703: Part of a Healthy Breakfast

15:54Casey Liss:Maybe that's the origin of Syracuse. When I want to if I want to listen to something, I want to start from episode one and go in order. Yeah, I'm telling you, you wanted this. I don't know if you currently do. I mean, it sounds like me. It definitely sounds like me because I definitely do that with like television shows and stuff. Like I want to, I go back to season one. I want to start from the beginning. I'm sure I've done it with podcasts too. Oh my God, John. I'm just saying I don't remember specifically. And it is confusing. There were two things you were calling Syracuse mode. But anyway, I'm saying that does sound like me.

16:20John Siracusa:I can assure you someone will go spelunking into like catatp.fm or something. And we will come up with you requesting this. Now maybe. In episode 34, right?

16:29Casey Liss:In episode 34.

16:30John Siracusa:You're exactly right. Now, maybe we didn't refer to this as Syracuse mode, or maybe we're getting our memories slightly wrong. Hi, have we met? But I really am on Team Marco for this one. I really feel like you've asked for this in some way, shape, or form. Marco, before we move on, I have a question for you. I have been seeing, and we were briefly talking about this privately before the show started, I've been seeing so much activity on Overcast over the last, I don't know, month, if I'm very courteous, maybe a couple of weeks more realistically. um i feel like you are in what is it a peak or a valley i guess you're in a peak i was gonna say fit or spurt i never get right i can never remember which one's right uh but you're you're really making progress here what is happening are you just in one of those times when you're super duper productive is are you just the world's best ai dictator director person what is happening

17:20Marco Arment:kind of maybe all of that or some of all of that so okay so here's what's going on so as I described, I was having Fable help me tackle some of Overcast's longest standing bugs. These were things that were just stumping me for months or years. And it was just such a burden. I was very discouraged because it was so difficult for me to keep working on Overcast mentally, because no matter what I did, there were this relatively small number of just very difficult bugs I couldn't figure out. And all the reviews all the stars all of the emails all the posts they would all be dominated by people saying yeah that thing you did that's nice but why haven't you fixed this and honestly i couldn't blame them like because many of those bugs were pretty annoying or pretty uh pretty you know interfering with uh with people's workflows and stuff so i get it but that just made it so hard to motivate myself to work on overcast at all because it just felt i was just had this boulder resting on me that I just couldn't get off and I couldn't move forward at all.

18:26Marco Arment:Meanwhile, all these years, I've had my own wish list of things that I would love to do. I know what people request because I read them. So I know what people want. I know what I want. And all this time, you know, I just told the story about how I've been trying to build Keep X oldest episodes for like six years. There's lots of features like that. there's lots of things that i have tried to build for years some of which i have even started to build or built most of and then just couldn't get it past couldn't get it you know to ship i couldn't get it good enough to ship or i couldn't finish it or i couldn't account for some kind of edge cases and therefore like it was kind of unshippable until i did or you know so i would shelve it or whatever there are so many of those features now that claude helped me get by the way claude is a past and probably future sponsor of our show um now that now that using ai in this case claude fable but you know i'm sure it doesn't matter which one i'm using um now that that's helped me find and fix some of these big nasty bugs it has like lifted this burden off of me and now i am free and empowered to go start working on these other things that i've been wanting to work on and it's delightful because everything you've seen me do in the last few weeks like in all these this crazy barrage of beta builds yeah yeah none of these are like brand new ideas that i just had today this is stuff i've been waiting for years to ship and with the help of ai to get me past the crazy bugs the test suites like some of the really boring implementation details i can now do it and i think i am a pretty good director of ai like when i when i write the spec to a prompt to find some kind of class of bug or investigate something or do an audit or generate tests.

20:15Marco Arment:I think I'm pretty good at writing those. It's proving to be a strength of mine. And then I look at the code it writes and see, there's a couple of things that I think really work in my favor. I've seen when you have AI write like a whole app from scratch, it's kind of a mess. It works, but the code organization is a mess. The performance in a lot of ways is a mess. It's not good when it's totally inventing everything from nothing and totally unbounded. But when you have it work in an existing code base and you're just having it like, hey, this feature that I wrote three quarters of six years ago, please finish it.

20:54Marco Arment:It can do that with your code and with your code style and in your architecture that you designed and built over years. When it's focused like that, when it's kind of bounded into a smaller problem said it isn't inventing a whole app or a whole feature by itself it's like taking what you already did and just adding a couple of things or fixing a couple of bugs then you look at like the total number of lines of code it's writing is very small so that makes it easier to review as the human so i'm able to say hey fix this or fix or finish this feature that i wrote and then i see what it did and i'm like i can review line by line like oh yeah that's of course that's obvious that's fine that's fine then you know occasionally i catch something like oh it's editing these episodes one by one i have a batch update function i'm gonna rewrite it to use that so i do you know it's stuff like you know i'll catch stuff like that catch some you know performance issues or unforeseen bugs or just kind of bad styles of code like if it's recomputing the property over and over again that i know i can just store and cache like i'll store and cache it you know stuff like that but for the most part what i am doing is i'm mining all of my past half done efforts and having claude like help me finish them and test them and prove them and write the boring parts of the ui code so i don't have to write them and then i can go edit them to make them good i'm having to do that kind of thing and because i have banked up over a decade of features that I have mostly done or that I have started doing or that I know I had to do but I didn't quite know how to do them, I can have it help me really a lot.

22:34Marco Arment:So for instance, in the current test flight builds, probably shipping in the next couple of weeks, app store review is very, very slow, but we're working on that. I'm trying, hopefully shipping soon. One of the major feature sets that I'm shipping is premium audio effects. A mono mix down, a full genuine parametric EQ, customizable volume normalization, a de-esser, and background noise reduction and isolation. Now, all of those things except the background noise reduction, I wrote those whenever I wrote a voice boost too. I don't know, that's six years ago, whatever it was. Those have been there that whole time.

23:13Marco Arment:When I edit this podcast, I have a voice boost command line utility that allows me to configure all those audio effects. and I pipe each of our tracks through that every time. For the last, I don't know, six years, whatever it's been, I forget what I wrote voice boost to. I have been piping our audio through basically a channel strip and I have customizable presets for each of the three of us to make this show. Because I wrote this whole audio engine, but none of it was exposed in the UI. Voice boost in the app has just been basically a preset configuration of this channel strip engine that I built.

23:48Marco Arment:and my plan was someday I will write the UI to have people actually change this and customize it that's a lot of work and I just it was never important enough it never rose above like the threshold of being more important than all the bugs I had to keep fixing and now that all those bugs got easier to fix I can go back to this and I say all these features that I wrote years ago that I just needed a UI for have Claude help me make a UI for God's sake and then I can polish it and make it good and now i can finally launch these features and the background noise reduction is a browser tab i've had open for three years for one of apple's audio units i knew what it would take to integrate that into my audio engine and i knew it was going to be a lot and there was just again there was never like a two-week span that i had where that was a good idea to use my time to do that but now it takes less time because now i can have claude sketch it out for me first and build the structure and then i can look at it and tweak a few things and make it good and release it all of these features that i'm doing now you know chapter pre-selection my little detail about how like if you uncheck a chapter and that same chapter appears next week in that show it skips it automatically i've been thinking about this that's that was my like clever idea that i had for chapter pre-selection again like three years ago it never rose to the top there is always more important stuff the sleep timer fade out people have been requesting that for since the beginning of time since we invented sleep and that i knew again like i know you know okay do the v-ramp mole over the array like i knew how to do it but again like getting it right would have taken a few hours probably of my time and getting it exactly right making sure like i covered all the edge cases but now i have some help so now it's easier to do all these features that I brainstormed six years ago or half wrote five years ago or almost finished four years ago.

25:46Marco Arment:And like, I can finally do them. So what you're seeing now is me just plowing through my backlog of all of this technical credit. It's the opposite of technical debt. Like I've been, I've half written so much, you know, so many features. I have, I've been thinking about I'm planning mentally so many features. I've been listening to other people's reports of what they want and try and planning how I would do that someday. Now, today is that day. That day has finally come. I'm actually able to do these things. So that's why this is all happening. It is a combination of, it is number one. I mean, it's enabled by Fable and high-end AI models.

26:32Marco Arment:And I'm not ashamed to say that because this is a game changer for indie app developers. To be able to have that level of bug finding and that level of framework generation for UIs and stuff, it just is such a difference of what we're able to accomplish and the quality of what we're able to ship. Because we have basically world-class bug fixing abilities at our disposal now.

26:58John Siracusa:Yeah, I mean, I have definitely had similar experiences with CallSheet. I got myself wrapped around the axle about something over the last week or so. Somebody wrote in and asked, hey, instead of just picking one Plex server to get now playing off of, why can't we use all of our Plex servers? Which was completely fair. and it was one of those things where it was like, oh, I didn't realize that some fundamental architectural decisions I made way back when were going to make this extremely difficult. But I was able to slog through it, a lot of it on my own, some with help of AI, but especially when Fable was cheaper, I fixed a ton of bugs in CallSheet.

27:39John Siracusa:This is like four or five test light fields ago. It'll be in the App Store similarly in a couple of weeks, I think. I fixed a ton of bugs, some of which I knew about, a lot of which I wasn't even aware of, but as Fable or whatever is introducing these bugs to me and saying, oh, this is wrong because this is that and the other thing, and then I'll take a look and try to convince myself, okay, I see what it's saying, or I can reproduce it myself, whatever the case may be, and figure out, oh, it's right. And in that sense, I echo what you're saying entirely, like to get through some of that like rote work and to do so so quickly and easily without feeling like you're back in the minds is so refreshing and so wonderful.

28:18John Siracusa:And I had a feeling this was, you know, a little of you, a little of, you know, your AI du jour, but it's been very impressive to watch all this stuff fly by. And I mean, as a daily Overcast user, I can't say that I've noticed anything going wrong or, you know, any more bugs than I would have ever seen in any app, you know, including my own. So it seems like it's all coming up mailhouse as far as I can tell.

28:39Marco Arment:Yeah, and like, and a lot of the stuff, like, for instance, like I had Claude sketch out the first version of the transcript, you know, the find and page functionality on transcripts. I keep not wanting to call it search because it's find and page. I feel like search, if you say transcript search, it kind of sounds like searching across different transcripts to find, like, what episode did I say this in? And it's not that yet. I'm hoping to do that sometime soon, but it's not that. But, you know, to do the transcript find and page thing, that's a web view. And as I've discussed previously on the show.

29:10Marco Arment:And I don't know what is the web API to highlight, to show a bunch of highlights of text. i probably would have you know defined a css class that's like you know puts a square background on the text and everything but i i wrote this giant like you know two paragraph long uh prompt to have cloud code sketch out the first version of it for me and it knows what the new web ais or apis are to do that i don't know that i haven't been a web developer for 20 years but like it knows all the web development apis now so it's like oh i use this new api to create you know changes or you You know, it's highlights that don't change the DOM and, you know, whatever.

29:49Marco Arment:And I don't even know what it is. But then I saw it and I looked. I'm like, oh, well, that's pretty clever. And I've read its JavaScript. I'm like, whoa, I didn't know you could do that. And again, like it is enabling me to be the director. And all these years I have thought I'm a decent programmer. I'm not like an amazing programmer. I'm a decent programmer. I might even say good, but I wouldn't say amazing. And now it's like I have the power of an amazing programmer at my fingertips. that I can just direct. And I think I'm a better director than I am a programmer. I think my experience being a programmer and being an app developer and listening to my customers over all these years, plus I think I have decent product sense to begin with, or at least now at least.

30:34Marco Arment:And so I think I'm able to be a really effective AI director. Because again, when you give AI, not much to work with. It'll make some really hideous apps. It is terrible at design the only thing it's worse at than design is naming things but it's really bad at design but it's really good at writing code that works and it can tell me things like there's this web api to highlight things that were disrupting the dom like great i had no idea that's awesome and then and that kind of works both ways i can tell it too like when i found the audio unit to do the uh sound isolation or the background introduction i told it use this api and first I had it tell me what would it take to use this API the complexity, the trade-offs, the power concerns, what would it take to use this API and it did all the research and it did the whole breakdown and it sketched out what it would take and there are things about it that when you pipe in this API you have to consider latency and no part of my audio engine was built yet to consider latency coming from one of the effects I would have had to do all of that manually first of all i wouldn't have even realized that at first it would have taken me half a day to realize there was latency and because i would just find weird bugs and not know why then i would have figured out oh my god i have to account for latency and that would have blown up voice boost complexity the way i would do it so much and then i saw how claude did it i'm like oh i would never have thought to do that but that's really elegant and way way smaller and faster and better than what i would have done and then meanwhile sometimes i get really i get a win sometimes like i wrote the de-esser again like probably five six years ago whenever i wrote voice boost and today i had claude look at him and i said investigate how i wrote the de-esser i actually don't know how de-essers are implemented in audio software i just guessed based on the tools i had at my disposal how one might work how did i do evaluate how i did tell me what other alternatives exist and it turns out i guessed right that the de-esser i wrote years ago that actually is how they work like oh great all right um and it suggested a couple of minor tweaks which i did um but it was like i had it mostly right um and that's good to know sometimes too so like it is such such a game changer for me to have this now and this is like this is as bad as the coding ai models are ever going to be they're getting better it's just it's remarkable to me what we can do now and and i am very comfortable taking more of a like half director half coder role because i am still writing the code i'm just not writing all of the code and i'm looking at the code that claude writes i'm like oh yeah that's you nailed it i'm not going to edit that because it's good you know the parts that aren't good as i mentioned earlier then i'll edit those you know the parts that need performance improvements or need god they need ui tweaks but you know i i tweak the ui like i have claude write the first ui i don't have to write the massive amount of like swift ui boilerplate to tie things together have claude do that and then i go in and make it actually a good ui i go in and make it you know attractive more functional line everything up right add the right margins add the right fonts you know do all that stuff like i do you know the polishing work that i'm good at and claude does all of the like templating and you know rote work that it's good at i think this is a really really really important time in coding and i'm very very happy to to to be finally embracing something as it happens rather than like five years later we are sponsored this episode by squarespace the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online whether you're just starting out or scaling your business squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain name showcase your offerings the professional website grow your brand and get paid all in one place quite simply they make it It's super easy at Squarespace to make amazing websites for you and your business.

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36:09John Siracusa:the episode before, SonosNet, where Sonos would make like an ad hoc network, or not ad hoc, like its own private network between devices. And I'd said, oh, you can turn that off now. Well, Will Smidline writes, I have been dutifully checking my Sonos app weekly since Casey first mentioned the disabled SonosNet beta, but the option never appeared for me. I just discovered that Unify's built-in ad blocking prevents the feature flag service they are using for the rollout from working. I disabled that filter and it immediately showed up. So if you're a piehole person like me, or if you use Unify's ad blocking, or perhaps other ones, you might want to flip

36:39Casey Liss:that off just for a moment it's like my own personal nightmare of ad blocking and why i'm so paranoid about it like i would never think that ad blocking would stop like a feature from a piano you know beta you know like just yeah yeah wow so yeah i mean i i don't really like ads but i i hate things not working because of something that i did yeah that's totally fair oh can i

36:58Marco Arment:can i before sorry i i totally forgot that like also in the intervening time since we last recorded because there was a bit of a vacation break here. In the intervening time, I also got all of the ubiquity high availability stuff. Oh, how's that working out? Oh, man, it's cool. There was only one snag. So this was for the Overcast Mac Mini's data center, basically getting redundant router, redundant switch, and the power backup system. So that way I can just plug in all the ubiquity stuff into both sides of the power in the data center and not have to deal with the transfer switch for that um and it's really cool like configuring the shadow mode for the for the two dream routers was really fun um and the wan switch like you know having stuff like that it's like i feel really cool the only weird thing about the ubiquity redundancy setups that i've that i've had so far is that the the ubiquity redundant power thing so as i described last time the you know most server gear has two power supplies and two power inputs because it has to plug into two different power sources in a data center for redundancy okay ubiquity stuff doesn't quite have that it has most of it has one regular power input and then it has this big dc connector that's like custom proprietary dc connector on the other side of the of like the switch or the router or whatever and they sell basically a giant power supply thing that you can plug into your other power source and then connect a whole bunch of these dc cables to all the ubiquity devices that support it why they do it this way i don't know whatever a second power input would have been fine um but i i got that and these have to be the worst computer cables i have ever worked with so the ubiquity dc power cables that run from the redundant power system i think it's like you know the ui rps something like that um to each device they are basically the thickness and flexibility of a slightly flat garden hose it is fun the thickest power cable i think i've ever seen for something that is that is like you know not like a piece of industrial equipment like it's these super thick power cables that are flat they sell it only in one length of like you know i think it's like six feet long so it's massive and heavy and it comes in this massive box and like 30 bucks each it's the thickest giantest thing ever and then on the ends of it are what look like giant ide connectors they're like they're these like huge rows of two like two rows of black pins on each one and it's it's got to be like three or four inches wide and they plug into these giant dc ports on the back of the the router as i said i'm so i'm like i plug everything in and i connect it all up to the dc thing and i shove these giant cables into these giant connectors and they like shove in i'm like i think it's in it looks like i can't get it any further so i guess it's in but what direction does it go who knows um like i i put it in one way and it like didn't quite go in all the way and i'm probably wrong flipped it over put it in like a little harder and it went in further like okay i guess that's right who knows so i plug everything in connect everything up i'm like all right let's test it out and i unplug everything from the main power and i walk back around to this other rack and it's all off well that's fun didn't do it right this time so walk back in plug it back in see how it got it's got to see how the shadow mode does failover because it considered it a failure okay great awesome at least that works yeah right that did work anyways so i'm like doing like you know ai research and youtube lookups and how to figure out like how do i how do i connect all these things and it turns out the cables are like directionally they can only go in one direction but you wouldn't know it unless you look really closely that across those two rows of pins two of them are rounded instead of square oh cool and so here i am in like the back of my server rack like shining my phone flashlight in like trying to like see what direction is what on here like looking in the ports and eventually i learned oh if you get it right you can shove it in even harder and you feel like you're gonna break the thing but if you really shove it you can get it all the way in and then a little light lights up next to it like oh now it's so anyway trying to put a round peg in a square hole yes or the other way i don't know but oh man what a giant pain those things were and i'm like tearing up my hands like my fingers are hurting like trying to get these things in i did eventually get them all in and it does work and it does work great but i have no idea why the cables are designed the way they are i don't know why they needs so many pins because there is some communication over them which is kind of nice like the the ubiquity rps thing will tell you when it's powering something via um power it'll tell you what it's powering like which device it's powering so they're like they are communicating over these pins to tell it you know i'm the switch 48 or whatever so that is kind of nice i but i still don't know why it needs so many pins and why the cable needs to be so incredibly thick because it's not you know it's delivering i don't know a couple hundred watts at most like it's not we're not talking about like 30 amp cables or anything so i don't know what ubiquity was thinking with this cable design but the functionality of it once you get them actually plugged in correctly is quite nice well i'm glad to hear it's working out well even though it sounds

42:47John Siracusa:like getting there was a bit of a nightmare but what are you gonna do all right we talked a little a while ago about how there is rumored to be nine gigs of ram on some upcoming iphones and joe lion front of the show wrote in to say nine gigs of ram is achieved with three 24 gigabit chips which have been in production for quite some time 24 gigabits times three 72 gigabits 72 gigabits divided by eight bits per byte equals guess what nine gigs 24 gigabit chips are also used to make configurations like 48 gigabytes and 96 gigabytes uh ddr5 server modules whereas the more traditional 8 16 32 64 etc are made with things like 8 16 and 32 gigabit chips yeah it's kind of like the uh math

43:31Casey Liss:on um tv refresh rates and knowing which ones divide evenly by uh you know uh or multiply out to be to work for 120 and 96 and 24 and 30 and you know and it gets complicated for uh multiples that are not the easy doubling that we're expecting for like powers of 2 8 16 32 64 but Nine gigs, it works if you remember that eight bits are in each pipe.

43:55John Siracusa:Exactly. TJ Ucian wrote with regard to multiple Apple accounts, I am pretty sure that the email address is what needs to be different for an Apple ID, but the phone number can be the same. Employer email address, but I still get verification texts on my phone, for example. There is some awkwardness to actually setting this up, but it works.

44:16Casey Liss:Yeah, I don't know what those rules are. I believe that this has been successful for some people, but in my experience trying to make new Apple IDs, it has varying degrees of insistence that a new phone number be used. But it changes so much with like the two-factor versus two-step and now with pass keys and everything. So who knows what the current rules are? So I guess just keep trying.

44:37John Siracusa:Just make an automatic kicking machine for your Apple ID sign up.

44:40Casey Liss:Yeah, just keep trying to make that Apple ID until you get through.

44:43John Siracusa:All right. With regard to ditching PlayStation discs, Jess Weatherbed at The Verge writes, Sony's latest quarterly earnings report shows that physical games earned the company just over$781 million in the 2025 fiscal year. So discs earned a little less than$800 million. A fraction of what it brought in for digital game sales, which was about$6.5 billion, and in-game purchases, which was about$8.5 billion over the same period.

45:10Casey Liss:yeah so if you're wondering why they're getting rid of discs uh just the numbers alone the writing has been on the wall for a while if i had to guess how lopsided it was i wouldn't have even guessed this because yeah that's that's a big difference all right so we have a bit of news

45:26John Siracusa:from a friend of ours uh do you want to talk about super duper 4 john well first i want to

45:32Casey Liss:talk about super duper uh which is a program for making a bootable clone of your disc that i've been using for a long time um and disclaimer i am friends with the developer and i was on the beta for the old version and the new version of super duper so keep that in mind um but anyway i've been using it for years it's part of my backup strategy i'm sure we won't get to it this week but there's an ask atb question revisiting backup strategies and suffice to say that i still think a bootable clone of your drive is one part of a healthy breakfast it's part of a good uh backup program in addition to all the other kinds of backups you can have um perhaps the thing that will get you back up and running the fastest is a recently created bootable clone of your boot drive so if your boot drive fails yes you could restore from a time machine backup you could restore from uh you know a network time machine or a local time machine you can restore from a cloud backup but if you want to get back up and running as fast as possible just rebooting from a different drive which is the same as your current drive as of less than 24 hours ago uh nothing can beat that and so i always make that an ingredient in my backup thing and there's a bunch of programs that do that carbon copy cloner is one super duper is the other super duper i think was the first one to sort of pioneer this uh problem space um and if you use the app uh in recent years you can see it shows its age i believe it was at one point brush metal to give you an idea how old it is or how old it was um and it doesn't particularly look you know bad or anything but it does it did look dated uh and and the plain fact is it hadn't changed much over the years in terms of the user experience now under the covers has had to change a tremendous amount because apple keeps changing how i mean super duper's been around for so long uh when it started, you could make bootable volumes just by copying files.

47:23Casey Liss:There was no sealed system volume. There was no read-only partition for the operating system. Like everything was so incredibly different. There was no booting into recovery. Like it predates all of that. So obviously, SuperDuper has had to change tremendously over the years just to continue to do the one thing that it does, which is, hey, make a bootable copy of my main drive for me. And it had a bunch of nice features where you could set up schedules and it would you know i always have my computer scheduled to like wake up in the middle of the night mount the drive that i want to clone to clone the drive unmount it and go back to sleep uh so not only did i have to make sure to run it i didn't even have to make sure my computer was awake i didn't even have to make sure the drive was mounted it would do all of it for me while i was asleep and i would just come back and i would always know my super duper clone is up to date and if there was a problem it would show me a log message and i would know i had to redo it anyway uh that's super duper and unfortunately the product has an exclamation point in the name i was hoping that the new version would not have exclamation point because the beta didn't but unfortunately the new one also has an exclamation point i protest the exclamation point i think it's bad but you know there you have it so super duper 4 is out and it kind of reminds me of marco's overcast rewrite um maybe people aren't excited about backup software i'm excited about backup software you yeah i know but this is so you'll have to put yourself in my mindset of like imagine there's a program that you're super i could not survive your mindset yeah imagine that there's some kind of program that you're really into this program and you really like it and it's great and everything and then imagine they come out with like a brand new version of this just rewritten from top to bottom just an entirely new app and not just new app like it looks different but like it's architected differently it has features the old one didn't have it's just like entirely new you're like wow that that seems to be what has happened here uh we'll link to uh dave nanian's blog post about it uh and he'll explain it and i'll actually have casey read the snippets that i pulled out here but suffice it to say that super duper 4 is basically an entirely new app in the spirit of the old one indeed so

49:30John Siracusa:So Dave Nanian writes, SuperDuper has had an impressive run. It has lasted in its original form for 22 years, longer than any other product I've ever been involved with over the so far 43 years of my working career. Let me remind you right now as – hi, this is Casey. Let me remind you that Marco and I are 44 years old. Continuing from Dave Nanian, the new version of SuperDuper is a ground-up rewrite, a tip-to-tail reinvention of what SuperDuper looks like, how it works, what it can do, and where I can tell. take it in the future. SuperMuper 4 is much faster than before. Smart updates are between two times and with the new Turbo feature in order of magnitude faster.

50:09John Siracusa:As an example, my 2.5 terabyte test volume used to take around 40 minutes to run. Without Turbo, it now takes... I think that should read with Turbo, right? Without. Oh, I'm sorry. You're right. You're right. You're right. Without Turbo, it now takes about 20 minutes. With Turbo, it takes about a minute.

50:28Casey Liss:so this is so like this is talking about the dream update yes it's a totally overhauled and developers you get a special thrill as a developer or an app of like you're finally i'm rewriting all that crufty old code and it's nice and everything like but what does this even mean for the user well this is a very simple program you know in in concept i was gonna say in execution no but in concept it makes a bootable clone or thing what along what axes can this program improve well it can improve in usability and aesthetics or whatever but mainly how fast can it do the thing i want it to do and this is not just like we made it 15 faster like just twice as fast just like almost all the time two x's even that you'd say wow double the speed but then this new mode where it's like how about way more than double the speed and i have tried this and i asked dave how turbo mode works and he hasn't told me yet but i have some ideas about how it works probably just um my guess is that it's uh keeping track of where it is in the fs events uh id log and then saying if the system has not dropped any events since then, I know exactly where I have to leave off and so I can save myself a huge amount of work.

51:29Casey Liss:This is something I always wanted when Apple was talking about adopting ZFS. ZFS has a way to do block level diffs between two volumes so that you can have two volumes that are kept in sync with each other by periodic sync jobs. And the sync job doesn't iterate over files or anything like that. It knows at the block level which individual disk blocks have changed since the last time it did this. So it doesn't have to do any work to say, oh I gotta crawl over this whole disk and see what has changed since the last time I did a sync that takes such a long time instead it's like no I know exactly where we left off I know these seven blocks have changed I don't have to do any work I just go one two three four five six seven and I'm done that's that's the dream macOS doesn't quite have that level of stuff but it does have a log of file system events and super duper looks like in turbo mode if it is able to take advantage of it at the very least it knows which files it needs to look at I think again I don't have technical details but I can tell you practically speaking having been on the beta and using the released version of it right now i've seen a clone update of you know a they call smart update of my clone drive happen in speeds that i've never seen before like a minute two minutes for 10 literally 10 million files it's fantastic so yeah like just if you don't care about like who cares someone wrote the wrap their old crufty code is gone and maybe the ui looks nicer what do i care twice as fast at minimum and way faster sometimes pretty good stuff all right so switching over to

52:51John Siracusa:pricing related stuff in all the years super duper has been on the market we've never charged for updates never even raised the price that's 22 years of free updates right i pushed back on this

53:01Casey Liss:a little bit because i'm like wasn't there that time you charged for the apple silicon version and he said yes but you didn't have to pay for that because the intel version continues to work on apple silicon so i'll give him that on a technicality but either way i'm not endorsing this as a software model this is not subscription software this is a pay once use it forever thing and he's never charged for an upgrade in 22 years except for the Apple Silicon version, which you didn't even have to buy. So that is, this is not a great business plan, but it is very nice.

53:30John Siracusa:No argument. All right, so continuing on, Dave writes, SuperDuper 4 is a totally new version, far more capable than before. And as such, I've decided this is going to be its first paid upgrade. I've also adjusted the price for inflation since 2004. So it's still the same bargain it was back when it was first released, but in today's dollars. SuperDuper 4 is free for qualifying recent purchases. Other SuperDuper 3 customers who purchased after July 31st of 2020, mind you, that's six years ago, receive an upgrade discount of up to 30 % based on purchase date. As before, even without a license, you can make full bootable backups for free.

54:05John Siracusa:And I, yes, it's really me, I work too much, provide support for both registered and unregistered users.

54:11Casey Liss:Yeah, Dave has been doing support just like seemingly 24 hours a day, seven days a week for just decades. I don't understand how he does it because as you can imagine, this program has a presumably a high support burden because people are trying to do backups and it's a complicated thing and they're and they're fraud and people are in situations, you know, where they want their backups to work or they're trying to restore. It's just again, this is not a subscription program. This is a pay once program. So it's amazing. But I encourage you. We'll link to the blog post. I encourage you to read it.

54:38Casey Liss:We cut out all the parts about how this thing is different. But a couple of highlights. It's like the program is like split up into basically a faceless server that does the work. And then like a UI that, you know, may or may not be running to reflect what's happening with the thing, which means that it can work when you're logged out and it can work when the app isn't running. It's an entirely new, cleaner architecture that's based on an idea that Dave had in 2007, I believe. But they just didn't have time to do it then because, I mean, this will be a familiar story for people listening to ADP.

55:07Casey Liss:just just trying to keep up with the stuff that apple was doing to mac os over the past 20 years or so has been so much like that they just you know this design of like we should re-architect it to be like a client server model with a faceless thing or whatever it's like we don't have time for that now we just need to we need to keep the current program so it continues to function otherwise this program just becomes a dead product like well now it can't do the thing you you buy it to do it can't do it anymore because apple made changes that wasn't acceptable so they had to keep it working and they did heroically but now they got the breathing room to do this and i'm here to tell you that it is fantastic uh and and honestly the beta the only thing the only feedback i had to give on the beta was like all ui stuff like functionally and you know it i haven't had any problems with it it works better than the old version so i know this sounds like an ad for super before but honestly this is one of my favorite programs ever for the mac i was just i had no idea this was coming i'm just so excited to see a brand new version of this And I, if you have used the old version, I encourage you to check out the new one.

56:05Casey Liss:It's a brand new program from top to bottom. It's amazing.

56:08John Siracusa:Well, congrats to Dave, genuinely. This is a really impressive effort and it's really great and I hope that Dave sells a trillion copies.

56:15Marco Arment:Yeah, like when John said earlier, like you would think this would be an easy thing, just clone this disk to this disk. Like that's kind of like saying, you know, Dropbox was just sync this folder to all of my computers. Like that's like you can there's a lot of very complex problems that you can boil down to one sentence and like that's what the user should see. Yes, that is true. But the actual implementation and details of that are a very different level of complexity than what it sounds like. And I can't even imagine the level of patience that Dave Nania must have to deal with Apple's changes over the years with this because they have not been small.

56:59Marco Arment:And certainly Apple has not been particularly helpful to people who want to clone disks with all of their changes. so yeah this this really is a remarkable feat to have an app like this that lasts so long and keeps up with all of those different things all those different waves and new requirements coming all the time and you know apple really i don't think apple is intentionally so but apple could not be more hostile towards this kind of use case with their with their development in the last i don't know decade or so um but they was kept up and it's a really really good app that solves a surprisingly complex problem very well at various times apple has probably unintentionally

57:39Casey Liss:basically broke the functionality that super duper needs to do its job because at a certain point when they started doing like the sealed system volume and cryptographically sealed stuff the only tools that could actually make a bootable volume were tools provided by apple and if apple provided broken versions of those tools you were screwed because you had they had to be signed by apple to do the thing like you know the whole chain of trust of like a bootable system is starting from a known good image or whatever eventually over the years necessarily involved using tools and apis that apple provided and there's no there was no alternative and so apple would ship versions of those that were broken and david like uh you broke my program in you know are you going to fix it before you release version mac os version whatever and it was always just incredibly fraught and like yeah they don't care about these kind of programs like oh this isn't the thing you should need or whatever it's like well great apple why don't you make iCloud backup for Macs like you have for phones but they're not doing that uh and that wouldn't provide bootable backups anyway so I'm glad that this app continues to work and it does still use Apple tools behind the scenes which are a major source of its limitations like I was talking about one recently where like there's a nice feature in SuperDuper that what it has to let you know about these nuances that you rather not think about but you have to when you're cloning your drive your boot drive the system the operating system is on a separate volume from your stuff I mean that's been that way for many years now but just to remind you there's it's an illusion provided you're like oh there's my bootable hard drive and when i open it up i see all my stuff those are multiple things merged together one of them is the bootable version of mac os um and when you do the syncing thing with it you're like oh it's just like copying your data files over there but what if you update mac os on your main boot drive the next time in the old days when you when you did a super duper clone it would also then clone that new operating system onto your clone but it can't do that anymore because of the sealed system volume so it detects hey your main disk and your clone are now running different versions of mac os do you want to fix that whereas before you might not think to do that and not realize when you boot it from your clone you're using an older version of mac os which would work fine it would continue to work is just you know anyway now it says oh do you want me to fix it and if you say yes guess what it has to wipe the whole thing because that's the only way apple to will allow you to do it which is fine it just takes longer and everything but like i asked can you just update the mac os part and the answer was no you just literally can't apple says no so things could definitely be improved here but this this program is going to great lengths to try to make it a seem simple and b give you every possible option for achieving what you want to achieve yep it's great work all right let's talk apple upgrade program so

1:00:13John Siracusa:So if you recall, there was the iPhone upgrade program, which let you finance a phone and you could upgrade like every year or you could just do it so that you own the phone outright after every two years. And now that's been sunset and there's an Apple upgrade program. So Apple upgrade offers 12 and 24 month leasing options for iPhone and Apple Watch and 24 and 36 month leasing options for Mac and iPad. So our friend John Voorhees over at MacStories writes, For iPads, the starting prices range from$13 a month to$25 a month. Macs range from starting prices of$25 to$49 a month. And the Apple Watch ranges from$12 to$47 a month.

1:00:56John Siracusa:But again, these are just the starting prices. You can configure a fully loaded 16-inch MacBook Pro that is just under$230 a month. And it won't include AppleCare. Back to the newsroom post. When customers first enroll in Apple Upgrade, they can further lower their monthly lease payments by trading in their currently owned device through Apple Trade-In. Customers can also earn 3 % daily cash back when making their lease payments with Apple Card. All applicants will be subject to a soft credit inquiry that will not impact their credit score. At the end of the lease term, customers can upgrade their device to the latest generation, purchase it with a one-time payment, or simply return it and exit the program.

1:01:31John Siracusa:in the Klarna app because guess what Klarna is what's uh doing the back end of all this uh they can stay on top of all their lease information including their billing schedule and remaining payouts customers can add an apple care subscription to protect their products marking excuse me making the return of their current device and upgrade to a new one even easier with the launch of apple upgrade apple will no longer offer the iphone upgrade program and iphone payments in the united states when eligible customers currently enrolled in the iphone upgrade program will have the option of leasing a new device without with apple upgrade financing with apple card monthly installments purchasing the product outright or choosing carrier financing so the verge has a table where they go through uh some example price breakdowns

1:02:11Casey Liss:and so on and so forth um yeah the important part of this table is uh how much is left to pay because that is really the big difference between i know they all both start with you the upgrade program and what was the old one update yes i believe that's right yeah anyway this this new one is a lease, which kind of like leasing a car, you make a bunch of monthly payments. And at the end of the payments, you have not paid for the thing. You don't own the thing. There is still some amount that you haven't paid yet. And you can choose to at that point, pay whatever is left and buy it outright or return the product and have it end the lease or get a different product and start a new lease.

1:02:47Casey Liss:And so how much is left? You know, so obviously you have lower monthly payments because when you add up all your monthly payments, it adds up to less than the price of the product. So when the lease ends, how much is left? And I was interested in the numbers they had in this diagram here, looking at the buyout amount, the right most column to say, because you would love to see the buyout amount. And you see like, how much is left on my new iPhone? A thousand dollars is up. That means I paid a hundred dollars over 24, you know, 24 months to be, to have an iPhone. Like, that'd be great. Anyway, how much is left?

1:03:16Casey Liss:And as you noted, these were like starting prices for the monthly thing. So I'm scrolling all the way down to the Mac thing. Mac studio, uh,$49 a month. uh at over the over the course of the entire lease you end up paying about 1700 bucks and you have 700 left over but that's for like a base mac studio that costs 2500 bucks what if you want the 8 terabyte ssd and 96 gigs of ram what is your monthly payment then and how much is left on that do you end the lease with 10 grand left to buy the thing out i'm definitely going to be looking at these numbers to see how they work out because as lots of people noted like there's no like interest payments or anything here like they're the the main catch is that compared to the old program is that there's um apple care is not included so you have to add that into the price if you're gonna if you want to have it or whatever but like but bottom line is it's it's not like uh you don't own it at the end you're just leasing it's just like a lease car and like a lease car if your goal is to never have a car that's more than two years old like you always want to have like a one or two year old car and you're okay with always having a car payment you lease a car for two years and then you give it back and then you lease a new car then you give it back and then you lease a new car and you give it back and you get in that way you will always have a newish car in exchange for always paying a car payment as opposed to if you just bought that one car and then paid it off over five years you would have that same car for five years but then the good thing is at the end of those five years you own the car outright and you can continue to drive it for another five years and so on and so forth so this is the computer version of that leasing computers which for most people doesn't make sense because most people don't need a new computer every two years or every three years.

1:04:52Casey Liss:Like I got to have a new computer. I got to have a new computer. But if you find yourself always buying a new computer every two or every three years, this program may make sense depending on how much is left that you didn't pay for during that time and how much you really, really want a new computer every two to three years. So I'm not sure how this is going to work for Apple. I know they're always innovating the financial space of finding ways that people can give them money. But yeah, this is not a radical innovation. car leasing has been around for a long time i'm just wondering how many customers want this the old program the people like the old one it was like a cheaper easier way to get a new iphone every x years but the good thing about that was at the end of you going through one of those set of payments you owned the phone and that's not the case here so uh i guess take it or leave it if it's what you want but i really want to see what the lease payments are and the buyout amount is for the mac studio that i'm going to configure and uh by the end of this year hopefully god help

1:05:48John Siracusa:you uh real time follow-up they were both the upgrade program it's just iphone upgrade program or apple or apple upgrade no program yeah we'll get to the differences and the more of the

1:05:58Casey Liss:differences in a second but yeah definitely check out the the verge table to see what the uh the monthly costs are and the buyout amounts are it's actually not bad for the phones too like 35 a month and at the end you have 360 bucks left so yeah like if you want a new iphone every two years you don't have to pay the full cost of an iphone for two years worth of iphone usage Yep.

1:06:20John Siracusa:So Ryan Christoffel over at 9to5Mac has a really good summary of, you know, basically the old versus the new, if you will. So the major differences that Ryan points out are, first of all, it's leasing versus financing, as we spoke about. Apple upgrade, generally speaking, has lower monthly payments, but that's, again, because at the end, you don't own the thing. You own a portion. Well, you don't really own anything, but you sort of kind of, figuratively speaking, own a portion of the thing.

1:06:45Casey Liss:You have the option to pay the rest or give it back.

1:06:47John Siracusa:Right. Uh, third, Apple care is optional instead of mandatory though. If you're planning on giving it back, I personally would strongly suggest opting into it. Uh, and then Apple upgrade also is obviously not limited to the iPhone. You can do it with a Mac and iPad or an Apple watch as well. Now there was some rumblings, I don't know, a week or two ago that somebody had found some evidence of some shenanigans that Apple might pull. Uh, so there was evidence that Apple would potentially restrict the use of a phone to only a small series of apps. And there was some reporting about that by Emma Roth at The Verge, who writes, Apple says it won't limit the capabilities of devices leased through its new upgrade program if you miss a payment.

1:07:28John Siracusa:In an emailed statement to The Verge, Apple spokesperson Brian Bumbery says, There will be no restricted mode and or there will be no limitations put on device functionality due to missed payments or default with the Apple upgrade program. This confirmation comes after 9to5Mac uncovered code in iOS 27 beta. for a new, quote, app-managed features, quote, system. This would reportedly allow financial partners to perform ongoing status checks on a device, as well as have Apple System Services put a device in restricted mode if its owner isn't in good financial standing. Restricted mode would prevent users from accessing most apps on their phone, except for the basic ones like phone, the app store, clock, settings, and wallet.

1:08:07John Siracusa:I love that app store is one of them, but what are you going to do?

1:08:09Casey Liss:Yeah, I'm not quite sure. i think there's some other stories like oh this restricted mode could be used by other things like let's say carriers or other companies or whatever but it's a pretty clear messaging from apple they're saying though this feature may exist we will not use it if you miss payments in the apple upgrade program i guess they're not saying what anyone else will use this for if anyone else will use it but it's nice to know that if you miss payments they won't like disable your phone but if they do if you do miss payments they will repossess your phone so

1:08:36Marco Arment:beware of that this whole system kind of like i i don't love that they built this you know because even though they're saying now oh we're don't worry we're not gonna use it for this well but yeah but somebody's gonna use it for that it's just it's kind of a weird gross system i i do not

1:08:50Casey Liss:like that they built this well like i said i mean in the end they will send you to collections if you stop you stop paying the payments on your lease just like they will with the car and that in general will not end well with you but these systems are worse than that like getting sent to collections and going through all that at least takes some amount of time and there's some recovery from it whereas an electronic off switch like a you know kill switch for your device would be immediate and much more severe and it's good that apple's saying that they will not do this in no

1:09:16Marco Arment:uncertain terms yeah but like you know imagine imagine what a government could compel apple to do for instance like there's all sorts of ways this can go very badly i just i don't like this

1:09:27Casey Liss:at all well i mean mdm already does all this stuff so it's not like this functionality is not already

1:09:31Marco Arment:in ios yeah but the user can choose whether to enroll in mdm or not yeah the user can choose

1:09:35Casey Liss:whether or not to enroll in this program like that's what it comes down to although it's not clear whether this functionality is only for apple upgrade phones or it's available on all phones like i mean mdm is built into every phone but if you're not enrolled in an mdm program for your workplace it doesn't affect you so the that's a question that apple has not answered is like this this functionality is unreleased os is it like mdm where you have to like opt into it and you know you're getting into it or is it just on everybody's phone and we just don't know it and it's sleeping

1:10:01John Siracusa:there that i don't know the answer to all right so joe rosignal at mac rumors answers the question is it worth it joe writes we'll use the iphone 17 pro with 256 gigs of storage on a one-year lease as an example in the u.s the device costs eleven hundred dollars up front but through apple upgrade you can lease it for 46 bucks a month for a year for a year long lease your payments would total $551.88, which is lower than the$1 ,100 that you would have spent up front. $552 is approximately half of the iPhone 17 Pro's price, so Apple is essentially betting that the device will retain more than 50 % of its value after one year in order to ensure that the Apple upgrade program is profitable.

1:10:43John Siracusa:If you simply want to spend the least amount of money on iPhones over time, buying them up front and reselling them privately is very likely the best option. I didn't take a poll quote out, but Joe makes a very right point, broadly speaking, that while that is the best option, financially speaking, that is also way more involved and way more complicated than just handing the phone back to Apple and walking away with a new one or just returning it. Yeah.

1:11:08Casey Liss:And this is emphasizing the point of like, how could, why would they do this? How do they make money? They make money because when you give back the phone, you're giving back something that is more valuable to Apple than the amount that you paid for. It's like if you paid half the price of the phone and you give it back after a year, if that phone hasn't dropped in value by at least half, Apple now can make a profit on it because they can sell it refurbished or they can do, you know, like that's, that's the whole idea with this is you're, you're, they don't make money on like, there's no interest payments.

1:11:36Casey Liss:They're not hoping that you'll default on your payments and they'll collect interest. That's not how the system works. System works is that they end up with more than they gave you. You get the phone for a year for a certain amount of money, and then Apple gets the phone back. And that phone is more valuable to them than the amount of money that you haven't paid off that much of the money. So I'm assuming this program will work out for them because, again, car leases work on the same principle, although I think they probably have interest payments. But anyway, I'm sure this will all work out financially for Apple.

1:12:05Casey Liss:It's just a question I have of among potential iPhone buyers, how many people find this type of system attractive? I think it is understandable and it is, you know, something people are familiar with. But is it something that people look at and say, yes, that's how I want to pay for my phone? And I don't know what the answer to that is. Maybe it will attract a new set of customers to iPhones who previously didn't want to pay the big upfront costs. But I think everybody kind of understands leases as a, again, like with leasing cars, it's not a bargain way to get into a car. It's a way for people who always want to have a nice new car to always have a nice new car with less hassle and basically less money because you're, you know, you could pay less money overall, but eventually you would have an older than two year old car, right?

1:12:53Casey Liss:Eventually you have a five year old car. If you just can't stand having a five year old car, leases are for you, right? but are those customers the type of ones who uh i can't stand having a five-year-old car but i wasn't going to buy an iphone because it's too expensive i don't know if there's a market fit

1:13:06Marco Arment:here but i guess we'll find out well i think there's i mean i think the world has shown that there is very much market for something like this so i mean so first of all i'm you know i i lease cars i've leased cars for a while i haven't leased all of my cars but i've leased many of them and the main reason I like a lease is that it is predictable there is no spike in cost anywhere along the way and there is no surprise in cost or trade and value or resale value down the road everything with the lease is preset so when you sign up for a lease for a car and then the iPhone is going to work the same way when you sign up for a lease you know what you're going to pay up front you know you're going to pay every month and you know at the end what's going to happen and you know when that's going to be and you know i've i've had i've bought used cars i bought new cars and i've leased and the lease is really nice because of how predictable that all is it's way better for cash flow if you know if you don't have to like suddenly lay out you know thirty thousand dollars you know it's like all at once or something you know that can be make things a lot easier on people um it can make things affordable that otherwise wouldn't be affordable it would be more difficult to be affordable.

1:14:16Marco Arment:And in a low interest rate environment, that can be very beneficial for the buyer. And oftentimes, car manufacturers will offer lease incentives where they are kind of eating some of the long-term interest to juice their sales today. And oftentimes, lease specials or lease incentives from the manufacturers are oftentimes some of the best deals in new cars if you happen to want what they happen to need to get rid of. So it can be quite nice. Um, in this case, you know, when you bring it down to like phone level, I see why people would do this, uh, because it does similar things. It levels out the, you know, capex from this giant outlay of money up, up front to just paid every month.

1:15:02Marco Arment:And in fact, if you look around the cell phone industry, many people have been buying phones through monthly payments for a long time. All the carriers have things like this, and many people buy phones this way to help absorb the cost of phones. In those cases, though, they usually own the phones at the end. In this case, they don't. But also the tradeoff here is that, well, it's also cheaper. and when you sign up for a lease like what what you are gaining as i mentioned you're gaining predictability and kind of a level cost over time what you are losing is flexibility so and again same thing with a car like with a car if you know that you're going to want this exact car for at least three years and you're going to put in no more than this number of miles per year on this car then you know this is a good fit i will have exactly this car for exactly this time i want to think about my car i want to think about service or anything like that because it's all going to be included i'm not going to have to worry about if i'm going to need some kind of big expensive repair you can just kind of not think about it and that's it this will do that for apple products there is a market for that it is not everybody like if you again like flexibility is key timeline flexibility usage flexibility in this case i don't i don't have any kind of usage limits but there certainly are time time flexibility uh trade-offs so if you want to buy a phone or you know maybe a phone is a bad example but if you want to buy like you know a macbook pro and you want to always have the newest macbook pro first of all i mean i don't even do that that's kind of ridiculous but if if suppose you wanted to do that at least ties you to a timeline so if you buy one now and you say, alright, I'll get a two-year lease or a three-year lease and then in three years or whatever, I'll upgrade to the M7 or 8 or whatever.

1:16:56Marco Arment:You don't actually know when that's coming out. And so you might it might come out and you still have six more months on your lease. Or it might come out and your lease ended six months ago and you had to figure out something else to do. So it does introduce limitations and trade-offs like that, but for many people, they just don't care. And they just want to know that I'm going to buy a phone, I'm going to maybe give it a three-year lease, and then at the end of three years, I'm going to bring it to Apple, and I don't have to worry about trade-in prices. I don't have to worry about resale sites.

1:17:31Marco Arment:I just bring it into Apple, and I swap it for a new one. That's pretty appealing, especially if the price is right, which in this case, I think Apple's doing everything they can to make the price right because there is no interest now they're not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts neither is their partner Klarna like Klarna is a is a big buy now pay later company those companies make money in various ways it seems like oh you're giving an industry loan for you know x months or years yes but a lot of people will be a little bit late on a payment and incur huge fees so it's not out of the goodness of their hearts like they do make money off people being imperfect they also will find ways you know with buy now pay later they'll usually find ways to like you know charge the retailers more or something like that in in the case with apple and clarina i don't know how that's worked out between the two of them uh for this deal but rest assured they're going to make money like clarina is going to make money apple's going to make money but apple's going to also just make money on the sale of the device however it happens so even if apple gives you know a couple of percent to clarna for their service part of this and then apple's hands are clean and they're out of it they made their money on the device sale so that's fine um so it makes sense for them and again i think it makes sense for a lot of people i even would consider it for like things like laptops where like i'm not buying a new laptop that often you know i'm getting usually about three years out of them these days.

1:19:01Marco Arment:So, you know, maybe it would make sense for that. But the other thing is businesses. This is a huge now Apple has done business leasing for a lot of their products for a while. You have to, you know, go through the business reps. I off the top of my head, I've never done it. So I don't know what products it covers. I think it has covered Macs at least. And I think even iPhones, if you were like a big enough business, but businesses love leasing because it makes things more predictable and again a business a business does not want to deal with trading in 19 phones every couple years like like they want to just have this be taken care of that's why business leasing is such an attractive option there's a lot of small businesses too that would have that same need that we're just never big enough to you know to have apple's business rep program or like that and when you think about like those are just families where that's true for like if you have a few if you you know a couple with a few kids you might have four or five devices that you replace every few years do you want to deal with sending four or five box kits in to trade them in to see like oh i i sent it in a week later and they changed the price and now it's worth less money or you know leasing saves a lot of hassle for a lot of people it's not worth it for a lot of people it is uh so i think it's really good to have this option it seems like they're doing it in what looks like a pretty straightforward way and you always have the option to buy it at the end so that kind of takes care of a lot of risks there.

1:20:26Marco Arment:Again, I think what you're mainly giving up is timing flexibility. You have to know, okay, I'm really going to keep this for two years or three years or whatever. Other than that, it seems like a pretty good option as long as they don't pull any of this remote disabling crap.

1:20:41Casey Liss:You mentioned something dealing with car leases and I haven't ever done one but I'm vaguely aware that there are usually clauses in a car lease about maximum mileage they expect you to put on it and if you go over it maybe there's some penalties and also often there's stuff about like cosmetics and wear and tear like you can't just like cut up all the seats and spill milk inside it or whatever like i'm sure you know automobile leases have stuff like that in them because if they didn't you know they would they'd probably lose money especially based on how people treat their cars and but you mentioned like you probably think there's not a usage uh limit on the phones but it makes me wonder if there is something in there about the condition of the phone that you turn back in and not just like oh it can't have a shattered screen or whatever but i'm thinking like you know the way people drive rental cars hey this is just a leased phone i'm going to charge it to 100 % all the time i'm going to leave it in the hot sun i'm going to do everything through magsafe like i'm gonna yeah i'm gonna abuse this battery so by the time i give it back it's going to be like redlining on like you know maximum battery capacity 52 % after two years of use you know fast charge it every day to 100 right is there something in the lease about that or is that like hey the lease didn't say anything about the condition of the battery i just used it like an iphone that you know it's not cracked it's not broken it's fully functional i just used it but i used apple chargers like you know i do wonder about the fine print and the leases there and they're going to get burned on that because if it's your phone and you're trying to like oh i paid so much for this phone you're inclined to like at least think about maybe i should baby the battery a little bit but you know this phone is going back in two years you're just gonna you know just ride it hard man like and and said i'm i this occurs to me now because i had mentioned that with my 16 pro i set an 80 battery limit when i bought the phone two years ago ish um and i recently i'm like look i'm in the home stretch now and actually at 80 battery limit a couple of days i was i felt like the battery was getting a little bit low so i cranked up to 90 and then recently when i'm on vacation i pushed it up to 100 i'm just gonna leave it at 100 because I'm getting a new phone in September anyway, right?

1:22:42Casey Liss:So even me, like at the end of this phone's life, you get 100 % battery. I mean, it's great. The battery's doing great. You know, the 80 % thing I fully endorsed if you could possibly do it. But that's because, I mean, this device is, my phone is going to the Pokemon minds, obviously. It's not going to be resold. It's going to my wife who will add it to her fleet and she will bump down one of her phones. We have a strange system going on here. But when it is your phone or when it's going to be passed on to play Pokemon Go for somebody, like, you do care about the battery. But if this was going back to Apple, I would have had it 100 % from day one because I wouldn't have cared.

1:23:14Casey Liss:So that's something to watch for as this program rolls out. And if it does get adopted to see if we start seeing stories about like, I returned my perfectly pristine phone, but the battery was a little bit wonky and Apple wouldn't give me the, you know, the Apple made me pay something for it or whatever.

1:23:28John Siracusa:Well, in one of the pieces of documentation I read, and I don't think I can put my hands on it right this second, but they said kind of in a wink-wink, nudge-nudge way that, hey, you're probably going to want to get AppleCare because that'll make, didn't I read that earlier, that it'll make turn-in way easier. You know, I forget what I read that actually said that.

1:23:46Casey Liss:It's just like a leased car and having car insurance. If you get a leased car and you crash it, I mean, you have to have car insurance on a car in most states anyway, but AppleCare is the car insurance of your phone.

1:23:55Marco Arment:Right, and if you get a leased car and you and something damages it more than their allowable damage like you know lease cars usually they will allow some degree of minor wear and tear like if you get like a little scratch in the clear coat it's fine you know they they have if you get if a pebble hits it like they have thresholds like okay well if it's easy i know well not that kind of pebble not that kind of yeah but like you know but they'll have thresholds like oh a scratch can be shorter than a couple of inches or a dent can be you know shallower than this and smaller than this and or they'll have like a dollar amount like it has to have less than fifteen hundred dollars worth of minor scrapes and scuffs and and you know if you go over that they'll charge you fees or what you're supposed to do is if your car if your leased car gets that much damage you're supposed to actually go through insurance and go to a body shop and have it fixed before you turn it in and that's that's what this is the equivalent of with apple care on the leased phones it's like the lease is not going to cover if you shadow the screen so if you have apple care you know that maybe maybe they will just do it for you when you turn it in if it's if like the apple store isn't involved or maybe they'll make you like do an apple care repair first and then turn it in but whatever it is like that's all under one roof yeah i'm i don't know if they would

1:25:07Casey Liss:combine it but for sure they what they want back is a phone in pristine working condition plus or minus whatever allowable nicks and scratches are so if you do have apple care and you come with a cracked screen they're going to be like oh yeah use your apple care to fix that screen and then will take it. And maybe they'll do that in a single transaction. But the point is, it's not going to save whatever it would cost you to get your screen fixed with AppleCare. It will still cost you that same amount to get your screen fixed with AppleCare, just like it would cost you the same amount to go through your insurance to the body shop.

1:25:32John Siracusa:Yeah, I mean, I can tell you when we leased the Volvo, one of the things they offered, well, they offered several add ons, because of course they did. But one of the things that we actually did do was, because we didn't know if we still don't know, actually, we'll talk about this later, probably, but we don't know if we're going to keep the car, turn in the car, whatever. One of the things they offered was for not a terrible amount of money. Some program, I don't remember the name of it, that basically said, hey, if you've curbed the snot out of your wheels, which coincidentally, I curbed Erin's wheels.

1:25:59John Siracusa:She didn't do it. I did it. But anyway, or one of the wheels. But anyways, if you curb the snot out of one of the wheels, we'll forgive you. You pay us something like a thousand bucks up front or whatever the case may be. And if you curb a wheel, it's fine. There are a few other things that are part of that. So generally speaking, if we were to turn in the car with one of the wheels the way it is, then we would have to pay it presumably to replace the whole wheel or at the very least, like not resurface it, you know, repair it. But because we did check the box on this whatever program that will be forgiven and it's not the end of the earth.

1:26:28John Siracusa:And it's like Marco was saying, you know, there's a small, there's a small amount of wear and tear that they consider completely reasonable, but anything more than that, there's going to be some sort of like penalty or something like that at the end of our lease that, and this is our first lease, so I don't really know what I'm talking about, but there'll be some sort of figuring out time where we need to figure out with Volvo, you know, okay, what do we need to fund or pay for? And what are they just going to eat?

1:26:48Casey Liss:And that flies in the face of the way people use phones, which is the expectation that you get a phone and then use it until it literally disintegrates in your hands. We've all seen people out there with phones, like how, how is that still running? And that's something people do because they don't like, it still works and they don't want to buy a new phone and it's expensive. But if you're on this lease, that's not an option for you. I mean, you can do that as long as you want but when the time comes and the lease ends you can't turn that thing back in with like a a shattered screen and a huge nick off the bottom and like the the thing separating like they apple will not take that back so you need to have apple care and have apple care repair probably a pretty large expense because apple care doesn't make all your repairs free and the worse it is the more it costs or you have to pay the remaining balance on that phone that is destroyed uh and so it's just like you had bought it up front uh only in smaller pieces at zero percent interest which may still be attractive to people but like that's the one place where the lump sum gets you yes it's even steady payments but when the even steady payments are over you know you've been paying 20 something bucks a month now it's 300 lump sum please or uh pay to have the phone repaired and with apple care it may be around 300 to get it repaired when it's that condition because people just use their phones for way longer than you would think they would because like if it still functions and is not actively slicing skin off their fingers as they use the touch screen They'll just keep using it.

1:28:06John Siracusa:You are describing my youngest brother 100%. The phones that I've seen him, and he refuses to use a case despite having an even worse history than I with his phones. But they can be shattered to smithereens, and as long as they still function and do not, to your point, actively cut him, he's going to still use them.

1:28:23Casey Liss:But my sister has a screen protector on her phone because it covers up the gigantic crack going from one corner of the screen to the other. So now you can't feel the crack anymore. Yeah. You can see it. so do either of you plan to lease anything with as you know i mean i'm gonna look at the mac the the lease prices for the mac i'm definitely going to look at it i'm not sure that i'm gonna do it because as you've seen i'm not the type of person who gets a new mac every two years but i'll look at it but especially because we're in this weird i wouldn't consider it at all if we weren't currently in this very weird time where everything is super expensive and you know so i will look at it i don't think it's attractive to me for phones because again i use them for two years and they go to the Pokemon Mines and it's a system that works well for me.

1:29:04John Siracusa:Yeah, for me, I don't particularly care for having leased. I don't disagree with anything you're saying, Marco. And you can make a very strong argument that, hey, instead of paying, you know, a thousand dollars for a phone, you can pay 50 bucks for the first month and invest most of the rest of that thousand dollars, you know, and have that 900 bucks or 950 bucks, whatever, work for you rather than just handing it to Apple. And intellectually, I 100 % understand that. But I really don't like owing people money. So for me, that's a house then. Yeah. Tell me about it. Um, for me, I don't, I don't think that there's any chance I would do this for a, for, excuse me, for an iPhone or a watch or an iPad, but I was, I had told myself prior to Ramageddon that this was probably going to be the year that I would upgrade my Mac.

1:29:54John Siracusa:I love my Mac. I have an M3 max MacBook pro, but the m3 max macbook pro that i do not want to go backwards from has 64 gigs of ram which is bad but as i've mentioned many times in the show it has an eight terabyte ssd which means this is like a 90 000 computer now and because of that if i choose to upgrade this year there is a very good chance that i would lease rather than buy because i'm going to look at the sticker price for whatever it is that I'd be potentially buying and vomit all over myself. So I don't know. That's kind of where I sit today. Ask me again in 10 minutes. I'll change my mind.

1:30:32John Siracusa:What about you, Marco?

1:30:33Marco Arment:I also don't like owing people money. I don't think I would do it for something like an iPhone because I think the timeline is pretty short on that because I buy a new iPhone almost every year. I have bought one every year. And so I don't know if I'm going to do that forever, but I am currently doing that. And so, you know, to split it across 12 payments and then have to deal with it at the end, like, maybe that might be worth it. It's not quite as much of a slam dunk for me. But when I look at something like my main Mac, like you were just saying, this is like, I think when I bought this Mac, it was something like$6 ,000 or$7 ,000.

1:31:12John Siracusa:Yeah, I think mine, again, M3 Max, was roughly$5 ,000, give or take a little bit. I don't remember exactly, but it's a similar order of magnitude.

1:31:20Marco Arment:Yeah, like mine's also an M3 Max.

1:31:22John Siracusa:you know it's now what is it three years old now wait your desktop laptop is also an m3 max i'm

1:31:27Marco Arment:sure i knew that but i'd forgotten yeah my my laptop laptop is a regular m4 no pro no max which a regular m4 um but my yeah my desktop laptop is an m3 max uh the first one was an m1 max i got an m3 max um and i'm probably going to get the m whatever they do with the m6 line that is rumored or the m7 whatever whatever like the next big boom is i'm probably going to jump to that but we'll see you know pricing and performance and everything like that but when i do replace that like you said like it's specced up it's probably going to be like eight thousand dollars or nine thousand it's probably gonna be a you know a big a big purchase and i'm gonna use it for more than the lease term probably like if i if i do say a two-year lease that gives me a two-year interest free loan on a eight thousand dollar purchase that's interesting especially since i know i will use it for that time and then at the end of it i would probably just buy it out right you know and because it's either way like it's the same amount of money at the end i just get an interest free loan for for half of it for most of that time that is compelling especially like you know if if the business pays for it again that kind of helps like it helps you know cash flow in the business be like up this month-to-month cost so that honestly like for something like like a mac or like a monitor where like it's going to be a lot of money but i expect to use it for longer than the least term and just buy it out at the end that actually makes a lot of sense financially as long as you don't mind the you know the the debt angle of it but it's if there's no fees and no interest it's kind of a rational move yeah i concur all right in mac os 26.4 there are battery

1:33:08John Siracusa:charge limits for the Mac. And you can use this in shortcuts, I guess. So reading from 9 to 5 Mac, in the first beta of macOS 26.4, Mac users can now specify a charge limit between 80 and 100%. The charge limit feature was previously only available on iPhone and iPad. Additionally, the new iOS 26.4 and macOS 26.4 betas bring charge limit to the shortcuts app. Now you can automate setting your charge limit. That is pretty neat.

1:33:33Casey Liss:Here we are on 26.6. It just came out. So this thing has been in the notes for a long time, but I wanted to keep it here because I am a huge fan of charge limit. I just talked about it on my phone, preserving my phone battery. But especially, especially, especially if you have a desktop laptop, do you have a laptop that spends most of its time on your desk plugged into power? You need to use this feature because it will so extend the life of your laptop's battery instead of having. And I know they have the optimized charging where like it'll try to do something smart, but like just take the slider and slam it to 80%.

1:34:04Casey Liss:percent because first of all the batteries are so good now that even 80 percent of these laptops is plenty and second of all you know what you're doing with your laptop if it really is on your desk plugged into power almost all the time there's no reason to keep it at 100 i wish you could even go lower like 40 which is i think one of the supposedly more on the optimal limit but anyway use this feature on your mac turn it down to 80 if it spends most of its time plugged in your battery will thank you resale value will thank you but even if you're selling to a private person because they might want to know the battery health if they're technically savvy again this was two point versions of mac os ago and yeah you could automate it with shortcuts you can have i'm sure you could write some shortcut that's like when i'm not in my house change the limit to 100 or what like i'm sure you can do all sorts of fancy automations but even just control this manually like i do on my phone i mean it can't bite you if you forget oh i forgot i'm going i'm going to be traveling today and i should have put it 100 but it doesn't take too much to remember that um and again if you're clever with shortcuts you can automate it interesting ways but it will just do so much for the life of your battery for when you do travel that every Mac users use this.

1:35:10Casey Liss:And I almost kind of wish that they would default it to 80 % or at least put it down to 80 % when it sees, hey, you've had this laptop for a month and it's always been plugging to the charger. I'm just going to turn that down to 80 % for you. Is that okay? Yes, no, right? Throw the dialogue up. But anyway, use this feature. I highly recommend it.

1:35:27John Siracusa:Yeah, yeah, I agree. I definitely I'm in a situation where I almost always see my battery at 80 or below because of the optimized battery charging thing. So I'm right there with you for a desktop laptop. That is the perfect way or reason to do this. So, yep, completely agree.

1:35:45Casey Liss:And also, there's been tons of third-party utilities that have done this for years. This is an example of something where you just assume that Apple eventually built it into macOS. And they have, and it is much more limited than the third-party options, but it's great that it's built in.

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1:37:39John Siracusa:All right, let's do some Ask ATP. And we have a twofer from friend of the show, Todd Vaziri, the first of which reads, perhaps it's a good time to revisit backup strategies. Given our talk about SuperDuper, I couldn't agree more. What are some good strategies for different situations? Like, I'm going to read them all, and then I'll ask you, particularly John, to go through your thoughts. So the three situations Todd provides are casual computer folks, you know, one to two computers, like your proverbial parents, advanced users, three or more computers in a single household, or mega advanced users, Syracuse level, NAS folks, et cetera.

1:38:12John Siracusa:So Marco, feel free to pop in whenever you want. But John, what do you recommend for casual computer folks specifically? And then we'll go to the others later. So with casual people, which to be clear is most people in this parlance, people who aren't listening to ATP, the main struggle there is having any kind of backup at all.

1:38:34Casey Liss:Like that is, I continue to believe that most people do not have backups, including people, by the way, on their phones. I mean, this doesn't, I'm thinking that this is in the Mac context, but it doesn't say that in the question. But like phones, we all know like, oh, backing up your phone is just a matter of hitting that little iCloud backup thing. But it's not because you have to pay for iCloud storage that can fit your backup and blah, blah, blah. And the plain fact is people just don't do it because they don't want to pay for iCloud storage and whatever. Even if they do pay for iCloud, they don't hit the toggle switch because they just don't think about it.

1:39:02Casey Liss:And with desktop computers or laptops or whatever, it's even worse. The entire concept of backups is entirely foreign. time machine is the greatest advance ever made to casual computer use backups and still it only moved the needle a little bit i'm sure so the main uh strategy i recommend for casual users of technology is to get them to use literally any kind of backup now ideally as a tech tech nerd friend who's helping them out or whatever you'd be like okay on the mac you should use time machine on your phone you should use iCloud backup like whatever the default simplest cheapest option is that doesn't involve third parties that you're sure it's going to be supported it's not going to be a hassle or whatever and even that it's going to be a struggle because you know what it's like with the max they're gonna be like well time machine backup well how do i do that well you need another hard drive what what do i do just it's the end of the world i gotta pay a monthly fee for for something in some cloud what it's gonna be hard but that's my my casual advice and that's that's not a great backup but it's better than nothing so the choices are nothing or something in a fight something in a fight is what you have to do that's the casual computer user solution i recommend anyone have any better brilliant ideas because that's kind of my defeat position right now no i think i'm with you yeah so for advanced and mega advanced i think they're similar it's just a question of when you stop uh wanting to spend money or care um and you know what i recommend is i mean and even i have my limits there because i stop having money and care sooner than if I had unlimited funds, I would do different, better backup things.

1:40:37Casey Liss:But you'd basically just go through the whole thing that we talk about. I hasn't, it hasn't changed for me in terms of the bullet points that you're going to hit and the order that you're going to hit them, but the specific technologies have changed a little bit. So, um, for phone backups and iPad backups, I mean, there's honestly not a lot of options pay for iCloud storage enough to back up all your devices, turn iCloud backups on that. That's it. I wish it was that simple on other devices it's that simple mostly because apple is not particularly friendly to third-party backup services for phones despite the eu's uh advice there but i mean that's the answer to the devices that support that on the mac you just go down the list number one time machine that means yes you have to get a hard drive local time machine a hard drive connected to your local thing it's the simplest version of time machine it's the most reliable version of time machine it does mean you have to have an external drive what external drive do i buy if i have a laptop how do i keep about a tech team i got a mounted and unmounted and now it says it was unmounted and properly and yep that's what you're signing up for that's time machine but that's got to be your step one local time machine backup i would say number two is uh cloud backup get some data that's not in your house so when your house burns down you have some kind of backup uh past fonts or backblaze is still my go-to recommendation i recently learned from somebody maybe my brother that crash plan somehow still exists i thought oh does it oh god gone out of business but maybe no no i thought they

1:42:02John Siracusa:were enterprise only or something or if not went out of business i thought maybe someone bought

1:42:06Marco Arment:them anyway they're very bad very very bad yeah i don't know what state they're in now but anyway although you know what's worse carbonite oh man they i had to deal with that once for for somebody i was doing a favor for oh man that was real bad yeah i mean again like we talked about some of

1:42:21Casey Liss:the stories of backblaze like not blocking up cloud drives or whatever but like i still feel like they are the best in the industry night and day again they sponsored us a long time ago but i used them before they sponsored i continue to use them after they sponsored us they're not perfect but i believe they are the best for the mac but if you have other solutions that you like like arc backup or any kind of tech nerdy if you want to go super tech nerdy i'm saying is that step step one is time machine local time machine step two is off-site backup by which i mean cloud backup all right step three then you go into a network time machine backup because sometimes uh doing a local time machine backup, especially if it involves a laptop that's on the move a lot.

1:42:57Casey Liss:Oh, I forgot to plug in the drive. I didn't plug into my docking station, whatever. You have all sorts of excuses why you didn't do your local time machine backup. But if you have network time machine backup, then every time you're on your network, that can happen. And yes, you can have multiple time machine backup destinations on a Mac. I know a lot of people don't think about this, but it's been my mode that I've operated in all the time. Time machine can back up to more than one place and it will back up to all of them whenever they're available. So if the local drive isn't attached, it will do to the network one.

1:43:23Casey Liss:If they're both attached, it will do them each in turn. You could have as many backup destinations as you want. So yeah, local time machine, cloud backup, network time machine. Now we start getting into the more exotic stuff, which is like, okay, bootable clone, super duper, carbon copy cloner. You could swap that maybe with network time machine, depending, but a clone is not a backup. A clone is get you back up and running as fast as possible. But if you deleted a file a week ago, your clone that you made last night is not going to save you so a clone is not a backup a clone is my hard drive just blew up i need to get back to work asap a time machine restoration is going to take literally eight hours reboot from your carbon copy clone or backup so you can swap that priority depending on what your needs are but yeah a clone backup then you start getting to the more exotic stuff which is like i'm going to have my own bespoke uh backup system involving rsync just for my particular files targeted at my nas and also pushing up to s3 like that's i don't even i don't go that hardcore i would love to but i don't have the money or time to push that and i'll have some some uh news on my backup struggles related to bespoke solutions that push my files up to various storage systems coming in probably a couple of months because i'm still working some things out here but anyway i don't go that hard that's because eventually it starts to cost real money because like one of the beautiful things about backblaze is they will back up everything that's directly attached to your mac and you can game it with iSCSI and stuff like that but they'll do it for a flat fee which is incredibly good compared to when you have to pay per byte and no matter how you price stuff out backblaze ends up ends up being cheaper pretty quickly if you have a lot of data um and beyond that um then you get into like not using a mac anymore and instead using some kind of like you know linux computer or a zfs with real-time uh multiple redundant block clones happening in real time and block though this being sprayed all over the internet and stuff uh again i don't do that either because i don't use linux and that's that's outside the realm of apple stuff so that's that's what i recommend for people and during that list of things there will come a point where you're like this is too much it's too annoying it's too expensive do i have to buy a nas now do i have to pay for this do i have to pay for that so stop when you can't bear it anymore um there are things i left out like oh i'm gonna periodically uh clone my hard drive and drive my hard drive over to my friend's house you feel free to mix that in but in my experience it's just too much of a hassle and people forget to do it same thing with like i'm gonna burn my photo library to m discs that'll last for 100 years how often are you gonna do that i mean it's better than nothing and you should do that if that's like this is like the long tale of like things i might remember to do when i'm enthusiastic about it but then forget about for a few years almost guaranteed that if some disaster happens you'll think back oh i haven't brought my hard drive over to my parents house in six months because i just forgot about it it's not gonna happen the day after you bring it over there so yeah that's that's my backup advice it hasn't really changed much like i said the only thing that's changed is the specific technologies and companies involved but the the main strategy is the same you want to have your data in more than one place and more than one medium and more than one company you know you're diversifying so backblaze is different than time machine is different than icloud is different than uh you know network time machine to a synology is different than you know the whole nine yards is different than a super duper clone is different than a carbon copy clone that you bring to your friend's house.

1:46:37John Siracusa:One addition, I don't disagree with anything you said. One addition, you had said, you know, bringing a hard drive over to your parents, whatever. Just a thought. What I have done for the small bits of data, which are, well, it's a lot of data, but only a couple of contexts, and photos is the number one example. So for like my photos, for example, I have a hard drive at my parents. I think it's a spinning hard drive, if I'm not mistaken. And what I do is whenever I'm there for more than like 20 minutes, which is almost every time I go, I bring my laptop more often than not, and I'll hook it up to this hard drive.

1:47:11John Siracusa:And thanks to the beauty of past and future sponsor tail scale, I can do an R sync between this hard drive and the Synology in my house. And since it's symmetric gigabit at both houses, it's reasonably quick. And so every time I'm at their house, I have this offsite backup that never leaves their house of the thing that is most valuable to me in the entire world, which is my photos. Now, I have my photos strewn across like literally six other places. So this is the reserve, reserve, reserve, reserve, reserve parachute, so to speak. But it's actually not particularly burdensome. And in my case, I tend to see my parents about once a month.

1:47:51John Siracusa:And so it's a nice, at least monthly backup of my photos. Again, I don't disagree with anything you said. And I do have to remember, and I do have to bring a laptop and so on and so forth. But it actually works out really nicely and is not particularly burdensome, especially thanks to the beauty of tail scale.

1:48:05Casey Liss:You should automate that though, because you're doing a manual. Like this was definitely in the mega advanced thing of like, have an asset someone else's house and make sure they have gigabit and set up a VPN between your houses. And yeah, like definitely in the mega advanced, like, you know, again, tailing off. But I would just say for you, the thing that you're doing, it just seems like everything you've described could be automated. You don't need to be physically there to make this happen. You could set up a little thing in their house. It just does this periodically, especially if you're doing some kind of like version to our sync type of thing.

1:48:29Casey Liss:I mean, anyway, feel again, everyone has the limit of where they stop, But just the fact that every time you go over there, you're sitting your laptop and run a command and hit return. Like that could be happening without you being there.

1:48:38John Siracusa:That is true. But what I didn't mention is I have also deployed a Synology there that gets nightly backups of everything as well.

1:48:44Casey Liss:Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Like if you happen to have a relative with Gigabit Fiber who will let you install a NAS in their house, all sorts of new options can be, you know, become open to. But still, it's the kind of thing of like you just said like your photos are strewn all over the place. Like it's one of the reasons I'm wanting to get an eight terabyte hard drive on my next Mac. It's just having stuff in separate places is just more things to keep track of. If you can, you know, keep all your eggs in one basket and really watch that basket. But this is the version, keep all your eggs in one basket and back up that basket basket to 17 different places.

1:49:16Casey Liss:It's so much easier to keep track of like my stuff is this eight terabytes. And yes, I could have it on three different volumes. And some of it is only on the NAS and some of it is only on my Mac and some of it is only on the external hard drive. but it becomes difficult to make to be to assure yourself that you have backed up all of that and not just oh i'm backing up my mac to three places but where is your nas backed up to well is anything only on your nas which things are only on your nas and you mac up your nas to some other thing like b2 or something but how much of that stuff is there and it's just it's so much easier when you can reduce it to a smaller number of buckets and by all means like you said spray those buckets everywhere in various things you know i also have like my photos being backed up to google photos I was a little Google was fighting me on that because Google drives are going to stop doing that.

1:49:57Casey Liss:So I'm battling that. But like if you pay for cloud storage like we do, I have Google one. I have the big plan and iCloud. If you pay, you know, I think I have one drive as part of like Microsoft 365. If they're giving you this cloud storage and it's enough to store some stuff, it's tempting to just put a little bit here, a little bit there. But it's really easy to lose track of that. And if you just think about like, what would I do if I needed to restore from my computer now? Your mind will immediately go to the things that are simpler, super duper. if I if it's not a backup scenario I just want to get up and running I understand how that works conceptually it's simple to use I just reboot it goes into it I'm fine and the expense is now you have to have an SSD that's the same size as your boot drive to be your clone drive that you just just sits there with you not using it you're like oh I'm gonna spend so much money to it for another eight terabyte SSD and its sole purpose is to sit there waiting for disaster and I'm never going to use it yes that's what a backup is that's it's painful for people they don't want to do it right and time machine like I know how time machine works I'll do that that's the other thing people think of because when you boot your mac and recovery it says hey do you want to restore from a time machine backup you're like yes that's exactly what i want to do and then you know wait eight hours and it will hopefully eventually work fingers crossed which is why it's good to have two time machine backups because if one of them is hosed maybe the other one is good backups are wet but all this to say backups are way more complicated than they should be on the mac uh backups on the phone are simpler but if anything goes wrong oh sorry couldn't restore from that backup or for some reason your backup is three days ago instead of two days ago uh you have very few options.

1:51:23Casey Liss:So pick your poison.

1:51:25John Siracusa:Indeed. And then to wrap up Ask ATP for today, Todd Vaziri also wrote, can you explain what a Docker container is? I feel like I could take a stab at this, but I think, John, you are far more qualified to explain this. So could you take a stab, please?

1:51:39Casey Liss:Well, I'm going to link to the Wizard Zines site again. There is a Wizard Zine, which is like a comic book style sort of capsule summary of technology written for nerds, but that doesn't go super deep on things but also isn't super shallow it's like an interesting mix anyway uh check that one out uh buy it and it will give you a good overview um i remember seeing a presentation from people the doc the docker company whatever they were a startup or whatever talking about docker i don't know many many many years ago when no one had heard of it and they were going around to companies saying hey we have this idea for this technology you should check it out um and i think the comic going around then it might have been xkcd it might have been from the company i don't know i think it was shown in the presentation was um the the developer problem especially for server-side software where you're writing something in your dev environment maybe the dev environment is running on your dev servers which is you know some server machine in your office maybe the dev environment is running your laptop in more enlightened times but very often back in these old days you had dev servers that were server machines either in your office or in a data center set aside from your production machines but these are just for development and in theory they were like the uh the production machines but anyway you would you would put right in your software there maybe you'd be remotely ssh into them you'd be developing on them or you'd be deploying to them or whatever and you'd work on some product some feature and it'd be like okay it's good works and people would qa and stuff and then you would release to production and it wouldn't work and you'd be like i don't know it worked worked when i tried it worked on my computer worked on the dev servers like what the hell like i just like what do you want me to do i tested it i debugged it i had we went through qa people tried it everything was fine i guess there's something different about production than my laptop or the dev server but it's like this is not my problem like it works on my computer and the docker solution that problem was fine on them then we'll ship your computer get it to work on your computer and what will deploy is your computer it's like well you're not going to deploy my computer my computer is a laptop and running everything locally how are you going to deploy my computer it's like well if you do your development in a little tiny private machine environment that thinks its own computer and you get it to work there and we can deploy that thing it doesn't know that it's someplace different because it didn't know where it was before it says i am the only one and only process on this linux machine i am process id one and i am this server and i see these files and these directories and this is a entirely reproducible artifact based on a recipe that says here's how you build this machine you start with this operating system you install these things you put these files here you do this that like just an automated process that builds this little you can think of it like as a virtual machine but for technical reasons it's not quite the same thing um and that's what you're running in your laptop and that's what you're running in your dev server and that's what you're running in production and all those places where it's running it thinks it's running in its own little computer and it thinks your server process is the only process in that computer and it thinks you're the user account that runs that server is the only user like it is its own little tiny kingdom where everything looks the same and that's what we ship so there's no like i got it to work on the dev server but then it goes to production and it doesn't work it's always the same everywhere now how do they do that technically speaking is it like virtual machines where like like vmware where you're like okay well we're gonna you know your cpu supports hypervisor and we're gonna boot a whole other operating system right here and it's gonna have its own ram and it's gonna have its own access to the screen and the hardware and this is that what it is no virtual machines are a different thing the technical details of what makes this different you should check out the wizard zine but basically it uses features of linux that allow it to run one operating system but fake out another make a little fake world where it thinks that you know it's got its own process ids and its own you know uh user accounts and its own directory structure or whatever really it's just a subset of the things shared with the host thing and same thing with networking there's complications about whether it's sharing the networking with the top layer or having a proxy anyway the whole point is it's a feature of linux that allows this to work in a more efficient way so you don't have to literally boot a whole other operating system with all the complete repetition it can use the resources of the main network system it's And again, the technical nuances of how this is different from hypervisor and VMs are not that interesting, but it's the same type of idea.

1:55:57Casey Liss:Think of it as a lighter weight version to do virtual machines. So lightweight, in fact, that the way you make one of these with Docker and various other tools is you literally do write a recipe, which is just a not very long text file that says, here is the recipe to build this little machine. And you run that recipe and it makes the container and you can deploy that container anywhere. There are many nuances to this that make it much more complicated than the simple description. But the simple description was compelling enough. And the old adage of works on my computer, fine, we'll ship your computer.

1:56:31Casey Liss:Turns out to be useful enough that this is actually caught on in various forms. There's the official Docker thing for the Mac. Apple has its own container system that looks like a Docker compatible type thing. This has been done many times over now because it is a genuinely good idea. and casey's using it in the instance of like so you want to run some software on your synology i don't know what your synology setup is like i don't know how you have things configured i don't know what your directory structure looks like i don't know what your user ids are i don't know what your permissions are i don't know any of that crap how am i going to get this thing to work on your synology and some other person's nas and this like how well we'll just make a docker container this docker container if you get anything that can run docker the world inside the docker container looks the same no matter where it is if it's on your synology if it's on someone's Linux computer if it's running on someone's Mac if it's running on a pie hole inside the Docker container it looks exactly the same because the world inside the Docker container is determined by that Docker file formula and that Docker file is the same everywhere that is the beauty of Docker containers and that's why so much is distributed that way because these stupid systems they have are like well you need to have this server running here on this port and talks is a server here running on that port and blah blah blah and you can have you know mega recipes that were like okay I'm going to run seven Docker containers and they're all going to talk to each other in this way.

1:57:45Casey Liss:And so there's a recipe that points to other recipes and you can build up from there. And in that way you can get something that will run anywhere and you're not debugging like, oh, I don't know how to get that to work on a pile. I only get to know how to get it to work on this specific version of Synology. No, it'll run everywhere. Anywhere that Docker runs, this will run because it's the same everywhere. Yeah.

1:58:03John Siracusa:So for me, it's generally speaking, and I'm not for the record running it on my Synology anymore. I have a little knock that runs almost all my Docker containers.

1:58:10Casey Liss:You're proving the point. You used to run a Synology, and then you're running

1:58:13John Siracusa:on something that is not Synology at all. That's a very good point. But basically, when I set up some new piece of server software, generally speaking, and obviously there's ifs, ands, buts, gotchas, and so on. But generally speaking, if you'll allow me to oversimplify, I tell Docker, hey, this folder, this directory, internal to the Docker container, map that to this other place in the host. So if the Docker container is looking for forward slash config, well, maybe the host is putting that in slash home slash Casey slash Docker slash such and such slash config. And so you're mapping between the containers world and the host world.

1:58:53John Siracusa:And usually there's a few like environment variables you need to specify, like maybe what time zone you're in, what user to use and stuff like that. This is all very straightforward. And obviously Todd is a friend of ours. And I know that Todd is definitely capable of doing these sorts of things. And most people are. But you basically configure it in a text file, generally speaking, called a Docker Compose file. And then you say to Docker, OK, run this thing or, in some cases, this suite of things that is in this one file. And it's typically very, very little configuration other than mapping volumes from or mapping folders, basically, directories, if you will, between host and client.

1:59:27John Siracusa:And that's about it. And that's how I can run so much server software really, really, really easily. And it's really, really great. You kind of have to, it bends your brain a bit. Even as a seasoned technologist, it bent my brain pretty fiercely at first. But eventually you can see the matrix. And I really like, particularly as John said, server-style software. I really, really like installing it this way because it's so easy, so reliable, and so repeatable.

1:59:53Casey Liss:And it's so lightweight, just to give you an example of how this is different from VMs. it's so lightweight that people will distribute command line tools as docker containers like imagine there's a fancy version of the ls command that has like animations in color or something someone makes a fancy version of ls you're like i'm not gonna boot a virtual machine just so i can run the fancy ls command from it why would i ever do that but it is feasible with docker because it's so lightweight because it's not booting an entire virtual machine again see the wizard zine thing about the various linux uh apis that it uses to confine a process to a what it thinks is its own little fake out world but it's just it's running on the same linux kernel that is already up and running there's no booting and operating system happening and so you can actually run a command line tool from inside a docker container it's not the speediest thing in the world like it's better to just have it out and run it but uh it is it is feasible at least to do that and it would never be feasible to like boot up a vm to do that and as you noted casey like you can map into and out of the world of the container with various you know configuration parameters of like which directories can see each other which network ports connect to which other things all sorts of stuff like that that's all entirely configurable inside the docker files and from the command line and hooking everything up and it's very automatable because these are all just command line tools and text files and so you can build up on top of that to make these uh big complicated things but yeah it's uh it's very useful like i think i said when i started uh taking over maintenance of the uh atp that i found website code and everything the first thing i did was get a docker container up this is despite the fact that our production does not run docker so we are not doing the works on my machine ship my machine we're not doing that but i made a reproduction inside docker as close as i could to what we are running on our production servers because there's no way my mac was ever going to look like our production servers which are not running mac os so i can make a little linux machine that's running the same version of linux as our production servers and so on and so forth in a docker container and same for all other back-end services and making them talk to each other and yada yada so it's extremely it's an indispensable tool because honestly in the in the bad old days i don't know what i would do i would do what marco was doing when he was writing this stuff which is i run kind of the same software and kind of the same versions on my mac and cross my fingers that when i deploy it on linux it'll be remotely similar again i'm still crossing my fingers because like we're not running docker in production uh and it's not worth us changing to do that because it's working fine so far fingers crossed but boy is it a lot closer running the same version of linux and the same version of all the software in docker versus not a docker versus whatever the hell thing homebrew is spewing out or whatever you built yourself for macOS and keeping up with that every the new version of macOS rebuilding all your world or making sure homebrew is up to date docker is a godsend i don't know what I would do without it.

2:02:36All right.

2:02:37Marco Arment:Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace and ZocDoc. Thank you to our members as well who support us directly. You can join us at ATP.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we'll be talking about OpenAI's hardware, both the announced hardware and the updates to their rumored hardware. Talking about that in Overtime, you can join to listen at ATP.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next time. See you next week.

2:03:36If you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

2:03:44Marco Arment:So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-G. Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast So long

2:04:09John Siracusa:I have some news. I have resumed car shopping. I have not finished car shopping, but I have resumed.

2:04:15Marco Arment:Have you ever really stopped car shopping? Yeah, exactly.

2:04:18Casey Liss:This is like me and TV shopping. When there is no car shopping going on, or is there just an intensity dial?

2:04:24John Siracusa:I guess there's an intensity dial, and it is all the way up to 11. That's a reference, John. So when we last left our hero, I think it was roundabouts of February, I had gone and I had investigated the Porsche Taycan. I always forget if I'm pronouncing that right or not. I had convinced myself that was my next car, having never actually been in one. I sat in it, looked through the rear view mirror and decided the rear visibility is so god awful. I don't think I can handle it. Then there's a two speed transmission in the Taycan and I decided I didn't like that either. So I abandoned that plan. and some friends of mine recommended you know i understand your bmw experience was not stellar but have you considered the bmw i4 and i think marco you were leading the charge on this

2:05:15Marco Arment:expedition i am constantly tempted to buy one myself i really want one every time i see one on the road i'm like oh it looks so good well except the pig nose but other than that i don't It came in orange. I can get them on AutoTrader in orange. Oh, it's such, and it's a good orange.

2:05:34John Siracusa:The i4 sedan came in orange? Yes, and it came in sunset orange metallic.

2:05:39Marco Arment:It's a good orange. I've seen a couple in real life. Oh my God, it's like the best orange BMW has shipped in a very long time on a car that is almost perfect for me. It drives me nuts.

2:05:52John Siracusa:Right. So the conclusion I came to in February after having driven an i4, specifically the M50 version, which is their hot rod version. The conclusion I came to is, first of all, this feels like home, which is mildly alarming. But nevertheless, it feels like home. Obviously, it's a lot more complicated than my old BMW was in a lot of ways. And some of that is good and some of that is not. It was incredibly fun to drive. I am a pureblood American when it comes to straight line speed. a more refined individual would care more about cornering ability and so on and so forth. I do enjoy that. Don't get me wrong.

2:06:26John Siracusa:But the quickest way to put a humongous smile on my face is to just launch me like a rocket ship in a straight line. And so I decided I really enjoy the i4 a lot. And the one I was looking at at the time, this to be clear, this was used. So was a Porsche. I also drove the Audi e-tron GT. Hated that as well, which makes sense because it's basically a Taycan. All these are used cars. And I looked at one that was, I thought at the time anyway, optioned the way I wanted. But the conclusion I came to was I don't have a problem with my Volkswagen. I mean, it's still, as I sit here today anyway, as I knock on wood, it's still running great.

2:07:06John Siracusa:Coincidentally, I'm taking it in tomorrow for routine maintenance. So hopefully they don't have any surprises for me, but it's running great. I have no reason to believe it's about to die as I continue to knock on wood. I have time. And I thought, you know, why would I spend a whole pile of money on a car I don't really need just because I think it's fun? And that's all still true. But I think I'm just over gasoline cars. And I don't mean that in the dismissive way I think you came across. I think the gasoline cars are great. I will always love gasoline cars. But for my needs at this particular time in my life, a gasoline car is not the right fit.

2:07:48John Siracusa:It just really isn't. Now, we're going to put aside, John Syracuse, the fact that any fully electric car means my left leg is useless. And that pains me more than I can begin to tell you. I'm not going to go so far as to say it would pain me more than it would pain John, but it's close. I really don't feel like I want a gasoline car anymore. Now, if you remember, Erin has a plug-in hybrid. Her Volvo XC90 weighs as much as a house. It only gets about 30 miles of range on the battery. But for our needs, 30 miles of range has actually been really freaking great. And I don't have the numbers in front of me.

2:08:24John Siracusa:I can call them up if I get a chance. But I do know, I was looking at this just the other day, in the two years that we've owned the Volvo, we have put 220 gallons of gas in it. And in the eight years, just a couple of weeks, five, eight years, we've owned the Volkswagen. We've put in like 1500 gallons of gas or something like that, like a staggering amount more gas. Um, and, and it's just for my needs, I don't need a gasoline car. I really, really don't much less a gasoline car that takes premium. Now, admittedly, the Volvo also takes premium, but we almost never run the engine. So, uh, The other thing that complicates things is that every time I go to go somewhere, Aaron says to me, why are you taking your car?

2:09:09John Siracusa:And she doesn't mean this to be a turd, but like, take my car, says Aaron. Why would we take yours? My car is, quote unquote, free insofar as anywhere I'd be going without her. I'm almost certainly going to be within 30 miles round trip. There are occasions I go further, but they're few and far between. and so it's become this sounds more dramatic than i mean it but it's become a point of contention between us because i like driving my car i want to continue to drive my car but she's not wrong why the hell am i burning gasoline why am i burning dead dinosaurs when her car is again air quotes free to drive good question and so i think i'm at the point now i am willing to trade my left leg and sacrifice my left leg and get a battery electric vehicle.

2:09:55John Siracusa:And I think the only battery electric vehicle that really fits my needs, wants, and desires, really, really closely anyway, is a BMW i4, most specifically an M50 trim. Since we talked about this in February, a lot of people have reached out and said, oh my God, I have one of those. And it's incredible. What's the line from Seinfeld? They're real and they're fantastic or something like that. You know what i'm saying spectacular there it is thank you um a lot of people reached out and said they're spectacular and beyond that allegedly as i knock furiously on more wood the bmw uh electric cars and marco jumping whenever you're ready are supposed to be considerably more reliable than my former uh 2011 335 with the n55 motor that was amazing for the 10 minutes it ran but was constantly broken.

2:10:43Marco Arment:Yeah, they're amazing. So I think it's time. However, the problem is

2:10:49John Siracusa:your boy has desires and I really, really want a really well optioned one. And let me tell you, not easy to find a pretty well loaded BMW i4 M50 on the used market. It's not great, friends. It's not great. And I need someone, I need a listener to step out of the woodwork and say, I am a like car broker headhunter whatever i don't know what the term is i'm looking for but i'm a car headhunter and i will find you this car but i have been looking constantly for the last several days because i think i'm ready i just i want to do it again i love my volkswagen but it's time i know

2:11:27Casey Liss:this is not going to help you casey but the actual solution to your problem is buying an no as marco suggested earlier is wait for the new i3 to come out and everyone gets all excited about the new even uglier bmws and guess what happens all of a sudden there's a lot of the old i4s more of those on the market than there used to be including the well option one because everybody's upgrading to the new hotness but you don't want the new hotness because it's even uglier well i don't know that it is actually but i take your point but i haven't seen one in person but i think they're too tall and i hate the front end even more than the old one if that's possible

2:11:59John Siracusa:but anyway the sedans are too tall you're not i'm not thinking the suv yeah the sedans are too tall

2:12:03Casey Liss:the i3 sedan is too tall all right in photos i haven't seen in person yet so i'll reserve of judgment but anyway that's going to happen those are going to come out and the people who those people who had leases people who were like who just got to have the latest and greatest they're going to be better who's going to be excited about them there's going to be all these reviews but you're not interested in that you're waiting you're just there you're waiting for people to get rid of those old dowdy i4 who wants the old i4 anymore you do that's your time but unfortunately you're casey and you want a car now so this advice is falling on deaf ears you are you know i was

2:12:34John Siracusa:talking, I did a guest spot in a podcast, which isn't out yet, and I was talking to the host about how the three of us are basically work spouses at this point, and we've known each other so freaking long that we could push each other's buttons so well, and you are so annoyingly right that I just simply do not have the patience for this. But that is an answer. That is unquestionably an answer.

2:12:54Casey Liss:And to be fair, I'll push my own buttons here. Sometimes, patience leads you into my current situation, where I'm waiting for a new Mac. It's like, it's not the right time to buy one yet. Right? What could happen?

2:13:07John Siracusa:Yeah, where the Ramageddon sneaks in. No, you're exactly right. So, I mean, an answer to this question, especially given the earlier topic in this very episode, is I could lease a new one. But, again, for my personal— Not for long, you can't. Well, also true. For my personal wants, needs, and desires, I don't think it's a good fit for me. And that's just more personal preference than anything else. And I'm not here to litigate that. That's totally fine. I 100 % concede that the easiest way to get a car optioned exactly how you want, assuming they're still making new ones or a dealer can put their hands on a new one, is to lease it.

2:13:40John Siracusa:But I'd prefer not to do that in no small part because I don't particularly want to spend pre-depreciation money. I'd rather spend post-depreciation money. And so I'd love to find a used one, but the problem is I want basically almost every package that it came with in addition to Aaron's car has ruined me. Why, you ask? Because Aaron's car has ventilated seats. Holy God, ventilated seats are my favorite thing in the whole wide world now. And I really don't want to buy a car without ventilated seats. And I'll give you one guess what is a single line item, not part of a package, a single line item on the G6i4 that nobody ticks.

2:14:22John Siracusa:Would you like to guess, fellas?

2:14:23Marco Arment:I'm surprised they sold it separately.

2:14:25John Siracusa:I know. I don't know why it's separate, but it's separate.

2:14:28Casey Liss:I will say that ventilated seats reportedly vary widely, not just between car makers, but between models of the same car. So be careful. You may love the ventilated seats in your Volvo and hate them in some other car. so maybe i don't know test drive the ventilated seat yeah i've only i've had them in i think two

2:14:45Marco Arment:cars ever like one of mine and one of tiff's um and yeah they vary a lot between cars like the ones i forget which car i had but the ones that i had were really weak and like didn't cover much surface area either um and the ones tiff had were like amazing on this like this ancient lexus sedan she had a million years ago um but like they're they're just very very different as john said so

2:15:10Casey Liss:it it might not be don't ruin my moment i mean are you going to turn down the car if the ventilated seats turn out to be bad or if you can't get them like i don't think that should be a deal breaker but what i'm saying is maybe they just suck on that particular yeah because like the like the technology involved with them is way more primitive than you think if you've seen car rebuilding channels and they show what the ventilated seats involved it is incredibly primitive but apparently some people just have better designs than others and because they change the seat even within within the manufacturer like for a generation like you'll see the same steering wheel everywhere to save money or whatever but the seats will be different like car makers like the the you know your your golf might not have the same seats as like the uh the the contemporary uh um volkswagen suv of whatever whatever it was called back then because they just make different seats for different cars and that's how you end up with like the good ventilated seats in the what is it tiguan or whatever what the hell is the anyway the good ventilated seats in the volkswagen suv a bad ventilated seats in the golf you're like how can the same manufacturer screw this up but it happens.

2:16:08Casey Liss:So, you know, check them out if you can.

2:16:09John Siracusa:That's fair. But what I want is a very, very specific car. And the problem is there is not a website that I have found that is reliable at telling that website, I would like the following options. And I think a large part of that is because on the G6i4, there is driving assistance and driving assistance pro. And so dealers are tagging their cars wrong. The website crawlers are emitting these options wrong. Like it's just a mess top to bottom. And so I've been spending an inordinate amount of time on visor.vin, which I think our friend Matt Howey suggested, if I'm not mistaken. I've spent a bunch of time on Auto Tempest, which is like an aggregator of a lot of other websites.

2:16:56John Siracusa:That currently is my favorite at the time, or as I speak, but I have been looking at all of these. And then what I find myself doing is none of these websites are reliable about options. And maybe half the time, after clicking a million different ways, I can find a Windows sticker or a rough facsimile of a Windows sticker, which enumerates all these options, but it's very unreliable. And so what I've started doing, which is not 100 % reliable, but seems to be pretty close, is there's a website, bimmer.work, B-I-M-M-E-R.work, and you can plug in a VIN, and it will show you the options from that car.

2:17:36John Siracusa:So what I was doing is, for each of these cars, I go and I grab the VIN, I go to bimmer.work, and then I go and plug in the VIN, and then I try to scroll through and command F and see, okay, does ZDY exist? Does ZPK exist? Does ZPP exist? Does 5AZ exist? Does 4FH exist? And I can tell you - It sounds awful. It's awful. It sucks. This is why I need -

2:17:55Marco Arment:for like a shell script.

2:17:57John Siracusa:Well, so I need a car headhunter is what I really need. But in lieu of that, while I'm still operating as my own car headhunter, I thought to myself, at the very least, at the very least, I should be able to have some sort of script or Safari extension that could parse through the resulting page from bimmer.work and at least put like, like insert a table at the top of the DOM, if you will, and just say, this is what it does have, and this is what it doesn't have. So me and my buddy Claude whipped together my very first Safari extension, which I'm not planning on sharing because I looked at none of the code, did not give a crap.

2:18:38John Siracusa:If the code was good, I just cared that it seemed to work. And so I will put a link in the show notes to an example of this, of me using my little Safari extension to tell me whether or not this particular car has the particular options I want. And in this particular example, the answer is mostly, but not all. And so the question becomes like, do I cave on some of these options and what do I cave on if I do? This is the first worldiest of first world problems. I am not suffering. Life is great. Don't get me wrong. But golly, it occurred to me that I, left to my own disposition, left to my own devices, I would buy a car every two to three years, be it lease, be it purchase, whatever, because I just really freaking love cars.

2:19:24John Siracusa:I would do it all the time. Except I've also started reaching out to a handful of dealers about a handful of cars. Let me tell you, you know what the worst possible thing you can do with your time for any reason is you can go reach out to a car dealer who, by the way, every single fucking one of these pieces of are all behind AI like triages. And so you'll email them and be like, Hey, I was wondering if you could give me a window sticker for this or something like that. Hi, I'm Sophie, the assistant, or sometimes Sophie doesn't even identify herself as an assistant. Hi, I'm Sophie. I would love to get that window sticker for you.

2:20:02John Siracusa:I will have someone assist me and I'll get back to you. Okay. Then today, earlier today, I found, I found a car that I really like that's at a dealer very far away from me and it's optioned perfectly. I found this earlier today and I email them or I use their little online form and I say, Hey, I noticed that you said you will only sell to your own state and the state surrounding you. is that really true like if i showed up with a check would you really say no and sophie said to me mind you i've never emailed this dealer before sophie said to me something along the lines of oh hey again casey oh i'm sorry what god so clearly sophie is like some national fucking thing that they're all sharing i mean not literally but you know what i'm saying it's disgusting Take how bad it was for you to buy a car two to four years ago, and it's worse now.

2:21:00John Siracusa:It's worse, my guys. It's worse. Oh my gosh. So I'm currently in the midst of bickering with this dealer, and they basically told me to kindly pound sand. If I want to get a car from them, which is in the Midwest, I need to ship it. That's the only way they will let me buy it. And I would have to do it sight unseen. And the shipping cost from the Midwest of the United States to the Eastern United States is$2 ,300.

2:21:27Casey Liss:It's a bargain.

2:21:28John Siracusa:I could get a direct flight to the airport nearest them. It's one of the like seven airports that I can get to from Richmond. I could get a direct flight for 500 bucks one way. $2 ,300 to ship this car.

2:21:39Casey Liss:That's not that bad if you consider how much it would cost to ship that car via UPS or FedEx. Right? Just by weight and volume alone. It's actually not that bad.

2:21:50John Siracusa:well but the thing of it is leaving aside my own personal feelings about buying a car site on scene because i think i could get over that but woof i don't love it don't love it do you think you too especially do you think aaron's going to be particularly keen on this and this is not one of those like oh my wife is such a buzzkill she's right no she's right yeah it's not a purchase

2:22:11Casey Liss:that you for this much money that you make without seeing the thing right and so i'm bickering with

2:22:16John Siracusa:them, but I think I'm going to, I think I'm going to lose this fight. I said to them, I said to them, what if I came to you with someone from our surrounding state escorting me? Because we have a mutual friend that lives in a state adjacent. The three of us have a mutual friend that lives in the state adjacent to this particular state. And I thought, is it good enough for me to just show up with someone who can produce a driver's license that says they live in the state next door? And they said, thank you. But no, if we're selling to you in Virginia, you have to go through, shoot, I forget the name of the website.

2:22:45John Siracusa:I think it's driveway.com or something like that, which is the only way they'll do it. So I told them, hey, all right, if this is the way you're going to be fine, I would love to do that, but I really would like you to take$2 ,300 off the cost of the car. How'd that go? Because there's no freaking way. They've ghosted me since then. I'm so talking. But the problem is that this is the first car that I've found with every single option I want that hasn't been in an accident or had a completely dodgy Carfax history. It's certified pre-owned, which is also nice because then you get an extended warranty and so on and so forth.

2:23:21It's just, I'm impatient,

2:23:24John Siracusa:which is what John initially said, and I am not denying it at all. But I'm also searching for the world's tiniest needle in a haystack that only has but so many pieces of hay in it. And granted, to John's point, there will be more and more over time, but golly, I'd love to be able to just find the car fly there if I have to pick it up and drive it home I will figure out the fine I said to them I'll figure out the financing I'll figure out how to get a temporary tag for it you don't have to do anything but hand me a title and keys and they told me to kindly pound sand yeah so I think so

2:23:59Marco Arment:a couple of things are going to work in your favor if you can be patient you know number one is that BMWs come up for sale at the time because BMW owners are car enthusiasts and they always want to change cars. And as John said, a new generation of BMW EV platforms is coming out and so many people want to upgrade to it. Number two, the i4 hasn't been around for that many years. Most of the leases of the i4s probably aren't expired yet. And the biggest source of used BMWs is ones that are exactly three years old because they're coming off lease. Because it turns out people who are rich enough to buy BMWs also tend to lease pretty often because they also like to have new cars all the time.

2:24:43Marco Arment:So it's a very well-leased brand. So if you can wait until they are three years old, which most of them, again, most of them aren't yet, you're going to have a lot more inventory to choose from. So I don't know when that is. Maybe like over the next year or two is when that's mostly going to roll through. But if you can be patient, if you just set up search alerts to find all the i4s that go for sale i bet you can find them when

2:25:08John Siracusa:you want within six months i mean i think you're probably right and for the record the first year of the i4 was model year 2023 which means these are cars bought in 2022 so it's been around longer than you think it doesn't really negate anything you're saying though and i think if i could be patient i i probably should be but because i want such an esoteric well maybe not esoteric but particular set of options. I worry that I'm going to let one slip through my fingers, which my knowledge of the one, actually it was the one that Marco found that was in just south of Richmond. At the time, not having really properly looked into it, that was optioned exactly right.

2:25:49John Siracusa:And in retrospect, I really wish I just pulled the trigger on it. But I think perhaps if I were to go back and look again, it wouldn't have had like ventilated seats, for example. But golly, I feel like I'm boxed. Even though I know intellectually that's not true, I feel like I'm boxed because I know I want something so specific and it's so rare to find it. The other thing that's kind of complicated is a lot of these cars seem to end up in Los Angeles and San Francisco, which I could ship from there. And that would be, I feel like that would be slightly less egregious, although I would still prefer to go and see it and drive it.

2:26:22But the thing is,

2:26:24John Siracusa:this car particularly the the m50 version which is the hot rod version at best it has 270 miles of range and let me tell you a 3 000 mile journey from san francisco or la to virginia 250 miles at a time does not strike me as a particularly fun or quick way to get across the country i mean to

2:26:44Marco Arment:be clear the charging stops are not going to be your problem with that kind of like yeah you'll you'll quickly learn what it's like to have an EV on a long road trip spoiler it's fine um but the the few hours of charging you'll do on that trip are going to pale in comparison to the tens of hours of driving that you'll be doing on that trip the mileage you'll be putting on your

2:27:06John Siracusa:car right i mean that i could get over but yeah it's the time it's i mean i i genuinely would expect i haven't computed this because i'm not that serious but i would expect that would be a roughly three to six day journey or something like that, which is just a lot of time. Now I work for myself. If I really needed to, I could take my equipment with me and record from the road. I've done it. I did it just a few weeks ago at the beach. Like this is something that I can solve, but I don't want to be away from the family for that long. And if I'm going to do a cross country trip, I want to do it everyone,

2:27:35Casey Liss:but don't buy a car in California. Just, just be, just have a little bit of patience. I mean, you just have to like when, when I was trying to find my dog to adopt, I think I looked for an entire year on petfinder.com looking every single night. You just got to be vigilant. When I got my wife's car, I'm pretty sure I got the only stick shift Honda Civic in this color and trim level in the entire region of New England. And I just sat there waiting. Is there one? Is there one? Is there one? Oh, there is. And you just got to snatch it, which means your new hobby is just being setting up systems. You can, you know, you're luckily you live in the age of vibe coding where you can automate this a lot easier than I could.

2:28:10Casey Liss:and you'll just get an alert when one with some percentage of your options appears on the market and you just got to pounce on it. But it's not going to be today or tomorrow or the next day, probably. You just got to be vigilant. These things take time.

2:28:22John Siracusa:Yeah. But I mean, we'll see what happens.

2:28:24Casey Liss:And the longer you wait, the cheaper they get.

2:28:26John Siracusa:That's true. But I don't know. I genuinely, I don't disagree with anything you said, but I genuinely feel like this one that I found in the Midwest could be the one, but the thought of just shipping it sight unseen. And apparently this driveway place has a seven-day money-back guarantee, and in this hypothetical situation, I would presumably sell my car separately after I received this hypothetical i4 that I don't actually think this is going to end up working out. I think they're going to tell me to pound sand. But within the few days of getting this car, I would know, okay, this is good, or, oh my gosh, this is a disaster, I need to return it.

2:29:01John Siracusa:And as long as I haven't already sold my Volkswagen, then I'm good to go. But it's just, I don't love the idea of buying a car site unseen. I mean, I did that sort of kind of with my BMW, but, you know, I drove up to the dealership. We did a pre-purchase inspection because we weren't buying from a BMW dealer. We took it to the local BMW dealer, did a PPI on it, and they said, no, it seems fine. Turns out they were wrong, but that's neither here nor there. You know, it seems fine. And then we finished the transaction and that was that. We drove two cars home. Um, but yeah, I, I, I really, if you are a car headhunter, I know that's the wrong term.

2:29:36John Siracusa:If you're a car headhunter and you want to do this for me for less than a gazillion dollars, please reach out. I would love, I would love to talk to you because this is so freaking frustrating. And for the record, I did ask Claude to vibe code me a whole like situation that would a couple of times a day, go to like auto tempest and a couple other sites and try to piece together what's new and what's old and it quickly became obvious that either i am not as good a director as marco is or it was just too many moving parts to really get something that worked and worked

2:30:07Casey Liss:reliably but i did try you're just gonna break up the problem into pieces i'm sure you can do it

2:30:11John Siracusa:do you have a safe search on cars and bids not on cars and bids are these the sorts of cars that

2:30:16Casey Liss:come up on cars and yeah definitely like i i have a safe search i know this because i get these emails i have safe search on cars and bids for the last uh stick shift honda accord that they made and Occasionally I see those come up and I just look at them. It's a good site for enthusiasts because there'll be a bazillion pictures and all sorts of info on it. And I mean, you still might have to travel somewhere and you still have to pay to trailer it to you and yada, yada, yada. But anyway, add that to your mix of places you're looking. I would add that to the list.

2:30:40John Siracusa:I'll do that right away. One other quick note that I just thought was funny. This is not designed to be an advertisement for Fastmail, but it's going to sound like it. And I apologize. When I was setting up alerts for cars and like Auto Tempest and other places, CarMax, for example, I wanted to use what Fastmail calls a masked email address, which is to say instead of using my actual email address, it's, you know, it's like gobbledygook at or it's two pronounceable words and a couple of numbers at my domain. Right. And so this way, once I eventually find a car, which will either be tomorrow or in 10 years, once I eventually find a car, I can just kill that email address and it all just goes away, which sounded all well and good until I was talking to one of the dealers and they're like, OK, your email is mouse dot farts.

2:31:32John Siracusa:I mean, it wasn't literally, but you know what I'm saying? Like, mouse.farts at caseylist.com. Yes, yes, it is. And that was quite funny to me because I did not expect that to be a complication of using FastMail's otherwise very delightful masked email feature, which was very funny. I don't know. Somebody find me a car. That's basically what I'm saying to you. Find me a car, please, and thank you.

2:31:52Marco Arment:And I think you'll find it just fine within a reasonable amount of time.

2:31:56John Siracusa:I sure hope so, but...

2:31:58Marco Arment:If you find a dealer that has an orange one next to your white one, I'll fly out there with you and we'll see if they'll discount them.

2:32:05Casey Liss:There's only one option Marco cares about.

2:32:07Marco Arment:There is a very well-optioned one in orange that's available for sale right now. The only problem is it's in Hawaii.

2:32:14John Siracusa:That's going to be a little bit challenging. Yeah. I don't know if that's going to work.

2:32:19Marco Arment:There might be a bit of a shipping charge on that one.