like bundling in our entire bundling a 3 gig model with our apps. If we just use Apple's platform, what can we do now that we couldn't do before?

1:01:45Marco Arment:What limits are raised? What new capabilities are added? And then finally, I just really want to see some revision to Liquid Glass. Now I know, I know, we talked about it over time last week. I know that we're not going to have a huge undoing. They're not going to throw it all in the trash and give us something that looks like iOS 18 again. That's fine. That's not what I'm asking for. And I don't think that's not what most people are asking for. What I want is revision, improvement, iteration on the concept of Liquid Glass. The number one thing I want to see is there should never be a common pattern in Apple's stock UI that puts blurry text under other text I'm trying to read.

1:02:32Marco Arment:Now, that's not all of Liquid Glass. the biggest offender here is bars text like toolbars and navigation bars navigation bars in ios parlance are the bars on top of a screen with the title bar and a couple of buttons and text that scrolls under it toolbars are the same thing at the bottom of the screen where you have buttons in the bottom with liquid glass there are no bars anymore your content just blurs and scrolls under everything that's not helping anybody and when most people have trouble with liquid glass, either conceptually or really like in terms of reading it, that's like the number one thing on the hit list is the lack of solid or mostly solid bars and having to blur text under other text, which makes it difficult to read.

1:03:19Marco Arment:That is not an easy problem to solve. With the design language they have chosen, that's going to require a decent amount of design to really to go back to some kind of defined bar with a defined edge and then the bar itself maybe is made of frosted glass or something you know and pretty heavily frosted hopefully and that would that would alleviate almost the entire problem like if they just made bars a defined area with a border that ended and a background that is mostly mostly solid you fix this problem i would be shocked if they did that but if you uh look in mac os 26.4 they did do something that you can see in system settings app lots of people used to post uh you know screenshots of the system settings app which has a search field on top of the left sidebar and as you scroll the left sidebar the left sidebar has text items like general sound whatever that text would scroll underneath the search field and as soon as you scrolled anywhere other than at the very, very top where basically where there was any text below the search field.

1:04:24The search field has placeholder text that says search. And then you could also read whatever the item was that was underneath it from the sidebar that had scrolled up there. And so it was like search with a word superimposed on it. And then you would type into that field and it was terrible. In 26.4, the search field is a lot more frosty and you can no longer read the text underneath it. You can still see some of the text through it. You can tell the text is there. you can see a black shadow scroll by as the text goes underneath it because it's real important that you do that for some reason but you can't read the text anymore so that's my guess of what they'll do in 27 is not actually have a defined bar which i agree would be way better but i my hopes are my expectations are set at the 26.4 level which is like no they're not going to bring back bars because they're too stubborn and it would be too hard but what they will do is crank up the frost dial and make it so that you can't literally read text that's underneath controls

1:05:18Marco Arment:i mean that that will help it is not a solution it is a band-aid no i agree but i think it's what they'll do yeah agree yeah like i i'm with you like i i am not this is not something i'm optimistic about this is not this is a wish not an expectation you're looking forward to but we're ready to be disappointed like casey with the documentation that's it yeah this is yeah i'd say i have similar odds of success here. I trust that Apple has really good design talent. And I know that they could make defined bars look good and look modern. It isn't, we don't have to like... It's been done many times before by Apple.

1:06:00Marco Arment:Yeah. And you can keep, like, so much of the liquid glass design language is not necessarily at odds with that. you could keep so much of how controls look, toolbars, buttons, the animation, the way they blob up and blob back together. And like so many of those things are totally doable on a mostly solid bar with a border. Like, and even if the whole bar could be a capsule, who cares? Like there's so many different ways you could do it and you could make the bar frosted. You can make whatever you want it to do. There are ways to design this, to make it look fresh and modern. It doesn't have to look old.

1:06:40Marco Arment:And the old way wasn't the only way to do it. They can do it. There's lots of options. It just takes the will and maybe the humility to some degree to realize like, okay, this direction of liquid glass has too many problems in real life. Let's rethink some of that. And you don't need to throw away the whole language to do it. So anyway, that's what I would hope to see is those two big pillars, better AI APIs and liquid glass being more usable. and I think I'll get probably both of those things, but probably neither one done to the level I want it to be done.

1:07:15John Siracusa:Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'm interested to see how this goes. I think to some degree there's, you know, what is the term of phrase from Godfather settling the family debts or whatever it is?

1:07:27Marco Arment:I'm settling all family toolbars.

1:07:31John Siracusa:They need to do that with Siri. I concur with you that I actually, especially on iOS, I mostly like liquid glass, but the thing that drives me nuts is the toolbar treatment. I mean, there's other things as well, but the thing that drives me nuts the most often is that I am looking directly through a toolbar and don't even know it. And so I completely agree with you there, Marco. But we'll see. I mean, time will tell. I'm excited to see what happens. I'm excited for us to do our Monday night show, as we always do. As far as I know, all of us will be remote, so I'm not trying to quietly announce anything.

1:08:02John Siracusa:But anyways, it should be fun. And I'm curious to see what Apple does.

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1:09:08Marco Arment:But DeleteMe specializes in this. So what you do is you sign up for DeleteMe and they, on an ongoing basis, will go around and make sure that your info is opted out and taken down of as many data broker sites as they can find. As new sites crop up, they figure out their opt-outs and they add them to the procedure. So you don't have to keep up with it yourself. It's a great service. I personally went around looking for one of these services a few years ago, and I found they were highly recommended. In fact, the New York Times Wirecutter named Delete Me their top pick for such services. And this was before they were a sponsor.

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1:10:11John Siracusa:All right, let's do some Ask ATP. We haven't had the opportunity to do that in a little while. And we're starting with something that could have been written by Casey List, but was actually been written by Philip Miller, who writes, Peskies have me befuddled. Amen, brother. When they first emerged, I took a wait-and-see approach, and that's where I remain today. Again, amen, brother. Even though many sites and services pressure me to adopt passkeys. Are all three of you fully embracing passkeys now? What are the biggest benefits of passkeys for someone like me who's a faithful user of tools like 1Password for managing traditional passwords and two-factor codes?

1:10:43John Siracusa:What are the real risks of passkeys? Am I being foolish to worry about scenarios where my Apple devices are all lost in a house fire? Now I'm locked out of every account? With 1Password, everything is backed up in the cloud, and I can keep my emergency logging credentials on a single sheet of paper in a safe deposit box. Are passkeys equally resilient? And I will also add a fourth question. What about family passwords? My understanding is that you can share passkeys, or maybe not originally, but certainly now. But there's a lot of stuff that, you know, one of the great things about 1Password is that it has family vaults, or you can get a family account with a family vault, where, you know, Aaron and I will share a bunch, if not most, of our passwords.

1:11:19John Siracusa:so I know nothing about this even though I should I don't know Marco if you have thoughts on this and let's start with you if so but I'd very much like to hear John's perspective as well

1:11:29Marco Arment:I have some thoughts and then we'll kick it to John who will have the right answers the way I've embraced passkeys is when a website asks me hey you want to make a passkey it's much better blah blah blah I will usually at that point say yes and do my fingerprint or whatever I have also found that as I am still bouncing between Apple passwords and 1Password, although more 1Password these days since I'm still using Chrome as my default desktop browser, the way both of them handle passkeys is fine. With Apple, you go to a website, if it wants a passkey, it'll show you the standard touch ID, face ID prompt, and you authenticate that way and it gets you in.

1:12:12Marco Arment:With 1Password, if you have the browser extension, if it's unlocked already, it'll just show a little thing in the upper right corner and it's like you want to use the passkey click to log in you click to log in and it logs you in um both of those are fine the one password one is i think a little more convenient um just you know providing the security in a different way but it's they're both fine my main issue with passkeys is that it's kind of like that old xkcd comic that's like we have too many standards here i made a new standard from a like technical and security perspective, they're amazing.

1:12:46Marco Arment:They're way better than everything we had before. But from the actual user experience of using them in practice most of the time, it's just another thing that gets added to the pile of things that we are supposed to keep track of and, you know, having a password manager or something and, you know, try to share maybe with mixed success with family members or coworkers or whatever. It can be done very well. In an ideal implementation of passkeys, both on the platform side and on the website side they're better than everything else. The main downside with passkeys so far is that the way that I see them being implemented by websites and services is not as a replacement for passwords but as a replacement for two-factor.

1:13:36Marco Arment:So it's actually just taking this other complex thing and replacing it with a different complex thing. Now, the security of a passkey is way better than most of those other systems or alternatives to it. But the user experience of it is still really clunky in a lot of places. And ideally, it would replace the entire login. Like ideally, you could just have it like automatically, if you have a passkey for the site you're on and it shows you a login screen, it just prompts you to use it and it logs you in all the way. That would be the ideal case. and you occasionally see sites like that, but it's not the common case.

1:14:15Marco Arment:So that's kind of my kind of mixed opinion of them is that they are a great technology that solves a lot of problems. They also create a lot of inconvenience in certain contexts and they are not really making logins on websites that much easier in practice, not because of their inherent technology, because of the implementation decisions of those websites. Yeah, I've really come around on past keys for the past six months or so um i was always trying them out whenever they were offered or whatever but now having uh implemented them or having uh asked uh coding agents to implement them for me more precisely um and seeing all the details there and and all the different trade-offs and everything um i still think implementing them is the most annoying part of fast keys because the input like if they want to get better adoption on websites and stuff they should really you know streamline that and work harder to give like friendly libraries that are easy to use with good documentation casey um but anyway the coding agents can do it so it's not that bad um but just a quicker view like what's good about passkeys why would you want to use them instead of passwords or whatever they have a bunch of security advantages that uh passwords and two-factor stuff are never going to be able to match just because they're inherent in the technology the first is that when you use a password on a website the server stores something on its side that could potentially compromise you you hope they don't just store your password in plain text but as we've seen some websites do that and you have no way of knowing if the website is incompetent in storing your passwords in plain text so there's that second so they don't store it in plain text let's say they install a store encrypted hash of your password or they should be doing what algorithm are they using for it has the algorithm been broken was the algorithm secure 10 years ago but now it's not anymore and all this is relevant because websites get hacked and what people leak from them is account information which is usually your email address which whatever people don't like it to leak but you know your email address is not a secret uh but also some hashed thing for your password and you're like well that's secure they can't get my password from that can they well again what algorithm are they using how maybe they can't get it now but three years from now they'll be able to do it with some nvidia gpu or something that can crack it pass keys do not store secret information on the server again you're assuming that they're implemented in the same way but i can tell you that pass keys don't involve the server storing something that is secret the server what the servers store it's public information they store your public key it is anyone can have it it's not a secret you can give it to the world and they use that to verify through this protocol that you're being signed in or whatever um so if a website gets hacked the only thing they can leak about you is your email address which again i don't think is actually secret because spammers just spam every email address in the entire world they just go through every combination of letters numbers like anyway um so that's good second thing is you don't have to make a human decision about where to enter something like a two-factor code or a password you're not involved in that process the passkey system has the computer do that for you yes you're still vulnerable to like dns poisoning or something else but the point is social engineering is how people get hacked they throw up something in front of them that looks like a web page for the website they're familiar with and they just blindly enter their password in there and yes password managers like one password which by the way is a current and former sponsor and the reason we recommend them is you should be using a password manager because they will automate a lot of this for you but you can always manually and people know how to do it because they're like oh i don't you know the password autofill is not working or whatever and people learn you can right click and do autofill or they i've seen even technically non-savvy people go find their password in whatever their password thing is usually apple passwords or whatever and copy and paste it into a text field people do that today because they have to because it doesn't you know autofill isn't everywhere or they don't know you can right click and autofill on the mac and recent versions of mac west so they make human decisions about where to put things like their two-factor code and their password which is why every two-factor code comes with an all-cap screaming at you saying don't show this to anybody we'll never ask you for your two-factor because it's so insecure people get social engineered all the time pass keys will never make you make a decision about where to put things it's automated based on the identity of the server as verified by tls blah blah again dns poisoning and man in the middle and stuff like that that's outside the scope but the point is that will obviously work with all the other uh all the other password systems as well but they don't ask you to make that decision so this whole realm of social engineering is eliminated because humans don't can't literally can't and don't decide where to put their credentials and that prevents you from screwing yourself when you get like phished or whatever and you think it's a regular login screen um and then finally they're secure i think this is one of the the big advantage is that starts to shade into the social which is for most accounts these days like if it's something important it's like okay you have a username and you have a good you know generated long complicated password that's stored in a password manager of your choosing right and also a second factor to make it even more secure and that second factor sometimes they make it do sms which is incredibly insecure and websites demand that you do it but a lot of places let you use an authenticator app like apple passwords or authy or one password or a million other apps that will that are better than sms and they'll do that you know six digit code or whatever and they need those two factors because there are so many other vulnerabilities in terms of phishing and getting your password cracked or reusing passwords and all sorts of stuff like that but they need a second factor pass keys are secure enough that you don't need a second factor and nothing drives me more crazy than having to log in a two-step process i don't want to get an email and enter code and do a thing even on sites where i have a password they insist on like mailing me a login like it's like what's the point of me having a password like just let me pick what i want to log in with but multiple steps are annoying which is why when i did all my personal sites i use passkeys only because it is a one-step login process there's no second screen after you log in with a passkey where it should ask you for a two-factor now to marco's point lots of websites say oh no we're We're going to we're going to use the pass keys as a second factor or we're going to make you pass key login and then ask you for an SMS code.

1:20:36It's like, why? Why? So there's a learning curve there. But the potential is because they are secure enough for all the reasons that I said before, they can be the only factor which simplifies login. So every website, every web service that I use that lets me only use a pass key to log in. I'm like, thank you. Thank you. This is the way it should work. And there's not many of them. And it's taking a long time. but i see progress i mean hell atp.fm does it now you can choose to use a password a passkey or you know neither one of those or an email login like you do all those things now there's still the question of like okay but if you can do email resets for forgot password doesn't that make passkeys less secure blah blah i'm like don't don't let perfect be the enemy of good passkeys are i to answer the first question are you embracing them i am embracing them to the extent that websites will let me i'm embracing it with the websites that i maintain that i build for myself my little toy things and every time they are there i always use them and i you know don't like it when they're not the only factor to log in but they can be they can be and i feel good about them being that and you can you can share them um with like apple passwords you can have family passwords and pass keys and stuff like that and it's good about and one password did the same deal and it's good about like most of the browsers are good these days when you log in it's like well what if i have more than one passkey to a website it will let you pick and you know they're identified by like email address or username or whatever so you can have multiple pass keys to a website and it's you know everything's great and in terms of like the failure scenario losing stuff like like the name one password again current and former sponsor you can have one password that you actually remember to unlock your password vault same thing with iCloud keychain Apple's password manager maybe that's the one password that you should actually memorize and have it be complicated don't have it be simple because that is sort of the keys to the kingdom there what if your house is on fire what if you lose all your devices what if you're on vacation your phone falls into the ocean what am i going to do this is one of the complaints i hear about pass keys it's like i can't just write it down like a password i can't just print out a piece of paper with a password on and have it there well first of all you can write down your like apple id password which is the keys to your you know iCloud keychain you can write down your one password password and put it in a safe deposit box or whatever so you can do that but second of all most sites even if they do like passkey is your only login will also give you backup codes which is like print these out and in case of fire like put these in a safe deposit box in a remote location on a piece of paper and a lot of them will force you to prove that you wrote them down somewhere by asking you to enter them or whatever later you only see them once and you're never going to see them again those are your like lifelines it's not you like people like i want to i want to see my passkey i want to see the like the giant base 64 you know like the passkey systems hide that from you as much as possible and the reason they hide it is not because they're trying to lock you in or whatever the reason they hide it is because they never want a user to be able to get at that because if users can get at that people will fish it people will say oh we're having trouble with our passkey login, go grab your private key from your password manager and paste it into this text field and people will do it.

1:23:42So that's why they make it basically impossible for a regular person to get at that data. But websites with accounts almost, especially if they're important and they're technically decent, almost always have backup codes. Print out your backup codes, store them off site somewhere, have multiple copies of them in physically secure locations. so if everything burns down and you lose every single one of your devices and you're like how am i gonna restore my digital world backup codes is the answer and also email-based passkey password resets but if you really get hacked or something and you can't get your email backup codes backup codes are the answer so yeah i'm i'm uh enthusiastic about passkeys i was less enthusiastic when they first rolled out but again like i said now having implemented them a few times and using them more every time I find a site that uses one, like, yes, yes, more of this.

1:24:31Just this one thing and nothing else, and I feel good about them.

1:24:34John Siracusa:All right. Well, it sounds like I'm going to need to start embracing them then. I mean, you probably already are, but it's like Marco said, but if the site you use makes you use it as a second factor or something like that, you just have to wait or maybe send them an email and say, hey, I wish you did something different. Yeah. John Fabridius writes, do you think that the eight gigs of RAM constraint in the MacBook Neo helps keep or make macOS lean, a self-imposed limitation that can prevent lazy bloat? Or is the iOS team cursing the hardware, cost-cutting people? Well, probably a little of both, right?

1:25:06John Siracusa:I don't know. I will say that I'm friends with a handful of Apple engineers. And without disclosing, and they've never told me anything secret, but without blowing up their spot or anything, I will say that all of them talk about perf or performance a lot. like you know just oh i've been working on some perf stuff lately and that's all they'll ever tell me it's never anything more than that but i hear that not infrequently and if you think about it you know if things perform well and maybe not specifically around ram but if things perform well that can also reduce like a battery drain and strain and so on so maybe john's up you got a point here but i think apple just genuinely really cares about this stuff irrespective of the fact that they have low RAM devices still floating around in the world.

1:25:56Marco Arment:Yeah, I think the main thing to keep in mind here is that when you look at where RAM goes on a Mac, macOS is not what you have to worry about. What you have to worry about is all the third-party apps, especially apps that use things like the web frameworks like Electron and stuff like that. so you have you know chrome itself chrome is a big you know resource hog compared to safari in most ways and then all of the all the electron based apps they just gobble up ram like crazy there's not a lot apple can do about that really you know the os does its best but for the most part that's what you have to worry about and now that being said like when you look at the when you're designing an app like that you look at the installed base of what people actually use and if computers that many people use are going to run that kind of app very slowly and it's going to bloat their computers up um you don't care because the entire industry doesn't care and you just have to suck it up as the user you like you know you want to think that they would look at you know the entire field of computers out there and be like should we maybe not use all the RAM in the world?

1:27:11Marco Arment:Should we maybe put a second of effort into not duplicating this thing over here? Nope. Nope. No one thinks that way at all. No one pays attention. Not a single software developer ever cares about that kind of stuff when making things like, you know, various electron apps and things like that. So, like, Apple does care a lot. No one else does. Yes, the 8 gig RAM constraint in the MacBook Neo keeps macOS lean, but macOS wasn't your problem. The problem is everyone else, and they're going to do whatever they're going to do. And the best thing macOS can do is have really good swap and virtual memory support.

1:27:45Marco Arment:And it does. MacOS can use a lot of memory, especially when things run away. But the real question is, and this was the question when the Neo came out when we were discussing it. If you're going to roll out a brand new computer in 2026 with 8 gigs of RAM, how long will macOS run on that computer? Because that's the question. Like, I don't think their Apple will feel constrained to keep macOS lean because they need it to run on the Neo. I think they'll decide based on wherever macOS is going, how long the Neo will be supported. And I'm sure it'll be supported for years because like not being able to run on the Neo, like, oh, you can't even boot macOS with 8 gigs.

1:28:23No, it's fine. You'll always be able to boot it. But like, there is a certain point where they'll add some feature to macOS 31 or something. They'll be like, well, this feature, we just can't fit it in the Neo. and at that point the neo will no longer run mac os 31 it'll it'll 30 will be the last one that'll run but i'm just making up numbers like that will happen and i think because the neo has so little ram it is definitely in danger of being the first line of max to be dropped from a software revision obviously like with the processor transition like the intel ones get dropped or whatever but just look at like apple support like how far back they go on the on the macbook pros for various versions of macOS versus the MacBook Airs versus the minis and stuff like that.

1:29:05Apple will drop hardware when it becomes unfeasible given their software plans. And so I don't think Apple will feel constrained by the Neo. And I think there is a potential for the Neo to fall off the end of the supported list longer than let's say it's contemporary M5 MacBook Air with 16 gigs. I think that one will last longer than the neo for multiple reasons so yeah i'm not optimistic about apple feeling constrained by the uh by the ram size and i don't know if software people are cursing apple's hardware choices but i i have to think some of them have to because it's like you have all these grand vision and you know when we got the big apple intelligence dividend where all the max went to 16 gigs like finally finally we broke out of that eight gig jail and and we fell back into it i'm not slamming the neo for it because it makes sense on the neo like i understand that but part one of the things that is going to hold back especially this first gen neo is it arrives at a time where 8 gig is the especially with the ram crisis and everything it rhymes at a time where 8 gig is it's the only choice for that machine giving given the prices and given the current ram scenarios like it could have been way worse uh and currently 8 gig is a little bit under what you would want from even a low-end machine but it's just it is what it is now when the next one comes out presumably with 12 and the a19 pro in it 12 is a little bit better it would be better if this one had 12 but it doesn't like i feel i feel like if apple continues to use the a series chips and does not adjust their a series chips to be up to 16 like to try to keep you know because it's possible they'll do that because we all know the max gets stuck at the base ram for way too long and right after the base ram on the max gets bumped that's the best time ever and as time goes on we're like we all love the macbook air 16 gigs of ramp in 10 years we're all going to be complaining that the macbook air has 16 gigs of ram in the base model because apple just does not change the base ram to keep up with the times and so there's that curve they're going to walk is it the case that the a series chips will just eventually hit 16 and stay there is it the case that the a series chips will end up with 18 while the max still doesn't have 16 because the phone just outraces them because the max stays static for so long we'll see how that turns out down there but like we're currently in a situation where the a series has half of what the base max have and that's probably the worst i imagine the worst it will ever be and i'm hoping that gap will narrow as apple again if apple keeps doing the a series chips on these i think they'll start designing the a series chips like for the three years from now with the mac in mind for like peripherals like usb and stuff like that and maybe you know we'll reach ram parity there so yeah i'm i'm not optimistic about the positive effects of the 8 gig ram than neo i just think that uh maybe we have a better ram days to look forward to in the future finally keith heaton

1:31:58John Siracusa:writes how long until we see an iphone with an m chip or an ipad pro with the ability to plug into a thunderbolt dock or studio display and present mac os to you i just know that a mac inside your pocket will eventually happen. Michael Cook writes, does MacBook Neo now mean that Apple will likely never allow the iPhone to plug into a monitor and be used like a computer the way you can with an iPad or a Samsung Dex? I think this would be awesome, except I don't think it would be as awesome as I think it would. And I really just don't see Apple doing it. I think having this mythical like dual boot or dual mode iPad would be incredible.

1:32:37John Siracusa:But I just really don't see Apple doing it. I mean, they're steadfastly refusing, mostly, to allow windowing on iPadOS. I know obviously that's different now, but they certainly steadfastly refused it for years. I just don't see this happening. And I don't think it really has anything to do with Macbook Neo. I just don't think this is Apple's style. It's like incoherent from a software message like technically possible sure but it's like apple seems not to and i kind of agree with them make um toaster fridges jekyll and hyde kind of uh devices where like it runs two different os's yeah sure you could do that from a technical perspective but it's weird that like it's a phone when it's in your hand but it's a mac when it's not and like how to synchronize the world of the phone and the mac with each other and obviously you're taking up more disk space and you kind of need to have power being supplied when you're hooked up to the monitor too because otherwise it'll drain your phone battery and like it's just it's a weird product to pitch even though this is exactly what i pitched in one of my early mac world back page articles which was like a laptop with a screen that folds back on itself and when you fold it back it runs ipad os because those those are the pieces available at the time and it's an interesting idea but like apple never took us up on it i think what people mostly are looking for here is like either they just want like an ultra portable like mac like experience that goes everywhere with them and like maybe the folding phone will help with that or whatever or they're really what they just want is like wherever i go i want my whole setup with me and they're just what they're asking for i think is what apple would hopefully deliver well i don't know over the years is a better cloud sync experience like because that's that's the way this is done like in the google world for example wherever you go with your google account there is in if you're tied into the google world there's all your stuff you got your mail you got your google photos you got your google drive you got Google Docs like it doesn't really matter where you land all your stuff is there whether it's a phone or tablet or whatever and and if you have that experience and you know if that's working well you don't need to plug your phone into a monitor all you need is to be able to just like log into a guest account on that monitor thing and just get all your stuff and use it kind of like more like a thin client or whatever but yeah I just think this is a product choice that Apple doesn't want to make and like I said I kind of agree with them because it's just weird to run iOS and macOS off the same device.

1:34:57Setting aside the amount of disk space you're wasting and having to divide it up or whatever, it's not an efficient use of resources and it's a difficult product to explain to people. And it's a difficult product for people to, like if you had this and you used it, you'd be like, yeah, but it is kind of weird that I run macOS and then I run the iPhone OS and the only place they sync is through this sipping straw of like iCloud stuff. And it's just, I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think it's going to happen.

1:35:22Marco Arment:Yeah, I think that's the kind of product that it sounds like a fun, interesting idea, but I think the reality of it would be weird and would disappoint people. And Apple is pretty good, in most cases, Vision Pro, from keeping products out of the market that would end up that way. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Babylon, Squarespace, and DeleteMe. And thanks to our members who support us directly. you can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about how Apple is going to add touch support to macOS.

1:36:03Marco Arment:Speaking of which, so this will play right into what we were just talking about here. There's been a new Gurman Report. We're going to be talking about that in Overtime. You can join us to listen at atp.fm slash join. Thank you, everybody. I'm going to talk to you next week.

1:36:20Marco Arment: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. 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. So that's Casey Liss. M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T. Marco Arment. S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to.

1:37:12John Siracusa:Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast.

1:37:17Marco Arment:So long.

1:37:19John Siracusa:So I've been, I don't know if quiet quitting is really the right term of art slash phrase for what I've been doing, but I've been, for lack of a better way of describing it, quiet quitting my Synology. I still, in and of itself, I still actually really do love my Synology. I have a DS1621 +, I believe. If I can, I'll put a link in the show notes, but I don't think it's made anymore, so I may or may not be able to find a good link, but I'll put something in there. Um, but I have been working on trying to set myself up to have the Synology go away and be okay with it. Now, I would still need a giant ass array of disks because I have a gazillion files.

1:38:08John Siracusa:I think I have something like 10 to 15 terabytes worth of stuff of active like stuff on the Synology, you know, and then another like in about that much again in free space at the moment. but I've really been disappointed with the path that Synology has been going recently which if you squint doesn't look that different than Apple services it's a different application but looks kind of similar but that's neither here nor there but

1:38:38Marco Arment:I mean that's probably not a coincidence like Apple inspires companies how to become gatekeepers to make more money

1:38:44John Siracusa:right that's exactly it because Apple's really good at that Right. And honestly, that is the executive summary of what I'm about to tell you, which is that, you know, a couple of years back, and we talked about it on the show, but a year or two back, they said, okay, all future Synology, you know, NASA's, disk stations, as they call them, they will be forced to use first-party Synology hard drives, which are themselves, you know, relabeled like Western Digitals, I think, or something like that. The details honestly don't matter, even if they are legitimately their own first-party drives. Honestly, I don't think that really matters either.

1:39:19John Siracusa:But this thing that was always and forever, you could put whatever drive you wanted in it, and they would slurp it up and it would be fine. But they've announced that, oh, no, no, no, no, no, you must use our first-party stuff. Now, in the defense of Synology, I can make some arguments in favor of that. You know, it's far easier to control these things. It's far easier to guarantee that it'll work the way they want it to and thus the way you want it to. Like, you can figure out legitimate reasons for this. But I feel like even though they are not taking it away from legacy users like myself, it's still gross.

1:39:57John Siracusa:because at some point I'm going to want a new bit of network attached storage. And I don't want to have to fill that with very expensive Synology drives. In the same way that all things being equal, I would put third-party RAM in a Mac, hi John, or potentially a third-party SSD in a Mac, hello again John, if such a thing were possible in the Macs that I buy. But it is not without a ton of work. So I've been trying to set myself up for, all right, what would the future look like if I gave up on my Synology. And to be clear, I think this will happen, but I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon.

1:40:34John Siracusa:I'm talking like maybe five plus years before this happens. But I wanted to set myself up for it. And so what I've been doing is trying to treat the Synology less like a computer and more like a giant array of disks. and that's in no small part because i think uh what i am likely to replace the synology with if i were to do it tomorrow is a is a homoset synology is a ubiquity uness which is a giant array of disks but it's very little else i mean obviously there is a computer in there but not really from a user's perspective by contrast a synology will let you you know you can run a shell on it.

1:41:19John Siracusa:Well, I mean, you can do that on the UNAS as well, I believe, but you can, you can run stuff on it. You can install software on the Synology. You can run Docker containers on it. And I was running a zillion, like 10 plus Docker containers on my Synology, which by the way, even despite having added third-party RAM to my Synology as an add-on rather than a replacement, that didn't go exceedingly well because while this is a computer and it is meant to serve things, it's not really meant to be a server if you ask me. And maybe, you know, you listening might disagree with me, but that's kind of my perspective on it.

1:41:53John Siracusa:It's supposed to do basic servey stuff, but not be like your one server for your small business or for your home or whatever. And so what I've done is, I feel like I've talked about a little of this on the show, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but if you recall way back when, a year or two ago, I got a little tiny NUC, a little tiny Intel LPC that I had shipped off to my dear friend in Connecticut with an antenna with the intention of streaming New York Giants games from Connecticut to me by slurping them up over the air. Apparently that's my word of the day. I'm sorry. By scooping them up from the air and using the absolutely excellent channels app, sending them, you know, sending what the antenna got into my house.

1:42:42John Siracusa:that didn't end up working out because my friend lives far enough into the middle of nowhere Connecticut which is a thing despite what you'd think that his signal from his house was basically useless and I had left the computer the NUC there for the longest time because I don't know there was no real need to repatriate it for lack of a better word but then it occurred to me you know what you know what a NUC would be really good at running a bunch of docker containers and so So I realized my home lab experience is finally leveling up and I need to do the thing that all self-respecting home labbers seem to do.

1:43:16John Siracusa:And now I'm going to get all the home labbers yelling at me for saying so. But nevertheless, it seems like all of the home labbers that I know and respect, like my friend Alex, who's from Tailscale, who does incredible videos on the Tailscale channel about home lab stuff. So Tailscale on YouTube, that is. um so anyway alex is a big fan of proxmox a proxmox uh which i am not really well qualified to describe but i would say is basically like an os that lets you run vms and lxcs which is sort of kind of but not really like a docker container or you know you can run a virtual machine that itself is basically its only purpose is to run docker containers and so on and so forth And so I repatriated the NUC.

1:44:01John Siracusa:I put Proxmox on it. That's been working pretty well. It only had, I believe, stop me if this sounds familiar, when I bought it, I didn't buy it to do this sort of thing. I bought it to be a channel server. And so it only had eight gigs of RAM on it, which once you start running five, 10, 15, literally 20 Docker containers, and by the way, Home Assistant and PyHole all on this device, I quickly found that eight gigs of RAM was not sufficient. And so for the tune of like$180 or something like that, just a few weeks ago, I bought 16 gigs of RAM, which I think a year ago was like literally 30 or 40 bucks or something like that.

1:44:40John Siracusa:But now it was something to the order of$150. On the spec front now, is the NUC more powerful than your Synology? Does it have more RAM? Is the CPU better? I believe the CPU is better. You know, it's a fair question to which, honestly, I don't know the answer. I have to assume yes. And I can tell you based on the behavior of the NUC and the way these containers run on the NUC, it is way faster. Way, way faster. How much RAM does your Synology have with the upgrade? Do you remember? I want to say it's the same. I want to say it's 16 gigs. And I will try to look that up as I continue to talk. Obviously, Synology is doing other things because it's doing disk serving stuff.

1:45:17But I do wonder, like, you're like, oh, you really shouldn't use your Synology as your home server. So I bought the smallest, tiniest, least powerful computer I could get that's not a Raspberry Pi.

1:45:25John Siracusa:Yeah, yeah, that's fair. I mean, actually, now that I think about it, maybe the crux of my problem, which didn't occur to me until just this very moment, is that there is literally no storage on my Synology that is not a spinning platter. I don't have any sort of SSD in my Synology in any way, shape, or form. Oh, yeah. Well, that will definitely make your Docker containers go slow. No, that's very true. And so perhaps maybe that was it. But even if that is it, I still stand by, I want to try to do what I can to get myself in a position that if I decide to leave Synology behind, I'll be okay. On that front, by the way, we should note that we have this story on a show a while back, but the Synology partially reversed its decision on the hard drives and they only do it on the enterprise ones now and the consumer ones.

1:46:12You can put any drive you want on them or whatever. We talked about it in the past.

1:46:14John Siracusa:I meant to bring that up, and I apologize. They walked it back a little bit, but your point stands is that A, they did it in the first place, and B, they didn't undo all of it. Right, exactly. And I apologize. I meant to say that, and I got myself sidetracked. So thank you for bringing that up. Total physical memory on the Synology, 20 gigabytes. So a bit more than the NUC, actually. Maybe it is as simple as an SSD, but like I said, I stand by going down this path just to see what my future would be like. And truth be told, I think for the most part, it's gone really well. It was a disaster at first when I still had 8 gigs of RAM and was running 15 or so containers.

1:46:50John Siracusa:That was not great. But once I put in the 16 gigs, and I don't think this particular NUC supports more than that, and certainly it'll cost a second mortgage to get more than that, but this seems to be fine for now. And I am currently running, let's look at Portainer. I am running, let's see, something like 22 containers on it of all various shapes and sizes. Most of them are very small. A couple of them are not as small. And in addition to Home Assistant, in addition to Piehole, and it's been working great. And I'm really, really happy with it. Proxmox has a bit of a learning curve, but it's also really good.

1:47:27John Siracusa:There's a listener to the show whose name is escaping me. I'm so sorry. I don't have it in front of me, but I will link their website. I believe I brought him up earlier. He has a bunch of really great information about Proxmox and Home Assistant and these sorts of home labby things. Um, so I will put his website into the show notes as well. Um, but between all these things in between Alex's, you know, tutorials on YouTube, I've been able to stand up this little Proxmox node. I have now decommissioned every single one of my Raspberry Pis. Uh, the one in the garage got decommissioned a couple of years ago because there's a home assistant integration for my garage door opener.

1:48:05John Siracusa:So I didn't need that anymore. The one in the bedroom, uh, or I should back up the one in the office was running Pi Hole and little else. That got decommissioned once the Pi Hole moved to the nock. And then finally, the one in the bedroom was running the little LED attached to my bed. And that got decommissioned for an ESP32 dev board that's running ESP Home. So that's driving the LED, which I presume takes even less power than the Pi Zero that was previously running it. So I'm really, believe it or not, mostly simplifying my life in terms of computing equipment. And so at this point, I feel like if I were to leave Synology's ecosystem behind, I think the only thing I would really miss is Synology Drive, which is the kind of faux Dropbox that I use.

1:48:52John Siracusa:And I've talked about this on and off over the years. But one of the great things about the Synology Drive application is that not only does it, you know, you are your own cloud, which for me in this context, it's a feature, not a bug. I can make an argument in the opposite. But one of the great things about it is you can use Synology, I think it's CloudSync, to take your Dropbox and basically put that inside your Synology drive. So when I want to upload the file that I'm recording right now to Marco for him to process later, I don't have Dropbox running on any of my computers, and I haven't for five plus years.

1:49:27John Siracusa:I simply put it into the Dropbox folder within my Synology drive and in the appropriate folder in my Dropbox in the drive root, and it will go ahead and sync that to Dropbox's cloud so that then Marco can pull it down. And that's worked incredibly well. I think I can replicate that with some open source stuff. It isn't quite as slick and it isn't quite as nice, but the combination of, oh shoot, what was it? Sync thing and something else. Shoot, I forget what the other one was. Oh, R clone. Sync thing and R clone. The two of them put together, if you squint, are kind of, sort of, what Synology Drive and Synology Cloud Sync does.

1:50:14John Siracusa:And I did trial that like a year or so ago, and it did do the trick. I just, like I said, I don't love it quite as much as I like Drive. But at this point, I am in a position where I think I can divorce myself of the Synology and be okay. And at that point, Marco, we're going to have to figure out what the virus slap is used for. We might have to get a new sound for you because speaking of spinning disks in your Synology, it made me think when you were rattling off all the things that you've consolidated onto this NUC. How are you backing this NUC up? It's funny you bring that up. There is, what is it called?

1:50:49John Siracusa:Proxmox Backup Server, PBS, I believe, where it has its own mechanism for doing this. And basically all of that is going onto the Synology. So, I mean, so the reason I ask is because like you have so much set up there, like the time you'd invested into setting up those 20 containers and consolidating everything. And it's not redundant storage, like the Synology spinning disks, the old cruddy rust that presumably you're not using RAID zero on the whole thing, I hope. So you have some hardware redundancy. Oh, what if the SSD goes bad? What if a kid spills a drink on it or whatever? Do you want to reset up your entire life on that NUC?

1:51:25Or do you want to restore from a backup? and then the question is where you put the backup. And as you noted, it's on the Synology. So you may not be out of the woods yet.

1:51:32John Siracusa:No, but that is actually one of the only things that the Synology is still doing other than drive that would be hard to replace. I would probably have to do something else because... You can do a cloud backup or whatever. It's just a question of like making sure it's some automated process. You actually are protected because one of the things the Synologies have going for them is that if a drive fails, you're protected. Two drives fail, maybe not. Yeah, no, you're exactly right. I have no reasonable way to contest what you're saying. And that thought has crossed my mind. The good news is a lot of this stuff, not all of it, but a lot of it, a lot of these containers, let's just say as long as I have the Docker composed somewhere, which I do, I have that in a private GitHub repo, most of this I could stand up again pretty easily.

1:52:18John Siracusa:And most of what these containers emit, this is not everything that I do with containers, but a lot of it, most of what these containers emit is stored on the Synology anyhow and it's one of those things if you know you know. Someone in the chat room mentioned R2 and you mentioned Rclone and for some of the stuff that I did for my private websites I ended up using R2 because it's part of Cloudflare and it's their S3 replacement but Transmit my favorite file transfer client does not talk to R2 for some obscure technical reason I think they don't do chunk transfer encoding or something anyway i couldn't use transmit so i had to find a nice app to a gui app and then a command line app because rsync doesn't work with it and transmit doesn't work with it so i ended up using r clone for the command line because r clone will talk to r2 and i'm using forklift which is a mac file transfer app that's been around for a while i wonder if their name is a play on the transmit truck but anyway forklift exists and it also talks to r2 so this is i guess this is an endorsement for Rclone, which is, I mean, I really feel like R-Sync should get support for R2, but R2 is a little bit of a, well, it's S3, but the letter is one lower and the number is one lower.

1:53:28And it's almost compatible with everything, but not my favorite apps and not my favorite command line tool. So I'm glad Rclone exists and I'm glad Forklift exists.

1:53:36John Siracusa:Yeah, I had not heard of Forklift before. That's interesting. It's pretty old. It's been around for a long time. CyberDoc also works with it. Someone mentioned that I've used, I use CyberDoc as well. I like Forklift a little bit better. I don't use R2 for backing up the Synology. I have other means for that that I'd rather not discuss here. But part of the reason I don't use anything like that to back up the Synology is because it's something like 15 terabytes, and that is prohibitively expensive. Even like the ice or something like that. The Glacier. That's what I'm thinking of. I use Backblaze B2 to back up my Synology, and I don't have as much data as you, but it's not that bad.

1:54:13John Siracusa:it's bad enough for me that i i can't stomach it but i'm also frugal as hell so what do you expect um but no i've been really really happy with this um it's been thanks to uh the unnamed listener i want to say his name is derrick i'm so sorry i will put a link in the show notes though um who had helped me a lot both but in terms of his website which is excellent and um in terms of you know actually some kind of personal email support which was very kind of him i have sent him some ATP stickers as a thank you, don't worry. But that and Alex on Tailscale's YouTube channel has really, really opened my eyes into a different way of approaching this.

1:54:48John Siracusa:And I'm actually really, really happy with it. Now, ask me again when this poops itself tomorrow and I lose everything. But sitting here now, it's been going really, really well, and I'm really happy with it. And if I decide to get rid of the Synology and go a different route entirely, like in UNAS, I think I am mostly ready to do that, leaving aside, you know, transmitting or transferring all this data and so on and so forth.