702: Isolate the Evil

20:01John Siracusa:Yeah, I don't think that I would be too keen to try this personally. But I mean, I appreciate the Six Colors boys for doing it or trying it. So I don't have to. All right, with regard to the way you paste in macOS 27, friend of the show Steve Trouton-Smith writes, you can paste things from your clipboard into the file system. Who else has been asking for this one? And then there's a video where you can see that Steve is copying image data from an app and then using the paste item context menu or a context menu item in Finder to create an image file, and that file name is pasted, you know, date at time, et cetera, et cetera.

20:38um now john you tried to do this as well yeah i'm like oh that looks interesting let me try it and

20:43Casey Liss:this i think this was back in an earlier beta of golden gate and i just didn't have that context menu item i would copy an image and then i would right click in the finder and there was no paste item in the context menu the context menu would appear and it would have the expected stuff in it but no paste item so maybe i was doing something wrong did you have a different experience well so

21:02John Siracusa:So I don't have macOS 27 on any of my computers because I don't trust it and I am not that keen to try macOS betas. I have a story about that.

21:11Casey Liss:Maybe I'll save it for next episode.

21:13John Siracusa:Okay. But I can tell you, I think I might be misunderstanding what Steve's trying to say because I, not always, but oftentimes I can copy something like an image and then paste it on my desktop and it will create an image. So I tried this with somebody had sent me an image in messages, or perhaps I'd sent an image, I don't recall. But one way or another, I copied an image in the messages app in macOS 26. And then I went to my desktop, and I made sure the desktop was active. And then I just hit command V, and then a file appeared. So again, maybe I'm misunderstanding what Steve's driving at here.

21:46Casey Liss:That's more or less what he was doing, but I do wonder if messages, when an app copies something on macOS, and I'm sure on all the platforms, it puts multiple representations on the pasteboard. and then when you paste it the thing you're pasting into can decide which one of these representations do i understand and can handle so maybe messages because a lot of the stuff in messages like you also get like the download icon next to it so it's like i can download this i can add it to your photos library i can put it in your downloads folder you have lots of options so i do wonder if there's some temp file that there's a url for and that when you paste it the finder says oh i see there's a url version that's in the pasteboard let me get that url version and just copy it over here with the file name that it has in the temp location i don't know i'm just speculating but um the thing this reminded me of is a thing that's been in xcode for a while now i think i don't use it but i know that it's there i've used it occasionally which is if you like copy a class or a struct or you know whatever like in text in a source code file in xcode and then you put the input focus on the sidebar that like lists all your files and you hit paste you're like what does it mean to paste a wad of text into the sidebar that lists all my files that shouldn't do anything well what it does is it looks at the text that you're pasting and it says well that text it looks like it's declaring a class so i'm going to make a file called name of that class dot swift because it was swift code and in that file i'm going to put the thing that you just pasted so it will create a file intelligently based on the text that was that you pasted into the sidebar which is neat and convenient instead of you having to go to xcode file new empty source code file pick swift yes click on the file on the sidebar put the input into the text area and hit paste that's what the finder is doing here it's like do you have data that could be in a file but isn't currently in a file go to the finder and paste and i think it's using oh this just said pasted month a year or whatever but i think there might be some context where it like looks at what it is or maybe just siri does that where it looks at the content of it and gives it an intelligent file name like picture of dog or whatever because it's a picture of dog but anyway this is an interesting twist on copy and paste where i think what you're seeing Casey is like it has been spottily supported in various places but I think with the advent of you know agentic stuff running locally or in the cloud even um being more pervasive in all of Apple's OS's the idea of taking something that is not in a file just data raw data whether it's text image data whatever and pasting it and making a file out of that paste becomes a lot more plausible because I think the making a file called pasted year month day hour minute second is not a great file name and you'll never remember what the heck that is uh kind of like screenshot with your month day hour minute second like you know there is a date on the file already we don't need to put it in the file name but what else what are the choices it have well now we have different choices so this is something i'm keeping an eye on yep all right uh apple is reportedly looking to acquire

24:31John Siracusa:some ai chip companies so reading from hartley charlton over at mac rumors apple is looking to acquire ai chip companies as a part of an effort to reduce its dependence on nvidia for demanding AI workloads, according to the information. Apple's own AI server chip, internally codenamed Baltra, B-A-L-T-R-A, had been expected to ship this year, but has been delayed, according to people said to be familiar with the project. Apple has historically limited its acquisitions to deals in the hundreds of millions of dollars and avoided large purchases, but that approach appears to be shifting. Apple signaled a change in financial strategy during its most recent quarterly earnings call when CFO Kevin Parekh, is that how you pronounce that?

25:08John Siracusa:I hope so, Told analysts the company would no longer target net cash neutral status, a policy under which it had kept its cash reserves roughly in line with its total debt. Apple did not explain the reasoning behind the change, though the added flexibility could free up capital for larger acquisitions.

25:23Casey Liss:So there's a couple of parts of this. First, Apple's AI server chip with a code name. Presumably that is not any of the previously rumored or previously confirmed to be used ultra chips, because those are I wouldn't call those server chips. they may be used in servers that apple uses the m2 ultras in its servers but it is not a server chip this makes me think that maybe they have a plan for a chip they would not ship to customers but would instead use just in their servers unclear from you know the story and then the code name but that's something to keep an eye on because i hadn't heard about that before i'd heard more vague rumors of it once you get an actual code name you're like oh this must have either been a project or someone's idea for a project so that's interesting and the second thing is i think mentioned this on earlier so looking to acquire ai chip companies what is an AI chip company what does that mean doesn't Apple make chips why do they need why are they even interested in another company that make chips don't they already make great chips that do great AI they always tell us they do well there is a subsection of chip making companies most of them small and newish that are trying to figure out a way to make a chip that is good at doing the one very specific thing that companies need to do right now with AI and you might be thinking isn't out what nvidia is doing but they mostly make general purpose you know gpus graphic private they're very general purpose you can do lots of stuff with nvidia gpus and granted they are tailoring them towards the needs of ai but they're big and complicated so the small companies are like we're not going to out nvidia nvidia we're not going to make a general purpose gpu that's better than what they're doing with our tiny startup and they have all the money in the world and decades and decades of experience but what if there's an idea that they're not thinking of let's try some weird stuff the one of the ones that comes to mind uh is um the wafer scale chip companies where normally you take like a big circular silicon wafer and you you print a bunch of chips on it and then you cut them up and you get however many chips can fit on the wafer they're like but what if we make the chip the size of the wafer the wafer is one chip and so you just print the entire chip on the way and it's it's it's massive obviously it's made up of little individual units like it's you know they're repeated units like just like there are in uh an nvd gpu just like there are in any kind of thing but it's like just make one chip the size of the wafer it's like well how can that be uh economically viable because every one of those little chips cost so much money because the wafer costs so much money to make it the current process size but there's at least one company out there doing this and saying actually the math works out because even though this thing costs more than you know it costs so much money also it's incredibly powerful for this one very specific task because it's so huge um so that's one example of an ai chip company i don't know if that's a good idea maybe it's a terrible idea but nvidia is not currently doing it so companies are out there trying things that nobody else is trying in the hopes that their startup hits on something and then you know presumably nvidia will buy them but maybe not if apple buys them first again apple bought pa semi which i think was filled with a bunch of like x power pc people who wanted to make really cool power pc chips but they're either their IBM or Motorola, whoever they used to work for, wouldn't do it.

28:24Casey Liss:So they started their own company and then Apple snatched them up. Fast forward many years, Apple Silicon. So that worked out really well. I think they're looking for the AI equivalent of PA Semi, which is some company with really good people and really good ideas that is currently undervalued out there in the world, doing something other people aren't doing and to snatch them up. And presumably they would use it to make their own AI server chips so they could be, as the story says, less dependent on NVIDIA. again see the story last episode about apparently they're supposedly still going forward with their own apple silicon servers even though they're doing the nvidia deal so the dream of apple servers is still alive in apple just not once they'll sell the customers uh for the record

29:03John Siracusa:if anyone at apple uh acquisitions or whatever it's called is listening you know we just i just read that apple has historically limited its acquisitions to deals in the hundreds of millions of dollars, ATP is available for a deal in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Just letting you know. We are within your price range,

29:20Casey Liss:Apple. I don't think we have any innovative AI chip technology, unfortunately. Not yet, John. Not yet. I cut out the part where it said their biggest deal was Beats for X number of billions. They have done bigger deals. I think Beats is the biggest, but I don't remember. I think that's right. They've done a couple of pretty big deals, but yeah, they usually mostly buy lots of small companies.

29:37John Siracusa:You could even call us a pretty big deal, John. You could. All right. Now, with regard to chip deals, there's actually an announced chip deal from Apple itself from their newsroom earlier this month, actually on July 8th. Let me read it. On July 8th, Apple announced a new multi-year commitment with Broadcom to design and produce custom silicon components and cutting edge wireless connectivity technologies for a wide range of Apple products. New agreement expected to exceed$30 billion will lead to the production of more than 15 billion U.S.-made chips and support hundreds of American jobs. Quote, Apple and Broadcom have a long history together, and this new phase of our partnership further accelerates our commitment to American manufacturing and innovation, said Tim Cook, Apple CEO.

30:20John Siracusa:The cutting-edge components built in Fort Collins are essential to delivering the incredible performance and connectivity our customers expect. Again, with Hartley Charlton over at MacRumors, Apple is one of Broadcom's largest customers, believed to account for about 20 % of its annual revenue. Apple's been steadily bringing chip design in-house, such as with its own C1 and C1X cellular modems, but many of Broadcom's wireless connectivity and radio frequency components remain in use. Broadcom's chips cover custom radio frequency components, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and other networking semiconductors found throughout Apple's lineup.

30:52John Siracusa:Apple and Broadcom signed a multi-billion dollar agreement in 2023 covering 5G radio frequency components manufactured in the U.S.

31:00Casey Liss:So I have two minds about this as well. So on the one hand, you can look at this and say, it's more like trying to bring manufacturing back to the united states supporting a u.s company making the trump administration happy all those things and i'm sure it is all those things it's been it's already been like leveraged in that and that's i think we cut out parts of this press release where it's like oh this is great we're bringing jobs back to america you know the current u.s government administration loves it apple loves it it's all making nice okay on the other hand as the as uh mac rumors points out isn't apple kind of making all their own chips these days like Broadcom used to make all sorts of stuff for Apple not Qualcomm made the cell modems of Broadcom make the Wi-Fi stuff but like Apple has its own Wi-Fi chips and it's making its own Bluetooth chips and like is it aren't they kind of isn't Apple kind of like yeah we are slowly but surely making everything in-house so we don't have to go to Broadcom so I do wonder if this is like you know oh it's just like window dressing and you know in the meantime while we're working on our own chips to replace everything Broadcom makes we'll do this deal and it looks good or Apple has drawn some kind of line that says we'll make the cell motor and chip because we hate qualcomm we'll make the wi-fi chip we'll make the h1 and h2 but at a certain point we get down to dinky little chips that we don't care about like maybe i don't know bluetooth or i think that apple might have a chip that does that but like maybe there's tiny what you know the thread radio does apple want to make the thread radio maybe they don't and so i do wonder if they're deciding you know whatever the the uh cook doctrine of uh own and control the primary technologies blah blah blah and they say like, well, is that radio chip a primary technology or is it just a commodity?

32:33Casey Liss:Because if we don't think we're ever going to make that, let's strike a deal for the next X years that Broadcom will sell them to us at a good price because we're 20 % of their business. So we'll see. But like the past several years has been a steady march of Apple rolling out chips with a letter and a number in front of them and slowly replacing all the silicon in all of its devices with Apple silicon. And so this Broadcom deal kind of feels weird in that context.

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34:59John Siracusa:We have finally heard Slate Truck price and availability announcements. We first discussed this way back in May 2025 in episode 641. Reading for The Verge in Jess Weatherbed, we now, as of June 24th, know the price of Slate Auto's affordable American-made electric truck, almost a year after the company warned it wouldn't hit its initial under$20 ,000 target price. The no-frills pickup starts at$24 ,950, matching the revised mid -$20 ,000 price range it promised last year after the Trump administration announced it was putting an end to the$7 ,500 federal EV tax credit. Pre-orders for the Slate truck are live now, with production scheduled to begin in autumn of 2026.

35:37John Siracusa:Customers can pay a$300 non-refundable deposit within the next 30 days to lock in a delivery date, which is expected to start in late 2026.

35:45Casey Liss:Yeah, this one just dodged price increase corner because it was actually increased back when the tax credit was ended, which was dumb, but it's one of the many dumb things happening in our country. Anyway, pretty good on them to come in at, you know, just under 25 grand when their original target was 20 grand with a$7 ,500 EV tax credit. So I wish them luck. We talked about the truck you can go listen to that episode it is first and foremost a very low priced electric vehicle it also happens to be a truck which is kind of dumb but americans love trucks so give them what they love there's lots of reviews on youtube you can check out it actually is a very clever and interesting vehicle and i wish them luck yeah it does look pretty cool yeah i mean i

36:25John Siracusa:i don't think it's for me but i really really want it to be a thing i think that would be incredible.

36:31Marco Arment:Well, like a huge number of vehicles sold in America, especially, are fleet trucks. You see like a lot of white Ford F-150s out there. You know why? Those are fleet trucks. It's a very, very common vehicle need. And people who buy those need them to be cheap, durable, serviceable, plentiful, and customizable. And that's exactly what Slate is promising. So it could be really interesting. But getting a new car company off the ground is very difficult.

36:58Casey Liss:so uh we'll see how it goes yeah there's some funny things i think i posted them to our car channel one of our slacks where they show the slate truck which by the way it looks very very tiny it is a very tiny vehicle looks it looks hilariously small not just small compared to today's pickup trucks but even small compared to like pickup trucks of decades past it is a small vehicle and they showed it next to one of those giant seventy thousand dollar like you know thing the size of a house and they said just pointing out the slate has a larger bed because the and i I think they just meant length, maybe not width, but still, uh, the monster, the gigantic pickup trucks we have in the U S today are essentially for people who really should have a sedan or probably a minivan, but want to have a truck anyway.

37:40Casey Liss:And so they make this huge vehicle with a four door cab on these terrible, uncomfortable back seats. And they're like, Oh, I guess we have to have a bed. So it still looks like a pickup truck. And they put this tiny little bed on the thing. It's totally useless. It's never going to be used anyway. It's always going to have a cover on it don't scratch up my bed there's no bed liner it's just like i don't know it's i'm it's very depressing but sleet the slate truck is like utilitarian it's like the little whatever the arcade vehicles from japan tiny little truck uh mostly bed two doors you know it it is and and the slate you can turn the bed into like rear seats and stuff and like sacrifice that room but lots of sort of like it kind of reminds me of marco's talk uh last episode about 3d printing because honestly this entire car the interior looks kind of like it's 3d printed and i'm sure people are going to be 3d printing a ton of stuff to augment the interior because like it doesn't even come with a radio like there's an extra you can buy where you can mount your ipad like it's just so customizable on the inside and it's all plastic and again you can customize the back and turn it into like an open top thing like a jeep casey where you have just a roll cage and open seats or or like a uh you know like a cap on it like it just it's very interesting and it comes in one color you know it's like the ford model t you can get any color you want as long as it's black well these are gray get it slate but you can wrap them and so they'll wrap it for you or you can do your own wrapping i can't wait until i see one of these on the road because i feel like if i see one of these it's like somebody who really wanted a cool interesting new thing and especially if i see it customized like it's like an art project it's like a kit car where like this is the starting point and then if you're the type of person who wants to add personality or custom abilities or 3D print crap and stick it to your dashboard.

39:18Casey Liss:This is the car for you as long as the company stays in business.

39:21John Siracusa:So speaking of car companies and older car companies in this case, there was a newsroom announcement. Shoot, it was a day or two ago. I'm sorry I didn't capture the date, but put a link in the show notes to the actual newsroom post. And it reads as follows. Apple and Ford today announced that Apple Maps will be integrated directly into Ford's upcoming universal electric vehicle or uev platform through apple's new map kit for automotive sdk let me take an aside did we know this was a thing the map kit for automotive sdk i think you just read the announcement of it okay that's what i thought too i mean they say new yeah i mean it's fine i'm not like upset about it i was very surprised and i had assumed i had either forgotten

40:00Casey Liss:or missed something but i guess unlike carplay ultra which was announced but no one ever used they figured why don't we wait until someone's actually going to use this before we announce

40:07John Siracusa:this one yeah so continuing from the newsroom post coming to Ford's UEV platform in 2027 this integration will deliver a navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle's displays leveraging Apple's new map kit for automotive SDK Ford's UEV platform will offer drivers turn-by-turn directions using natural language real-time traffic and instant information intuitive search featuring detailed place cards and routing options to help users easily find the best route to their destination additionally Ford UEV drivers will benefit from an intelligent EV routing functionality, including battery preconditioning.

40:40John Siracusa:Again, let me take a little aside here. All I hear about from people who are real electric vehicle nerds, and I mean that I think so far complimentary, is that there's reasons that car play can't be a thing. And one of those reasons is it's very important for an electric car to precondition the battery before it's going to get charged. The navigation needs to know when the car needs to be charged. et cetera, et cetera. So let me repeat. So argue with me,

41:09Marco Arment:I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, if you know, but I believe that preconditioning the battery is more, it's much more about like heat and like the, you know, temperature management of the battery to prepare it for fast charging. If you don't precondition the battery and you just pull up to a fast charger, you will still fast charge. It just might, you know, it might take a few minutes to like warm it up or, you know, whatever it's doing in that preparation. That's all you. So what you're doing is like, I believe what you're doing, if you don't precondition the battery is just artificially capping your charging speed for the first few minutes i got you so it's not like a huge difference it's a minor thing yeah but that's

41:45Casey Liss:what case is saying people complain about is like that's why you can't just use carplay because it doesn't know about the battery but my car's built-in system does and it preconditions it and how big of a difference preconditioning is in terms of your charging speed depends entirely on well how fast is the charger even connecting to and what is the weather like and what temperature as the battery but their point still stands which is there's an there's an integration with the car system that is smart about the battery and then car plays out there being dumb like oh i'll route you to a charger but i won't i can't do anything about your battery so you're going to get there how you're going to get there whatever the temperature your battery is when you get there oh well and this is a new technology that apple has that apparently integrates with at least ford cars it says guess what apple software can tell the battery to do the thing that you know the built-in car system does.

42:27John Siracusa:Yeah, so I will read that last thing one more time just so we have it fresh in mind. Additionally, Ford UEV drivers will benefit from an intelligent EV routing functionality, including battery preconditioning. Ford will also use road-level information from Apple Maps as part of the development of its next-generation Blue Cruise hands-free highway driving capability to deliver a more seamless on-ramp to off-ramp experience. I can't help but wonder does this intuitive search include ads hope not you never know it'll read the billboards along the road and speak them out to you yeah right and take a cut some way somehow well but

43:02Marco Arment:it's also worth pointing out like you know again once you have an ad revenue stream you're only one soft quarterly projection away from twisting that knob a little bit more i'm sure they probably have deals with the manufacturers of what they will and won't do in this situation and everything but how much do we want to count on those over time like how much would you assume that would never happen if it was a company other than apple especially an ad company like google if they were doing this we would definitely say well yeah they're probably going to have like ads and maps the way they have ads and maps everywhere else right apple can the way we see the way we know Apple today, maybe the John Tarnas era will change this.

43:46Marco Arment:I don't think it will. The way we see Apple today, we cannot say for sure that they will not junk up any of their properties with ads because they have already been doing that. The App Store is junked up with ads. Maps is about to be junked up with ads. Apple News has always been junked up with ads. And these are all significant revenue streams for Apple. We have already seen that they will throw the user experience out the window to juice services revenue like try try using any of their apps without being an apple one subscriber and getting everything you see upsells constantly for their own stuff even beyond the ads i was just talking about that are like just direct ads for other things not only is apple definitely an ad company but they're a bad ad company like all the app store search ads are terrible i know i have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years on App Store search ads.

44:38Marco Arment:They're horrible, but as a developer, you kind of have to buy them. It's a terrible system. They're not good at it, but they win by being the gatekeeper, not by being good. When it comes to stuff like this, if they are creating new properties within which they can serve ads, they have not shown that we should trust them at all not to. So in a situation like this where we're like, oh, maybe someday they'll put ads. the way that we what we know today with our current level of trust in apple around this particular topic we have to assume that every service that can have ads in it for apple eventually will until and unless they show us that they have been thinking different about that

45:18Casey Liss:but that has not been the case so far see what you did there well uh that same is true of ford unfortunately like and gm like the whole reason they don't want to let apple in is like we want to control the ads and subscriptions and stuff like that. So yeah, I'm not sure Apple is any worse than letting Ford control this because, you know, they would sell sponsorships to those same spots.

45:37John Siracusa:I'm sorry. Can we just go back a step? Did you say hundreds of thousands of dollars in Apple ads?

45:42Marco Arment:I did say that.

45:43John Siracusa:Jesus Christ. I'm not going to interrogate you further because I don't think I can handle that conversation, much less you. But holy God.

45:49Marco Arment:Frankly, I don't think I want to think about it anymore.

45:51John Siracusa:Anyway, let me get back to this newsroom post. So continuing, Our new midsize electric vehicle will be priced around$30 ,000, said Jim Farley, Ford Motor Company CEO. The MapKit for Automotive SDK also enables automakers to deliver a cohesive navigation experience for drivers that is consistent with the look and feel of their vehicles and provides road-level information to help automakers build hands-free driving experiences. The SDK follows the same privacy principles that the Apple Maps app provides today. Apple does not collect users' location details and activity on the vehicle's map in a way that can be tied back to the individual user.

46:23John Siracusa:I'm going to read just the beginning of that again. Apple does not collect users' location details. That's kind of doing a lot of work there, I think, because who knows what Ford is going to be doing, but that's all right. Also, good for them, good for Ford for saying it'll be around$30 ,000, because we just said the slate is$25 ,000, so we'll see what happens.

46:39Casey Liss:Well, I mean, there's been a long and storied history of people promising$30 ,000 EVs, and it's historically proven very difficult at that price point. But we'll see how they do.

46:49John Siracusa:Yep, no argument. All right, finishing up. In addition to the integration of Apple Maps into Ford's UEV platform, CarPlay will continue to be available on Ford vehicles, providing drivers with a safe and smart way to use their iPhone in the car. Let me translate that from corporate speak to real person. Hey, Rivian Tesla and GM, haha, go f*** yourselves. So good. I loved it. I loved it. Anyway, I think this is very interesting. I'm very much interested to see how this looks, you know, aesthetically and how it operates. Is it good? Is it not? but I really hope that this is a further step in the direction, as much as I snark, a step in the direction of Rivian and GM and Tesla, hopefully finally getting over themselves and adding CarPlay.

47:34John Siracusa:Because as a wise man once said on KCList.com, CarPlay is additive. You don't have to use it. If you don't want your users to use it, they don't necessarily have to. If your stuff is that good, they won't use it. But for someone like me that pretty much demands it, that won't buy a car without it, it sure would be nice.

47:54Casey Liss:It's also nice to see that Apple Maps, Apple Maps has come a long way since it's a very difficult launch. Yeah. And these days we don't say, oh, I can't believe Ford's putting Apple Maps in its car. Now it's going to not know where it's going to go. I still think Google Maps is better in certain ways. But one place that Apple has really excelled in the past many years is the actual visual appearance of the maps. not only does it look pretty but i think it does a good job of like uh information communication what is a road what is not a road what is a sign is a stop coming up what like that type of information is easier at least for me to read on apple's display than on google's maps display and also a lot of the native in-car mapping things that i've seen on like rental cars and stuff that we've used i'm like oh this map is not good looking like the roads are just thin and don't let me know what they're really doing and the things that i want to read are too small or in a weird font or you know or just like the contrast isn't good apple maps is i think does a pretty good job of both being readable and attractive it's not always a win versus google ones you can find on the web when we've talked about them on past shows i think lots of people saying i'm going to compare google maps to apple maps not the driving like 3d flying north through thing but really just the 2d looking down like the maps interface um and sometimes google does things better but uh i in all those tests i always feel like google looks uglier and there are some areas where apple excels it's one of the reasons i use apple maps mostly in my car even though i think google still has better traffic data and apple maps still sometimes takes me on routes like when i i use it you know just when i'm going in the local area not because i don't know how to get there but just because i want to know when some stupid construction is closed down a road i want to know that before i get to it so i'm like oh apple maps will tell me that that's why i have navigation on when i'm driving to places i already know how to get to in my local neighborhood but it also means that when apple maps tells me to go a certain way and i know how to get there i'm like no one would ever go that way that's insanity apple maps still does that sometimes i guess it's probably like technically shorter or faster or whatever but there are intangibles that apple doesn't know about i think maybe google uses a little bit more crowdsourcing of like when most people go from a to b they use they use this route and the traffic's good so they recommend that one uh but anyway uh i'm i'm also kind of like casey would love to see how this looks in because they described in one section of like oh it's going to like integrate it into the vehicle's experience like is it going to be like themed like it's right right right color change so it's you know looks like the color of the vehicle or matches the ford branding or something um but yeah this this seems like a more fruitful path than the carplay ultra thing which still low these many years later has let's say extremely limited adoption that's one way to put it uh you're

50:34John Siracusa:exactly right. I don't know. I just, I want so badly to get a different car and we're not going to turn this into a whole conversation right now, but I think I'm ready to get rid of my Volkswagen. I love the car. There's nothing wrong with the car as I sit here today, but I think I'm ready for a full electric car, which is very sad for my left leg, but that's neither here nor there. But there's just nothing on the market that I think that's it. See, now you know how I feel and also about Max.

51:00Marco Arment:i would i would say for whatever it's worth i i know that you know bmw might be a hard sell for you but i think the upcoming uh i3 uh is potentially very interesting the suv or the

51:13Casey Liss:sedan i can't recall sedan just close your eyes when you walk up to it yeah the electric 3 series

51:17Marco Arment:i think i it looks very good in the previews and everything so far like we'll see when it comes out i suspect casey as much as you love the i4 i suspect that new i3 is going to be very tempting for you.

51:30John Siracusa:I 100 % agree with you. I'm really, I want to move on because this is not accidental neutral. But I 100 % agree with you. I mostly think it looks good with the exception of the front. The front is real bad. But I don't think I'm going to want to pay $80 ,000,$90 ,000, whatever they're going to charge for this to get into it at the time frame.

51:48Casey Liss:You can get into it like$65 ,000 probably.

51:49John Siracusa:I don't think I want to pay that much either. I agree with you.

51:52Casey Liss:I don't think. Someone driving a$25 ,000 car, I'd agree with you.

51:57John Siracusa:I don't think I'm going to be able to get into Well, I will not choose to get into this car until it has fallen in price, is coming off lease, et cetera, et cetera. And that's like.

52:06Casey Liss:Yeah, get one after it's gone down or, you know, used on or whatever.

52:10John Siracusa:Right. But I don't think I want to drive my eight-year-old car, which is in great shape, only has like 35 ,000 miles. I don't want to drive this eight-year-old car for another three-ish years, four years before I get this. So I think there's, I need to figure out what to do in the interim. And I just, I can't figure out what that is. And I think the answer may be the i4, but it's, it's, it's, I'm not sold. There's nothing that I can look at and point to and say, yes, that's the one. And that makes me sad. Anyway, let's move on. Uh, let's talk Safari 27. And there's a post by Jeremy Keith at adactio, A-D-A-C-T-I-O.com.

52:46John Siracusa:I will put a link in the show notes so you don't have to worry.

52:48Casey Liss:It's pronounced archive, Casey. we learned that about the uh what is it a r x i v dot org site and everyone told us it's pronounced archive which is cute and clever they have like an explanation involving like greek letters unfortunately there is a website called archive.org and it's not that one and it's a well-known yeah it's it's kind of uh popular yeah so if everyone's saying oh my scientific paper is up at archive.org which one yeah exactly yeah because you can see scientific papers could be at either one because the actual archive.org holds lots of stuff that may have left the web elsewhere.

53:21Casey Liss:Anyway, it's silly.

53:23John Siracusa:Speaking of silly, I think your pronunciation of letterboxd is silly, but I think in this case we need to go that route or take a page out of your playbook, and it needs to be rchv.org. Anyway, coming back to the Safari 27, so at adactio.com, Jeremy Keith writes, the upcoming version of 27 of Safari is looking very good. That's not because it's at the cutting edge of the latest web standards. Quite the opposite. Most of the changes listed for this release are bug fixes. That's what I want to acknowledge and applaud. And John, I believe it was, found WWDC session 204. What is new in WebKit for Safari 27?

53:55John Siracusa:We'll put a link to that in the show notes, where Jen Simmons says, I hear from web developers that it's challenging when you have to work around a problem in our browser engine. You expect more. We hear you. And we set out to greatly improve the quality of existing web platform features. We put our focus there this year rather than on implementing a whole lot of brand new ones.

54:14Casey Liss:yeah they show a pie chart saying like here's the work that we did and the large pac-man size piece of the pie chart is resolved issues and then in the pac-man's mouth the majority of the mouth is improved features and then there's a look there's a tiny little sliver that's brand new features and then a tiny even tinier sliver there's deprecations so this was again the thrust of this wwc session about webkit was not look at all these new apis we implemented was like this is a rebuilding year you're annoyed that we you know have long-standing bugs that are stopping you from adapting a feature or there's some feature that we didn't implement all of or whatever this year we're going to concentrate on that work we're going to fix all our bugs the top bugs that you complain about and we're going to find whatever tech that you're like oh i would use this safari doesn't have it and we're going to put that one in and this whole session is all about that and a lot of people watching the session and applauding because if you're a web developer it's kind of like being it's it's worse than being like an ios developer you're like oh they added this cool new feature on ios whatever but i can't use it until most of my users like migrate but ios users migrate pretty quickly these days but on the web you're like uh you know this the can iuseit.com website i may have been getting that you were all wrong it's like on the web it's like okay when can i use this feature because web browsers have much more diversity than ios versions and people do not upgrade as quickly and so you're like and by diversity i don't mean different browsers i mean 800 different versions of chrome and so on and so forth again chrome auto updates itself so it's not that bad but you've got firefox and blah blah blah and back in my day web tv 1.0 which could barely read html um so when apple rolls out a feature like this then you can start your clock it's like great in four years i'll be able to put this on our website and it will make my life so much easier assuming i'm still working at the company at that time but still you know the best time to plant a tree is 25 years ago the second best time is now So thumbs up for adding these features.

56:05John Siracusa:Yep, agreed. Then there was a contrarian take from Alex Russell. And Alex says, basically, Safari's so far behind, it doesn't even matter. So this is on infrequently.org. And Alex writes, don't get me wrong. It's great that Apple is focusing on quality. It remains a persistent issue for Safari. But how much relief should long-suffering web developers expect? the best comparative measures come from the communal web platform tests project. Comparing the current experimental builds with stable channel releases can illustrate the scale of change we can expect when the next major version of each browser launches.

56:43John Siracusa:90 % is the minimum Apple requires across all WPT tests for competitors' engines in the EU and Japan, where it has been forced to allow them, in theory anyway. Safari barely clears the bar, and the source for that is WPT.fyi.

56:57Casey Liss:Yeah, and then they show the, you know, the WPT test pass rates and you can see Safari just barely clearing the 90 % line it's hilarious by the way that Apple's thing to make to discourage people from using alternate browsers this whole browser kit thing they made like oh it's for security blah blah blah we can't just let you run Chrome because that would be too insecure which is probably true but also it's yet another system like the alternative app stores it's like it's so onerous to implement this nobody wants to do it anyway they threw in there oh and by the way your browser has to pass this WPT test by at least 90 because we don't want people on our phones using crappy browsers but then you look at the competitive browsers and chrome is pushing up against 98 and firefox is like 96 so yeah if there's going to be another browser if there was someone did actually make an alternate browser for ios in the eu it would probably be based on the chromium engine or firefox it would easily clear the 90 bar it's almost like they put it 90 to say well you have to at least clear the bar that we

57:51Marco Arment:cleared well and i think this i don't think safari is ever going to be the browser for people who care about cutting edge web standards i mean it hasn't been um and there was actually a time when it was that competitive it was a long time ago um but there there was a span in like you know like the mid 2000s 2010s like there was a span where safari was very competitive very standards uh focused and that was a time when apple was not dominant so it was very important to apple especially early in the safari project but you know also kind of midway through it it was very important to apple for the mac to succeed that safari had to be really good and they they made it really good like those early versions of safari were great and safari was like a leading like beacon of awesomeness for web standards for a long time but that was when apple had to basically play catch up with the world like that you know it was mostly when they were still mostly about the mac like before the iphone or even in the early days of the iphone like they were still mostly you know mac and early iphone company and so they had to comply with the standards to be competitive.

59:09Marco Arment:And now Apple is so successful that they are dictating terms to the rest of the world most of the time. As I've mentioned before, like Apple does not know how to negotiate. They just know how to dictate. And with web standards, what that means is other people are dictating to Apple what Safari needs to do. That's just not going to play well with Apple today because Apple doesn't need to listen anymore. Again, there was a time where they needed to listen, so they did, but now they don't. And you can also kind of see their point on a lot of these things. A lot of modern web standards, just because something is declared a standard doesn't mean it's a good idea.

59:53Marco Arment:It also doesn't mean that the people who declared it a standard aren't doing so for reasons or for interests that Apple might consider maybe unfairly biased or invalid or bad ideas. on Apple's point of view. So for instance, if any of these web standards have implications on device security, battery life, or privacy, Apple's going to have possibly a different opinion on whether they're a good idea or how much of them they want to implement than somebody else might have. Also, if any of these web standards try to bring web apps up to levels of functionality that native apps have that Apple doesn't think web apps should have.

1:00:35Marco Arment:Apple's going to have a problem with that too. And maybe you could argue that part of the reason is their app store monopoly, and that might be part of the reason. In many cases, that probably is part of the reason. But also part of the reason might be they don't think it's a good idea for security or for device privacy. So they're going to have their reasons. And again, just because something is declared a standard doesn't mean it's a good idea. And it doesn't mean that Apple agrees that every standard is necessary to implement. I've given my own opinions on this on podcast quote standards that people try to launch, and I see both sides of the argument.

1:01:11Marco Arment:So for Apple, something like this, it's like Safari's way behind. Well, behind in what? Is it behind in a way that Apple agrees is the definite right inevitable path to go on? Probably not. now that being said i mean obviously safari can always get better and i as somebody who converted to chrome earlier this year i i see lots of ways that safari can get better um certainly though when i'm using chrome on my laptop and i see the battery life burning down like oh geez but um but apple has their reasons it isn't just that like you know they're not good at engineering like that's that's not the reason here if apple does not implement a web standard some of that is possibly because they don't have their foot on the gas because that is true apple does not have their foot on the gas and most areas they're not forced to compete but a lot of it could be they're actively choosing that the quote-unquote standard that someone dictated at some other company apple thinks we don't agree that that's actually something that's a good idea for us anyway all that is to say if what you're looking for is the most standards compliant browser and you know again who determines the standards it's a lot of google people so the most standards are going to be things that google people design and of course google's browser is going to do them because they're the ones who design them um and you know apple's going to not be competitive in that game if that's if that's what you're optimizing for so if what you want is the web browser that will work on the most websites possible doing the most features possible what you want is chrome and that's kind of that's going to be the case probably for the foreseeable future and again what and safari is a great choice for different reasons and different priorities

1:03:01Casey Liss:but that's the trade-off well when it comes to web standards uh nobody is dictating to apple anything because apple is on the same w3c committees as google and the firefox people that determine these standards and apple is notorious for throwing its weight around to put the kibosh on the standards that it doesn't like. So it's not as if these standards fall from the sky and Apple's like, oh, another standard, oh, great, we have to implement it. Oh, right, but they don't always succeed. Well, they're there in the room and they succeed a surprising amount of time. They are very, they're powerful, all out of proportion, well, I think, with their market share, which is the next factor, which is like, okay, Chrome is a problem for, an increasing problem for Apple as Chrome becomes so massively dominant in market share where people don't even test their websites in Safari anymore.

1:03:44Casey Liss:and they're just relying on these specific you know features and bugs that are in chrome you know works in chrome i'm done and even if safari in the cases where safari is do something doing something correctly but chrome is not the chrome behavior is considered correct because you know it's the internet explorer effect there's been some posts about like oh safari is the new internet explorer because it sucks and people have to design websites for it but no the one with dominant browser market share is always the internet explorer because whatever that browser does that is the default and your website has to work with it and especially as the market share becomes more and more dominant chrome whatever chrome does becomes the standard setting aside the web standards and yes there are web standards that they fight about what they should implement or whatever but i think this uh you know the this wwc session about the features implementing is not so much about features that apple disagrees with that they're somehow changing your mind about it it's almost entirely about and that's why this uh alex russell's post uh so snarky and and uh upset about this features that apple claims to have implemented years ago with much fanfare hey there was a w3c decided on this thing apple participated apple said yes we agree this is a great feature we're totally gonna add to safari and they added to safari in 2021 and declared victory and moved on but guess what safari's implementation was incomplete or buggy and apple just never revisited let me know if this sounds familiar apple just said but we did that already it's done and it's like well chrome a had a better implementation out the door and b chrome has a new version every two days and when they found these little bugs in their implementation back in 2021 they iterated and iterated iterated and by 2023 the chrome implementation was fast rock solid had all the features in the standard and apples hadn't been touched since 2021 and that's where people are like i can't use this feature not because apple disagrees with it apple supposedly implemented it but oh this one method there's a bug in it just makes it basically makes it unusable and actually there was a minor revision to this standard you know three months later that apple never picked up and then you're just sitting there waiting well surely this wwc apple will fix this thing and it just never happens and people get frustrated and so when they say like i can't do this because you know that test is like safari has a 90 or whatever those tests are always like not only do you have to implement it you have to actually implement it correctly and sometimes also in a way that doesn't like massacre performance in terms of like computational performance or whatever like has it implemented in the same way there was a couple of things that had been on like this in the past i forget the particular technology might have been index db or something where apple had a notoriously bad implementation and just never changed it and people like there was these warnings among web developers like yeah they say they implement but don't try to use it you'll just you'll lose your data and it'll be terrible wait until they fix it and there was some battle about that about index db versus a different standard or whatever but anyway apple in this situation again they throw their weight around in ways that i don't quite understand how they have this power and some kind of bureaucratic like however the w3c works because market share wise they should barely have a say in anything market share wise they should they should just be out there doing like like you said what they had to do back when safari was being written which is whatever currently works on the web we need to make safari deal with that like before safari 1.0 that was their thing it's like we're not dictating to anybody just the web is out there and people are using browsers that work with it probably at that point internet explorer maybe mozilla or whatever we have to make safari do whatever they're doing even if what they're doing is dumb or stupid or buggy we have to make it work with that and then they were like oh safari is going to be a web standards thing but then it was like just well there's a lot of web standards and they keep coming out with new ones and even though we fight against the ones we don't like sometimes things come out and even if we are in favor of it it's like well but how much money are we going to throw at safari this year and as you noted do any of these features threaten our app store dominance by making it possible to have web-based apps look like native apps and apple is so weird about that because apple did do the thing where you can put apps on the home screen that are actually web apps.

1:07:27Casey Liss:No one made them do that. They did that on their own so long ago. It's like, well, so clearly someone at Apple at some point thought, hey, this is a cool thing. You could have a web app. It's a website, but it will show up on your on your home screen on your phone like it's an app. It'll launch like an app. It won't look like a web browser. And we will support that. I think they might have supported that even before there was a standard for and then when there was a standard for it, they supported the standard. And it's like, okay but on the other hand apple's like yeah look at the things we argue against at the w3c look at the features that we say no to and you're like boy a lot of those look like things that would make web apps be able to compete with native apps so which is it is it just two different groups inside apple right i'm sure jen simmons wants to support every single web standard she is a web developer through and through she wants that she wishes she had all the money in the world and could support every web standard better than anybody she wants 100 of all those tests but jen simmons is not the CEO of Apple, right?

1:08:21Casey Liss:So as with all these things, it comes down to like, like we were talking about with like the bug fixes. Yes. Uh, having a, you know, LLMs help find bugs is great and everything, but before the prerequisite is someone who determines what resources are going to be spent on what has to say, you are allowed to spend this year, mostly doing bug fixes. If without that permission, yeah, you can try to sneak it in under the covers and it makes you more efficient. I could fix 10 bugs in the time I could fit one. But if your bug fix allowance time was 1 % of your time, it still doesn't make that big of a dent.

1:08:52Casey Liss:So you need permission for management and resource allocation to say, this year, we're going to be responsive to our customers, responsive to web developers and find out, like find out from them because, you know, Apple could be insular. What are web developers just about? Is it that one feature from 2021 that's been buggy? Like, which one is it? Because there's a whole bunch of features that we didn't implement or we have implemented or there are bugs in, but we have to know which ones would have the most impact on customers and in that respect i don't think apple is looking at these these uh uh wpt test pass rate things because those probably weight all the features equally what apple wants to know is which are the features that are hurting web developers the most which are the features that are making it so that when someone goes to a website in safari and it doesn't work which features are causing that to happen works fine in chrome why does it work fine in chrome is this chrome which feature does chrome have that we don't have or which feature does chrome implemented in a different way than us even if we're quote unquote right they need to go back to safari 1.0 mode and say whatever is chrome whatever chrome is doing we need to do exactly that because otherwise that website won't work right work right in safari it's one of the main reasons i use chrome and it's one of the main reasons i sometimes encourage my family to use chrome is this website not working right to you i in particular i always say to do it on government websites which you would think that would be the the opposite where it's like well government don't they have to support all these web browsers there's probably laws that say they do but there's laws that say a lot of things probably they're testing the website in chrome so if you're having any the jankier the website is and it's not working in safari try it in chrome very often it works and that is one of the things that they have to fight against so you know i i feel for the safari team because i know the people who are working actually working on safari and webkit are 100 aligned on everything that alex is complaining about but they don't decide the priorities at apple like it's great that they get to work at apple but i'm sure they argue internally all the time let us do x let us do what i get you know let us do z and then i don't understand whatever shadowy cabal is that the w3c arguing against the features that apple apparently doesn't want again sometimes for good reasons about privacy and you know battery life or whatever but sometimes for clearly nefarious reasons who are those people what are they like literal lobbyists so their only job is to go to the w3c and screw things up for the web i don't know sometimes someday there'll be a tell apple fighting the good fight and i'm happy to see this year uh that the pac-man shape thing is resolved issues honestly i think everybody at apple had to have that same pie chart for the next five to ten years and things would be a lot better but again i'm not the ceo of apple either

1:11:23John Siracusa:oh yeah yeah yeah i mean i don't know this this blog post it i think it made some very good points but it was clearly someone who is very angry about apple wanting to continue to be angry about apple

1:11:36Casey Liss:yeah i mean i was angry about ie ie sex you know how angry it was about ie sex you cannot imagine the angers it would just stop you from doing anything good on the web and safari has filled that role in that like you know everybody's using chrome and all these features are available and this feature is 10 years old and apple was totally in favor of it and touted it when they rolled it out and it's still broken and you just and you know it's like talking to apple it's like a brick wall it's like hey apple you like this feature you implemented it you told us to go and use it here's the wwc and it's been broken for five years what the hell and you hear nothing Indeed.

1:12:07John Siracusa:All right. And then finally, with regard to Safari, Apple has released a Safari MCP server. There is a blog post over at WebKit.org where Saren Yitbarek from Apple writes, in Safari Technology Preview 247. We're introducing the Safari MCP server, a model context protocol server for web developers. The Safari MCP server gives your agent the ability to know how your code actually renders in the browser by connecting it to a Safari browser window. Any MCP compatible client can connect to the Safari MCP server. By connecting your agent to a Safari browser window, your agent can emulate what your users experience, giving it the information it needs to debug more autonomously, like access to the DOM, network requests, screenshots and console output.

1:12:50John Siracusa:It speeds up your debugging process and lets you stay in the comfort of your terminal, which means fewer rounds of hopping windows and typing prompts to debug your code. There's a section in the blog post why we built this. There are many ways to build for the web, both with and without AI. If AI is part of your workflow, we think this tool will help make it even more productive. And if it isn't, that's okay too. If you end up giving it a try, or if this is your first time using an MCP server, let us know what you think. You can find these individuals on Mastodon and Blue Sky. If you run into issues, file a WebKit bug report.

1:13:19John Siracusa:Filing issues really does make a difference. So says everyone at Apple.

1:13:23Casey Liss:And WebKit actually has an open bug tracker on like feedback and radar. So that's nice. So at least you can watch your thing not getting picked up. But you know, and it's open source. And it's open source so you can contribute fixes yourself, but it's a little bit of a challenging code base. So I like that part at the end where it's like, you know, MCP, it's for, you know, agents, LLMs, coding agents to use. MCP basically like exposes the functionality of your application in a programmatic way using the standards so that agents can essentially puppeteer your app to make it do something that's what mcp is for and they say you know we add why do we add this we added mcp you know because we think if you use ai if ai is part of your workflow we think this tool will help and if it isn't that's okay too because they don't want to be like look we we're forcing you to use ai ai is still a difficult topic for a lot of people and apple is hedging they're you know unlike the raw raw ai is great at everything whoever wrote this blog post is like some people aren't ai some people aren't if you aren't fine this is not for you we understand we still like and support you right like so i i thought that head was interesting but on the flip side of this this is really like if you're doing web development with some kind of agent very often the agent will be like okay there's a million libraries for various languages that will essentially make a headless chrome using the chromium open source chromium engine and you know a headless chrome i can run on doing web development which is html css javascript and a back end and i can all run all that headless with this headless chrome thing so that i can actually execute the page where the javascript will execute and there will be a dom you know like essentially automated testing of a real web browser the next level up from that is okay but what if i could control your actual web browser not as headless chrome or a headless safari but like literally chrome or safari and chrome there's like a clawed chrome plugin that does this and safari same deal where you would see a safari window appearing on your screen i don't know if they can hide the window maybe they can but anyway it's puppeteering the actual running safari and the reason that's important is because in the absence of this you're just perpetuating the cycle where someone using a coding agent and they're making a website and the coding agent is dutifully writing tests and checking things out and it's got unit tests it's got integration tests and it's got end-to-end tests where it runs the actual browser engine and blah blah and you know what the agent's just made for you a website that works in chrome and someone goes to your website for the first time and they go oh your website didn't work you're like what are you meaning all my test pass is great i tried all the time it's wonderful it's like well i'm using safari because the the agents can only iterate on failures that they see during their tests and if they never test in safari i mean this is the same exact problem that humans had where someone makes a website they're using chrome they're testing in chrome once it works in chrome and they're done and then you know done with your project right the same is true of agents If the agent can't test in Safari, it will never know what's broken in Safari.

1:16:04Casey Liss:And so Apple's out there going, please, please, agents and developers, we've made an MCP for you. Please at least consider, consider trying, consider telling your agent that we exist. We'll register MCP and maybe, maybe on the off chance they'll look at that. And, you know, if someone writes in their problem description, and by the way, this website should not only work in Chrome, then maybe the agent will be like, oh, I see you have a Safari MCP server. I'll try it in there too. Oh, it breaks in there for this reason and it can fix it. So they're trying to do what they can, but it is an uphill battle given Chrome's market share.

1:16:34Casey Liss:I wish I had looked this up, but whatever the market share is for Chrome, it's big. And for Safari, especially on the desktop, it's very, very small. Safari on mobile doing pretty good because of the iPhone. But even there, Android is still pretty big.

1:16:47John Siracusa:Finally, Federico writes with regard to this, I asked Codex about comparing Safari's MCP to its own Chrome extension and the older Playwright. The verdict, although Chrome has a richer API with Chrome DevTools when it comes to network requests, Codex actually preferred Apple's leaner, more direct approach for letting an agent drive and debug a browser.

1:17:04Casey Liss:I love asking the coding agents their opinion on things. It's like they don't have an opinion. But, yes, you can ask them to show you the pros and cons in the feature lists and so on and so forth. But all this is showing that Apple is apparently, you know, again, putting in a good effort and trying to do a good job. And it's just a question of, you know, who will adopt these tools we are laying out before you? We want to participate. We want your website to work in Safari. What can we do to make that happen? They're trying.

1:17:31John Siracusa:This podcast was made possible by contributions by listeners like you. Thank you. Hey, so we don't have a whole bunch of ads this week, and we thought we'd take a moment to talk about ATP membership. So if you are interested in avoiding moments like this one and all the other ads on the show, then you can go to ATP.fm slash join, where you can be a member. It is just$8 a month or$88 per year, at least in American money. And you get all sorts of perks. You get ATP overtime, which is more ATP. The only way you can get ATP overtime is by being a member. And that's where we do some topics that just keep sliding down the show notes or we just don't have time for.

1:18:11John Siracusa:And it's actually really, really fun. It's about 15-ish minutes there or thereabouts. And it's the only way to get it is being a member at ATP.fm slash join. You also, like I said, get ad-read versions of the show. You get the bootleg, which is our unedited version of the show that Marco publishes literally minutes after we hang up the phone. So we typically record on Wednesday nights. By first thing Thursday morning, if you're an American, you will have an ATP waiting for you, often one to two days before everyone else gets it. There's also bonus episodes. We are just shy of 40 bonus episodes.

1:18:44John Siracusa:I just counted, and I might have missed one. So maybe it is 40. We have the ATP tier lists, which are my personal favorite, where one of these days it will probably become the end of the show because we typically nearly murder each other during the process. But they're fun. We also talk about inside stuff with our work and, you know, convince each other to do or not to do things. We watch movies. We do all sorts of fun stuff. And you also, if you're an ATP member, get a 15 % discount on our time-limited merchandise sales, which there's one every few months. So if any or all of this sounds exciting, and it should, go to ATP.fm slash join and check out the membership options.

1:19:21John Siracusa:You can do this by month or by year. You can do it in dollars, euros, or pounds. So go and check it out. ATP.fm slash join. Thank you to all of you for making ATP possible.

1:19:36John Siracusa:Let's do some Ask ATP. and Pete Ottery writes, Marco, can you share how the reception of transcription in Overcast is going? I love the story of you setting it up and I applaud the execution, but I find myself never looking at it or needing to. Do you feel it was all worthwhile? Before Marco answers this, let me throw in my two cents. Oftentimes I have used transcription for a couple of things. One is, and this was such a brilliant thing that you added, and I can't remember if I complimented you publicly, privately, or not at all. And I think the answer is not at all. publicly what did i just say publicly privately or not at all i know i'm answering you you you

1:20:09Casey Liss:complimented him publicly i already know what you're gonna say about the musical thing okay

1:20:14John Siracusa:okay then never mind all right we'll we'll fix all that in post yeah you gotta leave it and it's

1:20:18Casey Liss:wonderful i know it's we'll see if i'm wrong about what you're gonna compliment him about no i was

1:20:21John Siracusa:gonna say the um the music notes on the side i think okay you were right okay good i thought i'd said something publicly let me double down on it or reiterate or whatever the turn of phrase is uh i really love the music notes because a lot of times there'll be you know musical beds on something I don't care about. Now, that could be ads, but it could be other things. And going to the end of the music notes is so wonderful. The other thing that surprised me that I really like about transcriptions is a lot of times when I'm getting ready for bed and I'm not like having a conversation with anyone because I'm brushing my teeth.

1:20:51John Siracusa:I'll pop in an AirPod and I use a motorized electric, whatever you want to call it, toothbrush. And even with an AirPod in, unless I make it absurdly loud, it's a little difficult for me to tell precisely what people are saying because I listening at like 1.7x or something like that. However, if I have the transcription running and I'm vaguely looking at it as I'm brushing my teeth or what have you, it makes it so much easier for my brain to put together what the heck people are saying. And so I don't have to blare my AirPods or AirPod. Oftentimes I'm running mono at that point. I don't have to blare it and I can actually follow along with the conversation at the speed in which I want to follow along with it.

1:21:26John Siracusa:So for me personally a triple plus would would use again thank you 1.7 x yeah that's actually i i

1:21:33Marco Arment:took note of that as well that's actually faster than i would have guessed that's a little that's

1:21:36John Siracusa:a little fast it took a long long time for me to get to that point yeah i will like the i think the

1:21:42Marco Arment:fastest show that i run is about 1.6 but my usual speed for most shows is like 1.1 or 1.2 depending

1:21:49John Siracusa:on the show i just listen to too many darn podcasts is the problem i'm over here down in the slowness

1:21:54Casey Liss:uh verner vingy i think anyway um i'm a one x uh the only thing i do it more than one x is wwc videos because apple's presentation style makes those people talk so slowly and deliberately

1:22:09Marco Arment:that i go 1.25 for all wwc videos yeah i'm 1.5 on most of this um so transcription uh casey i think you nailed the the biggest use cases that i use it for um basically skimming a show so that's like for me whenever there is part of a show that i'm trying to skip past usually it's an ad like if you listen to any big shows like from big publishers where the ads are all just dai you're basically just hearing radio commercials stuck into podcasts like it isn't even they're not even host red they're just like here's another ad for ice tea and t-mobile like oh god so i listen to a few shows that do that and so it's very easy for me to swipe over the transcript and scroll to the end using the music notes or my little cut icons or a combination of both and i can quickly look at the text and say oh tap right there and boom i'm right at the segment sort of the next segment i also will occasionally use this even for shows that i that i'm not skipping an ad for that i I just kind of want to skip a topic.

1:23:14Casey Liss:And they don't have chapters.

1:23:15Marco Arment:Or if I'm trying to skip part of a chapter, like I don't care about baseball, scroll, scroll, scroll. What show could you be talking about? I find that the transcripts are a much easier, faster, and better way to skim past something in a podcast or to find something in a podcast. Or if I have a podcast playing and I realize, oh, I zoned out for the last couple of minutes because maybe I was distracted by something else. I don't want to go back. I will often use the transcript to skim back, too, to see what did I just miss, and it helps me more easily find the place that I want to go back to, or to skim back and see what I did just miss, and maybe I don't have to go back.

1:23:54Marco Arment:So generally speaking, transcripts for me are an assisting technology for skimming through different parts of a podcast, usually skipping past things I don't want to hear, but even sometimes going back and seeing what I did just hear. and because that's the role of them for me they work very well even though that like from a from an accuracy point of view they're still pretty bad but for what i'm using the transcript for the accuracy almost doesn't matter at all because i'm not reading it as a replacement for listening to it i'm just kind of i'm using it as a visual like cue to skim around in it and now that i'm accustomed to skimming around in a podcast that way when i when i have to like skip it by just the audio skipping i feel like i'm i'm a caveman i'm like what this is the most primitive awful tool to skip around a podcast using seat controls and audio like now that i'm accustomed to the transcript so it's it's painful like when i'm in the car and i have to like skip around because i don't have the transcript in the car and that's oh that's that's tough but uh but that's that's the use that I find for them is skimming.

1:25:04Marco Arment:And from the feedback from people, it's actually, I don't get a lot of feedback about it, to be honest. But the feedback, the little feedback that I do get is pretty positive. That being said, I think part of why I don't get a lot of feedback is that it is kind of buried in the UI. And I don't know, I don't have any firm plans around this yet, so I don't want to guarantee anything. But at some point, I would like to explore integrating the transcript better into the now playing UI. Like what I was just saying about how basic seek controls now feel primitive to me. I think there might be something there.

1:25:37Marco Arment:Maybe the transcripts should be involved in seeking more directly.

1:25:42Casey Liss:I think the even easier solution there is all these, you know, Instagram reels and TikToks or whatever. Just do the thing where whatever is currently being spoken is shown in little text that goes to sometimes they do one word at a time. I'm sure you've all seen them. Like the reason you can watch a reel with your phone muted is because they show the transcript one or two words at a time with the current word being bold. And sometimes the transcription is not accurate, but that you can figure out what they're saying. And that just that's on the now essentially the quote unquote now playing screen for whatever short form video you're watching.

1:26:12Casey Liss:So I can imagine a now playing screen in overcast that when I hit play, if I were to glance at it, I would see the words being spoken flashing two or three words at a time just constantly underneath thing. And if I were to tap on those words, it would take me to the full transcript. um that's that's just one possibility but i know what you're saying about seeking in terms of like can i get a textual a visual textual search for seeking instead of the essentially modeled after you know cd players or whatever back forward you know skip or whatever buttons that sounds more ambitious to me than the much simpler one of uh just essentially show me the closed captioning

1:26:45Marco Arment:of this podcast yeah i mean and the close that's the way i originally envisioned the ui for this was I just wanted to put a CC, you know, closed caption button on the main screen and you would tap it and it would stick it over the artwork. I didn't end up doing that for no good reason. I don't know why I didn't do that, but that was how I was envisioning this feature for many years. But I do think that like, yeah, those CD player style controls, we haven't rethought those in a long time. And now that we have this technology that is way better for skimming through a file maybe that deserves some rethinking but that that's more of a down the road thing

1:27:25Casey Liss:well speaking of not down the road i hope you mentioned using the uh transcript you for skimming and for skipping over stuff and going back to where you left off but you also mentioned finding things and every time i go to that screen i'm like where's the search box where's the search oh yeah you want to search please it's just text marco please let me search one thing i i want to

1:27:43Marco Arment:explore with that um is you know right all of the search i have in the app so far is basically old style search it's like you know sqlite fts you know full text search it's keyword based you know very loosely phrase based maybe um i'm curious to explore like the the on-device foundation model stuff for ai based search basically of like now we have better search algorithms that can take things much more abstractly. Like, what episode did John talk about? So-and-so. Like, you know, like that kind of search. I think that's what people actually want out of a search these days.

1:28:22Casey Liss:They probably do. But also, I just want actual text search within the one transcript that I'm currently looking at.

1:28:29Marco Arment:Well, so my challenge with that, though, is the accuracy is not very good. So it might not find what you're looking for.

1:28:36Casey Liss:I understand. I'm willing to battle through the words that sound similar. all right i just i just want a fighting chance i can try the three different words that it might be misinterpreted as i just want to find within the thing it just it kills me it kills me all the time because i'm like because then i do what you're doing which is like okay well the alternative is how well does my brain work how fast can i scroll this skim skim skim skim and you're hoping the like the the unconscious part of your brain is going to spot the word mac pro in the thing to find the section and usually it does but it's like we have the technology we can type mac space pro and hope that the transcription worked and you know for most of the terms i'm looking for it does i i didn't complain too much about this at 1.0 but as time progresses i'm like where's my search box where's my search box all the stuff you're talking about is awesome great good ideas i agree it's harder than this this is just literal plain text substring no regular expression search maybe i'm the only one who would use it but when i want it to be there and i find myself resorting to skimming, I do feel like the KF man you described.

1:29:36Casey Liss:Now, don't you all wish you could lobby for your favorite app directly to the developer? The privileges of podcasting.

1:29:45John Siracusa:Yeah, yeah. All right. Let's move on to our second question. Elijah writes, a year ago, John posited that Apple could, under new leadership, pursue, quote, growth the hard way. With Neo, Apple is indeed pursuing Mac growth, but John's Apple turnaround article or post focused on growing the iPhone. ATP 689 acknowledged, quote, they've been trying to Neo the phone like crazy, but it's hard to Neo. Alternatively, in ATP number 641, we asked Apple to consider, quote, why did that person choose a Samsung Galaxy? Do they have a different feature set? So Elijah says, what strategy sees Apple winning over Android users?

1:30:22John Siracusa:A privacy screen, a DEX style desktop mode, replaceable batteries, the current feature set, crash detection satellite connectivity find my etc doesn't seem to be doing the trick nor did the pre neo 430 iphone se what do you think john tech nerds who are listening to this episode and tech

1:30:38Casey Liss:nerds in general uh who are interested in ios versus android or are always like uh the the feature that i love about android is what ios would need to add to win me over there and the feature is always some nerdy customizable thing that most android users don't use and so even though that's what they want you know like oh some you know replaceable batteries or some feature like the privacy screen that's obscure or better configurability or the ability to customize this one thing that i care about those are advantages of android and it's why people who want that stick with android but it would be i would not recommend apple pursue that strategy to get android people over because you all you would get is that tiny tiny tiny percentage of android users who love that stuff and honestly you're never going to satisfy them because they want they always want more like they're the android power users right um but android is huge and people you know half the world buys android phones and it's not because of all those things that nerds care about so really i feel like is essentially they have to neo it they have to do what they did with the neo which is like what's the barrier to entry number one has got to be price make a a phone that is cheaper but feels expensive and apple's been trying and whatever for whatever reason all their various se phones and you know from from the 5c on apple has been trying to say here's an iphone it feels like an iphone it looks like an iphone it's got the cachet of an iphone you're going to love it as much everyone who loves an iphone loves it but it's so much cheaper that it suddenly enters a price range that apple wasn't really competing in before now setting aside the price increases with the ram and storage apocalypse and all the other stuff the neo really was their first revisiting of the strategy of, you know, maybe we could sell more Macs if we figured out what people who aren't buying Macs are complaining about.

1:32:25Casey Liss:The number one complaint I'm sure was Macs are too expensive. And they did it somehow, amazingly, without making a Mac that is crappy because the Neo is not crappy. That's proved hard on the phone. The phone, I just, you know, I think the margins are actually probably higher on the phone, but for whatever reason, they haven't figured out the right formula maybe they're afraid on the phone of like cannibalizing because they make a really good one they'll cannibalize the other phone sales because unlike the mac where like people who are buying the more expensive macs like they might not be well served by a neo if you need a macbook pro the neo is probably not going to get you to switch oh it's so much cheaper yeah but like it's it's significantly less powerful and maybe who knows maybe the neo is cutting into their the sales of what were previously the lowest price things like the macbook air and stuff but uh we'll see what i'll have to say about that which is probably nothing and we probably won't be able to intuit from their sales but still that is a danger and in the phone in particular they just all look like little rectangles right that like even more so on the mac the ram and storage and multiple cpus and local ai like there's just not a lot of room for variation in a device that's this small with with the battery constrained to be what it is whereas laptops at least can get bigger and thicker and desktops can go above that so uh yeah i i think is a thing they should continue to try to do uh but i think the the strategy is to do like literally what they did with the neo and not do the thing that every android nerd listening to atp wishes they would do because i'm not saying that it's bad that android people like that i'm saying apple will never satisfy them and if they want 100 of those customers they would shift market share by

1:33:59Marco Arment:like one percent yeah i think that's right i mean if you look at why most android users chose android it's almost always about price especially as you you know if you leave like the super rich countries like the u.s and you go other places like it's even more about the price but that's a huge part of it like there there is no significant nerd power user market that's choosing android for for its nerd power user features like that's in for apple that's not significant enough to worth address to be to be worth addressing at all if those of you out there who are in that market and who are yelling right now i don't say there's that there aren't any of you but that's not going to make a dent in apple's numbers and even the form factor argument which is always like oh but

1:34:43Casey Liss:android has there's so much more variety you can get them big and small and foldable and this and that and it's like if only apple offered more variety but like i think it is secondary like you said marco someone's going in they're like i don't want to pay a lot for this phone and then now when i've decided this is my price range oh there's a big one and a small one and a folding one that's nice but if there wasn't a big one a small one a folding one they wouldn't say oh now i'm going to look at apple for twice the price no they would still they would take whatever they could get so it is nice that there's more variety but first of all i think apple has been doing a great job of increasing the variety in the iphone line recently and they're going to do it again with the foldable one soon so watch out for that and maybe the 20th anniversary one like not that one company is never going to give you all the diversity of the Android space.

1:35:24Casey Liss:But for a long time, there was one iPhone and then there was a couple of them. They were all very similar, just different sizes. And they really have blossomed lately with the Air and even the Mini and the foldable one. And, you know, like I think they're doing a pretty good job and they could extend that a little bit as long as they're making sure that they like, you know, when they didn't have a big phone, that was a problem. But I think they're covering a lot of those bases. But I do think the massive variety in Android only becomes the decision point after someone has already chosen Android because that's within their budget.

1:35:52Marco Arment:And even then, when you look at what most people, what most Android users are using looks like a mid-sized phone, just like Apple's phones. It isn't the form factor that is making people choose it. It's almost always price. How would Apple possibly address that, the low price market? And I think they are addressing it down to the level they are willing to address it. Or able

1:36:18Casey Liss:because cameras are expensive, you know, like the screens are expensive it's it's tough right like when when people talk about android

1:36:24Marco Arment:having you know worldwide whatever it is like 75 percent whatever the worldwide market share is that's not a bunch of people using flagship samsung and google phones it's a whole bunch of people using some like very inexpensive phones with very inexpensive components that are nowhere near the cutting edge of what the high-end stuff and pretty much every iphone is offering that's a market that i don't think apple wants to address because the the compromises it would take to address it from apple's point of view would be so vast i don't think they're in it um i i think that i think apple is very happy taking the percentage of profit in the cell phone industry that they do now that was very different from the mac like the reason the macbook neo made so much something to do is that apple's share of the pc laptop market was way lower than their current share of the smartphone market and i think they they must have seen that as something that like from apple's point of view the neo is not very compromised uh they really did a very like they they really kind of nailed like what can we make for a significantly lower price than our other stuff that we can still feel proud of and you look at the neo like it's cool i don't think apple could make anything that would be a neo version of the iphone that would be like half the price of iphones today but still using new components the neo that the macbook neo they really had that opportunity because it was a totally different market they had totally different trade-offs they could make that would save a huge amount of cost without making what they view as a crappy product i think

1:38:02John Siracusa:to go back to the question of like, you know, how do you entice Android users? John stole one of my answers, which was different form factors. You know, do you want a foldable phone? Well, you can't have a foldable iPhone. Not yet anyway. The only other thing I can think of, which I will be the first to say is extremely esoteric and nerdy. And I get that and I acknowledge it. But I was trying to think about like, what would I, what did I covet in the past that Android could do that iPhones couldn't. And the only thing I could think of is that it is possible, or at least last I heard, it is possible to have like a TSR in DOS speak.

1:38:38John Siracusa:You could have a app that has a component that still runs even if the app isn't running. And iPhones and iOS has actually gotten much better about this over time. There's very few use cases that I can think of that you can't make work with iPhone software today, with iOS software today, or apps today. But that's the only thing that I always thought, man, that would be cool. Now, the question you should ask me is, well, why would that be cool, Casey? And I've got no good answer. But that's the only software trick that I can think of that I knew Android phones could do that iPhones can't. And I don't even know why that would be useful, but I feel like it would be useful.

1:39:16John Siracusa:But that's it.

1:39:17Marco Arment:And there are some amazing, fun capabilities that Android phones have that people love a lot that Apple's just not going to do. Some of the ways that Google's integrating some of their AI features and everything, the ways things like widgets work, there are just some fundamental differences that many people do just prefer on Android, especially if you're heavily into the Google ecosystem. There's a lot of good reasons for that. But Apple's never going to make those kind of changes because that's just not what iOS is. It isn't how iOS works. It isn't Apple's style. It isn't iOS's style. So they're never going to win over those people.

1:39:52Marco Arment:but again like those people i i don't think apple has a chance of winning them over no matter what apple does because that's that's not what those people are looking for so instead if apple were to focus on growing the iphone market significantly it would basically entirely need to be about price and again we as talked about like i don't think i don't think they have a lot more room they could go down and and still have it be something that apple wants to

1:40:15Casey Liss:sell and we can get to that it's just because phones are still kind of cutting edge like we're still in the phase where like everyone can essentially make their phones a little bit better every year even if it's only just like slightly better screen technology slightly better camera slightly better uh you know uh battery life or whatever um and and the cpu obviously and gpu and stuff so they're they're still like still like getting better like i think everyone whatever the economic turn is like this they the phones are not haven't completely satisfied the market because everyone has the complaints like oh my phone died i wish everyone would love their their phone to be a little bit lighter for the battery lasts a little bit longer for the screen to be a little bit brighter and for it never to be slow we're not quite there yet whereas with laptops uh especially before the dawn of local ai which most people are still at this point not really using it it does web browsing you can run a spreadsheet you can watch a movie on it it's everything is fine like and even the battery life has gotten pretty amazing so they're but laptops are closer closer to satisfying and as laptops approach that kind of like well we're we're starting to be able to satisfy most people's needs it created this section of the curve where it's like well you can make a laptop with a phone chip and most people will find it extremely satisfactory we might get there with phones with advances in technology and solid state batteries and so on and so forth or eventually the flagship phones are so good that you see this little section underneath it's like you know we can make a phone for half the price that most people would find entirely satisfactory we're just not there tech wise with phones because they are so miniaturized and so demanding and they're on the cell network and we use them all day like they're they are not quite yet completely fulfilling all of our needs we're still advancing on them it's just it's it's just a younger product right we couldn't make these kind of phones at all not too long ago whereas the laptop has been around much longer so watch for that this is not a thing that is unchangeable forever maybe sometime in our lifetime technology will exist to make a phone that is satisfying in the way that the Neo is satisfying for significantly less money.

1:42:14Casey Liss:And when that happens, probably five years later, Apple will do it.

1:42:19John Siracusa:All righty. And then finally for Ask ATP, in the past, you have mentioned that it is recommended that you create a separate Apple account for doing development. My question is, how does one go about doing this? When I go to sign up for a new account, I'm required to provide an email address and phone number. My phone is already linked to my existing Apple account, so it is not valid. I asked at the Apple store and they didn't know. I hit up the Apple support app and it says it's Apple's policy for every Apple account to be linked to a phone number for, quote, security and recoverability, quote.

1:42:44John Siracusa:How does one go about actually creating a separate account apart from inventing a time machine to go back in time before you were required an associated phone number? I don't have any good answer for this. I genuinely am not sure.

1:42:55Casey Liss:Well, let's revisit the premise here, which is creating a separate Apple account for doing development. there i think a lot of the reasons the particular people of our age and our circles do this is because we have a time machine which is called being old and we had apple ids a long time ago a lot of us have apple ids that were not email addresses my apple original apple id was not an email address it was just a username with no at sign in it whatsoever eventually apple made us change all those to email addresses but because we had that from way back in the day later when the Apple ID system was, you know, becoming more advanced, you could create an Apple ID with your phone number because you had whatever your cell phone number and your old Apple ID that maybe didn't even have a phone number, maybe had your home phone number or something was like, it was just still there.

1:43:41Casey Liss:So now you had two Apple IDs. And a lot of us in that situation with two Apple IDs made the decision that we're going to do development on one and the other one will be like our home thing or whatever. So and then we then it's kind of like, you know, back solving and say, well, since I had two of them, I decided to use one for that or whatever. But setting that aside the reason someone might still want to do this today in my opinion and maybe you two have different opinions uh is that the account for your apps is so fraught because you never know what the heck apple's going to do related to the app store that you kind of want to isolate the evil to and i know apple did all this stuff behind the scenes now to say oh you think that's a separate app already but we know you're the same person using both of them so this is not foolproof but it's just one extra layer of defense where someday they wake up and decide your app is banned and in fact it's banned so hard that your whole apple id is banned then that won't destroy all your itunes the movies you bought on itunes or whatever like that separating your personal from your business in general is a good practice uh and that's why i still recommend to people that i say look i'm not gonna lie to you it's gonna be a hassle juggling two apple ids is a hassle especially since apple still does not let you log in with a passkey with the second apple id that you're not going to join your Mac, please.

1:44:52Casey Liss:Somebody fix that. Um, it's going to be a hassle, but it having that separation is nice. Cause I would never want like my family photo library, everything I've ever bought from Apple, all of my various iCloud sync notes and stuff, my family plan, blah, blah, blah, that we're in a family, personal Apple ID. And then my apps developer Apple ID. And the only thing that developer Apple ID does is log into App Store Connect and, you know, register for WWDC and do all that stuff. Is that separation really saving me? Apple knows that I have both of these accounts. If they banned it and wanted to ban it so hard, they would probably ban my other one too, but I'm hoping that it provides a little bit of compartmentalization, so that's why I'd do it.

1:45:32Casey Liss:That's my opinion on why a second Apple ID might be useful before we get into how you make one. What do you guys think of that? Do you have two Apple IDs? Do you think it's a good idea?

1:45:39Marco Arment:Well, there's a huge other reason to do it, which is if you have a company entity to tie it to.

1:45:45Casey Liss:Oh, that's right. Yes, Marco, coming with this one for sure.

1:45:48Marco Arment:Yeah, so if you are developing apps under your own personal name, then that's fine. But it's very commonplace in the US, at least. I don't know how other countries work. But in the US, it's very commonplace for people to do their side businesses or main businesses in some kind of corporate entity. An LLC, an S corporation, an LLC being taxed as an S corporation, something like that. This is how I've always done my businesses. They've always been in LLCs. this makes a lot of things a lot easier but if you have a company that you are developing the apps under and you want to be taxed through that llc or whatever it is you're going to need a a company account a company apple id and a company developer account if you ever intend to make any money from it obviously talk to your talk to an accountant or whatever but like having an llc in the u.s is not that hard not that expensive and not that difficult for tax you know stuff so that's generally what many people do and what i recommend but anyway in that case you can't use your personal apple id you have to have a second apple id for the llc or whatever that's why you would do it as to what the people at the apple store and apple support app said they don't know they're delightful they mean well they can't answer questions like this like this is not within

1:47:04Casey Liss:their expertise they're kind of esoteric although before you go on there's one point that you i thought you were going to make that you didn't, which is, hey, guess what? If you ever want to sell one of your apps, a lot easier when it's confined to its own Apple ID with the whole, like you've done this more than, you know, I've never done this at all, but I've heard you talk about it. Like, I think that makes that easier as well, right?

1:47:24Marco Arment:That's a little bit outdated. Apple has over the years developed methods to be able to transfer ownership of an app to a different developer account. When they first did it, there was a bunch of restrictions. Like if it had ever used iCloud it couldn't do it i believe that none of those restrictions are still

1:47:40Casey Liss:true i believe not even the bundle one if it's ever been used in a bundle you can't do it uh i

1:47:44Marco Arment:don't know about that one but um over the years they they have made it more possible to move apps to a different developer account um that being said you are right it is easier to just buy the developer account but um i've i think in most cases most lawyers um when you're buying a business Most lawyers don't buy the business entity. They buy the assets of the business entity. So like if I wanted to sell Overcast, no one is going to come by and say, I'm going to buy Overcast Radio LLC from you. They're going to say, I'm going to set up a new LLC and we're going to agree to transfer Overcast assets to that new LLC.

1:48:22Casey Liss:Is the Apple ID an asset though?

1:48:24Marco Arment:Well, but the Apple ID is for that business entity.

1:48:27Casey Liss:I know, but you can change what Apple ID is. I had a non-business Apple ID that I converted to a business Apple ID. Presumably, I could convert it back.

1:48:34Marco Arment:I wouldn't guarantee that. What I have heard is that the process of changing the business entity or even the name of the business entity on an Apple ID is incredibly difficult to get Apple to actually do.

1:48:46Casey Liss:No, I went through it. It is difficult, but it is possible to do it. Maybe it only goes in one direction. I don't know because I only went from not business entity to business entity on my developer account. and that was incredibly painful and dumb and took a really long time but it did happen eventually

1:49:00Marco Arment:yeah so anyway i i think the idea of like having it be separate so that people can buy your app more easily first of all i think is a little optimistic for most people but also like i think many acquisitions if that does happen many acquisitions don't work that way anyway because

1:49:14Casey Liss:they'll want to make their own new thing did you hand off the uh the instapaper apple id or no

1:49:19Marco Arment:you know i don't remember how we did that honestly i'm being old because they like they didn't buy the LLC. They set up their own new company and we transferred everything over. I don't remember what we did for the developer account, to be honest.

1:49:29Casey Liss:I think you might have given them the Apple ID because I think that could have been before transfers.

1:49:33Marco Arment:Yeah, it probably was. And I don't think Instapaper used iCloud for anything. So I might have been able to do that.

1:49:38Casey Liss:Or maybe iCloud didn't exist that I remember back then. Yeah, I don't know. But anyway, as you were getting to for like, how do you register another one? I came into this problem as well. I think I complained about it on the show when I was like, I want to make an Apple ID for testing purposes. I know you can make sandbox apple id is a lot easier but i like i wanted to make a real apple it wasn't for like app testing purposes i think this was me trying to like do mac os 10 testing or something and i wanted to have other apple ids that i could do stuff with and for a while again i think i complained about it on the show i just literally could not create an apple id like just i couldn't do it i was getting errors or like it asked me for stuff that i didn't want the phone number thing like oh they want a phone number for you like one of the answers in the old days was like oh get a google voice number but i don't think they're handing them out anymore and i think apple rejects google voice numbers like the basically like synthetic voice over ip voice numbers things like apple's requirements for what it takes to open an apple we call an apple id sorry they're called apple accounts now apple's you know what does it take to to open a new apple account and will it actually work on whatever system you're trying to do it on those answers change all the time and to marco's point asking somebody quote at apple about it whether it is customer support or an ai chatbot or a person in a retail store, I wouldn't trust anything they say because it's not a part of the business they interact with frequently.

1:50:54Casey Liss:Like they're just like, you know, oh, you're a new Mac user. You're going to set up your very first app. Sure, that'll work because you've got all the information available and you're just a person. Although again, I couldn't even do it under that scenario back in the day. But if you're trying to open multiples, yeah, I don't know, get a burner phone, use your landline if you still have one. I think that's how I ended up doing things is I have a landline number and a cell phone number. like it's difficult but it is possible and if you do it the other order that i did it don't do it the way i did it which is come in with an apple id that is ancient and it's not even an email address and then just add a regular quote-unquote regular apple id at me.com or no itools.com or whatever the hell it was and now i have two yay instead start by creating a business entity thing and if you create a business entity i can tell you if you're going to sell things to the app store we all have to have a phone number associated with our business that is not our other number because if you want to sell in the eu they demand a you know a phone number and you probably don't want your home phone number posted on the app store in the eu so it's kind of like this whole sort of big wind up of like make an llc get a mailing address for the llc that's not your home address get a telephone number for the llc that's not your home telephone number and then once you've gathered all that and done all that stuff then you should probably be able to sail through the apple account creation process because you're creating a business account from day one with business info you've got your duns number you've got all your address and your phone number and you got everything ready to go i've never actually done that but i imagined it's got to be easier than what i ended up doing which was having a weird old personal apple id and watching it evolve over the years until i eventually converted it into an llc uh apple id yeah and there's also like if you

1:52:28Marco Arment:want to have a phone number that you can use for your business you don't have to have like a whole separate cell phone plan like you could you could have like a cheap voip plan or you maybe you could get like some kind of like you know one of those like very low use emergency only cell phone things like my phone number cost me nine dollars a month yeah like you can do stuff like that you know you can get like you know po boxes at a ups store as your address or you know whatever like i don't think apple will let you do a po box oh okay well but i'm sure like when they were doing the eu thing

1:52:56Casey Liss:whatever it was where everyone had to get an address i think you're not allowed to use a po box so you do have to like again there there are companies that will do this for you if you pay

1:53:03Marco Arment:them yeah many times though like if you form an llc through an accountant um many times the accountant will let you use their office address as the llc process address be careful for that though if they move or retire it screws with stuff true yeah but anyway so there's you have options but that's that's generally like the way to do it um and as for i did want to very quickly go on a totally different tangent us i would love the turnus era of apple to reconsider the flow of the stores the experience at a modern apple store is so crappy in so many ways because the stores are built with the structure and assumption of a time that has long passed that like this will be a place that people will explore our products and talk to a genius and it'll be so nice.

1:53:59Marco Arment:And like Apple stores basically are DMVs that look nicer now.

1:54:04Casey Liss:The DMV you get a number and you know where you are in line.

1:54:07Marco Arment:See that's the problem. Like the Apple store functionally is the DMV now. But they are still seemingly in denial about that. And so they don't work as well as DMVs do. They don't work as well as the deli counter. Right. And yeah sorry for non-US people that's the department of motor vehicles it's the the office here that you go to get your driver's

1:54:27Casey Liss:license and stuff it's rmv in the in massachusetts by the way yeah whatever it is yeah so like

1:54:31Marco Arment:apple stores have tons of people who are fighting for appointments to get their broken phones fixed like that is the basic the most common thing people are there for is like my phone broke or died i need a new one or i need you to fix it or whatever and you tell me it's going to be extraordinarily expensive and i didn't buy the iCloud storage and i didn't buy the apple care and you're going to tell me how horrible that is and it's going to suck most people in the apple store are sitting around looking sad about their broken phones waiting in cues that are not apparent to them that i think have a pretty high like forgetting rate of like you like you get forgotten because everyone's just identified by the color of shirt they're wearing another person comes in with a blue shirt and forget it right or it's like oh go go over there and talk to sam who the heck guess sam and oh it's that personal blue shirt yeah all seven of them like and and you go and it's like and people all the blue shirts are like standing around hovering appearing to be doing nothing and there's like two of them who are working their butts off and it's like it's a really weird setup and system and it's it just seems like it is based in fundamental denial about what they actually need to be today just in terms of sheer volume like they need a lot more stores They need a lot more capacity for appointments and genius appointments are also never served on time.

1:55:52Marco Arment:Like they're always late. So if you have an appointment at 1230, you go at 1230, you're going to be there till two. The whole system is straining under load. It seems like Apple is not maybe aware or acknowledging that. And the experience as a customer, like I now dread having to go to the Apple store for something unless I'm just buying something and picking up real quick. But like if I have a service need, I dread going there, not because the people are bad because they're not. The people are very nice. And I've always had good experiences with like once I actually get a person, it's always very pleasant and they're very good.

1:56:26Marco Arment:But they don't have the capacity they need. And the way they organize their traffic and manage their traffic is also terrible from the customer point of view. So I don't know how much they have to change here to make this significantly better. but... What they have now has not scaled well at all to its current level. And I hope at some point in this new era of leadership at Apple, I hope they think of addressing that somehow. And I don't know what that looks like. It could just be you need to open a lot more stores. but I think some basics like a queue that people can actually see and kind of know where they are and know and and you know be able to figure it out more easily I think would be a pretty big help

1:57:12Casey Liss:yeah we've been complaining about the lack of lines in apple stores for so long now it's hard to believe it's going to change but I want to rewind quite slightly before that tangent just

1:57:19John Siracusa:to hear from Casey do you have two apple ids or one yes I have one that is my personal stuff And I don't, I might've used that one for fast text. It was so darn long ago. I think I did, but everything else is under a different Apple ID that's held by my LLC, just like you described. I don't think it has an associated phone number because I think I made it long enough ago, like you were saying that it didn't need one. But I echo what you two were saying that it, if you were looking to make money from your app, and even if you're just looking to release your app, but especially if you're looking to make money.

1:57:51John Siracusa:I can't recommend enough getting a completely separate Apple ID. Treat that as its own entity. Never the two shall meet, just like you would, at least in the United States, with a business checking account versus a personal checking account. You want very clear lines between the two just to make sure everything is clear as day.

1:58:07Marco Arment:Yeah, definitely. If you're going to have an LLC in the US, give it its own bank account. It makes everything so much easier, because then it's like, what is business expense? Everything that was charged with this account. yep it's very very simple very easy thanks to our sponsor this episode squarespace and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us atp.fm slash join one of the many perks of membership is atp overtime our weekly bonus topic this week on overtime we're gonna be talking about some new rumors about the iphone 18 family coming up um didn't make it in the full show so we're gonna talk about it in overtime you can join to listen atp.fm slash join thanks everybody and We'll talk to you next week.

1:58:50Marco Arment:Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental.

1:59:11Casey Liss: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

1:59:25Marco Arment:So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M and T. Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental.

1:59:40John Siracusa:They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. So, John, you are sometime in the future going to be going to the beach for your annual beach trip. And I was curious, because I was ribbing you earlier, that it shouldn't take you long to pack because you have so little space to pack into, insofar as your cars are tiny. And I was curious— Have you seen the trunk of an Accord? It's not that tiny. Have you seen the back of Aaron's car? Everything is small compared to a bus. Right, well, and then we put a Thule on top Anyway, so when you go on a trip, John And this does not necessarily mean the beach So I was curious, like, when you pack for a regular trip Say you're going to the Midwest to visit family How do you, what do you pack?

2:00:30John Siracusa:How do you pack? What is your approach? And then I'm especially interested to hear What is your approach for the beach? And I think that the difference between you and I I'm going to wager Is that we tend to bring a ton And a great example of this I think we've talked about this in the past is that we bring our own beach chairs to the beach. And my understanding is you typically stay in the same house every year and you know that they have beach chairs there. And so you don't bring beach chairs. And that in and of itself is a ton of space. But I think there's a lot more to it than that. So when you go on a trip, what are you bringing?

2:01:03John Siracusa:Are you bringing a ubiquity travel router, John? Are you bringing a Sonos Roam like I tend to do? What are you bringing when you go on a trip and especially a beach trip?

2:01:11Casey Liss:Well, the additional context I will add, comparing my packing to Casey's, was I believe at one point Casey posted a picture of the back of his cavernous Volvo SUV.

2:01:21John Siracusa:I think I just shared that with you privately. I don't think I posted it publicly.

2:01:24Casey Liss:And the stuff that was in there that we were looking at, Beach Shares doesn't even begin to describe the category of things that was in the back of this car that I would never take on a trip with me. I don't remember the specifics. If you want to enumerate some of the things that our jaws were dropping about Casey.

2:01:39John Siracusa:Oh, gosh. I'm trying to remember. I'm also trying to find the photo because what we do is so I here's one of the things that I

2:01:45Casey Liss:remember I think you had like essentially uh cases of drinks yes soda or whatever yeah not just like one two liter bottle of soda or something but like a case of soda from like Costco like from like a warehouse store yep we're gonna pack that and bring on the trip beach chairs food like and we would look at this and say you know Casey wherever you're going on vacation you can buy soda they have it there it's there already you can get it you do not need to like think about like the bulk and weight and potential danger of a case of soda as a choice to put in the back of your car to go on a trip it's like on every axis of choosing things to pack in your car it is like bad wrong no don't do this absolutely not and he's got it in there just so much stuff now look you got a big car hey you know and you've got you've got a roof rack on top of the cavernous car and you want to fill it.

2:02:37John Siracusa:I'll send you a picture of that in a second.

2:02:38Casey Liss:Yeah, you do you. Because obviously you bought the giant car. At least you're using the giant car. Even more so using the giant car. Because is your car three row? I forget. It is, yes. All right. But you're putting down the third row when you go, I'm assuming. That's right, yes. Yeah, but anyway, it's huge. And you've got the roof rack, which you can probably barely reach because the car is so big. You do you. But anyway, I'm not an SUV person. I don't have one. I've never owned one. I just do sedans. The Accord sedan is a quote unquote full-size sedan. and the trunk is big, but it's a sedan.

2:03:07Casey Liss:The trunk is only big compared to the small to midsize SUVs that people think have a lot of room in them. But actually, when you open up the trunk, the back, the headrests are like two inches from the window glass because the entirety of that car has been taken up with space for the passengers and they have the little truncated back. And they're like, I've got a big SUV. I got a lot of storage space. Like, no, you don't. My Accord's trunk is bigger. But anyway, when I pack, this is a thing that I'm sure marco has already starting to realize in case he will realize soon if he hasn't already uh if you have children as they get older the amount of stuff you have to pack decreases yes you would think it would increase like oh they're getting bigger aren't their clothes bigger all these big teenage boy jeans are taking a ball's room no babies their crap takes up so much room and then toddlers it shrinks a little bit because you don't need so much stuff for them and it shrinks and it shrinks so now that both of my children are essentially adults although sometimes I forget about that.

2:04:00Casey Liss:And sometimes they do as well. They actually have less stuff. But still, we've had these accords, which actually have grown a little bit over the life of the kids. We've gone on trips in civics, but we just had a civic where we eventually got accords. We'd go on family trips and we would find a way to wedge all that crap in there. And also when we just had one kid, it was easier than packing for two kids. And anyway, so it all worked out. We always fit everything in. No roof racks, no nothing. It just all goes in the trunk. But what that means is no beach chairs one beach chair would make it so we can't pack one like because that's not because it's just it is a poor choice for packing it is not dense it is uh incompressible in various dimensions that are bad for packing in the trunk of a sedan so no beach chairs we do bring a beach umbrella um and just because they don't have them where we are we always bring them and their sticks and they can mostly fit in so it's not too bad so let me stop you right there just very very

2:04:52John Siracusa:briefly i'm genuinely curious about this so if you were to go to a different beach house which i know you would not do by choice but like let's say the owners of this beach house decide they're not going

2:05:02Casey Liss:to rent it or what we've been to different beach houses over the years it's not always been the

2:05:06John Siracusa:same one okay so how do you know if you need to bring a chair i'm genuinely asking well when you

2:05:11Casey Liss:rent a beach house usually they'll tell you like whatever amenities they have like sometimes they have bicycles you can use and they'll say if they have beach chairs or whatever um and so yeah like Like we just, you know, you know what you're walking into. And if they don't say anything one way or the other, guess what? You can buy beach chairs when you're there.

2:05:26John Siracusa:Oh, gosh.

2:05:26Casey Liss:And often you can just leave them at the house. And if you come back next year, they'll be there. Oh, gosh.

2:05:29John Siracusa:I'm way too, I was going to say cheap, but let's go with frugal to do that.

2:05:33Casey Liss:Well, that's, this is the ultimate cheapness because it's like, well, think of the other thing, Casey. I don't know if you've run into this. If you really, you know, if you rent a house, especially a beach house, but any kind of house, I would imagine. And this is like, we were doing this days before Airbnb or whatever. um when you go there if it's like a house house and you plan on cooking in the kitchen which we do because again see like we're not going to go out to restaurants all the time it's like kind of trying to keep it as low budget as possible family vacation you know every single pot and pan in that place is going to be garbage you know every knife is going to be so dull that you could not cut anything with it is just it's like a safety knife for a child and so what do we end up doing we go to the store we buy a cheap pancake pan a cheap knife from the supermarket that is a thousand times sharper than any other knife in the house.

2:06:16Casey Liss:And we put it in a particular drawer and we just leave it there. And guess what? When we come back next year, it's still there. And it's still better than all the other knives. And if it's not, go buy another$12 knife from the supermarket. Like they have things there. So yeah, we will, you know, what are you going to do if there was no beach chairs? We would go to the store and buy a beach. Like we're going to beach places. They sell beach chairs, right? But we've never had to do that. We've had to buy utensils and pans sometimes. so we've never had to buy beach chairs umbrellas just don't seem to be applied so we bring ours with us but yeah the stuff we have fits into the trunk of our car for four people for a week's vacation at the beach uh it does involve a beach umbrella and sometimes an inflatable air mattress if we're really trying to you know pack lots of kids into houses although these days as the kids all become adults no one wants to sleep on air mattresses so we bring them less uh it's just clothes you know the stuff you want to bring with you toiletries um my family apparently uh finds every pillow in the entire universe unsatisfactory no matter where it is same but i don't bring a

2:07:18Marco Arment:pillow because i don't have room for it okay to be clear casey these pictures you just sent include such items as a watermelon you're that's calling you're hauling a watermelon fans like you you know you can go to a grocery store when you get there but now you can't get this watermelon

2:07:34John Siracusa:well you can't get a costco watermelon which is like one third the cost of the one at the grocery store.

2:07:38Casey Liss:I see cans of Pringles. I see a roll of paper towels. I see multiple fans. I see a LaCroix, a case of LaCroix.

2:07:45Marco Arment:A huge case of bottled water bottles. Yes.

2:07:48Casey Liss:Bottled water.

2:07:50John Siracusa:Why? So the thing I'm understanding better, we've had a little bit of this conversation in years past. I'm understanding better that I'm not saying I'm right. Let me just make it plain right now. I'm not saying I'm right. But the approach that Aaron and I take is that the only thing that we buy or things that we buy when we get there are things that are particularly challenging to transport. So typically we'll go to the beach and I'll know, just hear me out. Watermelons.

2:08:15Casey Liss:So perfect. So easy to transport.

2:08:16John Siracusa:Well, it is easy to transport. It's just there, but like milk and OJ and eggs and things like that, that we're not going to bring from home, but basically everything else we bring.

2:08:28Casey Liss:Just wait until you find a refrigerated compartment. You're like, we're bringing the milk.

2:08:31John Siracusa:We would, if we had a refrigerated compartment and truth be told, we do bring a cooler with some things in it, but I will always go to the store and get like milk, OJ eggs, you know, some of those sorts of things, yogurts, whatever. But basically everything else we bring, you know, whatever, whatever like beach drinks that we have, bottled water, which I 100 % understand. You're exactly right. We could buy that at the beach, but it's like eight times the cost of what it is at Costco.

2:08:56Casey Liss:Child-sized shovels complete with solid wooden handles. Yeah. I mean, the kids - Rolls of toilet paper and paper towels and another fan.

2:09:04John Siracusa:Well, because you want the noise from the fan.

2:09:07Casey Liss:One fan for each person. Yeah, but the pillow thing with my family, we have a four-person family, and three of the people in that four-person family insist on bringing their own pillows. Sometimes they want to bring two pillows. That is a bit excessive. The good thing about the pillows, well, the good thing used to be about the pillows is like, look, they're the last thing that goes in, and guess what? You can squish them into pretty much any spot because they're pillows. That's true. But then some of them got on the memory foam pillow kick, and those are much more dense, and it's harder to get those into the spots where you want to wedge them.

2:09:32Casey Liss:But anyway, I tolerate the pillow thing, especially since worst case, you can say, oh, you really want the pillow? That's on your lap for the whole drive because there's no other place for it. And it's not so bad to have a pillow on your lap, but it does make you hotter. And I can't convince them not to bring. I don't bring any pillows. I just use whatever pillows they have there. And somehow I survive. But they all have to bring their pillows.

2:09:50John Siracusa:I am extremely picky about pillows. I think we've also talked about this in the past. I tend to sleep with my arm under the pillow. So, you know, it's like mattress arm, pillow head. and because of that i like a just paper thin pillow it's absurd how thin i would prefer my pillows to be but you know what for that week i just steal by the way enjoy your rotator cuff problem later oh i'm sure you're right i have no doubt i have those uh those beds that i always

2:10:14Casey Liss:see those like fake instagram ads for where it has like a place to tuck your arm you ever see those yeah yeah yeah i do notice that you're apparently only bringing two chairs that will change too because eventually your kids will be like hey why did mom and dad get chairs and we don't oh no no

2:10:26John Siracusa:know we do have fortune i don't think they were pictured you're right but we do eventually end up with four chairs in here you can bring a whole living room set like why why stop this the thought technology we had for this year was the they were selling at costco costco is our jam they were selling at costco these insta crate things not a sponsor or anything like that i see it there but you can fold these to almost nothing when you're not using them and then they become a fairly stable crate when you do need them so like i put all of my technology into one of those crates uh we brought although we always bring and almost never use the switch to the base for pro controllers we have an apple tv which we do use all the time um we have what else do i have in there uh a power strip is there a sonos setup hiding in there there are two sonoses which is big and a sonos rome which is

2:11:14Casey Liss:small because again like uh like uh casey being the the guy from ponyo who's got to spritz the water in front of him he needs music wherever he goes otherwise he dries out we're gonna have to

2:11:23John Siracusa:do that for a member special otherwise i'm never gonna watch that movie but um anyways we and we bring like paper plates and the reason we bring paper towels is because we get them cheap at home and it just kills me to spend five x what i would have spent at home to get all these things we could just as easily bring because we don't have a little baby car and i'm saying that actually not to insult you i genuinely mean that because like you said earlier because we have the space as with attics as with homes we fill up the space because why not and then in the tule which is the roof racky thing i'm probably pronouncing it incorrectly we have like the the all the beach stuff one of the fans uh one of the rolls of paper towels etc etc so i was just curious so it sounds to me like and i'm not snarking at all you with the exception of the beach umbrella in the pillows basically the only thing you're bringing is clothes and very little else is that fair to say

2:12:11Casey Liss:well i mean so tech wise uh just to touch on that i don't yeah i don't have a travel router i don't do all that crap although the house we're at doesn't have great uh internet but it's gotten better over the years but um i do i have been bringing the apple tv for many years whatever whatever my uh lowest ranked demoted apple tv is i bring um it because i take lots of pictures and i want to show them you know even just to just use it to airplay to the tv to show the pictures i've taken on the world's crappiest tv with terrible contrast where none of my colors look right every year i go there and hoping this is the year they'll have got a new their tv is sold it pains me so much i do always make sure the motion smoothing is turned back off but like this tv is so old and terrible this please let this be the year they fix their tv but anyway um that's why it doesn't have airplay built in which a lot of the modern ones do and also when the kids were little it's you know you can pick up put you can put their shows on that even for the adult sometimes if there's some series like oh you gotta watch this new show stranger things i've never heard of it oh good you know we apple tv is here i can go to my netflix and i'll show it to you can watch the first episode get you addicted so when you go back home you watch you know that type of That's the only real tech we bring.

2:13:17Marco Arment:Obviously, you know Casey would like strap a 65 inch TV to the roof of his car to bring it.

2:13:21Casey Liss:Exactly. Why not? He's got the roof.

2:13:22John Siracusa:Oh, I 100 % would if I could.

2:13:24Casey Liss:He's got the roof.

2:13:25John Siracusa:And actually, didn't you say, John, I think it was like last year, the year before, didn't you say that you were like on the precipice of buying a new TV for this place? If I remember right.

2:13:33Casey Liss:It's just like it would be so cheap and it would just be so much. But it's like, why? Like, just do it. Just they're so cheap. You can buy a$300 Walmart TV would be better than this thing. Please. Just it's terrible. um occasionally other people bring stuff like uh my brother has brought the his uh quest headset which is the only reason i got to try that so the whole family tried that out this is before the vision pro um but yeah there's not a lot of technology going it's mostly just everybody and their stuff but of course every individual person in our family has because we're all adults now their iphone their ipad their laptop all their chargers and their cables all you know that's just like your personal technology stuff that's but that's in their stuff every person has a personal bag so every kid has their personal backpack which used to be a cute little kid backpack but now it's a gigantic one you know so that's and since i'm driving the car i don't have my backpack with me and my backpack goes in between the the two kids in the seats because you know i can't put it at my feet like they do but yeah it's mostly just uh you know clothes and sunscreen and uh you know hairbrushes and toiletries and all the other stuff like that and we do bring towels with us even though the houses offer towels we like to have our own and we do bring like a beach blanket but here's the thing looking at the back of your packing your giant cavernous car and your roof rack and everything the tip i will give if you do not have a gigantic car like this because i'm looking at what you're putting in your back here i would never choose the things the containers that you have put your belongings in to go including the instacart thing and i'll tell you if you're out there and you do not have a giant box-shaped cargo place in your huge suv soft containers no carry-on luggage no away i love away luggage i have a bunch of it they were sponsored the show way back in the day but i honestly like their stuff no luggage nothing rectilinear nothing hard and rectangular because the way you get the most out of the cargo space in a thing that is not essentially a cargo van is squishy stuff duffel bags squishy things and yes the packing cubes use the packing cubes but then put the packing cubes into duffel bags because you'd be surprised how much you can squish a duffel bag and another duffel bag next to it and get things in and then the pillows that all the kids want wedged on top in that weird uneven space in the top of the trunk of a sedan where there's like oh nothing will fit there pillows will fit there and at the very end you put the hats on top because the hats you don't want to squish and also pro tip uh when you're going on the ferry the bag that has your lunch in it it's got to be easily accessible at the very very edge of the trunk so you can just open that trunk yank out the bag and go up and test it if you yank out the the lunch bag for the ferry and every other thing in the trunk expands to fill that space immediately you failed reset you need to have it so you can take the thing out and put it back in when you're done um yeah it my my trunk is packed i always do pack it because like casey said you fill the space that you have and i've developed strategies over the years uh we'll see how we go this year uh we might have a couple of challenges because people want to bring more stuff but you know i'm always fighting back against that it's like we don't need that much stuff we just need what we know we're going to use when we're there and if we find out we don't have something we can always go buy it and And the place we're going is not like a beach town or like a tourist trap type of thing.

2:16:39Casey Liss:It's actually one of the less tourist trap the areas on the East End of Long Island, if there can be said to be such a thing. So it's not like going to Bermuda or something where everything costs astronomical prices. We could just go to a plain old stop and shop and it's just the same prices in the stop and shop everywhere and it's fine.

2:16:55Marco Arment:that's the thing like like what do you like how much are you buying such that a grocery store wouldn't be fine like price wise like i know costco is cheaper but like u.s grocery stores are pretty inexpensive still well if you're in a tourist trapty town i mean

2:17:12Casey Liss:you live in one market like your grocery stores are not cheap because guess what you're trapped on this little island and you're gonna pay our prices yeah but that's because you can't drive to one here like right well i think like vacation towns where it's like hey everyone who's in this town is uh is on vacation here the little local market is going to be expensive well yeah but

2:17:30Marco Arment:it's again like when you have a car and regular road you can just drive 15 minutes to the nearest

2:17:36Casey Liss:regular grocery store like i think you might be more than 15 how close is the closest regular grocery store for to you when you go on these trips uh usually 10 to 15 minutes it's it's not

2:17:45John Siracusa:that burdensome then you have no excuse then yeah no no i don't but i think ultimately like you know

2:17:49Marco Arment:you mentioned a couple times like you fill the space you have like i i've i've now owned a lot of different sized vehicles um you know from the bmw 3 series probably at the smallest to the review which is the largest i have found when i take my large trips like especially like you know going upstate for christmas or whatever like when i take my large trips i fill them up no matter how big or small they are when i when i've had a smaller vehicle we fill it to the gills and we somehow fit it all in when i have a big vehicle that i think this will be so much easier at christmas christmas comes i fill it to the gills and i'm like i can't believe i filled this giant new vehicle or whatever and i've been i've been thinking about this recently as i am thinking you know whatever this lease is up for my ix i i'm planning on going with a smaller vehicle next time and one of the thoughts i've had has been like can i go down to a smaller vehicle like is that going to make family trips difficult or whatever and and i just have to keep reminding myself like no it'll be fine i've had smaller vehicles it was fine i'll bring less stuff because I'll have to bring less stuff and it will be fine.

2:18:53Marco Arment:And I think here, as much as we make fun of you, Casey, you are filling the space you have. And if you ever had to have less space or chose to have less space, you would fill that too and it would be fine. I think having a roof box is ridiculous to add to this.

2:19:11Casey Liss:You couldn't bring a case of bottled water. Did we get the count on that? Because when we say case of bottled water, I'm not sure we're giving you the right idea. Yeah, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight times maybe 40 bottles of water in there. What do we think?

2:19:23John Siracusa:I mean, we use most of it. Oh, I'm sure you do.

2:19:26Casey Liss:So we're going to say a Costco Kirkland bottled water, 40 bottles, pack it in the trunk. And there's soda. Did you see the Diet Cokes hanging out on the left side of that, just leaning over there? Shoved in there. And another Diet Coke wedged over the watermelon?

2:19:37John Siracusa:Well, it has to keep the watermelon from rolling. No, that was something different over the watermelon. I forget what that was.

2:19:42Casey Liss:Any fizzy drink that could possibly leak and or explode? Sure, throw it in there.

2:19:46John Siracusa:Well, I mean, these beaches are direct shot for us. One of them is like through the Cape Charles is like three hours. The other one we go to is like five or six hours, but there's no turns along the way. What I know what I mean by that is it's not like we're leaving the car for hours on end on a ferry or something like that.

2:20:01Casey Liss:Well, I don't trust any carbonated sugary drink in the trunk of a car. But, you know, so far it's worked out for you. So far. And I do think like, oh, you'll always fill the space. I would have real difficulty filling Casey's car without the roof rack. Cause I just don't think we have that much stuff that we want to bring to the beach. Like I said, the beach specific stuff is like sunscreen, which is small. I'm bringing Marco's Japanese sunscreen this time to try it out. Hey. And, uh, some, you know, a beach blanket, a towel, a towels, umbrella. Uh, you know, that's just, there's not, there's not much stuff.

2:20:33Casey Liss:Like we're not bringing a volleyball court. I got a Casey. We'll probably back that. Like, so I think honestly, if we went on a regular beach vacation with your car, Casey, we would have real trouble filling it.

2:20:42John Siracusa:That's fair. Do you, what is your, or let me rephrase. You said an umbrella is your shade of choice at the beach. Does Long Island, has Long Island gotten into the Shibumi thing? Are you familiar with this?

2:20:53Casey Liss:I do not recognize the name brand, but I can tell you the variety of things that people have had on beaches to give them shelter from the sun and wind is very high. There's lots of different things that exist, including some things that other people in my extended family bring with them. I've never been into them, but I know they exist. various balloon-y, wind-breakery, hut-type things. What is a shibumi?

2:21:15John Siracusa:So a shibumi, the idea is let the wind work for you, not against you. And what it is, it's basically a giant piece of like, what's the material that like a parachute or something like that would be made out of?

2:21:29Casey Liss:Ripstop nylon.

2:21:30John Siracusa:There you go. And what it is, is you put like a tent-style, like collapsible post through the front of it, and then it connects to a bag, or the carrying case becomes a bag that you fill with sand, and you put that in the front, and so you aim it into the wind such that it's trying to blow away from the bag of sand that's in front of it, but the combination of the bag of sand and all the wind gives you a pretty giant shade that you can sit under, and what's really great about it is this thing, when it's collapsed, is very small and weighs nothing, and this is, this was, I'd seen these for years at Cape Charles and I always thought like, oh, this seems like it's got to be a gimmick.

2:22:10John Siracusa:And then I would see more of them and more of them and more of them. And then, uh, when we went to, to Sunset Beach last year with our friends here in town, um, they got one. And so I finally got to like, try it out and put it up and take it down with them. And I was like, oh my God, this is the best thing I've ever seen. And they're not cheap. And I'm sure there's knockoffs that maybe are just as good, but Shibumi are, uh, incredible. If you're a beach person, and we'll put a link in the show notes, these things. For my money, this is incredible, and I cannot imagine going to the beach without it now.

2:22:38Marco Arment:It's funny. I would expect to have seen a lot of these because we can see the beach from upstairs to here, and one of the great fun things to watch here is sitting at breakfast with coffee in the morning on the deck, looking out and seeing all the dads setting up these ridiculous contraptions like trying to stake out a good spot you know eight in the morning on the beach and you see you see all the dads setting up their stuff you know you see the lifeguards are out digging and digging up their stuff and then like there's like four or five dads thinking like they are they're living for this moment all year long they get to play with all their gear and setting stuff up and staking out the great spot and so i see a pretty big variety of shade contraptions i have not seen these um i'm very surprised they

2:23:26Casey Liss:started in i'm not surprised because the reason i was giving these a thumbs down is i just don't think long island beaches have the consistent wind to make these viable it's just really oh we do it fluctuates too much directionally like even if it's steady at speed is steady the direction fluctuation is enough to make this troublesome i've seen these on the beach i've seen people have them and i've seen the failure case which is like well you want it to always be sort of stable and rippling in that position but like first of all stable and rippling in the position directed to the wind like a weather way in vain would be assuming the wind doesn't change direction which i think it does frequently and assuming it is steady also sometimes means the shade is in a weird place so then you start doing the thing where everyone does a scutching as the sun changes to today because if you're spending the whole day at the beach you're scutching and you're following the shade around whereas if you do one of the other systems including umbrellas you can adjust the umbrella you don't have to move your seats so that is handy but the second is the flappy thing like if the wind dies or changes direction or it goes in a weird direction or a gull comes down and starts attacking you and stuff it's just i just don't feel this is well supported enough the technology of very light material and a bag that it comes in that you fill with sand is well worn and there's lots of sort of various little tent cave hut things that are like this that are a little bit more reliable i think this has the wow factor but i i wouldn't i wouldn't put my stake on this for a long round be just specifically maybe it works better in things with steadier wind and constant wind direction for people who are not going to be on the beach all day long yeah what

2:24:53Marco Arment:what we see the most of here is whatever like tommy bahama umbrella costco is selling this year like that that's number one like number one most common and you can always tell like oh yeah that's you can see like there's like one or two old ones that's oh that's last year's design but for the most part the vast majority of people have whatever costco umbrella is this year i think i think i

2:25:17Casey Liss:have you seen the picture maybe i posted on my instagram of like it might have actually even been fire island beach uh of just like the beach from the distance and it just looks like a bunch of umbrellas live there like it just it's you could walk across the tops of the umbrellas especially when you're back in a distance at all the umbrellas are like foreshortened into a single line and it's just so colorful and pretty and yeah like you said like whatever the colors were the years they bought them and i don't know if people buying them like immediately that year because we are beach umbrellas we've been using for decades now so sometimes you get some really old designs in there well

2:25:45Marco Arment:thing is don't last very long is the problem so like ours are still going strong i guess they don't make them like they used to well that's definitely true but uh yeah so you see a lot of tommy bahama costco umbrellas and then every day there's usually like three of those giant tent

2:26:00Casey Liss:things that somebody has four poster tents sometimes the four or the ones that are like

2:26:05Marco Arment:triangles where it's like like you have like two up front and then they kind of just slants down

2:26:08Casey Liss:into like down to the sand like a lean to kind of looking yeah like there's a lot of those and

2:26:13Marco Arment:those are the ones that the 8 a.m. dads are usually trying to set up. It's like some giant thing that, like, it's way too big. Like, our beach isn't that big here. And people bring these tremendous things and not realizing, like, all right, you know, in two hours, the tide is going to be under that tent.

2:26:29Casey Liss:Hopefully the umbrella line makes it so they can't set up anything that close to it.

2:26:33John Siracusa:Let me, to go back just a half step, you had said, what happens if there is no wind? Let me introduce you to the incredible thought technology, or really just technology technology that is the Shibumi Wind Assist TM, which is two smaller bags that have clips on them and you fill the smaller bags with sand and clip them to the other end of the Shibumi.

2:26:55Casey Liss:So other families' kids can trip over that line and yell at you and take down your thing.

2:26:58John Siracusa:That's right, yes.

2:26:59Casey Liss:Because really, like anything that has a line going out to either a stake or a sandbag extending that far from the place that you staked out on a crowded beach on a weekend in Long Island, the kids are going to trip over that and it's going to be bad. I just, I'm not a Shibumi fan. I'm not convinced. I'll see if they become more prevalent. And in my experience, I've seen a couple of them, and I thought they were novel, but I don't see a lot of them. So I'm like, oh, that must have died. But, you know, maybe their marketing is going to bring them back.

2:27:23Marco Arment:Especially if you look at the amount of surface area that you are taking up versus the amount of shade that is created. Like, this is made for very large beaches that are not very crowded. Because we're way too crowded here on our small beach. So like here, an umbrella is about as large as most people want to be, because if you're setting up this kind of thing.

2:27:47Casey Liss:And even if you get there in the morning and can stake this out, people will hate you. You're taking up too much space.

2:27:52Marco Arment:You're taking up tons of room to create a very small square of shade, really, for, you know, two people.

2:27:59Casey Liss:That you can only walk into most easily through the one big aperture defined by the arc, because you try to walk into it from the sides, you're ducking down and it's messing up, and it doesn't really want you to walk into it from the back. It's just not a great idea. Not a fan.

2:28:12John Siracusa:Well, I think that's because you are on crippled beaches that are too small.

2:28:17Casey Liss:You mean the best beaches in the world, most beaches?

2:28:20John Siracusa:Oh, wow. Of course, John. Of course. I've forgotten that there's nowhere that counts in the entire world except Long Island.

2:28:25Casey Liss:You think the best beaches in the world are Long Island beaches? You know, I haven't been to all the beaches in the world, but I have been to Bermuda, which everyone bragged about. And I said, you know what? I'd prefer to be on Long Island Beach. Bermuda beaches are nice, but the water is too warm. The sand is weird.

2:28:39Marco Arment:What? Oh, my God, John. The water's too warm.

2:28:42Casey Liss:The water is too warm. I said it. It feels like a bathtub.

2:28:45John Siracusa:All right. I do not want to get in an argument with you, so I'm just going to plow forward. But I will say that -

2:28:50Marco Arment:Look, I love Long Island. I love Long Island beaches. I love Fire Island even more. But to call these the best beaches on any metric -

2:28:58Casey Liss:I absolutely do. I totally believe it. They are my favorite beaches in the whole world. I think they're some of the best beaches in the world. Well, that's different. That's different. I also think they're some of the best beaches. Marco is not really a beach person. as we have established. He lives near the beach, but he's not so much a fan of being on the beach and swimming in the water. Yeah, but because

2:29:15Marco Arment:our beach isn't actually that great to swim in, if I'm honest. And there are beaches that are. Like, when you go to the Caribbean, they're really

2:29:21Casey Liss:nice. I understand. I understand. Maybe Hawaii would convince me. I haven't been to Hawaii. Hawaii was also really nice. Very nice beaches in Hawaii. Have you been to Bermuda? No. You should. They have very nice beaches, but I prefer Long Island beaches, and I actually think the Long Island beaches are better. On what metrics? I have to know. Besides the water being colder i think they're more pretty i think they're more fun to be at i think they're more fun to sit on the sand all day uh and go in the water and come back out and have a nice lunch and play like because the bermuda beach is the water the water is not refreshing when you're hot and you want to go in the water to cool off and the water is 85 degrees it sucks what and the beach sand being so fine and pink is beautiful but it's it's not as good to play beach volleyball on

2:30:04John Siracusa:one day, one day before you die, which hopefully is not for a long time, I want to hear you acknowledge that cars other than Hondas exist and are good. I love cars other than Hondas. And Ferraris. And Porsches, I like them too. I also like BMWs.

2:30:19Casey Liss:I like a lot of cars. The cars are not a problem. And honestly, one of the things, like I didn't think about this when I moved here, but Cape Cod beaches actually are the closest I've found to Long Island beaches in terms of me liking the aspects of them. The Cape Cod beaches, I think, are not as nice, but they're really close. It is similar. Wow.

2:30:37John Siracusa:I can't with you, John.

2:30:38Casey Liss:Oh, my God. All right. Everyone wants their beaches with the palm trees, but not me. Not me.