690: Turn Left at the Next Tree

15:23Marco Arment:I don't think they necessarily need to.

15:25Casey Liss:I mean, look at what they did with the Neo. I think that's the next the next biggest place where the money is. It's got to be the case, right? And the case is because there's just so much more aluminum in the iMac, right? and it does have the stupid stand even though it's not technically adjustable it just tilts you know it's not height adjustable but i think the aluminum case is number two on the price list well but with

15:41Marco Arment:the neo what they showed is that they could still make an aluminum case they just had to make it

15:45Casey Liss:differently yeah but there's so much less aluminum in the neo than the iMac i i bet they could get

15:51Marco Arment:the iMac down to seven or eight hundred dollars as a neo version if they wanted to now that being said i don't think the iMac is a high volume enough product for them to care that much and And it's not because of its price. Like, I don't think like we knew there were there's a million there's a billion people wanting to buy a cheaper Apple laptop because everyone wants a laptop for almost everything. And cheaper Apple laptop is the best of all worlds for most people. I don't think that many people are dying to have an all in one desktop and saying, you know what, for my all in one desktop, I would get the iMac, but it's just too expensive.

16:26Marco Arment:I just don't think that's that big of a market. I think most people who buy iMacs are doing it for like aesthetic reasons in an office. They don't care. And most people, most consumers who are price sensitive probably aren't looking at a desktop. They're probably looking at what's the cheapest laptop I can get because that can be my only computer.

16:41Casey Liss:Yeah. Two separate questions is like, could you make a new version of this product? And does it make sense to? And I think most people were asking, like, is it possible to make one of these? But I think just the iMac, like a lesser case of the Vision Pro, it's like, to what end are you going to massively increase demand for the iMac by doing this? Probably not. Yeah.

17:01John Siracusa:All right, let's talk about Mythos. William Moran writes, I am very senior in tech at one of the firms that has access to Mythos and Nightwing. What is significant about it compared to previous LLMs like Sonic 4.6 or Opus 4.6 is not the ability to find bugs. It's the ability to chain them together into actual practical compromises. Some of the chains are 10 or more vulnerability steps long.

17:23Casey Liss:and to recap the context of this mythos was the um lm that's so amazing at finding security flaws that anthropic didn't want to release it to the general public yet because it would be too dangerous they just wanted a select set of security researchers to have access to it so they could shore up their software and of course it probably leaked due to anthropic's own security flaws and everyone has access to it but anyway uh that's one person chiming in on what makes mythos

17:45John Siracusa:special then uh with regard to the preview and some new stuff from chat gpt kyle orland at ars technico writes new research from the uk's ai security institute or aisi suggests that open ai's gpt 5.5 which launched publicly last week reached quote a similar level of performance on our cyber evaluations quote as mythos preview which the group evaluated last month on the highest level expert test gpt 5.5 passed an average of 71.4 slightly higher than 68.6 achieved by mythos preview although this was within the margin of error gpt 5.5 also matched mythos preview and its progress on an aisi test range set up to simulate a 32-step data extraction attack on a corporate network 5.5 succeeded in three out of 10 attempts on tlo compared to two of 10 for mythos preview no previous model had ever succeeded at the test even once the new results for 5.5 suggests that when it comes to cyber security risk mythos preview was likely not quote a breakthrough specific to one model quote but rather quote a byproduct of more general improvements in long horizon autonomy reasoning and coding aisi writes yeah so william was saying

18:56Casey Liss:that what makes mythos special is that it can chain together vulnerabilities and this test was a 32-step chain that no model had ever passed, but now Mythos passes it, and so does GPT 5.5. So it's not that Mythos is particularly special, like this review says. It's just that this is the new state of the art in these models. And guess what? Anthropik's latest model and OpenAI's latest model both are way better at this than past models.

19:19John Siracusa:Additionally, Daniel Stenberg, I can read, I swear. Daniel Stenberg writes with regard to Curl, I complained and I complained about the high-frequency junk submissions to the curl bug bounty that grew really intense during 2025 and early 2026 to the degree that we shut it down completely in February 1st of this year. Since March 2026, the nature of the security report submissions have changed. The slop situation is not a problem anymore.

19:46Marco Arment:So does that mean that they're getting better quality AI-based submissions?

19:50Casey Liss:That is my understanding. Here's my summary of this blog post, which you can read in full because it'll be linked in the notes. they're getting more security and bug reports than ever driven by AI, but now they're much higher quality than they were last year. So basically it's like they were being overwhelmed by garbage reports. It was like, this is wrong. And this is wrong. And this is wrong. And you'd waste your time looking at it and be like, no, it's not wrong. These stupid AI reports are coming in. They're just flagging stuff. That's not actually bugs. And it's wasting all of our time, even if they find some, because they're overwhelming us with this garbage input.

20:18Casey Liss:It's terrible. But, you know, apparently since March of this year, suddenly now they're getting tons of submissions and the quality is really high they're finding legit bugs and so daniel was early on on the curl curl is a library that does http requests essentially that's simplifying it greatly um it is the library like it's what everyone uses it's used in tons of software it's obviously security flaws there are really pivotal because if you have find a security flaw there it affects so much software because like every software that does http requests probably uses this library um and he's you know finding bugs is valuable to him as the maintainer of this project but the slop reports were terrible but now now they're finding legit bugs and giving high quality reports unfortunately there's also more of them but fortunately hey they're finding even more legit bugs i think the theory is again you can read the blog post i think the theory is that eventually the the this will sort of die down more because like there's not an infinite number of bugs in code.

21:16Casey Liss:Like there's, there's some number of bugs per line of code. And what, you know, when you found not that you're finding all the bugs, but eventually it's becomes much harder to find bugs when you've found all the quote unquote obvious ones, but we'll see these, you know, as evidenced by both mythos and GPT 5.5, these tools continue to rapidly advance. So it may be a while before, uh, we feel like we've got all the low hanging fruit and all the libraries that we're using.

21:39John Siracusa:Kind of tangentially related, Stevie Bonifield writes at The Verge, nearly every Linux distribution released since 2017 is currently vulnerable to a security bug called copy fail that allows any user to give themselves administrative privileges. The exploit uses a Python script that works across all of the vulnerable Linux distributions requiring no per distro offsets, no version checks, no recompilation, according to Theore, the security firm that uncovered it. Copy fail was identified by Theore's researchers with assistance from their xint code ai tool yes i don't know what xint is based on but anyway people

22:13Casey Liss:are just pointing these tools at just existing code bases and finding just really embarrassing really like obvious in hindsight really dangerous security flaws like this is not this is like nearly every linux distribution since 2017 no special tools required just run this python script and give yourself root that's pretty bad and obviously you still need to be able to execute code on the thing it's not a remote exploit blah blah blah but stuff like that you would think, well, surely none of those bugs probably exist. Or if they do exist, they're probably only one distro or something. It's like, oof.

22:43Casey Liss:Yeah. So, you know, people, these tools exist and people are using them and they're finding problems. And then, you know, fingers crossed, hopefully we're all fixing them.

22:50John Siracusa:All right. And then with regard to AI ruining everything from a hardware perspective instead of software, Joe Rosignal at Mac Rumors writes, Apple has stopped offering the 256 gig storage option for the Mac mini worldwide. The Mac mini now starts at$800 with the M4 chip, 16 gigs of RAM, and a half terabyte of storage, whereas it previously started at$600 with the M4 chip, 16 gigs of RAM, both the same, and 256 gigs of storage.

23:16Marco Arment:Yeah, my overcast Mac minis continue to appreciate an aftermarket value.

23:22Casey Liss:Mac minis have never gone down in value, Marco.

23:25Marco Arment:I did a quick eBay search earlier today for the sold items for my configuration, which was the former base of 16 256 regular m4 which i paid an average of around 550 each for they're currently selling in used condition for around 700 i didn't save this link but uh

23:45Casey Liss:sink up was it uh paul hadad of tap bots posted some ebay listings for mac studios with the big ram configurations that apple no longer sells and some of them are going for$35 ,000. Oh, yeah, I saw that. Because you can't get it. You just can't, like, supply and demand. Hey, do you want a Mac Studio with 512 gigs of RAM? They used to exist. You used to be able to buy them for what we thought was a huge price, but now you can't get them at any price. So check out eBay. $35 ,000. It can be yours. And you can kind of understand,

24:14Marco Arment:because, like, suppose you're a business and you need that for something. Suppose, you know, you're, like, you know, maybe a post-production house. You need more workstations or, you know, like the kind of business that actually needs high-end computers and like bills out client fees that can pay that kind of price. A lot of those businesses exist. A lot of people need that for their business. And so it actually is potentially worth it for you to get one for$35 ,000 that, you know, if you have the alternative is not getting it.

24:42Casey Liss:I mean, honestly, who would actually buy that? I would imagine it would be some AI company with a huge and existing investment. And to them, this is peanuts and you got to spend that VC money somehow. But yeah, well, I mean, And to be fair, I believe these were listings and not completed sales. So I'm not sure what they're actually going to sell for. But the bottom line is the supply and demand curve on Macs that Apple no longer sells, that Apple used to sell with a lot of RAM is looking rough these days.

25:07Marco Arment:Yeah, listings don't matter. But you got to scroll down and check that box that says sold items. Not just completed items, sold items. And that will tell you the prices they sell for.

25:16Casey Liss:I do have some saved eBay searches for really weird stuff like the bent piece of metal that holds the hard drives in my Mac Pro. remember me complaining about that all those years ago and for a while i had an ebay search i still do have it set up but i set up an ebay search to to get that bent piece of metal for less money and i just i've left it running because i'm like surely at some point this stupid bent piece of metal for this obsolete computer like it's going to come down in price it's not going to be 400 anymore and i can tell you as of like this afternoon they're still going for hundreds of dollars well there's again there's probably not that many buyers of that but i do think though

25:48Marco Arment:So the situation we are in now with component shortages, there is not a clear end in sight. I think this is going to be very disruptive. It already has been, but it's going to continue to be very disruptive that I think many products are going to be delayed. Many products are going to be unavailable. Many low-end products are going to just not be worth making. you know like i think one of the things that kind of strained uh nvidia's uh gaming business is that as the rise of ai started up um you know first you know i know bitcoin miners ruined gpus for gamers first but like it it became not necessarily that worth it for nvidia to serve the gaming market that much because they were having all these giant orders for their giant chips for their other stuff um and i think that that kind of thing we're going to see that in the entire industry now because in the entire industry the entire components and hardware business it's worth it for them to serve the very high-priced AI customers right now and the very high-priced data center customers right now.

26:48Marco Arment:And all of us on the consumer side, we're going to get squeezed in a bunch of different unpleasant ways. We're going to face dynamics we haven't seen before. Actual shortages of computing equipment mostly haven't happened in our entire lives.

27:04Casey Liss:The RAM market always has those things where they misestimate demand and RAM suddenly goes up and down ram used to fluctuate a lot more than it has recently it did but it was you know oftentimes

27:13Marco Arment:that was out of you know like some awful earthquake would hit taiwan or something and and you know that would that would crush ram prices for a little while but like i don't think that was that wasn't really this big of a swing or for this long of a time or this broad of an effect in this case what we are facing industry-wide here is significant shortages of lots of components for probably at least 18 months. Like that's wild and pretty unprecedented. So I think that's going to create some strange and difficult dynamics that, you know, if we're not really planning for them, they might catch us by surprise.

27:50Marco Arment:I think, for instance, if you think you're going to need a computer this year, buy it right now. Like do not wait. Like right now, you can still get, like if you want, say you want a new Mac. if you want a macbook pro you're in luck the macbook pros they just got their m5 update and you can go today and order any configuration of macbook pro all the way up to the max 128 gig ram the max chips you can get any configuration of macbook pro delivered in about two weeks nothing else you can get right now and you know the air probably too but like you know no desktop it's going to be rough and I think this is only going to get worse if you need a computer anytime soon get it now while you still can because in three or six months you might be facing delays of three to 12 months to get that computer and and it's also obviously very important for businesses businesses are going through the same calculus of like well if you know if we need to like get a new laptop or whatever for everybody we hire, maybe we should buy a few in advance.

28:56Marco Arment:Think about how the problems this creates for businesses too. It's massive. So we are going to have to be very aware of this dynamic as consumers. We are kind of last priority for a lot of these products. And there are shortages already, and they're going to get worse. And so on the silver lining front, maybe having a direct large financial incentive to eek more power out of the computers that we already have might result in other good good effect in the industry maybe we'll have things become a little bit more efficient maybe we'll have people you know care more about things like repairability we'll see that you know those kind of effects might happen as a result of this but in the meantime we're all going to be crunched and i think we need to be prepared for that which is one of the strangest excuses I've ever given anybody to buy a MacBook Pro, but here we are.

29:52John Siracusa:You are the king of good excuses. This reminds me a lot of when you couldn't get a car or a new car anyway because of the chip shortage. There's a chip shortage, you fellas, and you couldn't get a new car, not easily and not quickly during the height of COVID. And I feel like this is that, but much worse and much more universally applicable.

30:10Marco Arment:Yeah, totally.

30:10John Siracusa:Tim Hardwick in MacRumors writes, Apple's considering dropping the cheapest MacBook Neo configuration as one possible response to the rising cost of building the popular laptop, according to Tim Colpan, a former Bloomberg reporter. Shipping estimates on Apple's website currently set at two to three weeks across the lineup following stronger than expected demand, and the company is said to have instructed suppliers to increase production capacity to 10 million units, roughly double the original forecast of five to six million.

30:34Marco Arment:I mean, good news for the Neo. It's selling really well. But this could be a problem. I mean, you can see why Apple would really not want to say anything negative or cause any negative press about the MacBook Neo right now because it's a hit. It's a runaway hit. It's doing great. And for the Neo to either have to cut its cheaper price option, which is one rumor that I saw blow by, or to have just extended wait times for it, those aren't great looks. and not Apple's fault. They have a hit on their hands, which is otherwise great news. But I bet Apple would bend over backwards to avoid having to say or do anything negative about the Neo right now.

31:24John Siracusa:Tim Colpan adds in his own post, the renewed commitment to meeting demand means Apple must also ask TSMC for a hot lot of A18 Pro chips. The initial production run was at least two years ago. John, what's a hot lot?

31:36Casey Liss:Is that when they're stolen? I don't know. He italicized it in his thing, too. So maybe it's a term of art in the industry or maybe it's just Tim Culpin being spicy. But yeah, you got to go back to TSMC and say, can we get more of these? Yeah, I also agree that one of the worst things that Apple could do to the Neo right now is cut the low end model because that's like that's the whole point of the product. Don't do that. but yeah i mean as marco said a lot of the situation out there is that like suppliers are telling people manufacturers we don't have any more of these things to sell you until x number of months in the future so what are you doing that it's not like it's like oh how much like it's even if you had infinite money like we they're all bought like there's no more you have to wait for more to be built and we the ones we have we have already sold uh or the ones that are coming are already been bought and you know so that's that's supply and demand makes prices go up, it's not great.

32:25Casey Liss:I think Apple will hold the line on this one because this is definitely the type of thing that Apple can absorb, but it's not fun for anybody.

32:33John Siracusa:Apple's capital expenditures. Let's talk Apple Car and what other companies are spending on AI. So capital expenditure is, or capital expense, is the money an organization spends to buy, maintain, or improve its fixed assets, such as buildings, vehicles, equipment, or land. It is considered a capital expenditure when the asset is newly purchased or when money is used toward extending the useful life of an existing assets, such as repairing a roof. Capital expenditures contrast with operating expenses, or OPEX, which are ongoing expenses that are inherent to the operation of the asset. OPEX includes items like electricity or cleaning.

33:05John Siracusa:The difference between OPEX and CAPEX, or capital expenditure, may not be immediately obvious for some expenses. For instance, repaving the parking lot may be thought of as inherent to the operation of a shopping mall. Similarly, the cost of software for a business, either software development or software as a service licensing might fall into either OPEX or CAPEX. That is, is it merely business as usual, or is it something new, an investment with multi-year return? The dividing line for items like these is that the expense is considered CAPEX if the financial benefit of the expenditure extends beyond the current fiscal year.

33:35Casey Liss:So during my career having a regular jobby job for 25 years, whether or not the work that I was doing, software development, was considered CAPEX or OPEX has changed uh several times in ways that has affected me at my job because this this is just from the wikipedia page you think what is capex and what is opex and as i think the wikipedia page makes clear it's not always cut and dry like you can argue both ways and the real answer is like what do our lawyers slash financial people tell us we either have to do or we should do to optimize whatever the hell it is the cfo optimizes tax burden or whatever right so at various times it has been like you don't you're a software developer you don't have to worry you're pretty little head about this this is all taken care of for you know the times it's like log everything you do because we're we've decided that we've we're going to count all software development of any kind as capex and we need to have a catalog of it for tax reasons because we've decided this is the way we're doing and sometimes it's been in between oh well this group does when when these people write code it's capex but when these people write code it's opx again like the uh you know is repaving the parking lot capex or opx it's like well is this just an ongoing expense like electricity or cleaning or is this like a new thing where like you know you're making the parking lot fancier like i don't even know i'm i'm not interested in what goes into this but i'm saying that it's not always cut and dry what if you pave it really poorly and you have to do it every year right but like the reason this comes up is i think this was a couple of shows back um we were talking about um i think it was probably in the like tim cook turnus like turnover episode um like what is apple you know what does apple spend money on and the tim cook era that wasted all this money in the car one of the points i made was like yeah apple burned a lot of time and money and people and goodwill on the car but now nowadays looking at the current landscape where apple's you know peers in the technology market they're spending so much money on ai stuff that everything apple has ever spent on the car in the past decade is dwarfed by what people are doing with AI right now.

35:39Casey Liss:And that's all talking about CapEx. And to the people who are financial nerds who are into this, like this blog post we're about to read here, I think it's from MG Siegler, or eventually we'll get to it. They've been looking at Apple and saying, hey, Apple, why are all your competitors massively increasing their CapEx on AI stuff, data centers, chips, RAM,$100 million salaries for fancy AI people or whatever, whereas when we look at your capex it's you're not doing that and you're out of step with your industry are you falling behind and blah blah we often have the is apple falling behind discussion in the realm of like consumer facing why does siri suck why are apple's hardware products being delayed because siri sucks um how can they not deliver the the stuff that they announced in wwc 2024 that type of thing but then the financial people are like apple why aren't you doing the things your competitors are doing and so they're getting it from both sides here so i did pull out some info about Apple's CapEx to put hard numbers to the thing that I just vaguely alluded to in the earlier episode.

36:40John Siracusa:So Marcus Mendez writes at 9to5Mac as part of its fiscal quarter two of 2026 results, Apple reported$11.4 billion in R &D expenses, up 34 % from Q2 2025, making it the highest quarterly figure in the company's history. So$11.5 billion is as high as it's ever been. Tim Cook says, we are clearly investing more. You can see that in the OPEX numbers. And if you click down on those a step deeper, you can look at the R &D areas separate from SG &A, which is selling general and administrative, you'll find that R &D is even accelerating much higher than the company is. So we're clearly investing and we're investing in products and services.

37:18Yeah.

37:18Casey Liss:So this is talking about OPEX and SG &A is another one of those terms that comes up in your eyes glaze over about expenses. I'll link to the Wikipedia page on that as well. But these are the numbers they're talking about and they're saying they're up 34 % from Q2 2025 to 11 billion. And there's a chart in the nine to five Mac article, which shows like 2022 to current. And you can see it's been slowly going up. And then 2026 has a bit more of a bump, but then we get to MG Siegler's post about CapEx.

37:41John Siracusa:Right. So MG Siegler writes in 2021, Apple spent 11.1 billion on CapEx in 2022. That number fell slightly to 10.7 billion in 2023. It was back up to 11 billion by 2024. It was down a bit to 9.4 billion 2025. So it jumped to 12.7 billion in 2026. With half the fiscal year in the books, Apple's on track to spend$9 to$10 billion on CapEx. One could imagine a banker in Wall Street conjuring Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. That's what I love about Apple, man. Their big tech peers go crazy on CapEx, but they stay in the same range. The dichotomy is so wild that it now gets written about every single quarter.

38:17John Siracusa:But the dichotomy also keeps growing every single quarter as big tech keeps ramping CapEx and Apple stays the same. This chart, which is in his blog post, which is in the show notes, says it all.

38:27Casey Liss:so this chart shows 2020 through 2026 capex of apple google microsoft amazon and facebook uh and apple is the first blip they're dark blue and the little bar chart things and if you look at the dark blue bump as tnc just read the text little dark blue bump in 20 2020 21 22 23 24 25 it's like the same it doesn't move much it goes up and down a little bit but stays about the same the other lines in the chart google microsoft amazon and facebook go bonkers starting in like 2024 2025 and 2026 to the point where the where is it the amazon line is at what is that 200 billion in 2026 uh facebook is at about 150 uh google and microsoft are both about like 180 or so and apple is as we said before nine or ten like they're just so incredibly out of step and speaking of the car project looking on this graph the car project ended in 2024 that is not visible on this graph.

39:27Casey Liss:The end of the car project. Now Apple's no longer wasting billions of dollars on the car. Surely their line will change in an appreciable way. Maybe it does if it was just Apple being shown here. But in the scope, like this was my point, in the scope of what everyone else is spending on AI stuff and CapEx, money that they're laying out for things that are not just like ongoing expenses, but like we need to, you know, buy tons of GPUs, build new data centers, like new stuff or whatever, whatever rules they're using to consider it capex. Apple is not doing what everybody else is doing. And there's, you know, we've had debates about this from, again, from the product perspective, are they falling behind for what reasons are they falling behind or whatever?

40:05Casey Liss:But on the financial side, this is the other side of it, which is like, is Apple investing versus is Apple smarter than everybody else? And everyone else is going to waste all this money. And when the bubble pops, they're all going to be left holding the bag and they're just burning through cash. And Apple's going to be sitting on the sideline going, we didn't have to do any of that we saved our money we'll see how this turns out but the as as uh mjc says the dichotomy is clear like looking at this graph one of these things is not like the other and it's apple

40:33Marco Arment:we we know that over historically apple is pretty stingy with how and where it spends money so that could be an effect here but and i would say like combining like referring to the car project here as like, oh, it didn't matter. They blew all that time with the car. I think this is the point of why the car, I think, was so damaging to the company. It wasn't about money. Apple has plenty of money and has for a long time. It was about talent drain and opportunity cost. The car pulled a lot of talent from other areas of the company.

41:05Casey Liss:They hired a lot of people for the car project, though, too. Like, it wasn't, it's not like they took the macOS people and put them on the car.

41:10Marco Arment:No, like, they also hired people, But that was a significant talent drain. And while some of it probably resulted in some things they could use after the car project was killed, most of it probably wasn't. So that was the bigger opportunity cost. Apple is limited way more by talent and bandwidth, so to speak, than they are by money. but i think if you can fault them for um you know not having enough capex or you know whatever develop you know r &d costs i think it's it's not necessarily that oh they wasted money on the car and then you know wow look ai dwarfs it like no it's it's more like ai is like a huge deal apple is nowhere in it and they also separately had a car project that drained a lot of town and

42:01Casey Liss:was a big distraction for a long time yeah my main point is not to say that apple didn't waste money in the car project it's to say that everyone else is potentially wasting so much more money on or maybe it's not a waste like what i'm trying to say is that like again if this graph was just apple you'd talk about the car project and you'd talk about the money wasted the time wasted the opportunity cost all this other stuff you know obviously it wasn't a successful product although i still say it was successful and that they thankfully didn't ship something that they that would they would be embarrassed by or whatever but like it was misguided it was mismanaged.

42:31Casey Liss:It was rebooted too many times. Johnny Ive insisted not have a steering wheel. They wanted a dragon. They didn't have one like the whole nine yards. Right. And it was a waste of money and everything. But Apple is notoriously stingy. So even though over 10 years they spent billions of dollars, still generally drop in the bucket. But what this chart shows is what the rest of Apple's peers are doing right now. And essentially how it either looks like they all know something Apple doesn't or it shows that they are panicking and Apple isn't. We'll find out which one of those things is true because i don't think they can both be true right like they're spending so much money just astronomical sons i mean they have the money like these are very wealthy companies it's not like they're bankrupting themselves by spending this money but like they're not just outspending apple by a little bit like ai is different than any other like if you go back to any other trends or boom that apple didn't follow like everyone's investing in netbooks these bars were not like this when netbooks were popular right like whatever the thing is even even if you went back and looked at it like this is always funny when we talk about this number like uh in these the the smartphone revolution how much money was uh you know microsoft spending on the mobile devices versus how much money was apple spending and the bars would have looked pretty similar i think like the estimate i always see in those various stories about like how much money did apple invest before they could ship the first iphone it was like 150 million or something to get the first iphone out the door which at the time you know you're taking people off teams or whatever but like how much additional money did you have to to drop in before you ship the first iphone 150 million dollars to get that business started was a really good deal that was 150 million dollars extremely well spent and i bet during that same time period microsoft probably spent more on mobile than apple did they just didn't they just made worse choices and didn't get the same end result but then like again that those those lines wouldn't show up on this graph at all because these these are in billions right that they would this would be the thickness of the x-axis i just it just astronomical how much money is being spent by the way all those hardware shortages you can see that in these lines too who's buying all the hardware so i can't get ram these bars this right here this is where it's all going that's why you can't get the mac that you

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46:43John Siracusa:we talked about uh macbook neoing all the things but john you want to go to a different direction

46:49Casey Liss:this week what are we talking about do the pun do it casey do it for me the evil the age of ultra on apple products thank you i worked hard on that one i'm here to serve john i mean i'm making dated references the kids remember those movies it's a long time ago no they're so good though but it really this really is what this is about we did talk about newing but and what this topic is specifically sticking the word ultra on apple products which is different than i mean we weren't talking about sticking the word neo we're talking about newing in terms of we have the macbook neo which is a real product and it's the first one to have that suffix and kind of do it to other products but there are existing apple products with ultra stuck on the end of it uh this the question here is and these this is based on a whole bunch of rumors the rumors are swirling and people love to see a pattern.

47:36Casey Liss:Apple's going to stick the world Ultra on the end of a bunch of products, maybe products that we've already talked about. But suddenly when you stick Ultra on all the end of them, is this the age of Ultra on Apple products?

47:47John Siracusa:All right, so we're starting with the iPhone Ultra and John's favorite YouTuber, Max Tech, shows off some, I guess they were like aluminum or some sort of metal models that looked very accurate. And if you're to believe the video, and I have no reason not to, the same leaker that came up with these specs or printed or whatever made these metal objects. Did it a year ago for the iPhone 17.

48:10Casey Liss:They've done this for the past several models. You can get these essentially down to the fractional millimeter accurate models of the iPhone months before they come out. So I have no reason to doubt these. But if you want to see the foldable phone in physical form, this is it. But the reason this is part of this section is, hey, you know the foldable phone we've been talking about? One of the names that's been remembered for it has been iPhone Ultra. It's a pretty obvious choice. since the very first time that the foldable phone was rumored years ago, iPhone ultra was thrown out there along with iPhone fold, iPhone duo, whatever.

48:39Casey Liss:But in the light of this new Apple's going to stick ultra on all their products, it's really cementing iPhone ultra as the favorite name for this particular phone. And it is an interesting start to the ultra family of products that is rumored here because I mean, I, I reason I put a link to them thing with the showing the models of it is when I see that little, you know, aluminum model in the hands of a person and they're, you know, manipulating it and folding it and using it, it looks to me like, and I've seen other people say this as well. This is kind of the spiritual successor to the iPhone mini.

49:15Casey Liss:And you're going to put ultra on this product. Now in one respect, ultra will apply because rumors are that it will be ultra expensive because Hey, screens, the most expensive part. And this has two screens, one of which is twice as big as you would expect. Uh, and it's obviously expensive and fancy to make the folding screen and you got to make the sides thin and all, you know, it's going to, the rumor is, is going to be more expensive. If you look at all the folding phones in the industry, they tend to be very expensive models. So ultra makes sense. Well, when I look at the actual phone, I'm like, Oh, look, it's a phone for people who miss the iPhone mini because it's so small.

49:48Casey Liss:It's so short when it's, I mean, it's thick, it's fat, it's chunky when you have it folded up. But one of the points that's made in the video is like, look how easy I can reach everywhere on the screen with my thumb when it's folded up. it's like the fat nano of iphones i mean if you're that way or the iphone mini so right away i feel like this is a weird product to be called ultra because when i was in it was iphone ultra was that term was being applied to phones many years ago even before the foldable phone was a rumor and people were like apple's going to come out with another phone that's even more expensive than the iphone pro max and they're going to call it the iphone ultra and here's the ways that it's going to be better and there was like sort of a combination of the iphone air rumors with maybe the the nascent iphone folding phone rumors or whatever but that made sense to me it's like can you make a high-end phone that's higher end than the pro or pro max and you call it ultra and you spend more money for it but the folding phone other than the fact that it's going to be the most expensive iphone ever ultra seems like a weird choice for the name but uh rumor has it that's what they're going to go with yeah i don't i it doesn't quite fit the foldable for me if the

50:52Marco Arment:rumors are correct about you know the size and everything um i do think that this is less for the iphone mini than you think uh because first of all like i took up that 3d printer model that i that i have that everybody made a couple months back and like i can't reach the corner at all um i can reach about three quarters of the way to you know diagonal end to end um so i still have a big sweep up there that i cannot reach um because it's wide do you have a mini to

51:21John Siracusa:compare with um yes also for what it's worth max tech had said that the initial read on the ultra was that it would be much taller than people are saying it is now i think the model you had

51:33Casey Liss:matches what he had but yeah i don't know if it like the model the ones that he's got are the ones that they make when they're like when they like the case manufacturers use these like that i'm pretty sure they're accurate i'm not sure if the 3d print was close but it might be yeah so

51:44Marco Arment:the mini compared to this model the mini is a little bit taller but a lot narrower yeah i guess

51:50Casey Liss:It depends on the size of your hands and thumbs. Like, I don't know how big the MaxTec guy's hands are.

51:54Marco Arment:I mean, I don't think I have giant hands by any means, but they're not like tiny Trump hands. But anyway, calling this an ultra is a little bit of an odd move because, first of all, it is going to be very different than the others. Like, it's not going to be better in all ways. It's going to be worse in a few ways. When you look at previous uses of the name ultra, you know, the M chip ultras and the Apple Watch Ultra. Those are like, we took what was good about the thing before and just increased everything as much as we could. Like we gave you everything. That's not what the foldable is doing.

52:28Marco Arment:The foldable is increasing some things a lot, like the unfolded screen size is going to be dramatically increased, but then the folded up screen size is going to be shrunk and weird.

52:37Casey Liss:And take away a camera, most importantly.

52:39Marco Arment:Right. They're going to probably take away cameras. It's going to be questionable on things like how the battery life situation is going to work out, what other kind of limitations or sidesteps it's going to have and other features. Will it have things like magnetic charging? Who knows? Will it work with cases? Who knows? Will it have the heat management features of the Pro line? Probably not because I don't know how it would fit in there. There's all sorts of trade-offs. You can look at the iPhone Air for a preview of probably what kind of trade-offs were required to get the thickness required in there.

53:12Marco Arment:and like I think we're going to have a similar number of trade-offs. I think it's also going to be, you know, it's going to be mini in some ways sometimes, but one way it's not going to be mini is how it feels in your hand because it's going to be not only wide, but I would also guess heavy because this is a lot of mechanical parts, a lot of mechanical complexity. I think it's going to be dense and it's not going to feel mini at all, although it will feel ultra.

53:39Casey Liss:And thicker, obviously.

53:40Marco Arment:Yeah, obviously very thick. So I think it's going to be a bit of a sidestep. But what Ultra tends to mean in Apple's usage so far is we gave you the best and the most of everything. And that's not what this is. This is kind of a sidestep. So I don't think they're going to use that name for this. I think they're going to use a different name.

53:59Casey Liss:Well, I agree with you about what Ultra has historically meant. But I don't agree with you with the logic leap. Therefore, that's not what Apple is going to do. Because Apple does not care about logic or past patterns. they just name things whatever the hell they want and we're like but wait that doesn't make any sense your your past two things were like this and now this thing is like this and apple just goes and they shrug and we get it so but anyway these are just rumors so the iphone ultra and steven hack at it when he put his money down on iphone ultra i think he thinks that he was early he's like i'm putting this is going to be called the iphone ultra but he was like you know probably a year after the first time that was name was connected with the phone but he's very convinced apparently uh i don't think he has any inside info but there you have it iphone ultra potentially one of the ultras and and to be fair to the iphone ultra this has been the leading contender for the name people have basically been calling it the iphone ultra when they didn't just call it the folding iphone duo has not caught on among the rumors and iphone fold no one seems to really believe that's going to be a thing so if they don't call it ultra i'm not sure what they're going to call it but that's that's our first ultra product all right moving on macbook ultra otherwise

55:02John Siracusa:known as the m6 based oled macbook pro with a touchscreen and dynamic dynamic island and maybe

55:07Casey Liss:marco arment maybe cellular we'll see this is the macbook pro we've been talking about they're like oh i remember when it was like and and they're gonna have the m6 macbook pros of this year too that's the rumor i would say i think we talked about this last episode like based on the component shortages the having the m6 based macbook pros come out in calendar year 2026 seems vanishingly uh likely at this point so yeah too bad for that but this this product's been rumored for a long time we're like oh you can get the m5 ones if you're comfortable with the design again before the component shortages gave you another reason to it.

55:39Casey Liss:But like, hey, if you just want something that's tried and true and tested and you know what they're like, the M5 MacBook Pros are great. You can get one. They're available right now. The next one is going to be fancier in so many ways. It's going to have the OLED screen, right? It's going to be M6-based. It's going to be a new design for the case, which we haven't had in a long time. Supposedly also thinner. It's going to have dynamic ion, then a touchscreen, and maybe cellular. Like, wow, I should wait for the M6-based one. but all of those rumors were kind of like you know we have the m5 mace macbook pro and every once in a while the apple redesigns its things the mac money gets a new case and becomes smaller the the current macbook pro design was a redesign of the previous one like it just makes sense but the current rumor is oh no they're not just going to roll out this thing this m6 oled base blah blah blah touchscreen dynamica on macbook pro as the successor to the m5 ones no they're going to call it the MacBook Ultra.

56:34Casey Liss:As in, this is not the MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro has an M5, you see, and a non-OLED screen, and no touchscreen, and no dynamic island, and no cellular. But this is a new class of MacBook, presumably for more money. I feel like this is the only consistent theme of Ultra so far. For more money, and we'll keep selling the MacBook Pro with the M5 in it, I guess, in the old case. But if you want a MacBook Ultra, which is somewhat disappointing to me because I just assume it's like, this is the next best, greatest MacBook Pro. It's, it's no less a MacBook Pro than any of its predecessors. Yes. They occasionally go through these, you know, redesign, revision things, but we don't change the product line to say, okay, well now this is a whole different product.

57:19Casey Liss:No, it's just the next slate. It's the next evolution in the MacBook Pro. Why do you have to call it ultra? And when I see the name ultra rumor for this, I think, well, they either want to or have to charge massively more money for it, or they love the idea of having an even higher priced, higher margin model in the MacBook Pro line, so they can keep selling the MacBook Pro for the people who can't tolerate how massively we're going to gouge them for this new one. And by the way, this new one will be way nicer than the old one in a lot of ways. Newly redesigned thing, much better screen, touchscreen, the dynamic ion cellular like these are all features that just didn't exist before on the line so i see that if you're going to make this split now is the time to do it but it pains me a little bit to see them trying if they assuming again assuming this is even true um trying to split the line in a way that i think is Not justified by what I see as simply making the MacBook Pro catch up to modern specs in all regards.

58:19Marco Arment:See, I think this, the MacBook Ultra idea makes a lot more sense than the iPhone Ultra being the foldable. Like this, to me, it's like you want to give everybody the most. And again, look at the Apple Watch Ultra for a precedent here. The Apple Watch Ultra didn't need to be the thinnest, sleekest Apple Watch model. It was the one that was like, if people want absurd battery life, much higher durability, much brighter screen, much more depth rating, you know, all the different things the Ultra gives you. You know, things like the siren and the speaker and the extra button and like all this stuff.

58:58Marco Arment:The Ultra was like, we are going to prioritize giving you the most that you could possibly want out of this device. And that allows us to make something that is thick and blocky and has expensive metals in it and stuff like that. And that will help achieve that goal because this product doesn't need to be the thin, sleek, mass market thing for the more mass market targeted price. so when you take that attitude and consider how could you make a macbook pro ultra with that style so you can you can brainstorm things like yes it would have the higher end component the oled screen it you know maybe it has you know a higher end tier of chips available i don't

59:43Casey Liss:necessarily oh that's the other thing about it does that mean the macbook pro is never going to

59:46Marco Arment:get the m6 or we'll just get it like on a staggered pace like right now the macbook air has like a staggered cpu you know from the from the pro line maybe there is another subdivision of chip i don't know if the i don't know if it's feasible for the laptop thermal envelope to include like the actual

1:00:06Casey Liss:ultra chip that seems unlikely yeah that's the only thing i think would justify the ultra ultra name is if they actually did have an m6 class chip that is has unprecedented like that is just bigger and hotter than has ever but i don't think it's going to be the case because again the rumor is that the rumored MacBook Ultra will be thinner than the existing M5 MacBook Pros.

1:00:27Marco Arment:Maybe they're achieving that through things like a more expensive metal. Maybe it'll be titanium. I don't know. It's been done before, not recently, and not without its problems. But we have a different world now.

1:00:39Casey Liss:Is it going to be that fancy metal that we talked about in the earlier episode?

1:00:42Marco Arment:Yeah, right. I don't know how it would work out cost-wise, but certainly you can imagine, okay a macbook pro that has the best possible screen they can ship the fastest chip they can ship maybe it has higher resource limits on ram and storage also what if it's only available in 16 inch and that gives them a few more options of the configuration options they can they can offer you know what if it is titanium what if it is the you know better battery life than all the other ones because it's a little bit bigger a little bit heavier but it's ultra it's allowed to be there's a lot of freedom that's offered by the concept of making something of having an ultra line and i think the apple watch ultra i think has been a big success in in a lot of those ways so hopefully there is something to that besides just a higher price yeah i think if the ultra

1:01:29Casey Liss:actually was like the watch where it was actually bigger thicker and had higher specs in all regards i would accept it the thing that burns me up about this though is that i feel like the macbook pros are overdue to have oled touch screen is not a high-end feature it's on 300 laptops right the dynamic island is not so amazing that you need to have be the high price thing and i don't think they're going to put a bigger faster hotter chip in it i think it's just going to have the same chips it just it just kind of annoys me to like essentially uh fence off what used to be like we used to when the new macbook pros came out they got the the the pro and the max version of the plain the pro and the max version of the latest m chips and that's just what we accepted and now it's like okay well now there's this staggered thing only the ultras get the latest version of the pro on the mac ships you got to wait for the other ones that trickle down and by the way this is an excuse for us to to to keep tech from trickling down like basically the apple trickle down thing is we have to have a somewhat they try to have a somewhat sensible line where the higher end ones have options lower end ones don't which is why the non-pro phones took so long to get promotion because it was just a differentiator for the pro phones what this would mean is that don't hold your breath for the macbook air to get an oled screen because that's like a 2029 project i figure what the rumors were for that but it's like that's got to trickle all it's not even going to go on the macbook pro it's only going to be the ultra pros still don't get it then eventually it has to trickle down to the macbook pro when they go fine it's not going to be exclusive to the ultra in this third generation of the ultra product now the macbook pros will get it and then you got to wait another three years for to say fine a macbook air can have an oled screen and that's how apple essentially gets embarrassingly behind on technology that is found in commodity products where the oled screen the price of oled screen is one of the few components that is not going through the roof right now although i'm sure everything is increasing a little bit because of carry-on effects but like screen prices do go down screen quality does get better but apple just holds the line and says no oled is it is an ultra feature only and it has to stay that way for years and it just that annoys me so i'm i'm not happy about this rumor if it

1:03:23John Siracusa:turns out to be true i mean i'm happy about it if i get my cellular macbook pro that's all i'm saying

1:03:27Casey Liss:yeah that's the other thing you think like oh we want cellular so much guess what your only choice for cellular, which is like, again, a thing that you can get on like a base level iPad, right? Your only choice is the three starting at$3 ,000 MacBook Ultra or something that that feels gross, too.

1:03:41John Siracusa:You know, it's funny, when I bought my current computer that I'm using to speak to speak to you right now, which is an M3 Max MacBook Pro with with M3 Max in it and 64 gigs RAM, eight terabytes of storage. I thought it'll last me a year or two, which has been typical for me for the last several years. And now, I think three years in, I'm expecting that I'm going to hold onto this until the MacBook Ultra, whatever they call it, is something less than your Mac Pro in terms of expense because it's going to be a doozy, particularly if RAM and SSDs are still incredibly expensive. Next on our list, AirPods Ultra, otherwise known as AirPods Pro with cameras to feed visual intelligence to Siri.

1:04:22John Siracusa:And there was some news about this just earlier today. In fact, Mark Gurman writes, The earbuds, which rely on cameras to see the space surrounding a user and provide information, are an advanced testing. The cameras essentially act as eyes for the Siri digital assistant and aren't designed to take photos or video. These components, located in both the right and left earbuds, allow the device to capture visual information in low resolution. Other than longer stems to accommodate the cameras, the product will resemble the AirPods Pro 3. The idea is to let users ask questions about an item they may be looking at.

1:04:51John Siracusa:For instance, they could be facing food ingredients and ask what they should cook for dinner. The device could give the wearer a reminder based on something the camera sees, or it might use external visuals to provide more advanced turn-by-turn directions. The AI could cite specific landmark ahead when telling users when they should turn. The new AirPods aren't designed to support hand gesture controls. They do have a small LED light in the earbuds that will turn on when visual data is being fed into the cloud. Apple had planned for the earbuds to go on sale as early as the first half of this year but the launch was postponed after delays to a revamped version of siri everyone take a shot uh while the hardware is nearly ready concerns about the ai elements could further hold back a launch if apple isn't pleased with the quality of the visual intelligence features surprise surprise

1:05:35Casey Liss:so this is a way when they're applying ultras to the airpods with cameras in them which is again a long rumored product uh do you stick ultra on these well it's surely differentiated from the airpods pro this is not just like the next logical revision of the airpods pro to stick cameras on them i don't think that follows like we've had airpods pro airpods pro 2 2.5 3 cameras were not really on anyone's list of things that that everyone else is doing on their their earbuds earbuds that surely apple will have to do but this is apparently their plan so if they want to stick ultra on this one i give them a pass because i mean they're not airpods pro and sticking a camera on something that didn't previously have one it sounds pretty ultra whether or not this will be a good product or work or ever ship because they can't get their syriac together we'll see but i you know i could see and obviously it's probably gonna be more expensive too because you're adding cameras to things that didn't have them and there's not a lot of stuff on airpods to begin with so the addition of a camera is a significant addition to the parts that you need to make an airpod uh but if you're trying to make a family of products with ultra suffix this is and it's the same question i said before if they don't call these ultra what do you call yeah i guess because they already have pro airpods camera or it could just be well it could be airpods vision Remember when they did the iPod photo?

1:06:49Casey Liss:They just stuck photo right in the name.

1:06:51John Siracusa:I mean, you could just make a, this is what we were just talking about with regard to the MacBook Pro versus MacBook Pro Ultra, but it could just be the new AirPods Pro. You know, they just get more pro-y.

1:07:01Casey Liss:Yeah, I mean, they would just make it four, I guess. Like, well, they're up to three. They use the numbers in marketing, right? AirPods Pro with three, right? Yeah, I mean. Yeah, I don't know.

1:07:09Marco Arment:I mean, this is not a product I'm particularly excited about, but maybe it'll change my mind. But honestly, I still am not good with the AirPods Pro 3. I still use my 2s the vast majority of the time because I still find the 3s uncomfortable. Sorry. Even with the tips?

1:07:25Casey Liss:You went through the whole different tip things?

1:07:27Marco Arment:Yeah, I went to the comply tips and they're less uncomfortable, but they're still uncomfortable really after a long time. And I still use the 2s the vast majority of the time.

1:07:35Casey Liss:Losing the ear lottery sucks.

1:07:37Marco Arment:Yeah, it does. But yeah, I think that we went through the pro-ification of their product line over the years and now everything has a pro and so if they wanted to go higher than that ultra is the word they tend to use so yeah i think that's very likely to be used here well just to briefly

1:07:56John Siracusa:kind of echo what marco said i don't feel like i need cameras in my airpods however this is one of those things where i would be very unsurprised to see oh apple came up with something really

1:08:08Casey Liss:clever and i must have this in my life you know it's not the hardware though on these it's like any other ai type thing it's like you need the sensors there to provide input but it lives or dies entirely based on these much smarter thing living either on your phone or in the cloud or both that does something with those because as this rumor says the cameras aren't going to be like good camera i mean it's an airpod what do you think you can fit in there it's not going to be it's going to be a low resolution camera from which you the user will probably never see any output you will never see what these cameras are seeing it's probably some just garbage thing but it's input to what you hope is some kind of smart thing that can say like now now we can see what's around you and maybe we can do useful stuff with that like i said directions turn left at the next tree or whatever like when you're walking around like if the thing at the other end of this is smart and useful it's not the cameras that are doing it it's the smart and useful thing and it's just like just it just needs access to some cameras and these are already in your ears and they have a pretty good view depending on your haircut um so yeah there are challenges here but like as the end of this says uh there are concerns about the ai elements that could further hold back a bunch if apple isn't pleased with the quality of visual intelligence features yeah uh apparently they haven't been pleased with any any of the ai features because they haven't shipped them and they continue not to be pleased and so i'm not optimistic casey that uh that apple is going to bring you around on these or i'm not even that optimistic they're going to ship anytime soon because so many things have been delayed and especially for something like this where it's like the only purpose of these cameras is to feed some smart thing that's going to do stuff with them it's not going to take pictures it's not going to take video you're not going to see the output of these pictures according to this rumor its whole purpose is to hook up to that smart thing if the smart thing's not smart enough don't ship this product wait and it sounds like from this rumor like the people who did the hardware is twiddling their thumbs like yeah we we delivered the hardware on the schedule that you said you wanted it and now it's just sitting there waiting for the software people to get their act together for years yep all right next on our

1:10:06John Siracusa:list ipad ultra otherwise known as the 20 inch foldable oled ipad which has been uh reportedly

1:10:12Casey Liss:shelved yeah we talked about this on several shows ago the rumors about people didn't know whether it was going to be mac or whether it was going to run mac os or ipad os or whatever and then there was a rumor a while ago that i think we also reported on oh yeah they've decided not to do this one basically this is like imagine a foldable phone but massive and presumably running ipad os it's like an ipad that i you know you can fold out the screen is really big and i guess you could make it in like an l shape and it could have a an on-screen keyboard to be kind of like a laptop like it was this rumor was always just going all over the place but yeah the rumor is that they've decided for now not to do this one but had they done it it might have been called ipad ultra and this is another one where i think the ultra name fits because it's like massively expensive ipad that's way bigger that can bend in half which is the thing ipads can't do uh that one definitely Well, they can.

1:10:59John Siracusa:Marco did it once.

1:11:00Casey Liss:I did not do it. Excuse me. There was a butt in the household that did it, but it was not Marco's butt.

1:11:05John Siracusa:That's correct. All right. Apple Watch Ultra 4. What do we think about this, John?

1:11:10Casey Liss:It's already got the name Ultra, and this rumor is the worst because they're like, maybe there's an iWatch? Presumably there will be an Apple Watch Ultra 4. They're up to three. They're going to make another one. Probably not going to be redesigned, but maybe the rumors are so bad about it. Maybe it will have newer updated health sensors. maybe we'll have a resign case maybe it'll have touch id on the side button and maybe it'll have a new s12 soc but none of these none of these these maybes about the apple like like the fact that there will be an apple watch ultra 4 i would put money on but the fact that nobody can come up with anything that they're willing to say yeah it'll probably have this feature and it's just like what could they do for an apple they could do all these things but it doesn't seem like any of them are even rumored just seems like people are guessing based on like well if they do make one with the four it probably has to have this stuff so this is only in here as a courtesy because it's already got the name ultra and it is as far as i know the only product obviously the the chip but that's not a product like it's an ingredient in a product apple watch ultra was out there with the ultra name out ahead of everybody else being all ultra and uh they keep making them and they've been getting better a little tiny bit but uh nothing dramatic and that was the first ultra

1:12:19Marco Arment:right the apple watch ultra no so i double checked the the m1 ultra came out first yeah the chip oh

1:12:25Casey Liss:sorry i meant the chip is not a product it's an ingredient yeah they were both they were both the

1:12:30Marco Arment:same year they're both 2022 i believe but yeah they were the the app the m1 ultra beat the apple

1:12:34John Siracusa:watch ultra by like six months yeah i was thinking product product not chip but that is a fair point nevertheless uh john is still in the bargaining phase with regard to his uh mac pro bargaining i'm just i'm just i'm just saying mac ultra question mark and john himself has put an

1:12:51Casey Liss:upside down smiley in our internal show notes because honestly you know what kind of mac would you put a name i know we're talking about the macbook pro ultra right but like what about a mac which means desktop mac because the laptop ones are called macbooks of various kinds what would a mac ultra be yeah i think we know the answer to that question and apple does not want to make it but i'm just saying apple if you're going to put ultra on all your products i hope someone in some pitch meeting says hey what if we made a mac ultra and then someone someone wearing one of my shirts just glares at them said his name was stampy you loved him that's a simpsons reference casey nope i actually got that mac ultra you can rename it someday the case for a true mac ultra successor i don't know mac ultra just gonna leave that out there let's move on i mean i i think i think there there is room for mac ultra but i don't think it's ever

1:13:51Marco Arment:going to be the form that you want it to be well like i said i'm not married to the form as i've

1:13:57Casey Liss:made the pitch in the past several episodes more transistors bigger hotter more heat dissipation in exchange for more computation that's that's there's a lot of flexibility within that framework

1:14:07Marco Arment:a lot yeah i think if such a thing were to exist it would be another tier of the mac studio in this in the similar way that like when we had the imac pro it was you know externally it looked like a 27 inch retina imac even though internally it was very different and you know had much higher end components totally different cooling etc but it was it was like a pro form of a product line they already had i think if they're ever going to do a mac ultra uh it would it would be basically a pro a pro edition like a higher higher end edition of the mac studio or something that

1:14:48Casey Liss:looks very similar to the mac yeah but they'd call it the mac ultra they wouldn't call it the

1:14:51Marco Arment:mac studio right and they probably wouldn't call it the mac pro because that name is now tarnished

1:14:55Casey Liss:forever yeah i mean like it seems like they're moving towards ultra as their high-end name and leaving kind of pro as the middle kind of what they did with the uh actually with like the uh super cores and the medium cores and stuff like that you know by all means feel i have quibbles about which particular products they put into these slots but if they want to change their naming and make ultra the new top pro the new middle and then i guess a four level one which is like neo air pro ultra and then somewhere in there is the non-suffix ones somewhere in between like it's that anyway i'm fine with them going through that but yeah whatever they make if they were to make a mac the whole idea is a mac that can do more than the current highest end mac studio because it has more transistors, uses more power, like a desktop Mac, right?

1:15:35Casey Liss:You know, it's plugged into the wall. You don't have to worry about battery life on a thing. You're only using 300 watts now. Take some of those excess watts and turn them into computation because, hey, we have this, you know, there's plenty of things people want to use computation for, even more so now than there has ever been. Please use that. Please, you know, and if you can fit it in the same Mac Studio case and call it the Mac Ultra with using the special metal or some fancy heatsink, fine. but if you have to make a bigger case a taller max whatever yeah i'm not tied to the form factor again the trash can was not you know if they hadn't been able to scale that it would have been great like i like the idea of a chimney thing there's lots of directions you can go but like mac ultra like i i speaking of like me being like in a morning period i feel like there is a i don't know a latent period or something there is there's necessarily going to be a multi-year gap before apple even looks in the direction of anything resembling a mac ultra simply because they just finally got the, you know, the will to can what was everyone was a dead product, the Mac Pro.

1:16:38Casey Liss:So you got to wait many, many years for them to revisit this, if they ever revisit it. It's not even clear that they ever revisit it. But I do think the odds of them revisiting this in many years is increased if they actually do this rumored sort of ultra, you know, what's essentially a marketing rollout of like, hey, we're defining a new tier of product that was pioneered by the Apple Watch Ultra, which is our existing products with Ultra on the end, which are more expensive, fancier, better, more blah, blah, blah things. If they do that, it's inevitable that in five years, someone is going to go up to the whiteboard and write, Mac Ultra question mark with an upside down smiley face.

1:17:15Casey Liss:Like that's got to happen, but not now. It's too soon.

1:17:19John Siracusa:iMac Ultra. I am not in the market for this, but I love this idea. Reading from Macworld. uh roman loyola writes of all the desktop macs the imac is the most likely candidate for an ultra version would it be the fastest most powerful mac available no but apple isn't necessarily defining ultra that way ultra applies to the product in a particular line that goes above and beyond a typical feature set in some way like an iphone that folds or macbook with no led touchscreen an imac ultra could have a 6k 32 inch display and a pro or max chip to set it apart from the standard model i don't think they would sell any of these and i still think they would do it

1:17:52Casey Liss:do the issue do it because it would be awesome so if it's not time to look at the mac ultra because it's too soon i think it's about time to look at the iMac it's been a long time since the iMac pro and uh you know again roman putting his stake in the ground of what he thinks ultra should mean and i would caution again that just because your definition makes sense doesn't mean apple will do it in fact maybe the opposite the more sense it makes less likely apple is to do it but anyway that is a valid definition of ultra based on history and logic to say we're not you know the The whatever ultra is not the best whatever Apple sells.

1:18:22Casey Liss:It's just the best whatever within that line. So the iMac ultra would be a bigger, more powerful iMac that has a bigger screen and a faster CPU and dissipates more heat and blah, blah, blah, blah. We've already done this. It was called the iMac Pro. It was great. It was incredible. Yeah. And Apple decided a long time ago now they're not interested in pursuing that. But I feel like the time enough time has passed for them to at least consider, hey, this ultra thing is going great. if it turns out that essentially we're able to drive wealthy people up market and get more money from them like that what this boils down to from a products perspective is like yes we're making cooler better products and i'm not setting that aside because i like those products but also as you go higher end isn't it nice that you get nicer margins too you know like you get you much lower volume but you do get higher margins so like that's that's the play here like all for all their product lines they want to have a good spread they don't you know they want to go down low with the neos and make sure they're selling as much volume as they possibly can and they'll also go up high to some degree to try to get to see how much money there is to extract from the market right they've always done that so yeah again i don't i don't see because desktop maps are so our macs are so unpopular relatively speaking this doesn't seem likely uh i know there are people who would love this product uh but i don't know if there's enough of them for them to develop it especially since the only product in the imac line currently is the imac and it is extremely unfriendly to ultraing in its current form which is so thin you can't even put an ethernet port on it right so i you know it unlike because the imac pro had the advantage they could take the existing case and make it a darker color and stick better internals in it and it was done you can't do that with the uh with the current imac case they would have to make a new case and then that basically kills the project because like no it's you know or a 32 inch screen it's like you've just killed the project because we're not making a separate case separate bigger case with better cooling just for this product that's no one's going to buy that's not even going to be the fastest Mac because the Mac Studio will still be faster.

1:20:17Casey Liss:So sorry, Roman, I don't think this is going to happen. But I think it is about time for Apple to consider this before deciding that they don't want to do it.

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1:22:23John Siracusa:Let's do some Ask ATP, and Pat Murphy writes, I got a new laptop, an M5 Pro, four-terabyte SSD. I usually start a new time machine backup with a new machine. Do you have an opinion on how big of a time machine drive to get? I used to get a time machine drive 2X or 4X, the size of the drive it is backing up, but the current costs are making me pause. The price of a 4TB external SSD micro center is about$1 ,100 for the love of God. Wow. Just three years ago, that drive was$200. Yeah, I would generally say get at least as big, if not 2X, the size of your drive. But in this case, I would do one of two things.

1:22:58John Siracusa:I would either get a four terabyte drive and no bigger SSD that is, or just get a spinning disc. It's fine for a time machine. It's fine.

1:23:07Casey Liss:Not, not really that fine. I wouldn't recommend that, but here's been my philosophy for time machine backup drives has always been my philosophy and it's just served me well for multiple reasons. One of which is sad, um, get a time machine drive. That's the same size as a driver backing up. And now you're thinking that's not going to work. What about like, cause there's overhead for the backups themselves and everything. and I want to have multiple versions, multiple backups, not just one backup, yada, yada. But here's the thing. First of all, you shouldn't actually be filling the drive you're backing up to like the brim.

1:23:37Casey Liss:It should have less, your four terabyte drive should have less than four terabytes in it. Like not, you know, a reasonable amount less because macOS flips out when there's no free disk space, okay? Bad things happen. Do not fill it as much as you possibly can, which means that you're not backing up four terabytes of data. and also time machine doesn't back up every file that's on that drive it skips over stuff uh you know like the read-only system volume and crap like that i forget what it skips over these days i don't know if it's doing the whole system volume or not but like but it's not getting everything so my point is that your four terabyte backup drive should handily hold a complete backup of the data that's actually on your four terabyte disk that you're backing up plus a couple days weeks months of churn depending on how often you change files and also my practice has been to get the biggest drive that i can afford as my main drive which means that i can probably barely afford to get a drive the same size the reason you don't get 2x or 4x the size say wouldn't that be great i could have years and years of backups because i've got my first backup and then just all these iterative diffs for the subsequent backups i could have huge backup history the reason you don't do a 2x or 4x is because time machine will corrupt itself long before you were able to fill a 4x the size drive thing because time machine is reliable for spans of a year or two but eventually it will say oh no your time machine backup like it's corrupt in some way there's no real error your only recourse is to erase the drive and start over that happens to me every few years so i think before you're able to fill certainly a 4x size drive of the one you're backing up time machine will be corrupted as for spinning discs these days especially with apfs on spinning disk it's just too slow it like setting aside the noise and everything it's just it's a brutally slow because apfs is not optimized for spinning disks in any way whatsoever and time machine does lots of little ios and it's just i do not recommend it where i know it's cheaper to get the storage use that storage to hold your massive video files backing up you know 50 gig blu-ray reps that are in single mkv files great for spinning disks backing up the tiny little files that make up a time machine backup of your active main system drive not a good use of this so my recommendation get what drive that's the same size as the one you're backing up or maybe a little bit bigger getting something even 2x as big is probably as too aspirational with respect to the

1:26:07Marco Arment:historic reliability of time machine yeah i would also say definitely get the one that is the matching size. That's how I've operated my time machine discs for over a decade, and it's been totally fine. I've never had a problem with it. And as for spinning disc versus SSD, man, those prices hurt. I don't feel for the choice you have to make on this.

1:26:35Casey Liss:Go back in time and buy the SSD when it was 200 bucks.

1:26:38Marco Arment:Yeah, like John is right that spinning discs are really slow by today's standards. That being said time machine is one place where as long as you could tolerate the um the the noise but you know potential of where it is um that's that's a place where i would say it doesn't matter that

1:26:56Casey Liss:much for the speed exactly but it but it does though because you think it doesn't matter if you're like i don't care how long the backup takes i'm not waiting on it or anything here's the problem it will take so long that if you tell it like it's scheduled to like back up every hour forget about that a single backup is going to take many hours and you will get to the point where a single backup takes more than 12 or 24 hours so now you're not getting good backups because oh i modified that file an hour ago let me get it from time machine sorry it's still running the backup that it started at noon yesterday because this and i know this because i used come on i i'm telling you i used to have spinning disks inside directly attached inside my mac pro that i was using as my time machine volumes that's how i know this is the case it's so bad with apfs and time machine on spinning disks like that bad where i'm backing up a four terabyte ssd to like whatever it was an eight terabyte spinning disk it was just brutally slow such that first of all it was never not doing a time machine backup which was bad right because it's just and it's not like it's swamping my main drive with io because it's so stupid slow but it's just it's always doing it and the the interval of my backups like how how many different versions of this file that i've been working on for the past two days can i get out of the backup massively spaced out because it just took so darn long it is the close to the worst case scenario for spinning disks like i said spinning disks are great use them to store giant media files don't use them for time machine if you can possibly help it now it could also be that i am stressing these drives more again i will say the uh the two underscore separated words that everybody knows node underscore modules how many files can you create create how quickly and how quickly can they churn and change over the course of doing development of a week of work node underscore modules directory will really abuse your time machine backups it's easy to end up creating and modifying and deleting literally millions of files on a daily basis that will brutalize your time machine drive if you limit yourself to excluding certain drives folders or whatever maybe you can help but you know i'm still saying like it's i know the cost feels bad but uh i don't know try for yourself again maybe i'm a pathological case but i had i've had many years experience in this 2019 mac pro backing up to time machine and this spinning

1:29:09John Siracusa:disk and i do not recommend it that's just because it's a piece of crap intel computer that's why

1:29:13Casey Liss:it was a fast internal bus it was fast a good fast uh drive 7200 rpm high quality you know it's just spinning disks plus tiny files plus apfs equals sadness thanks to our sponsors this

1:29:26Marco Arment:episode factor and delete me and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join one of the many perks of membership is atp overtime our weekly bonus topic this week we're gonna be talking about adobe's um let's say they have recently forgotten to make good software uis especially um so we're gonna be talking about that and over time you can join to listen to hb.fm slash join thank you everybody and we'll talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental oh it was accidental john didn't do any research marco and casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental Who is accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M Anti-Marco-Armen S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse, it's accidental.

1:30:48Marco Arment:Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long.

1:30:59John Siracusa:Marco, you are in the office in your home. Did you walk into the office or did you roll in your wheelchair into the office? He sauntered in.

1:31:10Marco Arment:so i've mentioned in uh past shows that i was training to do a very long walk called the great saunter uh this is a once a year walk organized by the group called shore walkers um around the perimeter of manhattan it is one day you walk about 32 to 33 miles uh around the perimeter all you know from like seven in the morning until you know seven to nine ish p.m depending on how quickly you walk it. I've never done any kind of extreme, if you could call it that, extreme athletic event before, really any athletic event longer than a 5K run. I've never done anything bigger than that. This was a pretty big effort for me and the group I was with.

1:31:58Marco Arment:And I'm really proud of all of us for doing it. Here's the recap. So first of all, if we can go on a brief aside, just for a minute, bikes and pedestrians should never share the same paths. I know this is going to annoy all the bikists out there, but if you can just... They're going to be so mad at us. I know, but I think I have an angle that they will appreciate. Cars can't coexist with bikes gracefully because of the inherent differences in their size, their speed, their physical needs. Well, neither can pedestrians. Now, it's not as bad as it is with cars because drivers of cars often kill cyclists.

1:32:38Marco Arment:And I don't think it's super common for cyclists to kill pedestrians. I'm sure it has happened, but it's probably not very common. Whereas I know that cars pose a much greater danger to cyclists. So I know that. I'm not comparing the level of danger. But between cyclists and pedestrians, these two modes of transportation do not share the same path well. I've been training for this walk for about seven or eight months, something like that. I have had cyclists scream at me, threaten me, come within inches of hitting me at very high speeds, intentionally at least once, all while I was in either a shared lane or on the pedestrian side of a split lane.

1:33:22Marco Arment:So my view of cyclists, having now done a lot of long walks on shared paths, is now, I think similar to the view that cyclists have of car drivers. Not every cyclist is a problem, just like not every car driver is a problem to cyclists. But there's enough bad cyclists that they pose a menace to pedestrians when they're in shared paths. They are entitled, reckless, and inconsiderate of pedestrians, and they have no concern for pedestrian safety or the fact that we tend to have the right of way again this is not all cyclists but there's enough

1:33:58Casey Liss:that are like that that it's a problem interestingly when you posted your first instagram picture about this and it showed the big like crowd of people walking and then to the right there were like two cyclists i think i commented to my wife i'm like boy i bet these cyclists love this day of the year when their bike path is invaded by a gigantic crowd of people walking along it but

1:34:18Marco Arment:But it's not because there's a dividing line. But look, I want bikes out of my walking paths just as much as they want me out of their bike lanes. But there's oftentimes a shared path, especially in a city like New York. Bikes and pedestrians do not coexist well on an eight or 10 foot wide path. And it is best for everyone's safety and happiness for motor vehicles, bikes and pedestrians to each have dedicated spaces that are not shared with the others. And sorry to all the good cyclists out there, but the bad ones of you are a menace to pedestrians. Again, not to the same degree of life-threatening that cars are to you, but definitely physically threatening to a point where, I hate to say it because I never cared about cyclists before, but I really don't like them now.

1:35:12Marco Arment:And I have very good reason not to. and that's that's on the on the bad ones i know that but uh it is best for all of us to have our own spaces i am advocating for bikes cars and pedestrians to all have separate spaces and

1:35:25Casey Liss:wherever possible anyway that's a that's an amazing future because currently cars have a place sometimes pedestrians have a place and that's basically the state of the u.s every once in a while pedestrians and bikes have a shared space which is what you're current complaining about but the utopia of cars pedestrians and bicycles have each having their own separate place boy what a fantasy not in this country in most places yeah it's it's tough and it's tough

1:35:54Marco Arment:in this country but other countries have done it it is possible to do yeah no it's totally possible

1:36:00Casey Liss:it's just we have consistently uh done everything we possibly can to prevent this from happening

1:36:04Marco Arment:yeah so anyway consider this advocacy for everyone to have their own lanes anyway all right so going into this um a few weeks back i did two walks in consecutive weekends that were each about 22 miles the first one was in manhattan and it was on pavement and it was fine and afterwards i felt tired but everything physically was fine the second one was upstate and it was faster paced in the middle of that walk i got like significant pain um in my left rear end uh and it it progressed as the walk went on um into significant problems with my left ankle and this was a few weeks before the great saunter was this on pavement to upstate no it was on a gravel path so it was like a packed gravel um a beautiful it's the ashokin rail trail it's a beautiful path um i've been to ashokin yeah And that path is like 20 feet wide.

1:37:04Marco Arment:So it being shared with bikes is fine. And there's also just not that many people or bikes on it. It's a very wide, fairly sparsely populated path. It's a great path. But I took it, it was on gravel. I took it too fast. And that combination really inflamed my left side and especially for the following couple of weeks, my left ankle. so I went to physical therapist and got some advice and got some stretches and stuff like that but what it basically boiled down to is for me to get through the great saunter I had to take extra care for my ankles especially the left one and so what I did based on everyone's advice and a couple of tests I had these little like heel cups that you put in the shoe that are like little squishy wedges so that it cushions the heel.

1:37:55Marco Arment:The problem is it slopes the foot more forward as a result, which I knew going into it, this is going to make it more likely that the front of my toes might hit the front of my shoes and get blisters. But blisters heal a lot faster than tendons. And so I thought, and based on every, you know, everyone agreed, like all the physical therapists and the doctor, everybody agreed like, okay, yeah, this is what you need to do to get through it. anyway going into it the ankle was hurting but i but i made it through the ankle never got past medium uh hurting but boy did i get blisters and that really made the last 10 miles very challenging um i i'll get to the better news in a few minutes there this is this has happy happier news but um i did have a really hard time getting through the last 10 miles it was just the hardest like mental pain endurance activity I've ever had to do because it was literally 10 miles of every step hurting very painfully because of significant blisters.

1:39:02Marco Arment:So I got through it and there were a few nice things along the way that I wanted to mention. First of all, the day before, I made a saunter map app. Well, rather, I should say Cloud Code made a saunter map app based on about four prompts that i gave it um i the great saunter published a a an online map and a gpx file and you could you know use the web app but i'm like you know i would like to have this as a native iphone app for lots of reasons i think i could make it work a little bit better and also be able to do things like estimate my finish time because you know we were targeting like we want to finish by about 9 p.m got to keep a certain pace throughout the day or you know manage the breaks, etc.

1:39:44And I wanted to know things like, am I on track to meet that time?

1:39:49Marco Arment:And where is the next bathrooms and refreshments? Like how far, like, are we three miles from the next bathroom? Like maybe that will affect the choices I make, you know, things like that. So I just had, I pointed Cloud Code at the webpage that hosted their public map. And I said, you know, basically like, make an iPhone app that has this map in it, that puts my location on the map wherever I am, estimates the distance to the end and how long that will take at the given pace. And you make a dropdown to pick the pace and show the points of interest as little descriptions that pop up and tell me where the next bathroom and next refreshment stops are.

1:40:25Marco Arment:It just did it. I refined it over the course of like three or four prompts over maybe a half hour. I never looked at the code. I never edited the code. I submitted it to the app store. And this was the afternoon before the event. So I'm like, alright, a first time submission of an app, of a vibe coded app that requires location access, what are the odds this is going to get approved in the next 18 hours?

1:40:55Casey Liss:You didn't need it to be approved, right? You can just put it on your phone, right?

1:40:58Marco Arment:I could put it on my phone, but like, you know, TIFF wanted it on hers, and I'm like, alright, well, I could plug your phone in and add it to my developer account. But I'm like, let me see. It would be a lot easier, especially if anybody else asks if they can have it. It would be a lot easier if I could just get it on the app store so let me try and i submitted it and later that day it was approved first try i had to like make a privacy policy i had to answer all the questions about whether it's designed for kids and how much data it collects none no you know like all the like the answer was very simple it was it does collect no data that you know this doesn't have anything in it As far as you know.

1:41:34Marco Arment:Yeah, as far as I know, fair. But it was remarkable. It was, and the app worked great the entire day. And I'm happy. And I emailed the song to organizers just to say, hey, I put this up in case you, you know, want to tell anybody, feel free. If you want me to take it down, I'll take it down. No problem, you know, whatever you want. And they were very happy. But, you know, it was too late to actually tell anybody about it. however somehow the app got nine installations so nice which for for a one-day event that no one knew about the app and it was only existing like you know like 12 hours before the event started

1:42:14Casey Liss:that's pretty good i'm pretty happy i mean you're walking along with them you got nothing but time on your hands you just chat them up say i'm using this app you should try it that's how i got one of the installations yeah they can install while they walk it's fine as long as they don't wander

1:42:25Marco Arment:into the bike lane oh my god so anyway um so that was a fun like vibe coding story here's an app that like you know the day before i'm like on the train on the way there this was never going to be worth me taking time to spend you know three or four days making this app especially and there were some parts of it like you know the the source is a gpx file which is basically a series of points on the map and lines between them and it's like okay well i want you to tell me where i am along that map. But what if I'm not on one of the lines? Or what if I'm between two points? There's a certain amount of math you have to do to figure out, okay, well, what is the point on the route closest to where the person is actually standing?

1:43:09Marco Arment:And I know I could look up how to do that math. We're not talking about really difficult calculus here. We're talking about trigonometry and stuff. It's not that complicated, but I didn't have to. And if I was making this map myself, I would have spent three days on it at least. And so it would never have, not only would it not have gotten done on time, but it's also something I shouldn't have spent three days doing. It just wouldn't have been a good use of my time. And I didn't have to. I just submitted it and Claude wrote it. I tweaked a couple of things. It took me longer to make screenshots than it did to make the app.

1:43:46Marco Arment:I even made an icon.

1:43:47Casey Liss:I didn't ask you this before and I'm kind of afraid of the answer, but who made the icon?

1:43:51Marco Arment:Oh, I made the icon. It's rough.

1:43:54Casey Liss:i was afraid that was the answer because it looks not great the icon is two sf symbols spaced out ask claude to make it next time please it's the icon's bad um but again like i'm like

1:44:07Marco Arment:the that icon took me like a half hour and i'm like this is not a good use of my time i was

1:44:11Casey Liss:gonna say you're you didn't want to spend time but i bet you spent more time putting two sf symbols on a opaque background in some arrangement just man it's yeah it's it's a rough icon and

1:44:21Marco Arment:But even stuff like the screenshots, of course, in iTunes, I hardly ever do screenshots. I know there's tools to automate things fast lane or whatever. I'm sure there's a million things, but I don't use those things for my own BS. And so, but I hate doing screenshots because inevitably, like whatever device or simulator I take the screenshots on, I go to upload them to iTunes. These are not the right resolution. And it gives, these have to be this, this, this, this, or this resolution. Now, it doesn't tell you in iTunes Connect, well, what devices are those? So I was in a rush. So you know what I did?

1:44:59Marco Arment:I took a screenshot of that error message and I pasted it into Gemini. And I said, what devices are these? And it told me, oh, this is what you want to do is use the iPhone 13 Pro simulator or whatever it was. I'm like, perfect. Like, it saved me some time. I didn't.

1:45:13Casey Liss:I was going to say, why do you need to know what device it is? But it's because you're actually taking screenshots on the device in the simulator.

1:45:18Marco Arment:Yeah, like I'm taking screenshots in using the simulator. I'm taking screenshots because with the simulator, I was able to simulate my location. So I was using the simulator to take screenshots. But then iTunes or App Store Connect is like, no, these are the wrong resolution for the, you know, the 6.5 inch screen size or whatever. Well, what does what device is that?

1:45:34Casey Liss:As far as I can tell, though, in App Store Connect, they're not asking you to upload screenshots. They're asking you to upload images. I think you can upload basically. I see a lot of variety in like what people upload. Oh, that's true. Like, yes. But you can do just a picture of a smiley face. and the text that says, please give me money. As long as it's the right resolution, I think it will go through.

1:45:53Marco Arment:That is true. And that's why people will do things like, you know, zoom out and show like the frames of the device and make big marketing messages that span across the screenshot grid. And like, it's this whole thing. Anyway, I got all that stuff done. It was great. I think it was a really fun experiment for me of like, if I like literally don't have time to look at the code or it's so not worth doing, could I make an app that is minimally useful and functional and the answer is for a simple test like this yes obviously it's not going to work for all app types but I was very pleased that it worked for this one and it did exactly what I wanted it to do it was very helpful while we were actually on the saunter it worked perfectly I was very happy to have it and it helped eight other people or at least eight other people tried it I don't know if it helped them but they at least downloaded it um another another fun thing to mention um at the beginning so i i had mentioned on this show months ago one of the reasons that i wanted to do the great saunter and one of the like one of the things that drove us choosing to do it was when we lost our dog hops last summer um i wanted to kind of honor him by by having like a big walk because i was the dog walker we took a lot of walks together.

1:47:09Marco Arment:I walked thousands of miles with hops. And so kind of honoring him by doing this giant walk. At the beginning of the saunter, when everybody was picking up their hats and stuff like that and maps and everything, where everyone gathers at the beginning, a fan of the show just came up to me and said, hey, man, let's do it for hops. And a little fist bump. And I thought that was the most kind, awesome, touching thing. And to you out there, I'm sorry I didn't ask your name. I didn't say. I was kind of just so blown away by it. Also, it was 7 in the morning. And I was about to embark on this ridiculous thing.

1:47:50Marco Arment:So my mind was quite elsewhere. But that really meant a lot to me. And so thank you for doing that. That was really awesome. And the people I was with, I told them about it. And they were also like, wow, that's really cool.

1:48:04Casey Liss:You should have put a picture of Hopson to the app. He could have even been the app icon.

1:48:07Marco Arment:Yeah, well, that would have taken a lot longer, especially a liquid glass version. Adapting your dog to liquid glass is not that easy. Anyway, so thank you to that fan. That was really cool. Sorry, I was weird. I was very, very blown away and a little bit tired and distracted. Finally, for the technology side of things on the watches, the stats it was 33.7 miles total for for our walk it took almost exactly 14 hours 74 000 steps for the day and pedometer plus plus on the apple watch ultra worked fantastically the the battery life at the end on an ultra 3 in low power mode was still 33 so that was still that wasn't his expedition mode.

1:48:55Marco Arment:That was the watch in just regular low power mode. So what that means is that the always on screen was turned off, basically. Like that's what low power mode does mainly on the Apple Watch. So always on screen was off, but the GPS was full blast. The heart rate was full blast, like all of that. And I never paused the workout the whole day. So it was running the entire 14 hour span. And at the end, it was 33%. So that's pretty great. The Suunto watch that I have also did great. I believe it ended the day with somewhere in the 40s. I didn't quite I remember the number, but it was somewhere in the 40 % range.

1:49:28Marco Arment:Both watches did great. And all the tech prep I did was worth it. It was all fantastic. Like, you know, like Tiff was trying to install a pedometer on her watch, but she didn't actually start until like that morning. And trying to get an Apple Watch to install new software when it's not on Wi-Fi is challenging, to say the least. so it was difficult to have all that tech work for other people who hadn't like done it already but because i had done all these practice walks i wasn't really trying anything for the first time on this walk um it all it all made it um very smooth running for me so i can strongly recommend pedometer plus plus for these amazing you know long hikes or even short walks it's still great for that um i'm also very happy with the suunto uh the race s is the one i have again it's the kind I know their smaller one, but even it had ultra-level battery life, even a little bit better than ultra-level battery life.

1:50:23Marco Arment:So it was overall a success. We made it. I did it. I'm proud. It hurt like crazy at the end. It was really hard. But we got through it. I'm very happy about it.

1:50:36John Siracusa:Would you do it again?

1:50:37Marco Arment:I think so. If it was always going to be like that at the end, no. but I know from doing the 22 mile good training walk that I had zero blisters during that one and it was fine so I know that I can walk 22 miles on a pavement with you know these shoes these socks this these pants like I know what I know a way that it works that ended up working way better than what I had with the heel wedge uh modifications so I think if I can just keep my ankle in good enough shape during training, I can avoid that. I can avoid needing those heel wedges and then have a much better outcome with the shoes. So I think it is possible to do this better.

1:51:19Marco Arment:So next year, I am certainly interested in trying. I don't know. I mean, the only downside with training for something like this is that walking is just really slow. It takes a very long time. Like if you want to walk 22 miles in a day, that's going to be most of what you do that day. It's a very time-consuming training process. Basically, it's like every Sunday, you're taking a giant walk somewhere. So it is a big commitment to train for it. Now, you can also just kind of YOLO it and not train at all. I don't recommend that, Beth. That's not something I would suggest. But people do it. You can YOLO it if you're a young person.

1:51:56Casey Liss:It's the magic of being young.

1:51:58Marco Arment:Yeah, if you're young and if you don't mind things like maybe losing toenails afterwards um go ahead uh but i i wouldn't necessarily recommend that path the the training the training method uh tends to have significantly better outcomes but it does take longer i do get that did you sit at all during the day oh yeah we took breaks like i think if you if you walk it straight at our pace which our average pace was around like when we were moving was like, you know, 21 minutes per mile-ish. So, you know, if you don't stop, you can do it like, I don't know, an hour and a half faster or something. But we, you know, we stopped to like, you know, 10 minutes here and there.

1:52:38Marco Arment:Even simple things like, you know, there are certain spans where there are not that many bathrooms. And so when you finally get to one, there's a big line. So like there was one where we had to wait in a bathroom line for 15 minutes. So that was like, well, this is our break, I guess. But, you know, there's like a lunch break in the middle. They do a nice job. They have like snacks and stuff like along the route. So it's really cool. But yeah, there is there is some stopping, but it's not you're stopping for like five or 10 minutes at a time. You're not stopping for long spans.

1:53:03John Siracusa:And roughly how many people completed this just from what you know?

1:53:07Marco Arment:There were 3 ,500 registrants and about 2 ,200 finished. So it was like about a 62 % finish rate. So that's that's pretty good, I think. That's pretty great. For something with that that ridiculously long. That's pretty good.

1:53:23Casey Liss:I put a link in the chat room to the Barkley Marathon's Wikipedia page. There's a documentary, an older documentary about that, that I think you can find on YouTube. And there's a bunch of newer videos on YouTube about the newer iterations of that race. Maybe Marco will have a newfound appreciation for it if he ever checks it out, especially based on his upstate walking experience. Yeah.

1:53:41Marco Arment:And to be clear, like there's a whole world of extreme athletic events. I am not considering doing any of them. I don't really have any interest in doing, you know, marathons, ultra marathons, Ironman things, like most of that stuff. The reason why I was interested in this is because I really like walking. I hate running. Like, I'll do it, but I hate it. Every minute of a run, I can't wait for it to be over. Biking is fine until you have to go up a hill. Then I hate it. you know like there's there's parts of most exercises that even if i could train myself into the requirements to do them i just don't like them walking i really like so that's one of the reasons this appealed to me so much um whereas the others i just i don't care enough about the exercise to actually train for them enough to do it good news you can walk the

1:54:41Casey Liss:barclay marathons check out the uh the documentary i'll put the link to that in the chat room as well if you haven't seen it. It's enjoyable to watch even if you're just sitting on your couch. But yeah, running is not required.

1:54:50Marco Arment:Okay. I mean, it also, this looks like a trail thing. I also, I also should clarify, like, I really like walking on pavement. It's really nice. I'm not a big hiker. Like, I know hiking is just walking, like, but up things and in the woods. But I like walking on flat pavement a lot better than that. Yeah.

1:55:06Casey Liss:Barkley Marathons is not for you, to be clear, Marco, but you should watch the documentary. It is eye-opening. Great.