704: Past the Ternus Horizon

19:37John Siracusa:But nevertheless, that's reason one. The bigger reason though, and I quizzed you two on this and you didn't come up with this answer in the same way that i didn't come up with this answer but this is a reliable answer the biggest reason is i'm not coming back to service the car with them so they're not interested which is super gross but i do understand i'm not happy about it and it's gross and it's so flippin stupid to be worried about that with a battery electric vehicle like why is it gross first of all i also it's not stupid to think about why do you think it's gross That's how they make money.

20:12That's how dealers make money.

20:13John Siracusa:Well, if that's how they made money, I would have signed on the dotted line on a car I'm bickering with a dealer about right now. But anyways, no, I hear what you say. It feels icky to me that they're uninterested in selling the car if they can't service it forevermore. It's like Apple Services is what it is. It's just, I don't know. It just feels icky to me. I mean, I guess. I mean, they'll make more money long term if they sell it to someone who has at least a chance. It's not like they're guaranteed that the person's going to service them, but at least there's a chance they'll serve it with them if they don't live on the East Coast.

20:42John Siracusa:So you're saying there's a chance. Yeah. That's a reference. That's just playing the odds. It makes sense. And as you were complaining about in the Slack, like, well, electric vehicles don't even need maintenance. You know, accidents happen. Things break. There's recalls. There's warranty repairs. Dealers get a profit margin on those. It's not a great profit margin, but it's non-zero. So, yeah. And that probably hurts them even more. It's like, oh, now we sell these electric vehicles and they don't come in for the same kind of regular maintenance. So it's even more important than what little maintenance we do get.

21:06we need them to come back here we just got to hope they back out of their driveway and shear

21:10Marco Arment:off a side view mirror yeah i mean like the maintenance that most evs need is comically half uh butted like like because they try to make it like oh you should come in like you know once a year for your annual service or whatever and like most evs there's not much they even can service about them like you know the batteries usually are are factory sealed there's rarely anything that you can check about anything you know you can try to find one or two fluids here or there there's not many of them and so they're like all right we'll change your wiper blade inserts and your cabin air filter and that's about it like this that's to repair your wonky non-working

21:50John Siracusa:door handles well yeah that's true that's so true so yeah that that's the answer i find it deeply dissatisfying but i do understand what you're saying john and annoyingly you're as usual very right about it. Also, over the last week, I've made some discoveries. And this is the hashtag Casey was wrong section of follow up. First of all, I was fussing and moaning about how I absolutely my extremely fragile buttocks apparently needed a ventilated seat in order to cool them down. And as it turns out, I don't think I do anymore. And there's a few reasons. This would be hashtag John was right instead of hashtag Casey was wrong, but continue.

22:27John Siracusa:you i'll allow it either way but uh the the extremely short version is bmw ventilated seats apparently suck uh both literally and figuratively but the long version is is that first of all it just moves the cabin air it doesn't move it doesn't pipe like air conditioned air or you know straight from the source it just pushes cabin air allegedly into the seat or i guess actually that's not true because i've also heard i've heard that a little bit and i've also heard that allegedly it pulls air, which would actually be cabin air. Well, it's a sporty car. They want to suck you to the seat. Right? Exactly.

23:00John Siracusa:Yeah, there you go. You got to hold you in on those tight corners. We're going to get to that. That it pulls you into the seat, or it pulls the air into the seat rather than pushing it out of the seat. Why would anybody want that? I don't know. And additionally, it's allegedly very loud. Annoyingly loud, and also the vibration is very, very tangible. That's the massaging feature. Especially when it's at its highest setting. So there exist excellent ventilated seats. I would say Aaron's mobile house, I'm sorry, XC90 has excellent ventilated seats. Somebody wrote with some flavor of Porsche, I don't recall which one it was, that said their ventilated seats are excellent.

23:38John Siracusa:But allegedly the BMW ones are kind of trash. The other thing that's difficult about this is that if we rewind to my 2011 335, that had, I don't think they were particularly special seats, but the seats in that car had adjustable side bolsters. So if you imagine sitting in the car seat and right around the bottom of your rib cage or, you know, kind of the sides of your tummy area, the seat could adjustably squeeze in on that. Not to the point of like pain, of course, you would adjust it just so that it would be firmly against your side. And this is what you were joking about earlier, John, except it's really true.

24:12John Siracusa:As you're going around turns, that keeps you squared up laterally, right? You can't slide to the left or right because these side bolsters are keeping you in place. I loved that feature of my old car, and I don't want to give up on it. And so not only was I not willing to give up on it before I realized that the ventilated seats suck in every way, but additionally, the ventilated seats stink. So apparently, don't need that. Furthermore, I had told myself, you know, it would be really nice to have, and I could probably find a car that has BMW's laser lights. I forget exactly the mechanism by which these work, but it's like shining a laser, like some sort of phosphor, I believe, and then like reflecting it a zillion ways or something like that.

24:53John Siracusa:But I found some people say, well, it's not as good as you think it is, blah, blah, blah. And then I found a post about it, which we put in the show notes. Let me read you a quick section of that post. The problem with laser lighting is simpler. They're just too bright. Compliance systems in the U.S. state a maximum of 150 ,000 candela, whereas Europe, which uses the UNECE vehicle regulations, allows up to 430 ,000. So that's what, like two and a half, three times? These restrictions leave laser lights in the dark, limited to performing only as well as, well, basically any other high-end lighting system made in the last 10 years.

25:27John Siracusa:Additionally, since laser lights aren't allowed to offer their enhanced range, it's hard to find an argument that validates them. They're certainly more expensive. And I don't mean expensive, but it's a BMW. I mean, carbon ceramic brakes expensive. Mind you, this is, I believe from a BMW like blog or whatever. Anyway, continuing while I was still working at a BMW dealership and M eight on the lot was damaged and the cost with shop time to replace one laser headlight was$8 ,000. So no thanks on that. I will pass. Thank you very much. Additionally, I've read that they only work at like highway speeds and to be honest with you i drive in the night time so rarely and even more rarely am i on the interstate at night so it's no it's a no for me dog well going back to uh your ventilated seats

26:12Marco Arment:for a minute i i will also confirm like i've i think i've had them i think the m5 might have had them um i don't think i've had them since then um but tiff used to have um this little uh lexus is 250 sedan way back in the day i remember it it had a mate like it was like sitting on an air hockey table made of ice it was so satisfying and like and that's what you want if you're gonna have air-conditioned seats you want it like you almost want it to be so cold that for a minute you're like oh my god am i sitting in something wet you know it's like that's what you want like you want that that feeling of like oh oh what's that oh no it's so true and and yeah for whatever reason like it does vary a lot between brands and yeah as you said like it must be like you know i'm sure the lexus with the good seats was probably like piping in a direct air vent from the air conditioning source directly to the seat however you would route all those things that sounds like a nightmare so i'm i'm sure most cars don't do that but for whatever reason um yeah it's a pretty rare feature to see on cars um more rare than i would expect uh but i wish that were more common because it is really nice when you get a good one that's just not common yeah that's the thing and like i said

27:23John Siracusa:last week, you know, Aaron's XC90 seats have ruined me because they're excellent. And unfortunately, it's just not going to be the case in this car.

27:30Marco Arment:I will say one more thing before we leave the topic of your search for a BMW i4.

27:35John Siracusa:Oh, I forgot about this follow-up. I forgot to put it in the show notes. This is excellent follow-up. I'm so sorry.

27:39Marco Arment:The other day, I had not much to do for an afternoon on the mainland. John? I'm not doing the New Jersey thing anymore. I told you, I can't do it. It's too much. Oh, it's over? All right. You just continue to say the wrong word for it and look foolish feel free uh well i think it would sound foolish anyway um so anyway i was on i was on the mainland john for uh you know for a day and and i was like oh let me let me finally go like actually see and drive one of these because i i've also been thinking about the i4 for my next car and they're about to go out of production or they i think they already have gone into production so i kind of wanted to be like all right well is it worth you know waiting for it or you know getting maybe getting getting one early if i have to end my lease early or try to try to get a used one next year or whatever so i'm like let me let me just i want to just see what what it's like so i went and found one and drove it it's really fun right you were right slash i was right we were both right i'm not sure i'm not sure i should be taking credit for this one yeah i'm pretty sure i'm the one who told you you should probably look at the i4 but uh it was really super fun um i do think though i think i'm gonna wait for the upcoming new i3.

28:50John Siracusa:The Neuer Klasse or whatever it's called?

28:52Marco Arment:Yeah, because it has substantially more range. For my uses, that's actually pretty useful. I think I want some of the new stuff about it. What I mainly wanted to see was, alright, should I, first of all, look at the iX3, because the iX3 also looks amazing, or should I go back to a sedan? and like i i looked at all the sedans and they all look amazing they have a million different models now they have like you know a two series you know all these different things and they all looked great and i was like oh yeah i would love to you know have that as my car and then i saw on the lot an x3 uh which is not the ix3 but the ix3 is going to be very similar in size and proportions to the current x3 um and i saw that and i'm like i don't feel anything for that yep and then i drove the i4 and it was so much fun i'm like this car it's i am i feel like i'm i'm more nimble it's a smaller footprint it it steers better it moves better and like i'm like this this is it i have to go back to a sedan next time so i decided i am probably gonna go with the new i3 i gotta see you know once it actually comes out um you know maybe see reviews of it and if I can get my hands on one to drive, try to test drive it.

30:10Marco Arment:But that's probably how I'm going to go. But the i4 was a ton of fun. It would be if I was shopping today, it would be very tempting to get that instead. Instead of waiting. You could throw in a jam is right there with the sedans being better than SUVs. Because honestly, I do feel like coming off so many big trucks and SUVs, going back down to a regular car is always going to feel exciting. i know that the reduction in cargo space and the shrinking of the size of the cargo window that you can get cargo into it through a regular trunk like i know there's gonna be times and i'm like oh this is this is unfortunate you know like i'm sure it's gonna be inconvenient at times but i'm gonna like my car again and i haven't really liked my car that much for a while um because i've been optimizing for maximum function and hauling and you know beach traction and stuff and like now Now that I don't need that anymore, like I'm pretty sure I can just carry less stuff and and be happier all the time.

31:05Marco Arment:So that's the that's the direction I want to go. And I'm hoping it doesn't give me weird back and sciatic problems to go back to a lower seating vehicle. That remains to be seen. But here here's here's hoping.

31:18John Siracusa:Yeah, no, they're really fun. Now, to be clear, you did not drive the M50, though. You drove like a whatever the next rung down is, I believe.

31:24Marco Arment:The 40. Yeah.

31:25John Siracusa:I mean, those are allegedly also extremely fun, but not like break your neck fast. And because I'm a child, I would like break your neck fast.

31:32Marco Arment:With my current iX, I have like the middle speed one. I don't even know what it is, but it's not it's it's not the one with the M in front of the name. It's like the regular trim right below that. And it is so ridiculously fast. It's fast enough for me. When I had back when I had like the Tesla Model S, I didn't have the P line with like the super ridiculous acceleration. I had the middle one that maximized range. And that was as fast as the M5. I am perfectly happy getting like these middle grade performance EVs because they are as fast as, you know, the supercars of 10 years ago were.

32:07John Siracusa:Oh, God, yes. Yeah. The reason you're happy with that is because you're an adult. However, I am a child. Yeah, fair. So we'll see what happens. I mean, I'm not going to get into it much. But as it turns out, I'm in the midst of negotiating on one car. That's like I was saying to the boys before we went live, like it's maybe 95 percent perfect, but we haven't quite reached a middle ground, me and this dealer. And I think we're at a stalemate, so I'm probably going to have to walk. But I mean, we'll see what happens. But I am looking forward to ditching gasoline. And you made a mention a minute ago, which I think makes a lot of sense, that for your needs, you have a higher priority on range than I think I do.

32:44John Siracusa:And I think both of us are right that for your needs, you should worry about range and less speed. For my needs, I don't need to worry about range, and thus I am a child and will get speed instead. But I think it's important to recognize that you are 100 % right about that, from my personal opinion. And I think maybe if I had different needs, I would feel differently about what trim level and what speed car to get.

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35:06St.

35:07John Siracusa:Chris wrote with regard to Codex Micro, the silly little keyboard dingus. The Codex Micro is an OpenAI branded version of the WorkLouder Creator Micro 2 keypad with a special set of chat GPT themed icon keys. And so we'll put a link in the show notes to the thing that St. Chris is talking about. Additionally, Ian pointed out that the keyboard, little keyboard dingus, does not have a microphone. the demos that we were talking about were presumably just using the computers mike yeah this is in the context of uh over time in a past episode we were talking about this thing and i was complaining i can't believe they're doing this open ai is making hardware and they're spending time on this silly keyboard thing because any amount of hardware takes such an investment and i actually feel better knowing that all they did was take an existing product that someone had already developed and just essentially dress it up with some open ai stuff so that is less of a distraction than i thought it was so good for open AI, but still it is a non-zero distraction.

35:59And I think the product is silly.

36:03John Siracusa:John, you know, generally speaking, it, obviously I would prefer to record this in person. I wish we were all closer together and we saw each other more often. This moment though, for you and me, John, I wish we were together so we could give each other a supportive hug because at about the same moment, you and I each received a truly terrible text message Verizon sent to each of us individually. This is an urgent message from Verizon regarding your Fios TV equipment. Our records indicate you have either a digital adapter and or cable card that is scheduled for deactivation on November 5th. To avoid service interruption, please take action now.

36:39John Siracusa:Please disregard this message if you've already upgraded your equipment. So, what this means, John, we have until November 5th. We knew this day was coming, but they never gave a date. They would send us these scary, threatening emails. Oh, we're not going to support cable card anymore. You're going to have to upgrade XYZ, but no date. They wouldn't mention anything. So, see past episodes for when that was but now we all have a date and the thing about those emails they seem to trickle out but this text message seemed to go to everybody i know at the same instant because we're all messaging each other other friends are in the same boat people with cable cards people with your uh what is it called uh hd home run yeah hd home run all sorts of other cable cards enabled this whole ecosystem advices as they were supposed to which is like hey if we forced cable companies to support this then third parties can make hardware that can get cable tv and do interesting things and that stuff is obviously really old and essentially obsolete by now and cable card is gone which is why they're dropping support for it but cable card we salute you you did actually do what you were supposed to do which is make an ecosystem for third-party stuff it's just that the will to do something good in the realm of television uh only lasted for about a moment and then disappeared and then the cable card expired or they passed a law that said you don't need it or whatever anyway and now it's all going right which is fine like we'll be fine.

37:50I am still putting off calling Verizon to try to get my bill lower. I did check the website a couple months ago. And when I went through the website to try to like, remove or reduce my television service, my bill went up instead of down. So yeah, I'm gonna have to call them on the phone. Obviously, their website is probably just broken or whatever. But when do I call them on the phone? Not a not when we all got this text message, because I bet a bunch of people were calling then and not close to November. So sometime kind of in the middle between now and November, I will spend probably an entire day on the phone with Verizon trying to get my bill to be lower in exchange for not having TV anymore.

38:26Marco Arment:So you said a bunch of people probably called them. How many people do you think are still using a cable card today and know it? I mean, more than like, just think of what their normal support load is. There's a bunch of people who are absolutely not going to call Verizon suddenly are going to call them. And also nerdy people, especially if they haven't been paying attention or missed the previous email, are going to be mad. So they're going to call and they're going to be mad and say, what? I've had my TiVo for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, enjoy that for us and support people.

38:59John Siracusa:This is the bed they made for themselves. No sympathy. So your plan is to just ditch any sort of cable and you're just going to stream everything? I'm not sure if they'll let me. They might say, no, as part of your triple play, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know what the deal is, but basically if I could get them to remove my television service, I would. I suspect that the best I'll be able to do is to switch to the cheapest possible television service because they'll probably say, well, if you removed your television service, your bill would actually go up because of X, Y, and Z. Anyway, my goal is reduce bill, not care about television.

39:28Marco Arment:You still have a landline phone through them? Yeah, and that's the same. I do actually want to keep the landline phone. I could ditch that, but I actually want that number. It's convenient to have the landline that's separate from our cell phones. Really? Because I was going to say, if you just get like the Fios internet service without TV and phone that's got to be lower yeah we'll see we can do and the other bad thing and this is so stupid but it's like how much I fear Verizon our cell phone service is through an account that my wife made and our internet and television and telephone is through an account that I made and you do get a discount if you get all the stuff through them but because it's two separate accounts the fear of like hey can you combine two accounts technically to two different people Although, trust me, we're married and we live in the same house.

40:11The chaos that could ensue from that, I've just been avoiding that entirely. So we'll see how it works out. But yeah, I'm going to spend some quality time with Verizon. And hopefully I'll do it in such a way that I'm still able to podcast because my internet connection still functions. Not fun.

40:27John Siracusa:All right, let's talk backups. And Jonathan Dechko writes, I disagree that the baseline backup should be Time Machine. I bought my son a MacBook Air for college along with an external drive for Time Machine. I set it up and told him to connect the drive weekly. I was helping him with something last month and saw a notification that the time machine had not backed up for 340-something days. He had never plugged in the drive. But I also installed Backblaze on the computer and added it to my account. It dutifully backed up his computer every day, considering that, quote-unquote, all Macs or laptops, if you own or have access to a parent, spouse, or child, their computer on a limited basis, online backup is probably the best starting point.

41:02As I said in the Ask ADP section when we were talking about this, and we were categorizing people as like more casual computer users and more like nerdy computer users. The challenge with casual people is getting them to do literally anything. And this is an example of that. If they're not going to ever connect the drive, that option is off the table for you. And you have to like literally anything, whatever you can do. Now, my first choice would still be Time Machine because the function of backups, especially for somebody who's like, oh, they never connected the drive because I didn't notice until I revisited them.

41:30That means you're not like living with them all the time. That means they're on their own. And so that means if they do something stupid and screw something up, they have to be able to do something useful with the backups. And Time Machine is the easiest thing to restore from because it's built into macOS. It will prompt you for it. Like you could walk someone through sort of, you know, getting to the point where you can do a Time Machine restoration. You can walk someone through that on the phone. Whereas Backblaze, great. You don't have to do it. It'll back up for them. They don't have to remember to do it, blah, blah, blah.

41:59Restoring from Backblaze is not part of the macOS recovery process. and it would be substantially more complicated for a non-technical person to do on their own so yeah the challenges with people who are just not going to do backups get them to do anything in the end it's more important that their data is saved than the ease of restoration so if backblaze is all they're going to do if they've proven they will never plug the drive in yeah cloud backup is

42:20Marco Arment:the only option but it's a struggle yeah i i honestly i disagree i think backblaze should be the first step and you know ideally you would have both and the good thing is like i mean right now is maybe a bad example because right now hard drives are expensive but hard drives usually are not expensive and in most times you know you buy the hard drive once for maybe you know 150 dollars you know for whatever is big enough to store your computer plus a little bit extra maybe you buy the hard drive once and there's no ongoing fee for time machine that can last years and years and years that's the barrier to backblaze because people are like i gotta pay another monthly fee and even though it's only like five bucks or eight bucks or whatever just the idea of another monthly bill makes people's heads explode yeah but i think like in a case like this where you're kind of you know being a caretaker for somebody whether it's you know your kid going off to college in this case or like maybe like your elderly parents or whatever like you know whatever it is if you are kind of being like the computer caretaker for somebody if you can just eat that eight bucks a month yourself for it for backblaze i think that's that is the the best way to go that's the the most reliable way because like they don't have to then plug in the drive and do anything now what john said is correct if you have to do like a full system restore like if you know if your disk totally dies you have to do a full system restore backblaze is much more optimized for like we're going to give you all the files but you're going to have to like put all the apps back yourself and everything like that um and time machine is way better at that you can you can directly restore from a time machine backup when setting up a new mac during with the immigration assistant so like that is a better easier setup but if no one's going to do it a time machine backup that's 300 days old is is not a very very useful system restore yeah you just got to know who what it is you're dealing with and obviously if you're willing to pay the bills for them that really makes uh backblaze a lot easier although i will say backblaze has been chucking up some dialogue boxes lately complaining about permissions and i'm as far as i can tell everything's fine but if that was someone else's computer that i was supporting they're saying backblaze keeps throwing up a dialogue i'm like is there actually a problem are they being backed up you know every little bit of third-party software is one more place things can go wrong or if they automatically do a mac os update or something so yeah there's no perfect solution to this it's still more difficult than it should be but again for people who are not who are probably gonna not do any backup getting them to do literally anything is the first barrier and you just have to sort of negotiate with what's their situation how far are they uh far away from me are they what do i want to deal with do i want to pay a monthly bill for them do i not want to are they not going to ever buy a hard drive like it's complicated but yeah um backblaze is a good uh alternate choice if there's no way that they're going to either pay for a hard drive or use one and ideally like i would love for apple to someday i mean this is probably not the time again with like resource pricing and everything i would love for apple to someday offer effectively iCloud backup for max you know you see the way they do it on ios devices is very clever you know what they do with ios devices is iCloud backup backs up not like your entire photos library because that's separate That's already in your iCloud storage.

45:22Marco Arment:They don't need to make a copy of the files of your photos from your phone to iCloud. They don't back up that. They don't back up your music, your downloaded MP3s and stuff. Because again, that's already included in Apple Music or whatever. So they're able to exclude things. They don't back up your apps themselves, the actual app binaries and the app bundles that are these days apps are like hundreds of megabytes or maybe even gigabytes each. They don't back those up either because they know you can just reinstall them on an iOS device. You can re-download them from the App Store and re-install them.

45:52Marco Arment:So iCloud backups on iOS devices are able to be pretty slimmed down from the total storage on the device. Like my 256-gig iPhone does not need to back up 256 gigs of data to iCloud. It backs up probably something like 50 gigs of data because so much of that is re-downloadable through Apple's other means. and apps also apps can mark any file they create or write to they can mark it as exclude this from backup because i can regenerate it or redownload it so for instance overcast does that with its local sqlite casey database file because the sqlite file from overcast is just generated from your sync like back and forth with the servers and as soon as you log in on a new phone it just regenerates that whole database so there's no reason for that to take up space in your iCloud backups so it so i mark that as excluded and apps can do that for anything they can redownload so like you know on suppose you have like youtube offline files downloaded uh you know for youtube they probably mark those that same way that way all those offline copies of youtube videos don't sit there taking up your icloud storage space when if you set up a new phone you can just redownload those directly you know back to the app again if apple were to ever bring that kind of system to the mac obviously there's very different storage needs on the mac you know and there's the entire file system to have to worry about that you know that apps have more access to where they can put data what kind of data they can put different places so it would it would probably need to be like a little bit different of a situation but if they take some of those ideas from ios from the way it does iCloud backups i think they could do a reasonable job on the mac of offering something pretty compelling especially for the common cases like it's just a person with a MacBook Air who wants to just back up like most of their stuff.

47:41Marco Arment:So I hope someday that gets on their radar. Again, I don't think this is a good time for Apple to take on a significant large storage burden on the server side right now. But in probably a few years, that might be a very good time to do it. So I hope they consider that. Yeah, like I said last week, iCloud backup for Mac is long overdue, but you can't get people to pay for the iCloud storage for their phone backups. and the mac on top it's just some people are just so resistant i already own a phone why do i have to pay apple for something and so this is just another front for that same war and let's not talk about the five gigabytes of free space that we've gotten for 18 years or whatever the hell it's been yeah actually that's the main problem with this system with this idea is like they would have to lower the price of iCloud storage because it's not a thing that happens it's so ridiculous like to try to back up a whole mac to iCloud it would be like a thousand dollars a month right you're going to buy an 8TB Mac.

48:34You can't even back that up for any amount in iCloud now. I think, what is the maximum? Maybe 8 is the maximum. I forget if you do like the double thing where you do the expensive plan and the add-ons. Anyway, it's, again, maybe not the time to consider this.

48:46John Siracusa:Eric Jacobson adds, MacBook Pros have a slot for a second internal SSD. These little JetDrive SD cards that fit flush in the MacBook chassis. You can use it for additional storage or like me, time machine backups everywhere all the time. There's also a newer solution, a similarly designed micro SD card adapter. It should be significantly faster. The JetDrive uses a very old SD standard and costs about the same, which is incidentally double what they were roughly a year ago, because of course. Eric provided a couple links in the show notes. This reminded me that in like 2014, I backed, I forget the name of it.

49:19John Siracusa:It's like TinyDrive or NiftyDesk. NiftyDesk, I think that's it, which was, as far as I knew, the originator of this whole idea. And it was great, but I haven't thought about this in a long time. But Eric's right. You could get a little thing. it sits flush so from the outside you can't really tell it's there it's just you don't have an sd card slot and you can get astonishingly large micro sd cards these days so this is a very feasible answer despite being a fortune yeah i mean the main problem with this one is that it only works on laptops that have an sd card slot which are only the pros so you know for the more casual user who's going to have a macbook air or macbook neo this doesn't help them even though the macbook air should totally have an sd card slot also sd cards they're slow but who cares for Time Machine, but also reliability under heavy, constant, tiny writes like Time Machine does.

50:06But still, this is a possible solution to, oh, they're never going to plug in the drive? Just shove this thing in there and tell them, see this? Don't ever take it out.

50:14Marco Arment:Yeah, I feel like Time Machine was a lot easier to set up for somebody else in the age of desktops. And laptops create this problem of like, well, they're never going to plug in the drive. But this is a very elegant solution to that problem. Again, maybe not so much on current pricing, but it's better than nothing. Although it is fairly cheap because SD cards are cheap for the size. You know, it's just, it's just such a shame that the, the, have you looked recently at how much SD cards cost? I know. Well, but the smaller, cheaper computers should totally have SD card slots. The Neo should have an SD card slot.

50:42They're like, it's so cheap just to add one of those slots, but those are the computers that need it the most, not the MacBook pro. Cause someone who's got a MacBook pro, you can probably convince to buy a drive. But anyway, it's, it's out there if you want to try it.

50:53John Siracusa:Yep. And then Mustafa Hemoy writes, you guys just love to talk about backup this and backup that and backup software. But I find the idea of backup hilariously obsolete. My code is in GitHub. My photos are in Apple Photos and Google Photos. And my music is streaming. My documents are in OneDrive. My house can burn down right now and I won't lose any data. All these services are infinitely better at backing up than I will ever be. Doing your own backup and using backup software should be sent to wherever typewriters and other horse carriages went. I get that for a lot of people, but certainly not for me because I've got like 17 terabytes of stuff on my Synology that I don't want to lose.

51:29John Siracusa:A lot of that I could recreate, but certainly not all of it. So while I don't think Mustafa is wrong broadly, I absolutely completely reject their point when it comes to nerds like me. Well, so he's right that like things are very different than they used to be. The advent of cloud storage and the ubiquity of cloud storage, so many people have things in the cloud so many services put stuff in the cloud has made the situation so much better than it used to be because you know if you rewind far enough and people just had stuff on their computers and that was literally the only place it was and it was a terrible situation and people lost stuff all the time the the advent of cloud storage and cloud-backed services has allowed people to use computers more fully than they could before because it was always so fraught before so that point is absolutely true but as we say all the time cloud storage is not a backup the closest you can get and this is pretty close and probably good enough for a lot of people are cloud storage services that support versioning which as i believe dropbox does because that does start to become like a backup it doesn't function like a backup in all the ways i'm not sure if like you can do a point in time recovery of your entire dropbox but maybe you can but the point is versioning is like you need to have that to be a backup at all because if you don't have versioning and you delete a file and it's gone from both your computer and your cloud storage and you want it back you can't get it that's when you need a backup that's the point of backups right and you may say well but it's it's on my other computer that's turned off right now so i'll just unplug it from ethernet and unplug my wi-fi router and turn it on and just like that's not that's not a recovery strategy right cloud storage is not a backup it is great that it has your data in multiple places but the point is it doesn't save you from yourself when you screw things up second thing i'll point out is cloud storage service companies are not your friend all my photos are in apple photos now your apple id is banned or got taken over by hackers everything's on github github has banned you now do you have do you have all your git repos synced somewhere locally or are some of them only on github like if you have you know it's true that they're bet they're going to do better backups than they do you're not going to lose your data probably because they screw something up and like, oh, we lost your data and we didn't have a backup.

53:45What's going to happen is your account's going to get banned or you're going to get hacked or something like that. That's what happens to regular people. And when your only place where the data is, is on that one cloud storage service that you trusted, and suddenly your Google account gets banned for some reason that you don't understand and can never find out because of this Kafkaesque world that we live in, and no human will ever talk to you, it's a problem. That's the point of backups. It's a backstop against more bad things happening than just your house burning down. And I hope this never happens to people.

54:12And I agree that having cloud storage is so much better than not having it and covers almost everybody's needs almost all the time, but not entirely. That is the point of backups. You don't get insurance because you expect to be struck by lightning. You get it because it's a possible thing that could happen and you want triple damages if it does or whatever. So, yeah, I disagree that backups are obsolete and hysterically, you know, out of date. They're less necessary than they were, but they are still necessary if you want to be protected. Like, look, if you don't want the protection, you want to live dangerously, it's fine.

54:46Go for it. But I don't recommend it.

54:50Marco Arment:We are sponsored this episode by Claude. Literally right now, as I record this in the background, Claude Code is working for me trying to fix a bug. and I found it earlier. I'm like, oh, why is this behaving this way? And I told Claude, hey, go work on this. And I'm pretty sure how it's going to end because probably before I'm done even reading this ad message, this is a two minute ad. And within that time, I bet it will have found and fixed the bug. And then I'll ask it, make a bunch of tests to find similar bugs and make sure there's no other ones in the app. Claude can do all of that. It's the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough.

55:25Marco Arment:It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and your code base. And it thinks with you, whether you're debugging code or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. If you're a developer like me, you're spending a whole bunch of days and hours on tasks that you wish you could just hand off. Claude code is your new best friend. Any really hairy bug or really tedious testing task that I don't want to do, I just ask Claude to do it and it does it. And then it's off my plate. It's amazing at finding and fixing bugs.

55:55Marco Arment:and there's all sorts of things like writing tests refactoring that it can do without you hand-holding it through every step you just tell it like the problem you're trying to solve you can paste in images you can say a user report this behavior audit the code define this i cannot tell you how much time claude has saved me and it goes way beyond code if you're not a programmer don't worry it does all the other ai stuff too you can ask a questions you can have it work on documents you can do all sorts of stuff read excel files and make presentations claude can do so much i can't even enumerate it all in one ad but trust me it's oh look it's done it fixed the problem that's amazing all right for problems worth solving get started with claude at claude.ai slash atp that's claude.ai slash atp check out claude pro which includes access to all the features that i talked about today claude.ai slash atp thank you so much to claude for fixing my stuff and sponsoring our show all right let's talk apple upgrade

56:55John Siracusa:Patch writes, My company is a broker for IT leasing to schools in the UK. The deal between Apple and Klarna may be different, but leases are typically in agreement between the customer and the finance company, not the retailer or broker. So you would enter a deal with Klarna, Klarna would purchase the device from Apple, and it would belong to them, not Apple. When you return it, you would be returning it to Klarna, not Apple. Andrew Haglund writes, I know it's US only, but I have also always enjoyed the Apple Card 12-month interest-free thing when I buy big stuff from Apple. The payment automatically happens every month, easy to manage, and you're spreading it out over 12 months.

57:28John Siracusa:Simple. The advantage over the lease is that I'm in control if I want to upgrade every one, two, or three years. Paying$5 ,000 for a Mac over three years? Now that's appealing, especially for a desktop where it's unlikely to get damaged. Lastly, the concern over battery health with trade-ins. I don't think they care because I think all refurbished iPhones get brand new batteries, says Andrew?

57:48Marco Arment:question mark yeah i believe when when apple refurbishes any device i believe that the battery gets is always new and also all of the external surfaces so anything that like a customer can touch and that that you will touch like it like the case everything i believe those are always new with refurbished to patch's point about who uh actually owns the laptop or the the device and when you return it with the apple upgrade program uh maybe they're never going to tell us what the That would actually be interesting to know because whichever company gets the returned item potentially has some upside for selling a device.

58:25You know, again, if they paid 50 % of the price of it and now it's worth, it's still worth 60 % of its original price. That's another area for profit margin. But on the other hand, if Klarna is the one who owns the device and buys it from Apple, as soon as the like transaction goes through, Apple's done. Like they're like Klarna bought it from us. As far as we're concerned, this is a sold device that was sold and we don't care about it anymore. clarina bought it and we get our 40 margin or whatever we're going to get and we don't have to think about that device again unless it re-enters our ecosystem and then it's clarina's problem to deal with all the other stuff but i don't know i don't you know again this is apparently the way it is in the uk very often and that may be the way it is in this deal but as far as i'm aware they did not announce who who actually uh gets the device when you returned it all right

59:08John Siracusa:let's talk about rampocalypse uh first of all uh hartley charlton over at mac rumors writes Apple's attempt to use Chinese memory maker CXMT as leverage against Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix has backfired, with the two Korean chipmakers ending up with more pricing power rather than less, Digitimes reports, citing South Korean and Chinese trade press. Apple has explored CXMT and fellow Chinese chipmaker YMTC as potential DRAM suppliers. Apple hoped a credible Chinese alternative would pressure Samsung and SK Hynix into cutting their own prices, a tactic that it had used before with OLED suppliers and contract manufacturers.

59:47John Siracusa:CXMT is barred from EUV lithography tools under U.S. export controls, so it has to rely on older DUV equipment that requires around 30 % more wafer starts to produce the same output. That extra cost means matching Samsung and SK Hynix's prices is CXMT's floor, not a discount it's able to offer. So when Apple pushed for lower LPDDR5X quote, CXMT turned it down and held pricing at or above the Korean supplier's own rates. With that threat neutralized, Apple seemingly lost its main point of leverage. Digital Daily reports that Chinese device makers Huawei and Xiaomi have already locked up most of CXMT's output through long-term, high-priced contracts, so the company doesn't need Apple's business badly enough to negotiate.

1:00:29John Siracusa:the result is the opposite of what apple wanted without a credible cheaper alternative to point to samsung and sk hynix face less pressure to lower their own prices it's a tough world out there but you know uh we're all we'll just wait for those new factories to be built in three to

1:00:43Marco Arment:four years yeah i think we're going to be in this memory crunch for a lot longer than people think this is not going to be fixed this year it's probably not going to be fixed next year and

1:00:55John Siracusa:we'll see after that yeah it's not looking good uh also from harley charlton but slightly different topic uh the a20 pro will be apple's first built its first chip built using tsmc's n2 process production is reportedly progressing well but completed wafers are piling up because the dram needed to package them has not arrived because packaging cannot be completed without the corresponding dram semiconductor semiconductor analyst tim coolpan estimate estimates that tsmc is currently sitting on roughly$1 billion worth of Apple processors that cannot move to the next stage of production. Holy crap.

1:01:32You thought AppReview was backed up.

1:01:34John Siracusa:Right? Jeesy peasy. Hartley continues, the bottleneck apparently threatens to ripple into the final stages of iPhone production. Main logic board assembly and final assembly are handled primarily by Foxconn and BYD in China, and delays in package processor deliveries could compress their production schedules, even if Apple ultimately secures enough memory for launch. Oh dear. It's not great. Kevin Beaumont writes, all memory on track to be manufactured in 2027 by Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron is now sold out with no additional supply planned. We are currently, as I sit here tonight, it is August 12th of 2026.

1:02:12John Siracusa:All of 2027 is allegedly sold out. Kevin Beaumont continues, traditionally July and August are when companies secure memory for the following year. companies who got in early have pre-booked five years worth of supply. Presumably Apple is among those companies that pre-book their supply, but yeah, rough. Not good. All right, let's do some topics and let's start with, John, I think you want to talk to us about macOS and iOS 27 beta 5 icons. It's one of the few interesting things that's happening late in the beta cycle. They keep changing icons. Let's start with our friend Siri, which had the weird Pepsi logo thing Joanna Stern used as the weird looking head of the Siri guy in her video about it.

1:02:55Apparently, we're not the only ones who thought that icon was bad and silly because it has been replaced with something that looks kind of like a cat's eye marble or something. It's kind of like a 3D sphere with a wavy white line through it. Gone is the monochrome converted Pepsi symbol slash weird guy head. Yeah, this is a significant improvement. I still don't love it, but this is way, way better than the old one. i'm not sure if it reads as siri to me but the old one was just ugly and this one is not so thumbs up there uh the next one is more interesting they were looking at the chess icon yes the mac macOS still comes with the chess app which is updated recently i believe anyway the icon was very bad and just typical like liquid glassy it was like a you know four square uh checkerboard like it's a chess board and then like a a thin liquid glass material

1:03:43Marco Arment:side view of a night piece it was one of the it was one of the best examples when everybody was complaining about the liquid glass icons last year it was like it was almost always used as an example of how tragic the redesign was because it was such like a a tragic loss of what what was a high personality icon before liquid glass and then it just got this horrendous half-assed rendering yeah and then in in the uh and i think i then we don't see the macOS 26 one and the pictures we're looking at we'll link all these pictures in the show notes they're from various people's social media posts but the mac os 27 beta 1 and 2 had kind of a translucent horse head and 3 and 4 had a more opaque horse head but in beta 5 it's basically an entirely new icon first of all the checkerboard pattern is kind of like black and dark gray and goes edge to edge but most importantly the horsey head in the middle the knight chess piece has nothing to do with liquid glass but is actually as uh kira discovered it's just playing up a like an image like they did the old thing they did is they made a bit mapped image some maybe it's a 3d render maybe it's an illustration but the point is they just did a bit mapped image of a night piece that looks cool and shiny and it's made of glass there's no there's no liquid glass to it whatsoever it is just a bit map but it is a 3d rendering of what looks like glass it looks like a glass night piece i think it looks metal really no oh no this is glass now but you you can't see the background through it at all that's you're seeing like the refraction of the gray and black tile behind it

1:05:09John Siracusa:anyway it's obviously glass yes john this is 100 the point is it is not it is not the liquid glass effects where they have like a bunch of layers and recipes and effects on them nope it's just a bitmap and i see what you're saying that it looks like it's reflecting the background but if you look at it in because they broke open the dot icon file and you can see there is a checkerboard background which looks like a bitmap or maybe it's vectors i can't tell and then there is a bitmap of the thing so yeah i mean maybe they rendered it in a 3d program with the background and got the thing but the point is the liquid glass effects and they're very specular high dates and refractions are not used in this icon they just plain drew an icon and they did it in two pieces and when you see that you're like if you're gonna do that you can just draw it in one piece and now you're back to having a bitmap icon because look at the pieces if you take those two pieces and composite them together in an image editor and then just make it one image it's the same icon like so that is uh i mean i agree that it's the icon is way better like it looks much nicer it looked amateurish before it looks less amateurish now but it is only it's mostly interesting because who cares about the chess app right it's mostly interesting in that it is basically a rejection of the new dot icon system or is it degenerate use of the new icons dot icon systems like you can do this with the new dot icon system you can just put a bitmap there that takes up the whole icon um i didn't look at how this changes when you go to like dark mode and light mode and clear and stuff if they but but looking at the groups and in the icon composer sidebar and this post spike here it looks like this is it there's not like a dark mode and a light mode version of that so it's just going to end up like tinting them and stuff so yeah so much for the uh the vaunted dot icon format i continue to lobby for in a future mac west release forget about the whole clear thing nobody likes it that's stupid uh and just like give us a good way to do icons of any kind that we want obviously get rid of squirrel jail blah blah blah but we'll see apple seems to be leaning in that direction now if you look at the syria icon that we were just talking about that looks like a sphere and look at that dot icon file that is a lot more complicated you can see it's broken up into many pieces like the top half the bottom half this glow that glow maybe those are all just straightforwardly composited together but the point is there are individual components and i think if you look at the dark mode version of the cd icon they are doing interesting things with icon composer to assemble the pieces with a recipe in an interesting way it is not just we gave you a bitmap of that siri marble and and then just shoved onto a white background so two different approaches to make icons that suck less in beta 5 i kind of like it

1:07:36Marco Arment:because like what they basically did with with chess here a little maybe a little less so with siri i mean i'm similar i think what they're going for is like okay instead of having every single icon have to be layers of glass that are exactly in the template style and form that icon composer can support rendered exactly the way icon composer renders them they're saying no no no the theme of modern icons is glass. And you can render that glass in different ways if you want to. We're going to give you this easy way to do it with Icon Composer. If you just make a bunch of, you know, vector shapes and you can stick them in there and this will render as glass.

1:08:16Marco Arment:And for most icons, that'll be okay. But if you want to render your own version of glass, it will still look like part of the cohesive icon and design system as long as it is glassy in some way. so i i think that's that is even though it's again it's just the chess app who cares but i think it's it's a good omen it shows kind of where their heads are at just just as last year the crappy chess icon showed where their heads were at then and again even though this one particular icon doesn't matter that much it's i i think it bodes well so let me go to the safari icon where they're always messing with the safari icon and you'll see pictures in the links in the notes where they show the tahoe version the golden gate beta 1 version and the golden gate beta 5 version and the main visual difference in the golden gate beta 5 version is there are fewer little tick marks around the outside of the compass that defines the safari icon and they put a little circle in the center of the compass and they made like the red the red hand of the compass have a little rounded thing and that circle is a little bit glassy i think that little round circle is literally the only remotely glassy thing in the entire safari icon but anyway here they are out out there taking an icon that really did not get you know run over by tahoe too much like they just made it look a little bit more pale and low contrast like everything in tahoe uh but they're still tweaking it they're still out there saying how many tick marks should there be on the safari icon and those hands could they be a little tiny bit different and apparently the answer is yes so someone's out there changing icon like i would have put safari pretty low down the list of icons that need some attention but they're they're doing things to it i honestly i love seeing this because i have never liked the safari icon since ios 7 i always thought it had too many tick marks it always looked ridiculous and i think this is like a nice little tweak it makes it a little bit less visually weird to me so a thumbs up from me yeah and then they're over in preview which nobody liked the old uh 27 preview icon with just like the little loop uh and i believe the loop i didn't look at the inside of this one but there were some icons in in uh in 26 uh in the various 26 os's that again tried to look glassy but were essentially bitmaps um and one of the things annoys me by the way about icon composer is that for whatever reason they decided that the the squircle background cannot have any transparency which i mean i don't really understand that much because I don't think that would have prevented them from doing anything.

1:10:48And the whole theme is liquid glass. So why can the squircle itself not have transparency? Like, nope, squircle is opaque, which really, anyway, whatever. So there was the little loop icon of the 26 and 27 beta 1 through 4 preview icon. And it looks kind of dowdy. It's just a loop by itself. It's looping into nothing. Like you're not looking at anything. By loop, we mean a little thing with a magnifier on one end and a little glass cone on the other. And you put it down on an image and you put your eye to the little magnifier and you can see it bigger. looking at prints of images up close um it was using the old preview icon in a different way anyway in an ios 27 beta preview has a new icon on ios i believe the mac version has not changed um and it is again the it looks like the old preview icon where there's kind of like a top view of the loop but what is it looking at not a photograph not even i think an abstract representation of a photograph but what looks to me like a bunch of swirly colors in a squircle and that squircle is inset from the larger squircle for some reason and this is going to be a great representation from all my photos of colored swirling gases that i take it doesn't even look like a sunset or a sky like i don't know what it's supposed to be so you know e for effort but i just they're missing the mark here like that i maybe they're trying like we don't want to go back to the old icon it's like well the old icon made it pretty clear that you're talking about photos and the loop makes it pretty clear that you're like looking at photos at least and it has some tradition behind it anyway i think it's an improvement it does look glassier but uh they need to reconsider that weird color blob there because i don't think you know this this is what this is the thing about the icons there's the execution and there's the concept execution on this is okay concept is semi okay but they they blew half of it which is what is it that the loop is looking at that will indicate to me that this is the app i used to look at pictures and they decide we're not going to have a look at a picture yeah and you can uh they changed the settings icon as well we'll link to a post by beta profiles that shows preview series safari and settings all from the the two betas of beta 4 and beta 5 and settings they made the little gears a little more translucent so they're just they're out there tweaking things which i you know and having spent a lot of time with mac os 27 doing some stuff i do like the icon so much better than they were in 26 and i encourage them to continue tweaking but the choices of the ones they're tweaking is strange like did settings need the very subtle adjustments that it got between beta 4 and beta 5 i don't know

1:13:16Marco Arment:but it got them it's nicer i mean this is a weird beta cycle beta 4 lasted a very long time beta 5 seems like it's changing things like this weirdly late in the in the beta season uh and a lot about beta 5 seems like it was actually a step backwards uh which again like it's it seems late in the beta cycle to be having both that kind of change and that kind of regression that we've that we've seen so far in 5 um so what have you seen regress in 5 um on the mac it's kind of a mess with um with control layouts especially in search boxes uh there's a few weirdnesses there it's it's a bit of a weird step to be doing this kind of change now um but that being said overall this has been a very good beta cycle for me but it does kind of it doesn't really give a good indication of how close we are to this being shippable or done you would think by this normally by this time of this of the summer you know by by mid-august you know usually we're about three to five weeks from release and things don't change that much and so to be to see the changes like this happening now is is weird we are sponsored this week by quince so we're sitting here it's

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1:16:21John Siracusa:apple watch overhaul rumors uh mark german writes apple is considering an overhaul to its smart watch lineup in light of the industry's transition to screen-free devices and other new form factors the upcoming apple watch series 12 and ultra 4 slated to get some under the hood improvements including their first real boost in performance in years apple has also been plotting the return of a ceramic case option marco yes this year or next yes there will also be new colors and bands and a series of new health and fitness related upgrades. But bigger moves are coming. Apple's industrial design team has been exploring a broader rethink of its smartwatches over the past year or so and is evaluating several different directions.

1:16:58John Siracusa:Apple's considering new devices with no displays, as well as different types of screens in various sizes. While unlikely to hit the market, round screens have even been considered. I'm told the work also includes potentially adding premium models beyond the Ultra and Hermes variants. On the lower end, Apple's considering more affordable concepts besides the current SE model. The company hasn't settled on a single direction yet, but it is determined to reinvent the lineup in response to growing competition. Thank goodness. I think the biggest slam dunk here is screenless device. Honestly, it's surprising to me that Apple hasn't made it.

1:17:33And I don't even think they need to call it Apple Watch. Whatever you need to do, Apple, to make it okay so you feel like you're not cannibalizing something. they've done the Apple Watch has leaned so heavily into fitness that I believe there is a screenless fitness-based Apple ecosystem device that would sell well and be useful to people and shouldn't cannibalize Apple Watch sales too much and that like solves a lot of problems in that it frees up the Apple Watch to be what it already is it you know there's there's a pricing umbrella under the Apple Watch where it's like well we're not we don't even sell things that this cheap the the screenless one could be way cheaper than any possible apple watch a lot of possibilities there i would even say i know this is not part of the rumor but and i know the whole thing is oh the point is it's screenless a tiny circular screen on essentially screenless device that is not an apple watch and does not run watch os apps and blah blah blah but a tiny circular screen like you see this on a lot of devices these days i was just reading a rumor today of like the the next xbox elite controller having a tiny little screen on it and we've already talked about screens coming up and everything don't think of it as a screen that's going to display software that you're running think of it as just a more configurable part of a dedicated hardware device i could even see that working a very tiny and fine maybe put a tiny little clock on it if you want but like it's not an apple watch it doesn't run watch os it doesn't run watch apps it is a screenless device with a tiny screen i think that would be a great idea but yeah that's that one makes perfect sense to me and i really hope they do it everything else in this rumor I just throw up my hands and say, how many years have we heard about Apple Watch overhauls?

1:19:05I agree that it's needed, but they just seem unable to do it.

1:19:09Marco Arment:So first of all, there has been a lot of executive change over the last year or two. So I think hopefully they can actually do it this time. But I also think this is very exciting to me. When the Apple Watch was first designed and conceived and released, they didn't know what it was for they didn't know what would hit what wouldn't they had a bunch of weird directions that they tried to go at first and some of them hit and most of them didn't and now we have really just continuing evolutions of that same original apple watch concept the concept has not changed since then but the entire market around it has grown up evolved shifted when I look around now like I was in the city last night I was looking around at just people I see on the subway and people I see walking around outside and I look I'm like how many Apple watches do I see it seems maybe this is just anecdotal but it seems like not only is it seemingly going down over time but especially when I look at how many young people have Apple watches on it's almost none young people don't seem to be wearing smart watches at all the most common watch i see on young people which they don't seem to be wearing that many watches in general but the ones i see almost always are vintage themed casio watches that cost 25 dollars those are like super in right like they're super in fashion with all the like young men right now they're all wearing the exact same 25 casio i'll link to it in the show notes you can it's it's very popular it's a perfectly fine watch um that's what everyone's wearing that's what's in right now is the calculator watch gonna come back who knows at this point you know the mullet came back so at this point everything's on the table they're up to the kids are up to cds as we discussed before right retro thing calculator watch has got to be coming in our future sometime you can cheat on your math test with the kids right but right and so they're all wearing like 70s and 80s digital watches but how do you get people to wear the apple watch now i think apple has been shipping basically the same thing for so long now that I think it's passe.

1:21:19Marco Arment:I think it needs a significant overhaul to be remotely cool or fashionable again. How many years has it been, by the way? Let's do the math now. Is it 2011?

1:21:30John Siracusa:No, 2014, I think. I'm not 100 % sure, but I think so. Over a decade. Over a decade with essentially the same design.

1:21:38Marco Arment:Yeah. And, you know, because, yes, they have evolved the design a little bit. It's certainly improved. But if you look at an Apple Watch from a distance today, most non-super Apple nerds wouldn't be able to tell if you were wearing an Apple Watch Series 0 from 2014 or whatever, or the newest one, the Series 11, 12, from last fall. They look basically the same. Again, it's much better. We have the always-on screen. We have cellular. We have all these different things now that weren't in that very first version. But if it worked for you then, it still works for you now. If it didn't work for you then, it probably still doesn't work for you now.

1:22:12Marco Arment:And it just looks old. And the Ultra is the first time they diverge from that. And I do think the Ultra does look distinctive and with a purpose, but that is a narrow section of the Apple Watch product space. Yeah, and I think one of the biggest reasons the Ultra succeeded was just because it was a fresh new look for the Apple Watch. It finally was something else, some other style. Now, it also did cover a few more markets and things like that. The Ultra is a great watch. But ultimately what I mostly see when people wearing the ultra, most of them are not on the side of mountains. They're just wearing it because it was it looked cool and it was different.

1:22:45Marco Arment:And that's fine. That that's what wearables and fashionable fashion relevant devices need. They need to change over time to stay relevant. Meanwhile, so all that's been happening, like, you know, they've been shipping basically the same watch for 12 years. also the entire market of like fitness bands and fitbits and now there's rings and there's all these different things these are all growing like crazy and people like them a lot they're not maybe as popular as the apple watch but they're getting somewhere and for a lot of people like if you if you don't want to wear a watch maybe you'll wear a ring maybe you'll wear a whoop band around your bicep or your ankle or something like people like these they sell and also apple has not really ever served the very low price market well with the apple watch part of this rumor is they're considering more affordable concepts besides the current se model neo that watch yeah and and what would a watch neo be probably not a full-blown watch os computer as we know it today because that's kind of what the se already is is like what's the cheapest one of those we can make it would probably have to be competing with things like fitbit bands that are like 180 bucks like that's that's that market in the same way like when you know in the ipod era they had to eventually make the shuffle just to compete with more of that lower priced end and they had to cut off a bunch of features and things like that but they got there and it was a hit it worked i think we need that for the apple watch and i think they did they wouldn't have originally conceive it that way because they saw the Apple Watch as make a tiny phone, like software wise, hardware wise, kind of architecturally, conceptually, navigationally, it's a tiny phone.

1:24:28Marco Arment:And I think what we've learned over the years is that very few native apps make sense and are good on the watch. Most people who use the Apple Watch probably use no third party apps and very few Apple apps. Most people use the watch for notifications and fitness tracking. And that's about it. There's like, yeah, you know, I have, I have some people who use overcast on the watch, not a lot of them. It's, I can tell you like, and I have with overcast, I have analytics of how many people have a watch paired. Cause you can tell that from what the watch connectivity framework. So it's, so I actually log in my analytics.

1:25:05Marco Arment:How many people have a watch paired to their phone at all? How many of those have the Overcast app installed on the watch? And then how many of those actually use the app? And every one of those is a pretty big step down. As you go down that list, most people who have a watch paired, who have Overcast on their phone, don't even put the app on their watch. And the ones who do put the app on their watch almost never use it. And then the ones who do put it on their watch and use it almost never download files to the apple watch for local playback like when i run around something like most people who use the apple watch are using it for notifications and the built-in fitness tracking so i think there is a huge market for apple to make something like the apple watch that serves those needs notifications and fitness tracking and maybe not even notifications depending you know serves those needs without being a full-blown app platform a full-blown watch os computer like i think a lot of people would buy things like that and they can be lower end they can be mechanically and computationally simpler they don't need to be these whole computers they can be smaller maybe they can make something like that like the aura ring like the aura rings is like i i'm i'm shocked the aura ring exists but it actually is pretty good and the whoop band like people love their whoop bands part of that is the physical thing part of it is their whole app and software ecosystem but there's this whole world out there of all these different devices that have seen huge success and apple currently with their current watch strategy can't even compete in that world because their current watch strategy requires all of their wearables to be you know basically full-blown computer watches and you can see kind of like they tried to kind of attack the hot that the kind of upper end of the body so to speak with the airpods with their heart sensors and aren't there some beats uh things that also have heart sensors in the in the headphones i don't but those don't work that well and not a lot of people use or want that or are constantly wearing earbuds anyway so i think getting their watch strategy away from the idea that everything has to be a computer with an app store on it and focus on the things people actually want and and make a broader product line i think that's very wise just as it worked with the ipod line you know not every ipod could play video not every ipod could you know had like you know all the different media functions and everything but they all kind of serve like okay music players but much more broadly here we're gonna we're gonna satisfy these different needs of all the different models and all these different price points and physical sizes the watch is the perfect place to do that yeah i do wonder if they'll go as far as to the shuffle end of things i think they should but i wonder if they're like because the thing things you can do with screenless stuff that are health related, surely they will not go below the level of like whatever they sell, it will have fault detection because that's the thing you can do.

1:27:58It doesn't require a screen, doesn't require complicated centers, just basically accelerometers. Fall detection is important. A lot of older people who are at risk for falls don't want to wear a computer watch, but maybe you can get them to wear something that just looks like a nice wristband that does that, blah, blah, blah. But then you go to, okay, what about pulse detection, blood oxygen, all those really expensive sensors that are at the bottom of the watch and take up a bunch of room will apple be able to resist putting them on a screenless device and i hope they do because just with fall detection and like maybe some you know like whatever the simple sort of uh pulse heart rate things you can do without trying to get their blood oxygenation by shining light through their blood vessels and stuff like just just back it off because prices like like the neo price is really important the real most important aspect of this thing so go all the way shuffle the thing about the shuffles is they were dirt cheap like from apple they were dirt cheap they had nothing in them they were just as tiny especially as time went on like the shuffle i mean like the white shuffle was like mostly air and they eventually got it down to like the trident stick of gum with no buttons which was too far but boy was that cheap right apple can go that far down and by the way there are rumors about apple investigating rings it's not part of this rumor thing but there have been various reports about apple investigating rings and i kind of understand why apple's a little bit wary of that because rings on fingers have a lot of uh issues uh in terms of fit and uh dangerous situations that maybe they don't want to get into at this point and they maybe they feel like they have they've got the wrist they should continue to concentrate on the wrist and i kind of agree with them because as you were saying marco they haven't even fully exploited the wrist like they've just done the one thing which is a good thing and they dominate the smart watch market but things that go on your wrist is bigger than the smart watch market it's you know there are many things that can go on your wrist don't have to be a computer watch and just just you know there's a room for at least two other products there and then you know again what the story is about is what about the actual apple watch just the plain old apple watch it's good people like it it dominates the market they're finally going to make it faster for the first time in years which is great we'll get a new soc maybe it'll be lower power maybe the battery like that product category is not exhausted the watch battery still doesn't last long enough all right the watches are still too big, too bulky and too heavy, right?

1:30:08In the grand scheme of things, there's a lot of room for improvement there. If you could make a watch and a plain old Apple computer watch that lasts twice as long and weighed half as much and was twice as thin, people would go gaga. So keep pursuing that, right? Just the years of sort of stasis of just being like, well, it's about the same size. They've really been iterating on the screen. It's about the same size, about the same weight. We changed the materials, we changed the bands, but it's not getting super duper thinner. so it fluctuates in thickness and mainly where what we're doing is we're making the screen better and better and better and better edge edge on all the time better colors brighter brighter that was all great and everything let's iterate on some other aspect and obviously yes also after a decade after more than a decade it's time for a new physical design not that the current design is bad but a decade is a long time in a fashion conscious segment and you there's only so far you can coast on the bands because that's really where apple is concentrated with like oh it's a fashion product you can't sell the same thing every year well we don't we change up the bands all the time but there is another part of the watch besides the band and i know it is just a screen and it's like well there's no fashion to that it's just a black hole where we put oled pixels or whatever kind of pixels they have i think they're still all is right yeah um but there is the shape of the thing that's on your wrist and when i see people wearing apple watches in real life especially if they're a smaller person i'm still uh taken aback by exactly how big they are because yes i know people love to wear big watches but i see people wearing them who are probably not big mechanical watch people but they are in effect wearing a big non-mechanical watch it's so big and so thick on their wrist and it has to be that size to get decent battery life apple used to make much smaller devices that got horrendous battery life and so now all the apple watches there's been watch inflation to support the new batteries uh we're kind of on the cusp of uh you know what is it the i forget what it is one of you two knows the the new battery chemistry that everyone's using for higher density batteries and phones what is that one is it oh life po feffy for some some on the chat room will say but anyway um i'm hoping the new watch will have that uh no not solid state battery the chat room said um it's i keep thinking carbon ceramic but that's brakes anyway um i think they do it in the macbook air that has the newer battery chemistry but the other the not the macbook air the iphone air but the iphones don't have it as yet anyway that would be a great boon to the watch because it still needs more battery it still needs to be thinner it still needs to be lighter it still needs to be better and it needs a redesign so this is this is a vague rumor the only definitive things are like hey the series 12 and ultra 4 don't expect anything except finally a new soc which is great thumbs up maybe the year after that maybe the year after after that um a lot of things i feel like are up in the air when i read these rumors um because i it's like past the uh it's past the turnus horizon right it's just like okay there are these there are these rumors there's like but there's like this thing out there that's like a potential discontinuity and it's not like there's going to be this big change of plans i read but like the future past that point the future i feel like is unknown until we start to get a feel for what his deal is yeah or even just even just learn that his deal is he's not going to make waves for the first two years that's something to know right but we don't know so past that all these things about like oh a big watch overhaul is coming he's going to have a big say in whether a big watch overhaul is coming and when it's coming because the watch overhaul is going to happen in his timeline and he can delay that accelerate that change his mind about that like that's going to be his call no plans that tim cook makes now are going to affect a product that's going to potentially launch years after he's gone so i a lot of things are up in the air on that but uh but you know and and the other thing about the apple watches part of the reason apple hasn't been motivated seemingly to do a lot of stuff here is that they are so dominant like every time i see like you know share of the smart watch industry it's it's like it's like apple and the ipad practically it's like what is the tablet market it is the ipad and other what is the smart watch market is apple and other and i think apple's turning its eye towards what is the uh fitness tracker that's not a smart watch market apple's not even a player there so they have to look over there and they say well why aren't we a player over there that is a growth opportunity there's a lot of competitors there they have products they're all competing for each other we should get into that fight and i just they just feel like they've just you know not that they're resting on their laurels with the apple watch but they haven't felt this pressing need to as this rumor says overhaul the apple watch why would we overhaul the product that is dominant and that's you know that's not a good way to be like again see the classic example of the uh ipod mini why would we overhaul the ipod we dominate this market of portable mp3 players well you overhaul it because you can make something better and better and you keep iterating and that's how you stay in the lead so hopefully this rumor comes true sometime uh in turnus's watch so to Wow.

1:35:04Marco Arment:What excites me about this is that it seems like, first of all, it seems like maybe this is promising in terms of like what Ternus will do to stagnant or complacent product lines like the Apple Watch. But also, the Apple Watch has just never seemed like they really were stepping on the gas. It really never seemed like it had a lot of like effort and gusto behind it. it's always felt like it has a staff of like three people working on it and they were they and they you know maybe they were a little bit tired like there is so much potential for what the apple watch and the apple watch family of products could be what it could include hardware and software wise different form factors different sizes and they've just done almost none of it and you know i'm not just asking about custom watch faces you know just in generally watch os is really seemingly very under-resourced very under-invested in um the apple watch hardware as mentioned just is just so repetitive so let's see what if they're if they're really like putting a bunch of effort into it that's great let's see what effort can do because we i don't think we've really seen that uh and in the meantime if they want to give us a few you know fun new materials like ceramic and metals to play with, you know, to tide us over.

1:36:23Marco Arment:Cool. Great. I'm in. But they need to do something because the Apple watch looks very dated and I don't see a lot of younger people adopting it. Yeah.

1:36:35John Siracusa:I mean, I think we are long overdue for a redesign bigger than the ultra, not physically bigger, but more meaningful redesign than the ultra. And I think, while the watches have gotten a lot less chunky and and you know lighter and so on and so forth i still think battery life especially on year two for me every single apple watch the the year two battery life is suspect on a good day and and i i think that some of that is just you know battery chemistry is only but so good and these watches these devices are only but so big and i just told you i like you know thin watches but then you can't have a big battery So, like, I get why Apple is up against a wall here, but I think the physical design could and should be a little different.

1:37:21John Siracusa:I will be very sad if and when, I'm sure it's really just when, they changed the mounting mechanism for the bands. Because across both size watches, we have a lot of watch bands we've collected over the last decade. So I'll be sad about that, but maybe it's time. And I don't know, I hate to say change for change's sake, but at this point, you know, 12-ish years on, I think change for change's sake may be enough, you know, it might be time.

1:37:49Marco Arment:Well, and also, like, you know, what people want, you know, when you say things like significantly better battery life, is that possible? Yes, you can look around the market and you can see things like Garmin's and, you know, the sport watch category. Like you can see, oh, yes, there are indeed smartwatches that have way better battery life. How do they do it? Usually the answer is they make a bunch of different tradeoffs in terms of screen technology and computational capabilities. It's like if it's going to be a full blown computer on your wrist that can run all these apps and have all these, you know, have this super bright OLED screen and be able to be your music player and stream things over cellular and have Bluetooth support.

1:38:29Marco Arment:If it's going to do all that, yeah, that's going to be kind of rough on the battery. But there's a whole bunch of fitness watches that are a few hundred bucks and have amazing multi-day or sometimes even multi-week battery life. How do they do it? By not doing all those things, by making totally different trade-offs. There's no reason why Apple couldn't make a product that did that. Maybe it would be something else. Maybe you wouldn't be able to do things like take your phone calls on your wrist and run my little stupid breakout game in Overcast while it's waiting to download podcasts. But fine.

1:39:07Marco Arment:Obviously, people want that, and they're willing to make those tradeoffs in a lot of cases. Right now, if you want something – basically, the Apple Watch right now serves a very narrow band, so to speak, of needs. If you want a lot of computational capabilities, a little bit of battery life, and a medium to high price, Apple's got you covered. But if you want anything outside of that, if you want a physically smaller device, much smaller, or if you want significantly more battery life, or all these different – if you need it to be significantly cheaper than$200 or$300, all these different edge cases, every one of those is a market.

1:39:47Marco Arment:Suppose you don't want a glowing screen on your wrist, but you still want the health tracking stuff. a lot of people do. They buy other products for that. That's a very big market. We can see. There's no reason Apple can't compete in those markets. They have just chosen not to by having the watch be this very narrowly focused product line. Any sign of expansion there, I think, is probably a good thing. I had to look up the battery chemistry because the chat room failed me. Silicon carbon batteries. That is the slight alteration to lithium-ion battery chemistry that all of the fancy phones have been using for a little while, but so far not iPhones with the possible exception of the iPhone Air.

1:40:28John Siracusa:John, you want to tell me about passwords? Yeah, I don't know why I was doing this, but I had occasion to be in passwords, the passwords app of the Mac in particular, but it's the same cloud-synced password collection that used to be called iCloud Keychain before it had better marketing. But anyway, now it's the passwords app and it's your iCloud Sync collection of passwords and passkeys and all that stuff. And I was in that app. Well, actually, I do know why I was there because that's the second part of this. And I have a tip for folks who have never really thought about that app other than like, oh, that's where the stuff, you know, when I autofill stuff in web pages, that's where it comes from.

1:41:01And maybe occasionally you go to the app to look something up. But most of the time people interact with it indirectly through autocomplete and forms and stuff like that. and my tip is open the app the passwords app and use it and go find the passwords that you use frequently you probably know what they are do you log it whatever you log into frequently whatever you find yourself auto completing frequently and give the passwords that you use frequently names in the passwords app there is a place for you to name them and the app does a great job of sort of naming them by itself like it picks a name if you don't enter a name but you can enter anything you want there.

1:41:38Picking names, especially short names that you know will fit within an autocomplete field to remind you of what the thing is. Incredibly helpful. Also, the names are searchable. So when you're searching for something, you can find it. If you have multiple email addresses and multiple accounts, or if you use one email address for everything, like going to the passwords app and searching for your email address is not going to be helpful. Maybe you remember the domain name, Maybe you don't, but take something as simple as Apple IDs or Apple accounts as they're known today. Do you know all of the host names and websites associated with logging in with your Apple ID?

1:42:14I bet, you know, some of them are like, oh, it's probably apple.com. And yeah, apple.com will get you something, but it'll get you a lot of stuff too that is not your Apple ID. Call your Apple ID account and passwords, Apple ID or Apple account. Or if you have a developer account or a regular one, call it Apple ID parentheses developer, Apple ID parentheses these personal name them however you want but i i just realized i've spent so much time like going through multiple possible choices in autocomplete menus because often there's two three four sometimes more possible choices to autofill for this field which one is it and you have to look and it gives you enough information to mostly look because it'll show you the username and the title is usually pretty good but like i don't have to put up with parsing that i can just call them what i want like logging into an aws account there's like the iam users and the root user which and sometimes it's the same email address or else which one is which just call it iam you know call it aws parentheses root account and like give it the name that you'll see and pick so if you have never done that spend a day doing it and the great thing about it is as long as you don't do something really dumb and like lie in your names and say that it's something that it's not it's non-destructive you're not changing passwords you're not regenerating passwords you're not changing usernames you're just putting a label on a thing putting a name on a thing and even if you like the name that's there you can retype the name that's there just so the another version a future version doesn't change what that name is so that is my pro tip name your passwords do either one of you

1:43:42Marco Arment:do this with your passwords i do it in one password all the time yeah exactly like this is a one

1:43:47John Siracusa:password thing as far as i'm concerned and i i as far as i knew it wasn't like compulsory compulsory but it's the way one password works is that they basically expect you to have a name for everything

1:43:57Marco Arment:yeah and i'll use names like you know like you know apple overcast apple yeah yeah there you go that's because that's because many things i have multiple accounts or like you know things i have to separate for the restaurant or for overcast or like for personal like or stuff that's atoms or tiffs that that we have in a shared vault like you know there's all sorts of things like that and yeah of course you have to give them names so you can tell them apart i will even oftentimes um for things that we have a lot of logins like apple ids i will use the one password star feature or favorite i don't know what it's called but you can you can mark one as as a favorite that then shows up on the top of the list with a little star next to it in the autocomplete drop downs so if there's one that you use all the time and maybe it's like in the middle of the list alphabetically you can you can put it there and have it pop up at the top it's really nice if only you could do that with email addresses and contacts i know there are those apps that let you reorder the contacts and i do that i use those apps that let you reorder them but I'm not entirely sure that the the top one is the most favorite like whenever I need to autocomplete my email address in a form it shocks me that there's no there's no ability for me to teach it this is the email address that I always want yes I have a thousand email addresses no I'm not going to delete the old ones for my contact those are valid email addresses for me but always autocomplete this one and so I put it at the top and just hope for the best but favoriting would be nice but yeah to the credit of the password slash iCloud keychain system it auto generates pretty sensible names.

1:45:18And for most people who don't have a million accounts, that's probably fine. I'm not saying everyone needs to do this. But if you're listening to this podcast, chances are you're like us and you have way too many accounts. And especially like you said, with shared, you know, you shared vaults and one password or shared password groups with the password app. Once you start sharing things, good names really make it even more of a difference. Otherwise, you're like squinting at like what the what the username is, which is often like a lower contrast font and is smaller and stuff. So name your passwords.

1:45:44And the reason I was doing this, The reason I got into this thing is, as we all know, if anyone uses Slack a lot, when you set up a new device or do anything that sort of resets your world, the worst part of that in the modern age where almost everything sort of can come along with you migrating your system is logging back into all your Slacks.

1:46:04Marco Arment:Oh, yeah. If you have one Slack, fine. The worst. But Slack, for whatever reason, doesn't really cloud sync anything. my kingdom for them to at least cloud sync like the order of all of my things in the sidebar and which slacks i'm in and blah blah blah but they don't so you're just like hi i'm slack i've never heard of you before i'm like oh no okay so anyway we've all been through that dance my question to the two of you before i begin this is what is your mental model of how logging into a slack works what What is Slack's account system as it relates to workspaces or whatever they call them that you log into?

1:46:41John Siracusa:Well, it's tough, right? Because for the longest time, every workspace, whatever it is, was a completely separate silo from every other one. And for the longest time, it seemed like never the two or three or six or ten shall meet. And then at some point a couple of years ago now, they seem to try to build or create or whatever a universal Slack-level login that could be then used across different workspaces. But the ship had already sailed for us old-time Slack users, so I don't know what the right answer is anymore. I almost preferred it when it was each silo had its own login, which was a pain, a royal pain, like you were saying.

1:47:23John Siracusa:but at least it was understandable and predictable well now like you can you can log in with one

1:47:28Marco Arment:email address have it said a stupid thing here and then you can like you know log into multiple section that but the problem is like i have i have to whenever i have to set up a new device i have to do it with like three or four different email addresses because like okay well is it was it the overcast email was it my current personal email was it my old personal email and like there's it's just it's such a pain and then oh i gotta set them in the right order what order i have them in again oh this one requires two fa that's a whole different login system like it's it's a mess so what you described is also kind of how i understood it to be low casey has added some complications that i had thought didn't exist but now i'm not sure um so my idea was my mental model was uh kind of like what marco was saying i again for historical reasons have multiple email addresses that i log into slacks with just it just turned out that way i made a mistakes made several mistakes early on email addresses change blah blah and so you the first step is for this slack what email address essentially what username whatever what email address goes with this one how do i log into this okay but up until recently my mental model was once you have gone through slack's crappy login system with one of whatever email address you pick and say you pick the right one and you successfully log into slack you're trying to log into that i think of as like that's an account so i have my like you know email address number one account and i've logged into one of my slacks with it and the slack website to its credit several years ago started saying hey that email address can log into these five other slacks too do you want to log into them and you'd go through and say yes i want to log into that i want to right that's one of the ways you could tell which email address was associated with which thing and so my mental model is i have let's say i have two email addresses i log into slacks with i have two Slack accounts, one with email address A and one with email address B.

1:49:16Some of my Slacks, I log in with a Slack account number one, and some of my Slacks I log into with a Slack account number two. That was my mental model of how Slack works. But as Casey pointed out, maybe that's not how it actually works. Because I got into a situation trying to just log back into Slack's where there was some like, I would log into one of my email addresses, and I would log into Slack's with it and then eventually would say no sorry your password's wrong i'm like how can that be i'm i just use that that email address and that password to log into three slacks and when i go to the fourth and it's not the same thing as saying oh it's the other email address that's a different error message that message is hey that email address doesn't even have an account on this slack that's a different message this message is oh that's the right email address it you could be able to log into the slack with that email address but your password is wrong and I had done so many of them like oh maybe I screwed it up or maybe I auto completed wrong or whatever so I would go to change my password but it's like where do you go to change your password for I again I'm thinking of my slack account as being associated with an email address and then I looked at my passwords thing and I had multiple entries for email address a slack host names and different passwords I'm like is that just historical like do they somehow like like how is this working you know because it would it would say them by like you know slack workspace one dot slack.com slack workspace two dot slack.com and i saw different passwords i'm like oh that just must be historical baggage because of course for each slack for each email address there's one password that works for that account but then i found when i could log into i used one of the passwords from those other entries and it let me log into that slack that i couldn't get into so i use email address a with a one set one set of just one password login login login success then i use that same email address to another slack with a different password login success so now i'm like what the hell is the system here because i use two different passwords with the same email address and successfully logged into four slacks three of them with one password and one of them with a second password i don't even know how to represent that in the passwords app right because you can't put like workspace name.slack.com is the only thing because you often get funneled through like the main slack.com like flow before you pick a workspace and so i don't know i eventually got logged into all my slacks and i like dutifully saved the passwords this is another feature by the way it's one of the one of the few features that i missed from tahoe the 26 os is is that i believe in tahoe they added uh history to the password the apple passwords app so it'll keep a history of your old passwords so basically i had to make a bunch of dummy entries and passwords to say i think i might need this password for slack but i put fake email address fake host names in the website thing which is hard to do because it tries to prevent you from doing this but i'm just like look i need to save this password because it did work for me but i changed my password on what i think of as my the account associated with that to this thing but this other password still works for the is it just a cash propagation delay anyway my point is i have no freaking idea how log into slacks work i know how it should work we all know how it should work it should be like single sign on sign to an account authorized for like there's a million ways that it should work it should all be cloud synced it should all be so much easier than it is they they shouldn't bury the password auto complete behind the link like just but i'm just i find it baffling and i'm not asking for someone slack to come and explain it because i think casey basically did like they basically had an old system they had a new system there's a transition period so i probably essentially have three slack accounts email address a old email address a new and then email address b email address c like i i that's probably the situation or that situation is untenable because i have no i have no mental model for that and the apple passwords app cannot handle saving those passwords and by the way i tried to when i logged in with the second password to the same with the same email address i said well let me just at least just change that password should be the same as my other one so at least i can pretend they're unified but no it said you can't use that password you can't use a password that you use in the past so maybe at some point they did have the same password which to your point casey maybe that was like when they were separated it's madness slack i still like to use your app but your account system makes no sense whatsoever and I literally don't understand it.

1:53:34It's rough out there.

1:53:36Marco Arment:All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Quince, Factor, and Claude. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership, the many perks of membership, is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in Overtime, we're going to be talking about more AI company hardware rumors. The OpenAI Donut and Anthropic Silicon, whatever that means. Join to listen to atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.

1:54:26Marco Arment:Accidental. Accidental. Who is accidental? Accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-S-S-E-R-O-Q. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to.

1:55:03John Siracusa:Accidental. Accidental.

1:55:06Marco Arment:Tech podcast. So long. Someone in the chat room said, I thought you logged into Slack with codes that email you. Yeah, that's what they try to lead you towards. And if you do that, you'll forget that you even have a password, but you do.

1:55:18John Siracusa:You certainly do. John, I believe you're bringing us an after show tonight. right yeah this is uh basically old news but i mean maybe i can use it use myself as a cautionary tale um that's never good yeah i don't i don't like this at all yeah as we all know from uh listening to the show for a long time i skipped mac os 26 because i didn't like it um and i spent a lot of time trying to make that be the case if you don't want to upgrade to the next version of mac os uh it's difficult if you uh you know your mac will say hey there's a new version of mac os It's called 26. You sure you don't want it?

1:55:54And it will bug you about it. And you can get it to stop bugging you mostly, but you have to live with a few things. If you keep system settings in your dock, you might have to live with the red badge being there, which is not the end of the world, but I don't like it. Why would you put system settings in your dock? That's what the Apple menu is for. System settings has got to be in the dock, man. It's got to be. You're nuts. Really? I hate people who don't have system settings in the dock. Oh, it's in the Apple menu. Just go to it. Oh, command space, blah, blah, blah. No, no. It needs to be in the dock.

1:56:21John Siracusa:What? You are a lunatic. I go there all the time, and I don't want to go to the Apple menu, and I don't want to command space. I just want to click on it. Command space, set, enter. System settings should be in everyone's stock. When it's not in people's stocks, I get a no idea, and I put it there immediately. Hard no on this, John. Out of curiosity, what kinds of things do you frequently go into there for? Oh, God. I'm in there all the time. For what? For what? What are you changing? If you are a Mac developer, you're going to spend a lot of time in system settings, let me tell you. Oh, you're like resetting permissions and stuff?

1:56:48just privacy and security alone is a maze of crap that you're going to be wandering to but also changing all the appearance settings changing all the accessibility settings xcode is getting better about having those like in previews and doing ui automation and stuff but you will spend

1:57:01Marco Arment:a lot of time in system settings oh man i would in that case i would have claude sponsor um write me like a script to do all like to change all those things over and over again like whatever i need to do like that's that's wild yeah i keep hoping xcode will get better at that and it is it is getting better but it's still not entirely there especially when you're dealing with tcc stuff just like it's there there are complications to mac develop suffice to say there are complications to match with anyway i want system settings to be there and so i see the badge and i don't like it and remember very shows past were like oh someone figured out that if you add like a profile not full-blown mdm but you've got like a profile to your mac you can tell it hey defer os updates for like 90 days and just keep reapplying that profile but then it turns out that was like a bug it was supposed to be defer uh prompting for an update 90 days after the os was released but there was a bug that it was just 90 days after you installed the profile and then apple fixed that bug and then 90 days since tau's introduction elapsed and so the badge was back so i was out there fighting the badge then another thing someone suggested was the badge was that badge came back i'm like oh it's bad and by the way it's not just the badge and it's not just my computer i'm doing this on my computer but also my wife's computer and my kids two computers because they also didn't want the new os i didn't spoil i didn't tell them that they should dislike it they decided on their own like word on the street was they didn't want the new os okay they they don't listen to this podcast word on syracuse street yeah like whatever high school college no they didn't want the new os and but the problem with that is if i say fine uh just don't do an update like those things will prompt you like when you least they find you when you're weak and just as all it comes up updates are ready do you want to install and the choices are like uh yes install or later tonight and they just click later tonight and then they wake up the next day and their thing's updated it's not super malicious it's not super annoying but over the course of like an entire school year with me not being present the odds of them not accidentally updating tahoe are low so i needed some way to make it so they wouldn't be prompted in any way it's not about the badge because they don't care they don't even have some settings in their dock it's it's the little you know upper right corner of the thing of like hey did you know there's a uos an updated and the thing is you do want them to apply like the like the security updates and stuff but you don't want them to apply the tahoe update and dialogues aren't always clear and so i need to do something on all their computers too to prevent them from accidentally updating and so i was looking for something else that i could do because i did the profile and there are things that wore out right and then people were suggesting okay go in the software update thing and instead of picking you can pick like do you want to do beta updates i'm like well i certainly don't want to do beta updates right they said but no you can pick sequoia beta updates sequoia's mac os 15 it's the one everyone we want to stay on so instead of being on the regular update channel say i want to be on the sequoia public beta update channel like that's great there's not going to be any more sequoia public betas so we'll always say you're up to date right so i put everybody on the sequoia public beta update channel badge went away no more being bugged about software updates right thought it was great until many months passed and the thing is apple was releasing updates on the sequoia beta update channel for things like security updates and for whatever reason in particular 15 i believe it's 15.7.8 had like nine betas i thought it was a bug i thought does this thing not know it already installed 15.7.8 it's telling me i 15.7.8 is ready again but then I looked at the build numbers.

2:00:26I'm like, no, this is a new build of 15.7.8. And then I looked up on the internet, how many builds of Sequoia 15.7.8 have there been? There've been a lot. And so there was, it's like, fine, whatever. We're doing software updates. Like I know it's annoying, but you're not updating Tahoe, right? No badge on the icon. And the policy is simple to explain to kids. If you see an update, just do it because it's a security update. Your computer's fine. It won't update to the bad OS. This system held for a long time. Kids came back from school. everything's still fine then on my wife's computer i was on her computer doing some development stuff because sometimes i need to do development stuff on apple silicon and sometimes i don't want to use my macbook air um and one of the updates come through and i saw that it was like safari beta because if you're on the sequoia public beta train you also get offered like safari beta updates it's not safari technology preview that's a whole different thing purple safari this is like when there was again security updates or like new versions of safari that support sequoia it's good to be clear it's good that apple is doing this it's good that apple isn't abandoning their old os this is good that they're offering security updates and new versions of safari for for mac os 15 like all thumbs up but remember all these macs are on the sequoia beta update train so they're getting these updates and she installed one of the safari beta updates because you know the policy was if the updates come their security updates just do them and it hosed her system so badly that i you know first basically my daughter's account on the system likes the apple id the stuff in her apple id stops syncing like her photos stop syncing and everything stops syncing i was like all right well i'll just sign out of her apple id and sign back in which i don't do i hate doing that but it's like in the end if things aren't syncing you can't figure it out you've done all the other diagnostics and you've just tried everything you possibly try reboot with the shift key down or whatever the current incantation is like try to reset everything it just didn't work log out of the apple id back in so i logged her out of her apple id could not log her back into her apple id that's bad that's not good so i did what you do in this modern age hey fable what what's the deal what what and so there it is it's decompiling things it's checking on system demons it's doing all the things and it basically figures out hey here's the problem going on it it sorts through the giant wad of stuff that goes in the system log that you could never possibly sort through and it says here's what's happening during the login process is accepting the username and password which are correct the login is succeeding and then it's going to the part where it's going to log you in and it we basically get a link error where it can't find some library or the library it finds is not what's expected and i trace where that library came from that library was part of the safari update and so the safari update replaced or hosed a library that the apple id system needs to log in and so now she just couldn't log into her apple id and there's nothing i could do about it i'm like all right i'll just install regular sequoia on top of this and it's like can't install an old version of sequoia on top of a new version of sequoia like really you can't it's like no you really can't

2:03:35John Siracusa:Hey, John, you know what you can do to avoid all these problems? Update your f***ing operating system, you lunatic. Good God, this is such a self-created issue. Well, you know, so here we are. Anyway, so there I was. And again, this is not my computer. So I don't really have the luxury of like, I'll sort this out. And you know, my wife's account works, so I'm not really in the doghouse here. My daughter doesn't use the computer frequently, but the fact that she is no longer logged into her Apple ID and all her stuff is not on the computer anymore. more is not ideal so i do need to resolve this and so i resolved it the only possible way i could but just update oh no golden gate beta oh of course you did of course jump right over tahoe and let me tell you it was the best thing i ever did because golden gate is so much nicer than tahoe so yeah i updated my wife's computer to golden gate beta and not only is it was it was great because first of all this solved my problem no more badges it's pretty stable and also i started doing mac os 27 development over there i because i would had been using i had a taco computer that i was using for tahoe development because i have to release my apps and i have to make sure they work correctly on tahoe even though i'm not running it so my dev machine is running tahoe and that's great and everything but what about mac os 27 development right so now i have three dev machines mac os 15 dev machine which is my main dev machine mac os 26 dev machine which is the macbook air mac os 27 beta dev machine which is unfortunately for my wife her computer but hey she's at work during the day so i can use her computer and i've been doing tons of mac os 27 development and doing lots of fun stuff that we'll talk about in future episodes and so yeah she's running uh golden gate beta she barely even noticed that she's running a different os which as far as i'm concerned is thumbs up that's exactly what you want you don't want them to sit down in front of the computer and say what happened i don't understand anything i briefly tried to show her the new siri and she did not care but whatever that's that the computer's working it's running mac os 27 beta anyway the cautionary tale is um if you really really don't want that badge to be there and you are fighting against it you can end up hosing yourself because the rules about mac os updating are so harsh now that for me to get out of the situation i was in i essentially would have had to restore from backup which i could have done but would have taken so many hours and would have been disruptive to somebody's life.

2:05:57So going forward to 27 was, fingers crossed, I think the best thing available to me because I really didn't want to restore from a backup. And, you know, reinstall 15 non-beta, restore from backup on top of it. It would have been fine, but it would have taken, I swear it would have taken eight hours because these things take so long, especially since she doesn't have an SSD time machine backup. She's got a spinning hard drive time machine backup and a NAS time machine backup and a Backblaze backup. Right. but all those things restoring from all those are slow um i think she's also got a super duper clone but also on a spinning disc unfortunately she is she is the she gets the hand-me-down backup stuff she doesn't she doesn't get the eight terabyte ssd uh time machine uh backup drive that i have on my thing um yeah so that's the cautionary tale be careful be careful about beta updates because you would think oh as long as the beta works fine i'm fine but then the safari update comes along and stops you from logging into your apple id you know the other

2:06:49John Siracusa:way of looking at this cautionary tale is like i said stop being a dingus and just update your operating system i mean come on i did i updated it so far i'm updated to the max i mean on the one side you should be okay before all your flying monkeys come and attack me you one should be able to stay on the operating system you like and tell apple to piss off i don't want any updates and to be fair you can as long as you're okay with the badge and an occasional dialogue and i think the dialogues are actually the worst part because again i can't trust my family not to accidentally click the wrong button on one of those dialogues which is not on them it's just like you know how it is the dogs come up you don't know what they mean yeah yeah go away go away sometimes the go away go away button is update tonight and that's that's what gets you you're right and and again like in the grand scheme of things one should be able to do this and you should not be nagged incessantly about it that being said this is such an own goal my guy it's such an own goal i did to myself what's that is a cautionary tale learn from me updating safari can make you not able to log into your apple id you wouldn't think it would happen it's probably a bug i could have reported it but it was too late for me and this is again assuming fable is right and it's diagnostic i believe what it said it showed me the log lines i'm like yeah that seems plausible i don't know if it was actually true but you know all i know is that i couldn't solve the problem myself and neither could it so this was his explanation take take that for what you will i am sorry for you I really am but you should be happy for me because uh 27 is uh nice and fun and it's got some cool new apis macOS