711: Hot Dog on an Actuator

15:21Casey Liss:yeah i got airpods five and i was like i didn't is this something to do with my new phone or my new airpods but when i put them in first of all it sounded like uh head tracking was on because i would hear the sound like come from my left and then go to my right or whatever and then they would even out and i didn't know what the deal with that was and then the second thing was when i took the uh the airpods out i take out my right one fine and then when i go to grab my left one my fingers would brush against the microphone grading on the outside and the microphone would pick that up as if i'm rubbing my finger on like a lavalier mic or something and would make huge static in my ear i'm like what the hell like because i have i have everything off like not Not in any mode.

16:00Casey Liss:All effects are off. So it shouldn't even be using that microchrome. But every time I did it, when I took out the left one, because I take them out one at a time, when I took out the left one, my fingers would hit the little speaker grid and it would make terrible static. And I couldn't figure out why.

16:10John Siracusa:So BombSquad writes, The AirPods' weird sound change when putting in the second AirPod and the microphone being activated when you take out one AirPod is almost certainly the same thing. The listening mode, like transparency or noise cancellation setting, is discrete between one AirPod and two AirPod use cases. the fix is to only put in one air pod then go and go to your air pod setting and control center and switch the listen to the listening mode that you want do the same with two air pods in now they

16:37Casey Liss:should be fixed have you tried this john i did this and it worked and i think bomb squad has the right idea that essentially there's two sets of settings there there's the settings for when one air pod is in it doesn't matter if it's the right or left i think but there's the one air pod setting and then there's the two air pod setting and for whatever reason the one air pod setting was defaulting to transparency mode. And so when I put the AirPods in, I put them in one at a time. I put one in, it would be in transparency mode. And then I would put the second one in, it would go to my two AirPods mode, which was everything off.

17:07Casey Liss:And so that's why I heard the weird difference between left and right, you know, when I was putting them in. And same thing, when I take them out, as soon as I take out one AirPod, it's like, oh, you're in one AirPod mode now. And one AirPod mode is configured for transparency. And then I would take out the left one and I would hear the speaker. So many people wrote in to say, oh, this is because when you have one AirPod in, they always default to transparency mode and those people are close but i think that bomb squad gets it right in that it's not regardless of what the default is it's not like oh they always do one they always do transparency with one airpod they do whatever you set it to with one airpod that may be the default but they're just simply two sets of settings it's not as if they're saying oh they they always default to transparency but when you have one they'll they'll one when you put one in and change the settings that will be the setting forever more i think so that's the situation, I would not have guessed this.

17:54Casey Liss:It has solved my problem.

17:55John Siracusa:All right. With regard to excising all of the Intel apps from your computer, there's a way to do this that I presume John found. You can go into system settings and then about and then Intel based apps, and it will tell you all of the Intel based apps. There's a sheet that comes up that says support ending for Intel based apps. Intel based apps running on Rosetta will not open in Mac OS 28. The following apps need to be updated for apple silicon an update may be available on the developer's website and then there's a learn more link we will put the learn more link into the show notes so a couple things

18:29Casey Liss:in this so last episode i was saying i was going to like what used to be called system profiler i think it's called system information now because that of course lists all your applications and the architecture activity monitor also show running applications and their architecture there's a bunch of ways to do this but apparently in mac os 27 they added this like to a much higher level like in system settings about it's right there on the about screen there's there's an intel based

18:53John Siracusa:app setting and i'm sorry oh it's in general about yeah sorry did i miss something yes yes

18:59Casey Liss:you missed general that's okay yeah anyway but the point is it's you don't have to launch a separate app you don't have to click on detail there's more info it's it's much more prominently placed and the second thing is as many people have noted there is this text that you just read and there's also a notification if like the system finds like a printer driver or some other you know background thing that is intel only it'll pop up a notification in mac os and say you know this is rosetta is going away and this won't happen to mac open a mac os 28 blah blah are we still using printer drivers yeah i've found a bunch of them i'm excising them but anyway as many people have pointed out this is one of the rare occasions when apple is officially saying there will be a mac os 28 which is so dumb because everybody knows there's gonna be another version of mac os just like there's going to be another version of ios but apple in its way is always so cagey if you say like well an ios n plus one they're like what are you talking about there is no ios n plus one it's like okay but like if you were to make another version of ios that has the same number as the current one both one more like they'll never admit that a future product is going to happen but here they are within mac os 27 saying that a thing called mac os 28 exists which most of the time is you know i guess for the number discontinuity it would have been a spoiler to know that they were going to jump from 15 to 26 or something but this is a very very rare and strange occurrence where they're not saying in the next major version of mac os ever they're saying mac os 28 that's going to be the name of a product they might as well have announced it

20:26Marco Arment:very un-apple like i'm surprised they didn't reject it from the app store for mentioning a future

20:31Casey Liss:yeah so it's supposedly gotten better about that but i still do because i've been burned too many times i still do latest version of mac os future version of mac os i never say the name oh yeah

20:40Marco Arment:Yeah, me too. It's like, you know, it's like theater superstitions. Like, never say the name of a future OS.

20:46Casey Liss:Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Like, regardless of whether it's like, oh, it's fine now, they say it's fine. They say a lot of things, first of all. Second of all, the price of getting it wrong could be an extra several days or a week of waiting. And is it worth it? No.

20:58John Siracusa:We are sponsored this week by Granola. So I have an odd job, not the bad guy, but a unique job wherein I don't really have meetings. but we wanted to make sure that granola was the real thing. And so John and I had a meeting and we talked about ATP membership stuff. And we talked for like something like an hour, hour and a half. And while we were talking, granola was there listening and capturing meeting notes for us and a transcript as well. And this worked out really well because one of my big failings when I had a jobby job was that I would oftentimes record the bare minimum amount of action items, particularly for myself, that I would then look back on later and be like, I have no idea what these words mean, and I'm the one who wrote them.

21:44John Siracusa:I lost the context completely. So Granola is an AI-powered notepad that makes your meeting notes useful. It captures what happens in your meetings and turns it into clean, structured notes with decisions and action items pulled out and made easy to find. So like I said, action items are pulled out and made easy to find. So at the bottom of the notes that Granola generated for our meeting, there's next steps. And one of the next steps, I'm reading this verbatim, is approve sponsor product in the doc assigned to Casey, which is exactly right. That is one of the things that I needed to do. And this is very helpful because not only does it tell me what I need to do, but I can click on that line item and get a transcription summary.

22:23John Siracusa:And then if I really want to go back to the actual transcript, I can do that as well. This makes it really hard for me to lose context, which is really, really helpful. So, once you try it on a first meeting, it is hard to go without. You can try it totally free. You can head to granola.ai.atp. That's G-R-A-N-O-L-A.ai.atp to get your time back. Go to granola.ai.atp and try it on your next call. Thank you to Granola for sponsoring the show.

22:59John Siracusa:how lee writes the m5 ultra is the first apple gpu to beat the amd 6900 xt a gpu i once owned and that was released in december 2020 it wasn't even the top of the line at the time nvidia had faster gpus so looking at geekbench the m3 ultra with whatever this unit is 232 267 the radeon rx 6900 XT 237 ,041 and the M5 Ultra 350 ,305.

23:33Casey Liss:So congratulations to Apple Silicon for finally besting a six-year-old GPU that you could put in a 2019 Mac Pro.

23:41John Siracusa:I'm excited. All right, new Mac Minis have some issues, caveats, if you will, about their storage. Joe Rosignal at MacRumors writes NAND storage in the new Mac Mini models with the M6 and M5 Pro chips is soldered to the logic board whereas the previous models with the M4 and M4 Pro chips have removable storage that can be upgraded ahem Marco in addition all new Mac Mini configurations with 256 gigs of storage reportedly have a single NAND chip rather than a pair of 128 gig chips as a result 256 gig configurations have slower SSD speeds compared to configurations with 512 gigs of storage or more that do have dual NAND chips, according to some person who was doing some testing, with Blackmagic's disk speed test benchmark tool.

24:30Casey Liss:Yeah, it looks like a pure doubling. Like the 512 has 6.4 gigs per second compared to 3.2, and the M4 has 2.8. So even with the single chip, the M6 one is still faster than the M4 and with the quote-unquote good two 128s in them or whatever, but it's worth knowing. It doesn't matter for Marco's case because all he cares about is the SOC. like he's not constrained by disk size or disk speeds or anything like that but just fyi they cheaped out a little bit on the lowest end uh m5 with 256 gigs if that matters to you yeah and this

24:59Marco Arment:is fairly common apple does this a lot with their lower end products like almost in almost all of their products the base storage uses fewer chips and therefore is slower than the upgraded storage

25:10Casey Liss:but they they did that and then they reversed it remember the first time they did it everyone made a big stink and then like the next round of computers came back and they didn't do it we're like, yeah, they've stopped doing that thing, but now they're back.

25:19John Siracusa:All right. The OS's 27 have a rejiggered screen time situation, or so we're told. A friend of the show, Stephen Robles, put up a great YouTube video about many things, but the end of it, we'll put a timestamp link in the show notes. At the end of it, Stephen talks about this. It requires every single device, I think in your family, if I understood him right, to be upgraded, updated to a 27 OS. and if you've just got a new device, stolen device protection won't let you remove old devices from the list without waiting five days first. In Steven's case, his mom is in his Apple family, but he doesn't have anything to do with her screen time specifically.

25:59John Siracusa:However, because she's part of the family, she also has to update to OS 27 before Steven can use any of the new screen time features for anyone in his family. And then also what happens to older devices that can't go to 27 do you never ever ever get the new screen time stuff like this i get that you have to draw a line in the sand if you've completely rejiggered like how this data is stored or whatever but

26:22Casey Liss:this kind of stinks and the mystery about it is like i mean if you have old devices it doesn't stop you from updating to the new screen time features but then his question was can i no longer control screen time on those devices like they just become uncontrolled and only the 27 devices he was comparing to like home kit remember when they did the home kit architecture change where you had all these prompts were like so you want to convert your home to the new home kit architecture or whatever but that wasn't as restrictive but this like i mean so the two things are combining he was in like he's trying to put out a video like day and date of the ios 27 coming out and the stolen device protection is like hey you just got this device you don't have enough time in this device for us to let you start removing devices from an apple id like that's a security thing if someone snatches your phone and unlock state or whatever like to stop you stop them from like deleting all the devices off of your apple id so you don't have any control anymore so i get why that protection is there but he can't remove that means he's got to wait five days which is an eternity in youtube time so that was annoying him and then like having to have you know his mom is part of his like apple family thing but he doesn't want control our screen time but she has to update they won't let him he can't see any of the new features he can't upgrade anything until everybody every device that can be upgraded to 27 is updated to 27 and who knows maybe those features you won't even care or care about them or like them but this is just this sort of like i mean this is a transient problem.

27:40Casey Liss:This will go away in a few years when everybody's devices are updated. And like, this will solve itself. It's not a big deal, but it is kind of frustrating for one of the headlining features. Like it got its own section in the, like in the WWC keynote about all about the screen time things. They did not emphasize that this is one of those things that you're not going to be able to use unless everybody updates. All right.

27:59John Siracusa:Uh, I was trying to figure out just a day or two back. Why was my pie hole did not seem to be working, particularly on my iPhone. I was getting loads of advertisements. And let me tell you, if you haven't done, I swear to God, I swear to God, this just happened. I just got a text from Aaron. True story. It literally just happened. It says the following. My phone is inundated with ads with like the raised eyebrow emoji. I could not have planned that better. I planned on heart that literally just came in as I was trying to talk.

28:34Casey Liss:Did somebody, uh, shut your pie hole.

28:37John Siracusa:You could say that. Exactly. Exactly.

28:39Marco Arment:Oh, my God.

28:42John Siracusa:I'm shook that this just happened. I'm like completely blue screen now. So anyway, so sorry, let me try that. We're going to leave it in. We're going to leave it in, Marco. It's fine. We're going to leave it in. So yeah, I was trying to figure out why the pie hole was not really working. Now Aaron is asking the same question. It wasn't working, particularly on my phone. And the most obvious place I saw this is, well, if you ever go to any news related website where you have an advertisement to every other paragraph.

29:07Marco Arment:Or any website these days. Just go to any website to do anything.

29:12John Siracusa:But I noticed this most especially, it was most concrete when I did Wordle in the morning, because typically, you know, I will say play Wordle and it'll show you an interstitial. And with the pie hole, you'll see advertisement and you wait a couple of seconds and then you can click continue. Then you would just go and play your Wordle. But in this case, I'm seeing like video advertisements like what is happening right now this was driving me batty and i was going to bring it up on the show at some point but i hadn't gotten around to it i've been very busy recently we all have very been very busy recently um and all of a sudden i got copied on a tweet or a tweet or whatever uh which originated with daz fuller d-a-z-f-u-l-l-e-r and it reads as follows in the latest version of ios there's something called connectivity assist we're going to come to that in a second.

30:00John Siracusa:If you're running a pie hole or similar, then this seems to be bypassing it by routing the rejected requests over mobile data instead. Even the text below the settings says you should probably turn it off if you're running an ad blocker. So connectivity assist, I was all in for before I knew this. And what connectivity assist says is, well, if the phone is trying to cling to Wi-Fi, but it ain't working, go ahead and just go to mobile data. And they tried this like 10 years ago or something like that under a different name. I forget what it was called. It never really worked right. And this was one of the kind of headline features of iOS 27 was your phone is going to do better about releasing Wi-Fi.

30:36John Siracusa:And I guess this is the primary way in which it does that. Well, as it turns out, what I think is happening is when it's getting no good response from DNS for a lot of these queries, because the way piehole works is it'll give you like nothing better. I think it responds with like a I don't know what that is when when your device does a DNS request for something that it knows is an advertiser. Well, apparently the iPhone or whatever iOS device is saying, hey, all right, I'll go to mobile data instead, which is not at all what you want. And I'll give you one guess what happened when I turned it off.

31:08John Siracusa:Then all of a sudden it all started working again, just like it had been before iOS 27. Now, a friend of the show, Aaron Vey, who writes is one of the authors of Indigo, which is my preferred Blue Sky and Macedon client. Aaron writes, this is not a new feature. It's the Wi-Fi assist from previous versions renamed and turned on by default. I run pie hole in my home network and started seeing ads on my devices. This is why think about this. Apple enabled a feature that sees a block while downloading ad stuff, then reaches out through the cellular network to get it. I understand to a degree how Apple landed here.

31:41John Siracusa:Don't love it though. And let me tell you, I got, I was in a much better spot once I turned this off and now Aaron will be too after I can tell her about it. Yeah.

31:50Casey Liss:I think I would still leave this feature on. I mean, obviously the alternative is like pie holes, like solve the problem once for everybody in your house, because all the dns will go through the pie hole and problem solved but the other alternative is run ad blockers on your individual devices which is more annoying but also doesn't run afoul of this situation and i i think i want this because very often like if i'm leaving the house to walk the dog there might i have seen my various past iphones a struggle to decide should i cling to the wi-fi that i can still get through the wall of the house as i walk down the block or should i switch to cellular so if i'm doing like a facetime call or i'm like a regular you know doing anything where i'm like talking to somebody or videoing with somebody while i walk the dog you can see the part where it's like i don't know should i be trying to get that one little bar of wi-fi from the house or should i give up and use cellular you're like just give up and use cellular we're going for a walk but it struggles so i i like that feature i like this previously named wi-fi assist now called connectivity assist and if it was interfering with my ad blocking which is not because I don't have a pie hole, I would just switch to using something on device.

32:52Casey Liss:Like that's how much I want that feature more than the, uh, the, the hassle of having to run an ad blocker as an individual devices, which for me is not much of a big thing. Cause if you use like one blocker, it's on Mac, it's on iPad, it's on iOS. If you're an all Apple house, you can get one app and it'll take you pretty far. Yeah.

33:07John Siracusa:I mean, I, I totally get why that juice may be worth the squeeze for you, but for me, absolutely turned it off and immediately was so much happier when I did it. All right. This is a little bit of a journey, just like that last topic I ended up being actually, but there was some news about GM and CarPlay. I didn't put this in the show notes. I presume John did, but I'm going to tell you something that I wrote on my blog a couple of days ago. I wrote, just shy of a year ago, GM CEO Mary Barra extended this lunacy edict to that they will never do any more CarPlay in their cars to include all future internal combustion vehicles as well.

33:43John Siracusa:Unsurprisingly, this did not end well. The backlash was immediate and the data was brutal. Surveys at the time found 79 % of new car buyers would only consider a vehicle that offered car play and that it was available on 98 % of new cars sold. Dealers warned buyers would simply walk to a rival showroom. Forgive me, that was a quote from somewhere. I don't have my own blog post in front of me at the moment. I'm going off our show notes. Anyway, coming back to my blog post, well, look who did an about face after realizing they scored a tremendous own goal. And again, from whatever source I quoted, this week GM unveiled a new infotainment interface debuting on the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups that folds smartphone projection back into the dashboard and runs alongside GM's native system.

34:25John Siracusa:Well, look at us. Look at us. We knew it. We called it. We told you you were idiots. the internet was aflame in the happy way for once uh about how exciting this was that gm was finally getting a friggin grip that was whatever day the 21st was that was monday uh then later that same day after i posted my blog post later on monday uh reading from joe rossignol at mac rumors gm wants you to know it still plans to ditch apple carplay and future evs joe says recent reports claiming that general motors is reversing course on its controversial plans to ditch carplay and its future evs appear to be incorrect as noted by joanna stern in her new things youtube channel a gm spokesperson has confirmed that its new software interface that shows carplay or android auto alongside its own native system in 2027 models of pickups is specific to the gas-powered versions of those pickup trucks gm previously stated that carplay and android auto would continue to be offered in its new gas-powered vehicles for the foreseeable future.

35:24John Siracusa:So the 2027 models of those trucks still supporting these platforms is not a change of course. Boo this man, not Joe, I guess I should say boo Mary, boo that person. So I did post a mea culpa on my website earlier today. But I really, really hate this. And just to be clear on my mea culpa, I have been keeping track of the sorts of devices that you can get car play on. So you can get it on most new cars, as we talked about at all kinds of different price points. I had forgotten to note, and this has been true for years now, but I'd forgotten to note that several motorcycles have them. I picked out like the Honda Goldwing and the Harley Road Glide as two examples.

36:03John Siracusa:Those are larger, more luxury bikes, but it's not just them. You can get it on boats. I think it's Mastercraft. Yes, Mastercraft has announced that they will do it on some of their boats. And you can have CarPlay in your freaking shower. That is not a joke. Upbeat Sound Company at upbeatsound.co. Not a sponsor. makes like one of those dinguses that you would put in, I don't know, maybe a Rivian that you stick to your shower wall and it has speakers on it and you get a CarPlay interface, like a waterproof car, water resistant CarPlay interface in your shower. This is 100 % of true story. That's kind of awesome.

36:42John Siracusa:Oh, it's incredible.

36:43Casey Liss:I kind of want one, but I want to be able to text for my shower though. I don't want to be like, keep your eyes on the road. I'm like, I'm not going anywhere. Like I should be able to text.

36:51Marco Arment:Does it work with wet hands? Like, Because normally, I would assume normally touchscreens don't like, you know what I know. But the point is, it has like a resistive touch screen. It could like that. It's pressure sensitive. Yeah. Whatever the case may be. And by the way, there's a there's this entire family out there of like hundred ish dollar little tablets that run CarPlay that are made to be stuck in a car or like a Rivian. And and like I that's what I use now for testing overcast CarPlay stuff because it's easy and it's on my desk and they're fine and they're cheap and they work just fine.

37:20John Siracusa:Yeah, it's bananas. So just to recap, almost every new car, a bunch of new motorcycles, boats, and showers, but not Rivian and not GM EVs. Great work, guys. Just stellar work. Really proud of you.

37:34Casey Liss:Yeah. When everyone was getting all excited about this, I'm like, don't you guys remember? This is not a change. But like I said, the follow-up story came like moments later. So it's like, okay, everyone will be corrected. So I couldn't save you, Casey, but I could have told you if you were telling me you're riding that, I would have said, this is not a change. This is just them continuing what they said they were going to do.

37:49John Siracusa:You know, and I thought this, but everyone was so excited. I read a few things and I was like, oh, I guess I'm wrong or I've forgotten.

37:54Casey Liss:Well, so here's the thing about it. All right. So those are the facts as you've read them. But reading between the lines, as you noted, I think this experiment is currently not going well for GM. So start your timers, right? At a certain point, there'll be a change in leadership or they'll have a change of heart. Like, I think this does, I think the longer this goes on, the more likely they are to eventually reverse especially if tesla ever actually goes through with their supposed plans to add carplay like i don't just because they're this is still the status quo does not mean that every day that passes makes everyone realize inside and outside of gm what a stupid home this was so i think you know despite the fact that this is not an actual change it's not going well for No.

38:39John Siracusa:And the thing that blows my mind is that if you're Rivian, if your primary competitor, at least in people's minds, maybe not like literal competitor, but I feel like almost everyone I know that's even vaguely interested in Rivian is at least considering cross-shopping Tesla. if you're Rivian why wouldn't you use this as a differentiator and one of my earlier blog posts on this subject because I've been banging this drum for a while now is that um Waseem Ben Saeed I think is his name who is like the CTO uh at Rivian was on I want to say it was decoder it was one of the great verge podcasts and said well it's it takes over your screen that's why we can't to it.

39:22John Siracusa:It doesn't though. Like CarPlay Ultra does, but regular CarPlay doesn't. In my BMW now, it uses most of the screen, but not all of it. In Erin's Volvo, in her old Volvo, it used like half the screen. Now it uses the majority of the screen, but not all of it. And so if you're Rivian, why would you not use this as a differentiator? It's frigging additive. If your infotainment is so freaking great, then no one will use it and it's fine. What does it hurt you. Why would you not use that as a differentiator? It blows my mind. And so there's been rumblings, as John said, there's been at least a moderate amount of smoke, which makes you think there's fire, that Tesla is potentially going to juice their, as far as I understand, pretty bad sales these days, because, hey, guess what?

40:08John Siracusa:The CEO is a f***ing maniac. But anyway, they're trying to juice their sales, potentially, by adding CarPlay. And then I think John is exactly right. The second that happens, Rivian is going to suddenly discover that all of their issues with CarPlay just magically disappear. And I think GM will also do the same thing. But why would you not differentiate? Why would you not do it now? It drives me batty. This is on the long list of things that I get very worked up about that I really shouldn't, but I just don't understand what they're doing. And again, it's additive. If your infotainment is so freaking spectacular, then maybe your owners won't use it.

40:48John Siracusa:Maybe what'll happen is all these people, like, I don't know, me, who refuse to buy a car without CarPlay, will buy the Rivian and then see, you know what, maybe I don't need this after all. But at least now I've gotten in the door. Like, I just don't get what they're doing here. For such an admirable company, it's in so many ways, Rivian, to me anyway, seems like Tesla, but not evil. So why wouldn't you do this? I just don't understand. It drives me batty.

41:15Marco Arment:yeah and and i think once tesla does it like you know there's i think there's enough smoke behind that like that it's probably going to happen and you start you see like apple made a few changes in the latest couple ios versions that seem like they're aimed at getting tesla on board with car play like it looks like it's probably going to happen the only question is when uh but once tesla caves i first of all i think it will be a big deal i think it will be a big deal to their sales i I think Apple will want to brag about it. And I think that is a huge thing that buyers look for in new cars. And so once Tesla caves, it's only a matter of time before Rivian does.

41:54Marco Arment:But I think it will take that. I don't think Rivian is going to change their mind until and unless Tesla caves.

42:00John Siracusa:I agree, which is so dumb. It's so dumb.

42:04Marco Arment:Honestly, I love the idea of going back to Rivian in the future. Because the only reason I got rid of my Rivian was because it was a service nightmare because it was such a young company. and it had a lot of little bugs that couldn't be fixed for 12 weeks or whatever it was. But I would love to go back to reviewing in the future. I still miss things about it, and I still really respect what they're doing as a company, and their vehicles are very capable and very appealing to me. But one thing I don't miss is having to put my phone in a stupid dock next to the dashboard and having to operate little tiny phone apps manually with my hands because there's no CarPlay, and their maps sucked and there's no overcast and there's no other, like everything about the infotainment thing was terrible.

42:50Marco Arment:And I know I've heard that they have better maps now, which that's great. But what you don't have is any maps. Like you don't give me the ability to use any map app I want. What if I like Waze better than Google Maps or Apple Maps better than Google Maps? Like whatever it is, like if what I want is not exactly the one app that you've selected to build a half-assed version of in your infotainment system, then it's a bad experience for me. And what are the odds that you're going to guess right on everyone's preferences? I said it before, never bet against the smartphone. And the good thing is you don't have to.

43:25Marco Arment:You can, like, and every other car company has figured this out. Like, just show the phone thing in the window. And that's, and it's fine. And no other car company has had any problems just doing that. And the customers love it. So it's only a matter of time before Tesla needs to juice their sales that way. As you mentioned, they're always looking for something because they're always getting themselves into trouble. And the thing is, I so hope that I have one more year on my lease. Next summer, I'm picking a new car. I don't think Rivian is going to come around by then. but maybe the one after that i would love to go back to rivian like three years after that maybe by then they'll have a nice big service network the r3 and the r3x will be out and they'll be super fun and maybe they'll have carplay one can dream yep no i agree i agree

44:22John Siracusa:with you completely and here's the thing let's take it as writ that both tesla and and or rivian infotainment is without equal i don't care if it's both of them one of them doesn't matter let's let's just say rivian is without equal let's say it's better than tesla i don't care if that's true or not let's say it's the best infotainment in any automobile let's say that's the case do they have overcast support marco no of course not right and they never will because it's never

44:47Marco Arment:worth will because it is never going to be worth either tesla or me building that or rivian but yeah yeah yeah and there's so many like if when i plug in my phone to carplay i don't just see three apps there's like 40 apps on there right there's so like audible has an app like there's so many like every map app has one like instapaper has an app that'll read articles to you like there's so like there's stuff you would never even think about the ai providers are now having carplay apps whatsapp has a carplay app there's so many there's no way any car maker is ever going to cover them all. And they don't need to.

45:28Marco Arment:So it's just a self-created problem. Right.

45:31John Siracusa:That's the thing is that even if Rivian's infotainment is miles better than everything else out there, let's say it's better than CarPlay. But the problem is if I want to go and switch what podcast I'm listening to in Overcast while connected to a Rivian, maybe I'm ignorant. Maybe I'm missing the point here. But as far as I know, I would need to pick up my phone and use Overcast. or if they supported CarPlay, I could pop over to CarPlay for a moment if it's not already up, do what I need to do in Overcast and then pop back to Rivian's infotainment. Like, I just, I don't understand what they're thinking.

46:07John Siracusa:And as you said, Marco, and it's exactly on the nose, every one of us has a different array of apps that we want to use in the car. I want to use Overcast. I don't typically use Waze and I don't typically use Google Maps, so that doesn't bother me. But I want to use Overcast. Marco, presumably you want to use Overcast, but you also use Waze. And that's fine. That's the beauty of CarPlay is that we don't have to all agree, as you said, on the same six frigging apps. It's just, I don't get it. And it drives me so batty. It's just such, I guess, hubris, for lack of a better word. I don't know. It's just, it's deciding in Rivian's headquarters that they know better than you.

46:47John Siracusa:And that's so frustrating. And you know what I've heard a very smart man say from time to time? In fact, as recently as like five minutes ago, don't bet against the smartphone.

46:57Marco Arment:I love how fired up you get about this. You're so mad.

47:01John Siracusa:It's so dumb. It's so dumb.

47:03Marco Arment:And the Rivian guy, he's very calm and soft-spoken. He's like, well, we believe this is a better experience. And I don't get all fired up like Casey about this. I can very calmly address it and I say, I believe it's not. And therefore, I believe I'll buy a different car.

47:19John Siracusa:And that's exactly it. Like I genuinely, I think I've said this a couple of times on the show. I genuinely, even though I just got a car, I will probably put a deposit down on an R3 because I want the, or the R3X specifically. Cause I just think that would be such an amazing car. It's like a little hatchbacky thing. That's supposed to be like a little hot rod hatchback. Like my golf. It looks so cool. It looks so freaking cool. And having driven a couple of R1 S or I've driven one or two R1 S's and an R1 T. And I love the whole vibe of Rivian. Like everything about it, I love like the concrete things and the not so concrete things.

47:54John Siracusa:And I can absolutely see myself driving a Rivian, but I will not freaking do it without CarPlay. So I will probably put a deposit down when they're willing to take them. And if they don't cave on this, which I think Marco's right, it's at least a year or two away, then I will ask for my money back or, or maybe I will just sacrifice, you know, whatever that money is, because I will not buy a car without CarPlay. I just won't do it. John, am I crazy?

48:16Marco Arment:Yes, but not for this reason.

48:19Casey Liss:My car doesn't have CarPlay either, you know.

48:21John Siracusa:Yeah, well, it's time for you to get a new car. All right. We are in an in-between-ish area where you could squint and say this is follow-up. Maybe this is a topic. I don't know. We'll see what I end up deciding in the show notes. But we're in that kind of gray zone. And what we're going to talk about is the Apple Watch and it listening to you. And we're going to start with some feedback from Steve Riggins, who writes, I'm not sure why Marco is so concerned over the new Siri audio features when voice memos have been sitting there for years. It only automatically records the last 15 seconds, this new feature.

48:52John Siracusa:Only automatically records the last 15 seconds. Otherwise, it's not as bad as voice memos, which just records audio flat out basically forever.

49:00Marco Arment:So the main difference between the announced Siri Replay and Siri Rewind features is that they're always recording. Voice Memos requires the user to explicitly decide, I'm going to open up the Voice Memos app and hit record, and I'm recording. That is a different level of thing than a product that just always records all the time without you initiating the recording. Now, there's all sorts of opinions and laws about whether it is right to record people around you possibly without their knowledge or whether somebody can leave a recording device somewhere and record the people around it with none of their knowledge.

49:47Marco Arment:There's lots of laws and opinions about that. But I think for this particular question, that distinction almost doesn't matter. it's when when you are deciding i am i'm taking out my phone and i'm hitting record on this app and i'm making a recording that is a very different degree of surveillance and recording than a product that is always doing it in the background so my follow-up to this to steve's

50:14Casey Liss:question was so let's think about hey siri sorry i just did it hey dingus whatever um which has existed for years and years on phones right um that technically works in a very similar manner and that you may be wondering especially when they first roll this out how does it know when i say hey dingus is it always listening and the answer is yes it's always listening and it technically you know setting aside the secure exclave or whatever it's a similar type of thing where there's some very low power corner of the logic board or potentially chip that has a tiny little buffer that's constantly recording audio through the microphone in a very low power state and the hey dingus one is saying i'm just gonna be constantly recording a couple seconds of audio and i'm just gonna be looking at it saying did they say hey siri did they say hey siri sorry i can't do it did they say hey siri that's all that's all it's doing all the time and they change it to eventually look for just just the word without the hey but that's all it's doing it's just it's constantly quote-unquote recording as in taking in digital audio taking in audio the analog audio converting it to digital and it has some buffer of you know the past one or two or three seconds of audio and it's analyzing that buffer to see is anywhere in this buffer did anybody say hey dingus at any point and if it did it says oh i'm gonna wake up the whole rest of the phone and say oh they i they said the thing so and by the way here's like you know the beginning of the audio that they said after that and then piece it all together and blah blah that feature has existed for a really long time most people have not uh worried about it because they don't think about they're just like oh like a human you just say hey whatever like i mean people do this all the time where um someone you know says something and then says your name at the end of it that you have this phenomenon where they shout something and they say your name at the end to realize that they were addressing you and suddenly you hear all the stuff they said before that whereas if they didn't say your name at the end of it you would have ignored it as background noise right yeah and so they think oh the phone's just like a little person when i say hey dingus it wakes up and it's like, well, how, how does it wake up?

52:15Casey Liss:How does it know you say that said that? How does it know you're addressing you? It doesn't know your intention. It's not reading your mind. It is always recording a tiny bit of audio. But what it does with that audio is it just looking for the wake word. Okay. Enter the watch, which is always recording audio, but it's not just looking for Haydengis anymore. First of all, the buffer seems bigger. I don't know how long, how big the hey siri buffer is or whatever but this buffer we know is at least 15 seconds second it's not just constantly scanning that buffer looking for a wake word instead it's got that buffer all ready to go and you know it's a rolling buffer so it's just throwing away the data that's you know it's keeping a 15 second window it's just letting it kind of sit there i mean it's probably also scanning it for the wake word but it's making it sit there waiting for you to double tap the crown on your watch and then it goes oh they want to know what was said in the last 15 seconds well luckily i've been recording audio all day and i have the last 15 seconds of audio as a matter of fact in this buffer right here now that they've tapped that instead of me just scanning that buffer for the wake word i am going to run it through a speech to text thing i'm going to get some text out of it i'm going to summarize it and i'm going to put it up on the screen in a

53:27Marco Arment:bubble that's what this feature does and well hold on that's there's a final distinction here this feature does not summarize it oh yeah the 15 second yeah the 15 second one just transcribed exactly what was said does not do any summarization i think it does it doesn't do some sort of like

53:45Casey Liss:um anonymization or something in it i think it might do some processing on it i don't think

53:49Marco Arment:so there's is it i forget that's replay not rewind right yeah no i don't talk about there's there's

53:54Casey Liss:the distinction between the one that summarizes versus transcribes and 15 seconds is the transcript but i thought they had also said that in the 15 seconds transcript they'll try to like blank out people's names or something but either way uh what it's doing with the audio is not just scanning it to find something and say have i been triggered yes no and then feeding the audio to the the system to like do a command or whatever but they're making text out of it okay whether it is literal transcription or a summary either way i don't think it actually makes that much of a difference other than like trying to make it digestible because 15 seconds you can transcribe and that's it's a lot of text but it's not too much whereas if you've been an hour-long meeting the transcript of that is going to be much longer than the summary um but yeah so that that distinction i think it's mostly because people think of a wake word as being just again they think of the phones you know they conceptualize the phones the way the way we conceptualize living things as in that it's just responding to its name it's not recording me it's not listening to me but of course it is listening like in the same way that you're not listening until someone yells your name when you hear your name your brain wakes up and says oh i was just i was just you know blocking out all that background noise of people chattering behind me.

54:58Casey Liss:But when I hear my name, I'm like, oh, I suddenly pay attention. That's all the phone is doing. Right. So that's fine. Versus, oh, you didn't know I've been listening to you. But now when you see that, that I transcribed the last 15 seconds of speech, you're like, wow, you've really been listening this whole time, because here I see the things that were just said in the last 15 seconds, including what the people at the next table were saying, and they didn't even realize they were being recorded. So anyway, I don't want to belabor this, but that's, I wanted to bring up, uh, Hey Siri at this point, because technologically, oh, sorry, both of my phones lit up here.

55:28Casey Liss:Technologically speaking. You brought this on yourself. Yeah, my other phone is going to the Pokemon Mines. It's got a new, as in, actually, I found a new, not used, orange Apple silicone case, which is what my wife wanted to put my phone in to embarrass it while it goes to the Pokemon Mines. So they both lit up. Yeah, we should continue with the feedback because there is more.

55:49John Siracusa:All right, so Carlo writes, my basic position is simple. If I legitimately hear something, I don't think another person has a privacy right over how well I'm allowed to remember it. If you tell me something, I might remember it perfectly. I might write it down afterward. I might dictate myself a note. None of those things are normally considered privacy violations. So if my watch privately creates a summary to help me remember the same conversation, what exactly changed? Information reached the same person. It wasn't disclosed to anyone else. Technology just made that person's memory more reliable.

56:16John Siracusa:This feels much closer to augmented memory than surveillance. I get this a lot, but I don't know. It just feels really different.

56:24Casey Liss:There's a difference between surveillance and eavesdropping. Eavesdropping, some etymologists will let us know where that comes from or whatever. But eavesdropping is like you're around the corner from someone having a conversation and you're listening. That's generally frowned upon too. Like it's kind of, you know, like you're being sneaky. You're listening in a conversation. You shouldn't be listening. And sometimes you're not around the corner. Maybe you're just like at a restaurant in a booth and you can hear the people in the booth next to you and you're listening to their conversation. that's also kind of frowned upon socially speaking but you're right that you can do it but surveillance is different from that in that you don't have to be there or do anything or participate you can continue ignoring them having your conversation confident in the fact that your watch is recording everything and will summarize everything the next booth said without you having to concentrate on it or appear to be eavesdropping or anything like that and that is a violation of the social contract much more so than eavesdropping is rude it's like you shouldn't be listening to our conversation but at least people can see that you're listening because you're not if you're having your own conversation or whatever they're like oh they're someone would see you and say they're clearly being polite and not listening to the conversation on the next table but no you're not being polite you put a tape recorder down the table and you're recording it and later you're going to listen back to it i know it's not the same thing as summarized or whatever but that's the point surveillance is a machine doing a thing that would be too socially unacceptable for you to do, but you just set the machine to do it.

57:44Casey Liss:And so you can appear not to be violating that social norm when you totally are, which is why it is usually considered more invasive to, for example, plant cameras in your neighbor's house than it is for you to look out your window in through their window. Both of them are bad. You shouldn't be peeping in their windows. But if you went into their house and planted cameras and tape recorders, that would be more of a violation of you looking out your window at their house.

58:07Marco Arment:There's also there's a lot of differences in in degree and situation here. First of all, if for a product like this, it is creating an artifact that you can refer to and that might have some kind of authority. So for instance, if there's some dispute over what was said, you can point to this. You can go open up your Siri app or wherever these recordings land and you can say, no, no, no, look, this is what you said. And that's a different type that's a different a different nature than you know you just just trying to

58:43Casey Liss:argue that you remember something although i feel like you could be that pretty easily in court given how poorly these things summarize well sure but but also but again you are you're creating an

58:51Marco Arment:artifact that maybe somebody else could have access to like you know when we first discussed this i brought up the example of like you know a lot of spouses or partners have access to each other's apple ids or know each other's passcodes to their devices and so you could plausibly like If you had a partner or an ex, maybe, who knew your passcode to your phone and could open it up and read these notes, it is plausible that they could maybe see an action item or a summary of a conversation that could give away something that you would rather they not know. So, for instance, what if you are planning to move out and they see in your Siri app when they're spying on you that you met with an apartment listing agent?

59:35Marco Arment:that they and they it's even if it says something like met with michelle what if they know that your friend michelle is an apartment listing agent and like there's there's so many ways this this can be a privacy violation unintentionally um or or in this case you know intentionally but like when you when you're creating these records of everything around you it does change things dramatically because you know also in that situation you as the wearer of this recording device, again, like we were saying earlier, you might forget that this is a feature. You might not even know this is it. Or you might have turned it on once months ago, forgotten about it, and it's been recording your conversations for months.

1:00:11Marco Arment:Or rather, it's been taking notes on your conversations for months. So even though it is not creating an audio recording that persists, it is still creating artifacts automatically all the time that could have major privacy implications and could backfire on you and the people around you in ways that you would rather they not. Again, think about law enforcement. Suppose that this becomes one of those things that the TSA agents make you check when you enter the country or the customs agents. They want to see what you've been talking about with your friends. Have you been saying anything maybe against the president?

1:00:47Marco Arment:This sounds ridiculous to only some people out there now because most of us, you hear an example like that and you're like, oh yeah, that could happen. That probably will happen. These kinds of scenarios are not ridiculous. So meanwhile, why are they creating this? But it does seem like if what you want is something to take notes on your meetings, there's lots of other solutions for that that will do a better job and will be like, you know, they'll be more thorough. They'll actually have things like searchable transcripts and more recordings in those kind of contexts that makes a lot more sense and is more defensible and they'll probably do a better job.

1:01:25Marco Arment:So Apple's going to be here with this kind of very limited, possibly very mediocre version and bring on all this baggage for what? And then finally, I would also say that if you consider it a memory augmentation, that is an interesting approach. That is an interesting theory that you're saying, I'm not recording conversations. I'm just automatically taking durable, automated notes on everything around me all the time. okay isn't that a similar argument to llms are just reading things like humans read them and just learning them and then just it can repeat them back perfectly but that's not a copyright violation it read it just like just like you or i would read it and if i can read a news article and recite it perfectly back to you i'm that's not a copyright violation well it might be a public performance but you know like there's you can see like when you change the degree or the the nature of something by this much it does change a lot of the legal questions around it and there's a lot of precedent for that throughout all of technology and history like when you change something this dramatically the law and the perception and the judgments around it often change in this case something that takes constant, persistent, automatic notes of everything is a difference in degree versus me having the right to remember what you said to me.

1:02:51Casey Liss:A couple of things on what you said first. I hate that LLM analogy because LLMs aren't people, but I'm setting that aside. The I think what another thing I want to push back against, although you keep bringing up as an example to help people understand it, which makes sense from an emotional perspective, but technically speaking, and I feel like from like the principle of all this, it doesn't actually matter if anything that has been recorded is sensitive in any way. Like this is not bad because you might say a thing that you don't want people to know. It's bad even if you never say anything. It's the whole like, well, if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't have to worry about it.

1:03:22Casey Liss:No. Surveillance is surveillance. Even if you never say anything, if nothing is ever recorded that is harmful in any way. Okay. It's still just as bad. It doesn't change the badness of it based on whether you had said something that is potentially sensitive because that, that way leads you to, okay, well, it's fine. As long as you have nothing to hide, we'll just record everything. And if you object to the recording, then obviously you have something to hide. And your argument is like, well, everybody has something to hide. But really, it doesn't matter if I have anything to hide. The principle is, I should not constantly be recorded.

1:03:52Casey Liss:And I think this is getting to the heart of the difference, which is what is surveillance versus taking notes or memorizing or eavesdropping or whatever. Surveillance is constant, ambient, and back referenceable as in it's just running all the time. You just have the camera pointed at your garage and it's just there all the time. It's just recording 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Maybe once in a blue moon, someone will come and try to break into your garage, but it's recording all the time. That is surveillance. You don't have to do anything to make it. It's not an intentional move where every morning you wake up and say, well, time to record the garage in case someone's skills.

1:04:25Casey Liss:It's just running all the time. That's what surveillance is. It's the difference between sitting down at a meeting at work and starting your note taking thing. And then you You have the meeting and then it summarizes your notes as one of our sponsors does, you know, I think for this episode and then you're done. That is an intentional act in a particular context where I think everyone is socially acceptable to take notes during meetings, whether you're taking them with a pad and a pencil on your computer or with a note taking app. It is an intentional act that everyone is aware of that's going on a particular context versus my watch is recording everything all the time.

1:04:57Casey Liss:Oh, I can geofence it. But like just because it is ambient, because it is surveillance, once it is off and running, is just filling up your Siri app with like summaries of things that have happened all around you all day. Because surveillance is not an intentional time limited act where you say record now stop recording. It is just I've set a camera up pointing at my garage and that's going to be there forever. And I might only look at it when someone breaks into my garage, but it's recording all the time. And surveillance, you know, video surveillance, audio surveillance, there are laws around that because of the nature of surveillance is not as simple as, you know, an intentional recording act, although we have laws about that as well.

1:05:33Casey Liss:it is like it is it is different in kind and again it doesn't matter if anything ever happens that is important in that video the act of surveillance is still the act of surveillance even if nothing ever happens the thing you point at the camera at certain scenarios you can't point your camera you can't play again you can't plant cameras in your neighbor's house and say well it's not a problem unless something sensitive happens in their house like no it's problem that the camera is there at all recording all the time uh again without their without their knowledge or whatever so carl's point is like well they don't know that i'm listening to them and I'm memorizing everything they say and now I'm recording everything they say.

1:06:04Casey Liss:And it's like, yeah, you've just crept right up to probably existing laws on eavesdropping and surveillance. And this is turning a thing that was previously a thing on your wrist that would tell you time and do stuff into, hey, you may not know it, but we're constantly recording and summarizing every conversation that happens around you.

1:06:18John Siracusa:Nick here writes, Apple swears up and down. It's doing all it can to make this private and secure. And I have no reason to believe otherwise. The audio is not actually saved and is instead merely transcribed. That text is automatically deleted unless the user takes an action to save it too. But good luck explaining that to anyone around you after you read back an exact transcript of what they just said. I think normal people will continue to react negatively when you tell them that you've been passively recording them because outside Silicon Valley, that is considered gross and invasive. Let me just plus one, the very last thing there that Nick said.

1:06:52John Siracusa:I have not spent inordinate amounts of time in Silicon Valley, but I've spent more time than most East Coasters, I like to think. And I don't think reality as the rest of the country, I'm not saying the East Coast, I don't think the reality is the rest of the country and perhaps the world sees it really exists in Silicon Valley. It's very different there. In some ways, that's good. In a lot of ways, I don't think it's great. And I think Nick hit the nail on the head that this is considered absolutely gross and invasive everywhere except maybe in the Valley.

1:07:31Casey Liss:And it is again, it is confusing. I'll emphasize again, there's the 15 second transcript and then there's the thing with it summarizes conversations that have happened. And the 15 second transcript is a small time window, throws it away. If you don't keep it, blah, blah, blah. You have to double tap the crown, blah, blah, blah. But the recap thing is like, it's just constantly listening to everything and it's not transcribing everything, but it is summarizing the conversations. It is just a condensed, compressed version of constant surveillance. And that's the most dangerous one because you're just living your life, going through your day and somewhere on your phone it is filling it up with paragraph long summaries of conversations that you had and that is just a different form of surveillance it's the old school kind like if you're watching um star city on apple tv there's it's like a 70s era soviet you know type of thing and they have they have they have actual audio listening devices spying on people right but it's just too much content so they have a room full of people who listen to the audio tapes and then summarize them they're basically doing what the recap feature does and they because it's too long to listen you know they didn't they're not transcribing them word for word right they're just being like okay they listen 15 minutes and they say this person talked with that person and they argued about shopping right it's just a summary but it's still you watch the show and you're supposed to believe this is oppressive surveillance he's like oh no no it's not surveillance the tapes they throw away the audio tapes they just have these people summarizing it so you just get a summary it's like yeah that's still surveillance and also like everyone thinks

1:08:55Marco Arment:their phone is listening to them that's everyone right i mean it is it's listening for it's listening for hey dingus right but like you you've had you as the nerd and in your life you've had everybody tell you you know your phone's listening to you because this one time i can run ads yeah yeah because i this one time i mentioned this water filter and then the next day i was seeing ads for water filters all over my phone they was listening to what i didn't i didn't type in anything it heard me everyone has stories like that and you know even and it's already been hard enough as the nerd to try to explain like well actually that's not you know they don't need to be listening to you for that you know this is now this now it's just out the window it's like

1:09:30Casey Liss:no yeah your phone's listening to you it is well so here's the thing about that the reason people would freak out about that is because they like if you explain how it's actually working like you know based on their ip address and other things and all sorts of like they're like oh well that's boring and i'm not interested but as soon as you say but no but imagine it didn't work that way which is actually probably the better way but imagine instead it was literally listening to you that bothers them so much more because it is more more connected to the human experience of eavesdropping right that is more a violation of the human social norm of don't hey don't listen in other people's conversations that it's the phone being rude whereas when it does it the computer way with ip addresses and cookies and stuff like that they're like oh that's computer junk i don't care what it doesn't like there's no social norm around like persistent tracking cookies and stuff like the actual tech the actual ad tech that does this thing that gives you the ads that are based on the stuff you've been doing online that ad tech doesn't bother people because it doesn't have an analog in human society but listening on conversations that you shouldn't be listening to does and that's why they latch on to the idea that it's listening and now that literally is listening of course it's going to bother them it just like it's it's a fact of human nature that just like things that are outside our lived experience seem alien and not as interesting to us.

1:10:49Casey Liss:But now that the phones are doing things that are analogous to our own sense experience of living in the world, it makes people angry, which is exactly why they were angry when they thought phones were doing this. And then when you explain what they're actually doing, they're like, oh, that doesn't bother me. But if it's listening, that does bother me. Well, now it's listening.

1:11:05Marco Arment:And I think what we've seen is like people don't, like, you know, as Nick here was saying, good luck explaining these minor differences or these minor technical things to anybody. Do you think anyone is going to sit through an explanation about, well, it's not actually storing a recording?

1:11:22Casey Liss:It's only 15 seconds or whatever. You read back what they just said, they're like, they hate you now.

1:11:26Marco Arment:It's only transcribing. It's like it's taking notes for you and it's super secure and it streams the audio from this part of the chip to this part of the phone chip and no one cares. Everyone will just say, oh yeah, so it's recording everything we're saying. Okay, great. None of those technical distinctions matter to any regular people. It's just, okay, yeah, now every Apple Watch is a recording device.

1:11:48John Siracusa:Anonymous writes, I'm a lawyer and I live in Washington state. Although I'm not a privacy expert, I do think it's interesting to consider the implications of this kind of recording under various state laws. In Washington, for example, we have a statute that expressly makes it against the law to record any, quote, private conversation by any device, electronic or otherwise designed to record or transmit such conversation, regardless how the device is powered or actuated without first obtaining the consent of all the persons engaged in the conversation, quote. On its face, then, I can't see how anyone wearing an Apple Watch constantly recording others without them knowing wouldn't be violating Washington law.

1:12:23Marco Arment:Well, it depends on the definition of record. It depends on the definition of conversation. That's how laws like this are tested. It's like you evaluate all the words. Well, is this a recording? What is a recording of a conversation? Does a loosely transcribed series of notes about facts in it, does that count as a recording? if you talk to me and I take notes on the conversation, is that a recording? Apple, I'm sure their lawyers reviewed all this and I'm sure their lawyers determined, no, it's not. We are not lawyers, so we are not really qualified to make that kind of determination. But even if it is technically skating by the law, it almost doesn't matter because, again, it's a PR problem.

1:13:12Marco Arment:It's a perception problem. that is going to do far more damage to apple than you know if if some state sues them for violating some edge of a law that they can talk their way out of the 15 second one would be pretty

1:13:25Casey Liss:easy to to you know win on in court because that is straight up you know transcription of what was

1:13:31Marco Arment:said maybe with a little massaging is not is a transcription a recording is i don't know it's yeah i think they would say it is like they say electronic device if you had an electronic device

1:13:41Casey Liss:that recorded audio and immediately turned it into speech, I think that would be pretty easy to win. But anyway, someone will try it, I guess. The summaries are maybe a little bit harder, but that's just like, I'm sure there's existing laws in the book with particular wording, but if people rebel against this, and especially with state laws where there's actually a chance of passing laws on like the federal level, you can just have laws that say, yeah, whatever the Apple Watch is doing, that's now against the law.

1:14:06John Siracusa:Another anonymous, a different anonymous writes, on the topic of audio intelligence, it seems Apple is following a very similar strategy at the Genius Bar. If you have a Genius Bar appointment, you're asked to agree that they are not responsible for data loss, followed by an additional agreement page that asks about audio collection for note-taking during the appointment. This happens right at the beginning of every appointment. The audio consent agreement covers the fact that audio is transcribed on the iPad they use, and that transcript is sent to the cloud for processing.

1:14:30Casey Liss:This is an example of a social norm that I think we've pretty well established. For decades, I guess, you call a customer a support number, and they say this call will be recording for training and quality purposes. and blah, blah, blah. That's an example of a confined scenario, like a meeting at work, where everyone agrees. All right, fine. Like, I understand why it's being recorded. In fact, it might actually benefit me here. It's like similar to if you're having a meeting, you might want it to be recorded. So both sides, you know, you can't argue about what took place or like literal audio recording.

1:14:57Casey Liss:There are limited contexts where you say, fine, if you don't agree, hang up with the phone. But if you do agree, we're both here, this is being recorded. And both parties have an interest in it being recorded because you don't want like the customer service person lying about what you said and you want to be able to prove what they said obviously they have the recording and you don't and so it's not quite fair but in some states you can record your end too and blah blah blah um but yeah like essentially ai note-taking technologies uses the genius bar that's a great idea because people there's a lot of conversation happening in the genius bar and it's hard to keep track of what everyone is saying and people are trying to take notes in real time but also pay attention to the customer if the customer and the genius bar person agree that we're okay with this, I think, again, it benefits both of them to have additional data about their interaction so that they get the best service possible.

1:15:45Casey Liss:That's so different than, by the way, on your walk from the parking lot, we were recording you and we heard your conversation and we already know what you are. We already know what you're coming here to talk to us about. And it's like, I'm not okay with that. That is surveillance.

1:15:58John Siracusa:Finally, you, I believe John, noted that mkbhd has a segment in his watch review that discusses exactly this all right so here the

1:16:06Casey Liss:one of the things that when we first discussed this i'm like well uh this from a technical perspective and a a principled ethical perspective is very very bad but it's the type of thing where depending on what the defaults are again this hasn't actually shipped yet so we don't know how this will be configured out the box if it ever ships we'll see um but like depending on this is deployed maybe this stuff is off by default right um and it's the type of thing where if if it doesn't occur to you i would love to just record and get summaries of every conversation that happens to me all day and you seek out this feature and turn it on and if it's off by default it's so obscure that like i don't think it's a need that people will be seeking out and basically what it would mean is that you know the tyranny of the faults most people will have no interaction with this feature and it won't even rise to the level that people know about it won't become a pr problem but then mkbhd made a video about it it's like well that ship has sailed because now millions and millions and millions of casual tech enthusiasts know about these features and his take on it was very similar to ours which is this is a bad idea apple why are you doing this and so now any hope that apple could weather this storm with smart defaults and obscurity i feel like is out the window not that like mkbhd is talking to the public but he's talking to the broadest possible swath of people who care about tech stuff like literally millions of people so and he's not the only one who has talked about this but yeah apple really i mean it's great that this didn't ship in 27.0 because apple now has a chance to think better of it and do something different and maybe say oh we're gonna delay this feature while we think about it but we'll see how this goes but yeah

1:17:41Marco Arment:he mkbhd is on it i i just i can't imagine this providing enough utility to be worth all of the reputational damage and downsides. Because, like we were saying earlier, the products that do this, like our sponsor of this episode, the products that do this for business meetings are much more thorough and much more specialized and intentionally don't strip out a whole bunch of information because that's not the point of them.

1:18:08Casey Liss:And they have a long history. Like when I was in my jobby job, every meeting we had was recorded, whether it was in WebEx or Zoom or Teams or all the different, like every meeting was recorded. Full audio, both ends of every meeting. And it was beneficial to everybody. We didn't have any AI note-taking or whatever, but if you missed the meeting, for example, you couldn't attend it, you could go and play back the recording of the meeting. Incredibly beneficial. No one was like, you're recording meetings? That's just the way things work in this office. It's fine, not surveillance.

1:18:36Marco Arment:If I had to guess, honestly, I bet this feature never ships. I bet it kind of gets delayed, very similar to the CSAM scanning thing from a few years back. Like, I bet it kind of gets like, you know, delayed, rethought, and then, oh, actually, never mind. Like, you know, in some form.

1:18:53Casey Liss:Yeah, and the thing is, a lot of this same tech has been used in Apple devices and could be used in the future in Apple devices as an assistive technology for people who can't hear what's being said and basically getting closed captions on people. Like, it's a potential thing of glasses. Like, if you can't hear what people are saying, if you just looked at them and can see subtitles as they speak, that's an incredibly valuable assistive technology. most people would not consider that surveillance because it is just someone using an assistive device to live through the world it's not recording those the transcripts it's just putting the words under their face so you can understand what they're saying when they're talking to you without being able to hear them um and obviously they have actual hearing aids for people who just need the sound boosted or whatever like as an assistive technology i think it does have value and that's why i feel like the the one that could reasonably survive with some tweaks is the 15 second rewind thing um i'm not sure of the utility of that but like that is less that is much more like hey dingus right it's like it's just a rolling buffer and if you never listen to the rolling buffer it all just disappears just like the rolling buffer that was listening to hey dingus all that audio is gone like dears and rain right lost sorry uh will be lost anyway um and so those 15 second buffers if you never double tap the crown it never shows that when you do double tap it arguably you could say i'm using it as an assistive technology especially if you can't actually save that 15 seconds and it's just on your watch briefly.

1:20:11Casey Liss:But the recap one, that's surveillance.

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1:22:22John Siracusa:All right, we have been very busy and I apologize we haven't had more time for Ask ATP, but this is the benefit of having two shows 48 hours apart is that we can do some ask ATP. So Elliot writes, what is the highest mileage you've ever got to in a single car? What do you think is the highest mileage that you should go for me? When I had a 1994 Saturn SL two, I believe that got to like 120 ,000 miles or there about before, after the wheels fell off that one. First of all, excellent memory. Second of all, it was one wheel. Thank you very much. And third of all, it was after.

1:22:57Casey Liss:Really, if any of the wheels fall off, that's bad, by the way.

1:22:59John Siracusa:That can confirm.

1:23:00Casey Liss:Even if it's just one, I don't feel like it's not much of a defense.

1:23:02John Siracusa:That was not great. So to be fair, that was Dad's commuter car until it was eventually handed down to me. That car bombed up and down the Sawmill River Parkway at truly heinous speeds at like four o 'clock in the morning when Dad would go to work. It was astonishing. He was like the Sabine Schmitz of the Sawmill. It was really Sawmills. And that reference probably made sense to six people. but that's okay. Anyways, that car got to like 120 ,000 miles on one clutch, I should add. And then the Nissan 300 CX that we bought with something like 70 or 80 ,000 miles on it from a coworker of my dad's.

1:23:39John Siracusa:And I think that had like 110 ish when we got rid of, when I got rid of it, because at that point it was mine. But nothing since then has been anywhere close to that mileage. Um, I think the original BMW was like 70, 80 ,000 miles. I could look it up, but I'm not going to do that while we're on the air. Um, the Volkswagen had 35 ,000. Um, I'm starting life with this BMW at 23 ,000 or something like that. So we'll see, but I have a feeling that Marco will probably be on par with me and John will shame us both, but let's see, Marco, let's start with you. Cause I think you're going to be close. What is your world record holder?

1:24:17John Siracusa:Well, your maximum probably had a bunch of miles, didn't it?

1:24:20Marco Arment:Yeah, so growing up, my family cars, we would go past 100 ,000 miles. Not that far past, but maybe 100 ,000, 100 ,000, 100 ,000. My personally owned ones, my Nissan Maxima was the highest at 94 ,000.

1:24:36John Siracusa:So you never crossed 100 ,000? Wow.

1:24:39Marco Arment:Honestly, I would have loved to, but at that point, there were a whole bunch of repairs the car needed that were not related to the engine. Like a whole, there was like, I, that car, I don't know what happened to it before I owned it, but the weirdest stuff would break on that car. Like I had to replace like the windshield washer fluid tank. Why? I don't know. Like there's, I had to replace like thousands of dollars worth of really minor little crap all around the car. What year was it? I'm sorry. 96.

1:25:10John Siracusa:Oh, see. So the 300ZX was 91 and it was very much the same at the end of life. It just started falling apart.

1:25:17Marco Arment:Yeah. And I wish, because it was a 90s Japanese car. It should have been able to go significantly longer than 94 ,000 miles. And it could have if I actually kept up with all these repairs. But honestly, at that point, it was costing so much in minor repairs. I was like, you know what? I'm just going to get a new. And that's when I replaced it with a new Accord.

1:25:37John Siracusa:Oh, that's right. I forgot about that step in your journey. Yes.

1:25:40Marco Arment:Yeah. I mean, there was a gap between where I didn't have a car for a few months, but that didn't last very long.

1:25:45John Siracusa:Was the Maxima, the Maxima was not a stick. Is that right?

1:25:47Marco Arment:No, no, it was. It was a 96 Nissan Maxima SE.

1:25:51John Siracusa:Four-door sports car.

1:25:52Marco Arment:Yep. It was all leather inside with the Bose stereo. It had like every other option you could get on a Maxima SE. It was all there, but with a stick. That car, I loved that car. It was so good.

1:26:04John Siracusa:Oh, man. Those were so hot. I swear to you. If you think of like, well, I don't think they make the Maxima anymore and haven't for several years. But the most recent Maxima that I can think of was like.

1:26:13Marco Arment:It's probably a crossover now.

1:26:14John Siracusa:Yeah, right? The most recent Maxima I can think of was very bulbous and gross. It had a vertical sunroof that didn't open or something like that. They really have not been good for a long time. But the mid to late 90s and the early aughts, they were so hot. And you could get them with decent power with a five-speed, maybe even a six-speed toward the end of this being an option. God, they were so hot. Oh, my God. I wanted one so bad.

1:26:38Marco Arment:And honestly, I would greatly prefer the climate control in this car to the car I have now. Look at all those buttons. Physical controls. Yeah.

1:26:46John Siracusa:Imagine that.

1:26:46Marco Arment:And like high fan speeds, strong AC. I love the iX in lots of ways. The climate control sucks. Like it's not good. I hear that.

1:26:56John Siracusa:We'll come back to the highest mileage we think you should go. But first, John, how high have you been?

1:27:00Casey Liss:I mean, I think it's different for cars that I've owned versus cars that I've driven. So I put in, I was trying to find pictures of this. It's always frustrating to me when I can't find pictures of the exact car. But anyway, you can see on our Slack channel. 1980 something i think ours was 1981 uh volvo volvo 240 wagon that's what i learned to drive

1:27:20John Siracusa:stick on oh these were these were hot in the like they're actually hideously boxy and gross but i

1:27:26Casey Liss:still love them way yeah very uh very ungainly very awkward looking uh very hard clutch depressed because it needed to be stiff for that 80 horsepower engine in there um no pickup whatsoever it had a the stick shift was four gears in an h pattern and uh with a button on the top of the shifter to go into the fifth overdrive gear like an electronically actuated overdrive there wasn't actually like a shift position for it uh and reverse was like a ring to pull up to get into reverse anyway really weird um i was driving this car when it crossed 100k because i would drive this around you know as a teenager with my friends and stuff we were all in the car we saw that we were going to get close to 100k so we drove around the neighborhood and i and i watched the physical odometer roll over to 100k while going up the steepest hill in the neighborhood at a very high speed um so we timed it out just so we would be going up uh the big hill on a grassy pond uh if you know where that is but you probably know it uh very steep hill that used to go down on my bicycle and go like 40 miles an hour down the hill on a bicycle incredibly dangerous i don't know why i did this i'm amazing that i'm still alive the the same hill by the way where the bunch of teenagers who are a couple years younger than me died by going too fast and losing control of their car going over the crest of that hill and hitting a tree um oh lovely so i was in this car when it crossed 100k but that wasn't the end for this car this car continued to live on and i believe it crossed 140 150 before we got rid of it by that point it was so rusted through that like we had a you know a a plus sign shaped tire iron like wrench thing yeah yeah yeah and that fell out of the back of the car through a hole in the bottom of the car when someone was driving because it had rusted the bottom of the car rusted out so much that just went yeah and it made a lot of noise and yeah um so i think that is the highest mileage car i've ever driven and i'm

1:29:17John Siracusa:sorry you said that was a volvo 200 series is that 240 i believe it was okay yeah but 200 series

1:29:21Casey Liss:though yeah yeah a wagon and it was beige but it wasn't the color bait you see a white one in the in the slack and you see this beige one but the our beige one was not that dark um this is the right headlights so in like the 85 86 one they did like the headlights where they wrapped all this around but ours was the one with the little squares like this so i don't know the exact but that was not my car that's my parents car for my cars usually what would happen is once they got around 90 or 100 we'd start thinking about getting a different car so i think uh well my first car yeah so i should do that i forgot all about that my 1992 civic my very first car which my parents quote unquote sold to me for like a dollar um when they gave it to me i think it was pushing up around 70 or 80 and then i drove that well into the hundreds i don't remember what mileage it was at when it was dying i think it was maybe 120 130 and i sold it to a private citizen and the clutch was going and they test drove it i'm like please don't slip please don't like and they're just like the whole test drive i'm like just just need them to give me the money and leave with this car because i knew the clutch was going like it 120 130 000 miles in the first clutch it'll do it needs a new clutch okay and i could feel that it needed a new clutch but i didn't want to pay for a new clutch and somebody did buy it from me and they probably immediately had to buy a new clutch sorry to that person although they didn't give me much money for it so that is probably the highest mileage champ and then all the other ones i had all the civics and accords i had usually once they cross around 100 we're usually thinking of uh swapping them out like the 2017 accord we have is around 86, 87 now.

1:30:54Casey Liss:And I bet we're going to keep that a while longer. Maybe we'll sell it to quote unquote, sell it to a kid at some point. So yeah, I don't have exact numbers, but I've never been past 150, I think. I think the Volvo around 150 is the highest I've gone. And then that wasn't my car. And my 992 Civic was around 121.30 before we sold it.

1:31:11John Siracusa:So how high do you think one should go? It sounds like John, you're in the 100 ,000 range.

1:31:15Casey Liss:No, that's not. My answer to that is different. How high should you go? okay keep driving it until you don't want to own the car anymore like that's my always my policy right um mileage shouldn't matter because if you still keep wanting to have the car just keep paying for parts for it and if paying for parts makes you not want the car well then you don't want the car anymore like that's what it comes down to so for example my 2014 accord which granted is very low mileage my current strategy is if anything breaks in that car i'm going to pay to fix it and they're gonna say well why would you pay for that it's you paying for that is more than the car is worth and i'm gonna pay it because i want to keep driving that car like that happens to a lot of people though the car is worth 1500 bucks and it's going to cost you five grand to fix this engine you sure you want to fix this engine some people say hell no i don't want this car anymore but for this specific car i would say yes fix it because i still want to drive this car that's the decision like you see all these like lexus things that go for like a million miles or volvos that have a million 1.2 million miles on the same engine or whatever if people keep wanting to drive the car they just keep putting money into it and you just you know it's the car of theseus you're replacing the water pump you're replacing the the head gaskets you're then you're replacing the head you're replacing all the pulleys you're you know like the distributor you all new wires like you just so many parts that are being replaced over time and of course all the wear items are replaced many times over and you get new shocks and you get new struts and you know but if you want to keep driving the car i'd say there there is no limit if the car continues to run and you can get parts for it and you want to keep driving that car

1:32:41John Siracusa:keep driving it you could say the limit does not exist john that's a reference uh marco any

1:32:46Marco Arment:thoughts on highest you should go i think you it's like replacing your iphone if you want to rationalize a new purchase you can at any time like in some way like well it's going to keep costing more to maintain i'm on it's getting gas getting expensive you know you can always find some reason to rationalize replacing it but usually just repairing an old car is usually the cheapest way to keep going. Especially if you average it out over the years, repairing an old car is almost always cheaper than replacing it for a very long time. But it also depends on the car. Sometimes you can get a lot of miles out of a car before it needs the entire engine to be rebuilt.

1:33:28Marco Arment:Like John was saying, sometimes you can go well past 100. Sometimes you don't even get to 50. Sometimes a pebble creates some bad luck. There's all sorts of ways that your car ownership can end. but if if something is reasonably repairable for reasonable prices and you still like the car and still serves your needs repair it that's one of the things you learn from watching car rebuilding

1:33:51Casey Liss:channels is any modern engine in a commodity car should easily go hundreds of thousands of miles if you just continue to replace the wear parts the parts that are always going to wear out certain parts certain parts are always going to wear out you do have to replace belts and uh you know hoses and stuff that just you know rots out but like the the heart of the engine should easily last hundreds of thousands of miles the exception to that i remember i said commodity cars what if you don't have a commodity car what if you have a fancy car those unfortunately many of them are lucky to make it to 100 000 because they have some fatal flaw where the rod bearings wear out or the timing chain guard has a problem and needs to be replaced and if you don't do whatever like if whatever the weakness of this exotic weird engine has if you don't address that weakness preemptively the engine potentially will not make it to 100 000 which is so not true of like a four-cylinder naturally aspirated honda engine like you just like don't have to do anything to that and it will easily make it to 100k as long as you know again something catastrophic doesn't happen like damage or whatever but temperamental cars you've got your fancy bmw m car so many of them have something that everyone knows oh these all have this problem so if you don't get these things replaced at this number of miles this engine is toast like catastrophic things that will cause you know interference in the interference in the engine and just destroy it entirely that won't happen with a stupid simple honda engine because there's nothing in there to go wrong but performance engines they're trying to you know they're they're not made to be like we have to make sure this last hundred thousand miles if no one ever pays attention to it they're like no we want maximum power and you know efficiency and all these other things about it and they're not looking towards longevity.

1:35:29Casey Liss:So that's one of the weird things about this business is the more exotic or interesting and or exciting the engine, the less likely it is to cruise easily to hundreds of thousands of miles.

1:35:39John Siracusa:The canonical example of this to me is the Porsche IMS bearings, which I forget the specifics about what the IMS bearing is or where it sits or whatever. But it was on, I think, Boxster's and especially 911s for like five or so years. And it's one of those things that you don't really know when it's going to go, but if it goes, it's a catastrophic failure, like John was saying. Like, you have to throw away the engine and start anew, which is just astonishing. JJ in the chat said, the engine of fancy cars are wear items.

1:36:08Casey Liss:Yeah, I mean, there's always such weird things. Like, one of the recent ones, like, a particular Porsche engine, speaking of them, where there's, like, the little finger followers that actuate the valves from the cam shafts or whatever, and the little finger followers, like, wear out in a particular way, and once they start to wear it screws with your timing and it's just like and you know it's fixed in the next version of the engine the the rod bearings i was thinking with bm there's so many bmw engines like these are great but at 50 000 miles you better replace the rod bearings because the ones they come with are just going to be toast pretty soon and the whole engine's going to seize up it's like that that doesn't happen with a stupid commodity car engine because they're not made fancy they don't have the special silicon graphite impregnated rod bearings for extra low friction it's just no it's just like the cheapest most reliable thing um so yeah modern cars should last easily hundreds of thousands of miles if something doesn't go wrong unless you have a fancy car in which case all bets are off and you better know the lore about the particular model year of the particular fancy car that you bought or just be willing to constantly take it in for service and pay gobs and gobs of money vanos by the way as you found out casey is also a giant source of pain and BMWs because their valve timing system and the way it works with oil pressure, actuating all those little things is temperamental.

1:37:18John Siracusa:That's very gentle of you. I'm very, very impressed.

1:37:21Casey Liss:I think they also had the timing chain, plastic timing chain guards that shatter into a million pieces. That was also not what you wanted to happen. Yeah, tell Aaron's first Volvo.

1:37:31John Siracusa:Ay, ay, ay.

1:37:32Casey Liss:That was the Pebble did that one.

1:37:35John Siracusa:No, no, no, but it broke through the timing chain guard and took out the timing chain and then it was an interference.

1:37:39Casey Liss:Yeah, no, the timing chain guard is just like keeping the timing chain from like, you know, like it's wrapping around some pulleys and the guard like pushes it out a little bit. And that guard made a plastic that eventually becomes brittle and breaks. And now you have pieces of plastic being caught between the gears of the timing chain. And it's bad news.

1:37:55John Siracusa:Anyway, Mark Bramhill writes, Google recently announced the end of support for third-party email addresses, sending and receiving mail through Gmail starting in January. I remember John uses this for routing all of his different accounts into one Gmail account. out. Do you have a plan for what to do when the new year arrives? My email setup depends on this, and I don't want to lose my custom domain, make my account a Google workspace account, or lose my bajillion Gmail filter rules. What do we say for our friend, Mark?

1:38:19Casey Liss:I didn't know about this until this was sent in probably several months ago, based on how long things stay in SKTP. So I looked into it, and sure enough, there's like some little Google announcement that says, yeah, by the way, you may have been enjoying the fact that you can be in the gmail web interface and send mail from any of your email addresses that you own in other words it will go through like the smtp server of whatever your domain is but you can do that from the gmail web interface so for example i one of the domains i own is hypercritical.co which is where my website is and i have email addresses at hypercritical.co like switchglass at hypercritical.co for like switchglass support for one of my apps i have email addresses for all my app names okay um and if someone sends an email to that address and says hey i'm having a problem with switchglass when i reply my reply comes from switchglass at hypercritical.co but i send that reply from gmail.com because gmail.com lets you configure hey when you're replying as switchglass hypercritical.co what should i use for the smtp server and i point it to the now these days the fast mail server that is my you know smtp server and you know anything blah blah blah this is separate from receiving email which is very easier again i've moved everything to fastmail a while back um i receive email for all my various addresses at hypercurtle.co and they go to fastmail but fastmail is how it makes it easy to send a rule that says oh do you want me also to send a copy of this to your gmail address and i say yes so that's still going to work you can still receive emails that were really sent to a different address because all that is just forwarding just fastmail saying oh just forward this to this gmail address and i receive it and i see it there it's they're responding as a different address i don't know why google is getting rid of this other than just being punitive and mean uh trying to get you to upgrade to some paid thing or whatever which by the way i would do i wasn't terrified of it destroying my entire life because i don't trust any ability to upgrade this type of stuff and i hear all these horror stories about how free gmail is better than workspace until they lock your account forever and you lose access to everything which i know is a problem anyway just fingers you have a chance of getting someone on the phone but if google locks your free gmail account you're never getting it back anyway yeah so what am i going to do for sending here's what i'm personally planning to do first of all when people send email to like you know switchglass at hypocritical.co half the time i don't even bother responding i just respond for my gmail address like i don't pay that much attention like they know it's me it's not like i'm not pretending to be a big company they send email they know it's getting to me when i respond i respond for my personal email address it comes from my gmail who cares okay i may probably do that but if i decide that oh for whatever reason it's important for me to send an email as switchglass and hypercuddle.co i'll just go to the fastmail web interface and do it from there like that's what i'm gonna do like it's not going to affect my life too much because it was just kind of like a nice convenience that i can send email as my different addresses from the gmail web interface but if i can't most of the time i just won't do it and if i do want to

1:41:12John Siracusa:do it i'll go to the fast mail web interface ben cooper writes if apple ever makes a new mac pro one day probably with some or one of their ai super servers chips that will roll out in the next three to five years will it reuse the 2019 design or have a new one i kind of feel like it

1:41:28Casey Liss:depends on how long it is like i've always said when they made this case design in 2019 that they were going to try to get mileage out of it because it was so expensive to develop and it turns out they did get many years out of it mostly by just never updating the machines that they sell in that case so they they sold the intel one and they sold the m2 one and that's it just just been you know it was the intel it was for the intel's maybe they was i forget if they had a zeon rev in this case maybe not um yeah and the m2 was the only apple silicon one to it but they sold that stupid m2 thing for way longer than they should have they did get a lot of years out of it maybe they feel like they recouped their costs on developing and maybe they feel like they didn't which is why the whole thing is canned uh if they came out with an expert mac pro next year they would reuse the case if they come out with a mac pro 10 years from now i think they have a new case yeah i think they

1:42:17John Siracusa:would do something new it may look very similar to what you just left behind but i think it would

1:42:22Marco Arment:be new marco any thoughts i mean besides my standard disclaimer that i think the mac studio is the mac pro now and i think if they call if they wanted to call something else the mac pro it would probably just be like the mac studio in space grave or maybe it would be a little bit

1:42:40Casey Liss:bigger they'll call it the mac ultra that's what they would call it oh maybe because i mean we'll see how they go with the rumored uh it didn't work out for the phone so far right so the phone is the duo and not the ultra and maybe the 20th anniversary would be the ultra but the rumor still is that the touch-based oled macbook pro will be the macbook ultra if they do the macbook ultra clearly in three to five years if they're going to make something that is bigger and hotter than the mac studio i feel like they would call it mac ultra or i mean you know they're on their kick for

1:43:05Marco Arment:like you know three letter names ending in oh we got neo we got duo is there anything like mac bow quadro they already did quadra

1:43:15Casey Liss:well that's quadra not quadro quadro is different that's something i doesn't isn't quadro an nvidia

1:43:21Marco Arment:trademark uh what was that wasn't that their professional gpus yeah that weren't those the ones that were like for cad not games right yeah exactly yeah all right thank you to our sponsors this episode claude and granola and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join one of the many perks of membership is atp overtime our weekly bonus topic this week on overtime we're going to be talking a little more about john turnis's intelligent personal hub remarks during that keynote and apple's home ai hub that's rumored and we're talking about that. In overtime, you can join and listen at atp.fm slash join.

1:43:59Marco Arment:Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

1:44:25Casey Liss:And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.

1:44:30Marco Arment: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-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long.

1:45:04John Siracusa:I have a problem. An AI hasn't solved it.

1:45:08Marco Arment:Is it a cowbell joke? What are we doing?

1:45:10John Siracusa:No, I wish a cowbell would be the answer. But was that a fever anyway? I think it was a fever. But anyhow, I bought my BMW, you know, a month or so ago, a month and a half ago. And like six-ish months ago, BMW in America cut off the API that some third-party individual like open source wrote a home assistant integration for. So with Aaron's car, there's a non-supported, or not Volvo-supported, integration and home assistant that'll let me tell it to start cooling itself or unlock or lock or whatever the case may be. And this is completely unnecessary. Let me start by saying completely unnecessary.

1:45:59John Siracusa:I recognize that. I get it. But it's actually kind of nice. So as an example, instead of having the Volvo always start preconditioning itself every morning when Aaron is about to do the school run, I can use Home Assistant to make an automation that says if it's over such and such degrees or below such and such degrees, precondition. If you're in that sweet spot in the middle, don't bother. Again, for this entire conversation, I'm just going to take it as writ. I understand none of this is necessary. It's a hobby. I think it's neat, and I like doing it. I don't think I need any of this for my BMW.

1:46:34John Siracusa:I don't have repeatable common uses like that, but it's still nice to have. And it's still nice to be able to see that, oh, the BMW is charged at 80 % or 20 % or whatever the case may be. It's nice to have that in Home Assistant.

1:46:46Casey Liss:You have to make a new LED for that.

1:46:47John Siracusa:I could make a new LED for that. You're exactly right. And I absolutely would, 100%. Now I'm frustrated again because I remember that that was part of the plan and I can't do it. And so to cut to the end of the story, I have not solved this problem. but there is a read-only API that BMW had to make, I think because of EU rules in the EU, where you can get information about your car. You cannot influence your car. So you couldn't lock it or unlock it. You couldn't start it to precondition or whatever, but you can at least know how charged it is, among other things. This API does not exist in the United States.

1:47:24John Siracusa:There is a home assistant integration that does work with that API, But when you go to register for it in the U.S., it just kind of hangs. So I figured I'd like to think of myself as reasonably smart. I should be able to figure this out. So my first, well, how would you two start to try to get access in Home Assistant to the BMW APIs? What would be your first step?

1:47:49Marco Arment:I'd go right to an LLM for this.

1:47:51Casey Liss:Do you have an example of a product that does this that you can reverse engineer? like something that exists that you have access to that uses the API?

1:48:01John Siracusa:Sure. My iOS app.

1:48:02Casey Liss:Oh yeah. Well then just wire sniff that sucker.

1:48:05John Siracusa:That is exactly what I did. Unfortunately, and now I'm talking a little bit out of my comfort zone, but unfortunately it appears that BMW did the thing that they should do and their certificate pinning. So I can't sniff that traffic. It, it, it rejects everything. Like I have Charles installed on my phone. Now it could be that it's user error. Maybe I misunderstood how to do this with Charles, But I've done this with other things with Charles that aren't as sophisticated, and it's worked great. And I tried to do this with Charles on the phone. Charles is a wire sniffer. And I couldn't get anything useful out of it.

1:48:36Casey Liss:I don't know how the certificate pinning works. Does this totally stop you from man-in-the-middling it with, like, a proxy?

1:48:42John Siracusa:Again, I'm talking outside my comfort zone. But my limited understanding, very limited and probably incorrect understanding of certificate pinning, it's probably all wrong. So consider your source here. But my understanding is it basically says the other end has to match this exact certificate. It can't be a good certificate. And maybe, Marco, you might know about this. But it has to match a particular certificate or something along those lines. I forget the details.

1:49:06Marco Arment:Yeah, so when – because I do the same thing on Overcast. I've done it since day one. And so using the standard stock iOS APIs as a way to basically intercept the negotiation of the secure connection before it's actually made. and you can be presented with the certificate chain of trust and you can inspect it. And you return like yes or no, do I trust this or not? Or you can block it, you can cancel it, whatever else. But anyway, you can inspect, is it signed by one of the keys that you approve of? Or you can say, is it an exact certificate that you approve of? Or is it signed by an intermediate certificate that you trust?

1:49:44Marco Arment:So that's usually like, you can get very, very picky and low level with this, but the most common approach, I think, is to pin one of the intermediates. That way you can reissue your certificate as long as it's still signed by the same CA or something like that, then you don't have to issue an update to your app for it to work.

1:50:02John Siracusa:Thank you. That is a much better explanation than I could have given. But yes, that matches what I was experiencing, which is basically it was trying to man in the middle. And I think I might have said Wireshark, but I meant Charles. I used Charles Proxy. to, I used Charles Proxy to attempt a man in the middle of it. And even though I told Charles, you know, I told my phone to trust Charles' certificate, the BMW app rejected it.

1:50:26Casey Liss:But my next step would be, okay, decompile the app and see what the source code is doing. Because if you can't see what's happening over the wire, you can see the code that produces the content that goes over the wire.

1:50:34John Siracusa:That is what I should have done, but I didn't. And I should try that. I don't know if it'll matter, but I agree with you. That is the next step. I did not, That did not occur to me, and it should have. Now, in my defense, I was doing this a month or so ago, or shortly after getting the car. And I forget when you were talking about reverse engineering something, but I think it was subsequent to that. But anyway, it doesn't really matter. I should have thought of it, and I didn't. So what I thought was, all right, well, I know the app works. What if I used iPhone mirroring?

1:51:05Marco Arment:Oh, no. I have— Does this end with, like, a hot dog on an actuator?

1:51:09John Siracusa:Pretty close.

1:51:10Marco Arment:The water-drinking part from the Simpsons.

1:51:13Casey Liss:Exactly it. Exactly it.

1:51:15John Siracusa:I thought, you know what? I'll have Claude write me, and Claude is past and potentially future sponsor. Current this episode. Oh, yeah, it is this episode. I'm sorry. I didn't even think about that. Yes, current sponsor. But anyways, I thought, let me have Claude write a Mac OS app that will tickle iPhone mirroring and do what I want it to do in the BMW app via iPhone mirroring. This took a long time. There's a lot of back and forth, but I'll be damned. Fellas, it worked perfectly.

1:51:53Marco Arment:Oh, that's awesome.

1:51:55John Siracusa:Which is incredible. I could get information on my Mac about what was happening on my phone via iPhone mirroring via the MyBMW app, right? It's the same app, presumably, you're using for your car, Marco. And it would look at the, it would do screen, it would take a picture, you know, look at the iPhone mirroring screens, which is my iPhone screen. It would figure out what was the state of charge, you know, is it locked, is it unlocked, et cetera. Then it got to the point that it would lock or unlock the car if I asked it to. like it was interactive it was incredible this is all well and good i feel like you're using the

1:52:33Marco Arment:past tense a lot in this in this last sentence i was gonna say instead of using your phone i was

1:52:38Casey Liss:like you need like a sacrificial phone whose only function in life is to be that phone that you are

1:52:42John Siracusa:exactly exactly right john and i am lucky enough to buy an iphone every year like a friggin idiot i have old phones laying around and so i thought you know what i'll do i'll sacrifice my webcam phone, which is like an iPhone 15, maybe 14. I forget exactly what this is. I'll sacrifice that and no longer use it as a webcam for, you know, a handful of FaceTime, social FaceTime calls I do every month. I'll just use my actual phone for those. I'll sacrifice this and I'll put this bad boy attached to my M1 Mac mini job done. This is going to be fricking great. I start that process. Everything's going great.

1:53:19John Siracusa:I log into my BMW on this sacrificial phone and I connected to the Mac mini. I installed my little, I don't even remember what Claude ended up calling it, but it was probably just as bad a name as I would have come up with, or maybe I told it. Uh, but anyways, I, I had Claude, you know, right. I had Claude, you know, help me put it on the, on the Mac mini. Everything is going great. This is working perfectly. And the next step was going to be, all right, now let's put this bad boy in home assistant, which honestly, what I was, what I did was I had it dump everything into my MQTT server, which is basically like a generic bus that a bunch of different things can talk to.

1:53:58John Siracusa:It's not really that important to the story here, but it would dump everything on MQTT, and then it's very easy for Home Assistant to pick up stuff on MQTT. So I have it in MQTT. My next step was going to be to start integrating into Home Assistant using this bus, and I noticed that it was working great until I disconnected via screen sharing. This is a headless Mac mini. I do everything via Apple screen sharing. The second I disconnect, it locks the Mac mini. Okay, fine. I'll tell it to have an infinite screen saver. Never, ever auto lock yourself. It'll be great.

1:54:39Marco Arment:I have some scripts to set that up for you. That's exactly how all of mine run.

1:54:42John Siracusa:Right? The second you disconnect the screen sharing, it locks the Mac Mini. All right, fine. I'm talking with Claude about this. Why don't you purchase an HDMI dongle so it thinks there's a physical connection to an actual monitor connected to the device? Well, you know what, Claude? I happen to have one laying around. I plug that in. No good. The second you disconnect screen sharing, it locks the computer. When it locks the computer, it locks the iPhone mirroring. That is where I ended up getting stuck. Ooh, the GLI net Comet Q. That is interesting. I wonder. But the problem, though, is that if I use the Mac Mini for normal stuff, like with screen sharing, then as soon as I disconnect, it's going to relock everything, right?

1:55:32John Siracusa:So the solution I could choose is to disavow screen sharing for the purposes of this one computer and only ever log into it via like the GLI net or use like a more vanilla VNC thing or something like that. And that is a solution. But I don't want this that badly that I want to rejigger how I access this Mac mini because I do that more frequently than you would think. So I ended up throwing up the white flag. But the fact that I was this close, I was so close. I almost got it. And if it wasn't for the fact that there's no way I can figure out to prevent the Mac Mini from locking itself the second I disconnect, if it wasn't for that, I think I would have had it.

1:56:19John Siracusa:And that, to me, is absolutely astonishing. So it was a really fun journey. I'm glad I tried it. But ultimately, it didn't work out.

1:56:28Marco Arment:Well, I think what's interesting about, you know, part of the great loss that we've had as we've moved away from a lot of web browser apps and a lot of, you know, kind of more open APIs into now everything has its own custom app. And they're all super locked down and they have no one has public APIs anymore. And they're all those are all locked down and everything is through API keys and pinning and stuff like that. And of course, my own app does exactly this. And so I can't really talk. But I think one of the things that we've lost in this world is like the ability for power users and tinkerers and programmers to hack around stuff and make cool stuff.

1:57:09Marco Arment:And I think one of the great enabling things about AI is that it basically is like a complete, almost like, you know, like the world's best brute force solution. It's like, okay, well, what if we just have this intelligent automated agent just operate a computer and just click through all your BS? You want to have it log into your BS? Okay, it'll do that. You want to have it read the screen and scrape things because you don't have an API? Okay, it'll do that. And, you know, nerds like us can start rigging up things like, you know, remote KVMs or screen shares or iPhone mirroring to actually start doing the same thing to iOS apps, too, or just have the iOS app run on your Mac if it can do that.

1:57:52Marco Arment:Like, I feel like we now are in – we're in an era now where, like, one of the fun things about AI is that it helps break down those walls that everyone else has put up. Yep.

1:58:02John Siracusa:I couldn't agree more. I'll have to take a stab at having it, like, decompile the app. I really should have thought about that. I'm really frustrated that I didn't. But I bring this up both because I want to fuss and moan about the fact that I can't seemingly do this. Although it also didn't occur to me to just run the app natively, which it looks like I might be able to do, which presumably might get me what I want. So you both have saved me potentially, potentially saved me. So instead of running it in iPhone mirroring. I might be able to just run it natively on my Apple Silicon Mac mini. But it's both fascinating to me that this is a potential like Rube Goldberg solution, which I felt pretty proud that I came up with this and that Claude was able to basically get it working.

1:58:50John Siracusa:It was no fault of Claude that it failed. But it's also a bummer that all of this, like you said, Marco, is locked in and there's nothing we can do to get at it. And as much as I have very mixed feelings about the EU's regulatory landscape. It's stuff like this. When it's executed right, which the EU doesn't always do, this is the EU at its best, right? At the very least, I could have gotten read-only info out of the BMW if I lived in, I almost said in Britain, but if I lived in mainland Europe. Too soon? Too soon. But yeah, no, I'm bummed that it didn't work, but I thought it was a really fun experiment in Rube Goldberg machine to try to get it to work.

1:59:31Thank you.