690: Turn Left at the Next Tree

Oh, I'm a little sick. You too? Yeah, you too. Yeah, so what happened was, you know, last week, as I'm getting ready to do the Great Saunter, like the day before. Oh, I don't love this. Yeah, the day before I wake up. And, you know, I've had a little bit of, you know, congestion for a few days. But it's also, you know, my car was also turning yellow last week because it's pollen season. Right now, at this moment, for this particular six-month period, I don't own an ostensibly yellow car. But it happens sometimes. It can happen to you, Marco. Right, but this is not one of those times. So I figured, oh, it's just allergies. And then, you know, every day the congestion gets a little bit worse. I'm like, ooh, it's allergies. And then the day before the saunter, I get a sore throat. Now, at this point, I was still telling myself, wow, the allergies are really bad right now. To be so bad, it caused a sore throat. I mean, obviously totally in denial, right? because I was not going to be sick and miss the saunter after training for it for like eight or nine months or whatever it's been. Like I'm not going to miss it. So I willed myself into thinking I was not sick. However, as became pretty clear a day later, two days later, I was like, oh, yeah, no, I'm definitely sick. This is not allergies. It's really just a cold. So it is the season. It is the season. So it's funny you say that because I'm sitting here doing some work in the evening time, which is unusual for me. Uh, but my boss is a jerk. So here we are. Um, so I was doing work in the evening time and I was sitting here and I was like, huh, Hmm. Hmm. I don't think that's good. And I'm feeling like just the beginnings of like the, the, the, the zygote of a sore throat. You know what I mean? Like just the, the idios littlest bit of sore throat. And I'm like, Oh, yep. That's probably coming for me maybe tomorrow, certainly over the weekend. Cause the kids both had like colds and light sore throats. Declan, in particular, is extremely susceptible to strep. And as far as we could tell, it wasn't that. But yeah, it sounds like I'm coming down with a cold as well. I guess, Marco, and you and I shouldn't have been smooching over the last few days. That's really what ruined everything. Yeah, you got it for me through last week's show, I guess. Yeah, right. Well, with that in mind, let's just get started. And let's start with some follow-up. With regard to backblazing cloud backups, Barry Rubenstein writes, One of the best backup decisions I recently made was switching from Time Machine to Carbon Copy Cloner plus Backblaze. It works seamlessly in the background and provides a ton of options to customize. Carbon Copy Cloner backs up all the major cloud file providers, including Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, etc. It temporarily downloads only new or changed files locally for backup and then, quote-unquote, evicts those local copies. I back these up to a dedicated volume on my external backup drive and then have Backblaze backup that drive. Here's the support document on how it works, which we'll link in the show notes. This is highlighting a backup strategy that I tend not to think about, but a lot of people find valuable. I'm always like, just back up the whole volume, like everything. Don't pick and choose directories. But a lot of people know, like they have a habit where they're like, look, the only files I care about are here or in these two locations. And if that's the case with you, you can use lots of other solutions that are much more targeted. So this one is basically like Carbon Copy Cloner, which Carbon Copy Cloner does the whole drive, to be clear. But if you only care about these specific directories, you could target copy those with ARC or Carbon Copy Cloner or whatever to another place. And, you know, again, given its claim that it's going to ask for them to be downloaded from the cloud service, back them up and then evict them, assuming that all that works and is successful, what you end up with is a target drive that just contains the files you want to back up. And they're just plain files. So they came from cloud files, maybe in the source, but in their destination, they're just plain files. And then you point Backblaze at that drive, and it cloud backs up that drive. And again, all the files are plain files. There's no cloud anything. And as long as that drive is directly connected to your computer, Backblaze will back it up. So that sounds like a solution that works well for Barry. Yeah, I was thinking more about this whole situation. And I realized, like, you know, when we were first getting into Dropbox and then all the services that kind of followed in its footsteps, it was not cloud storage. It was sync. Like that was functionally what we were doing. We were taking a directory that was on our drives and we were syncing it between our computers. The idea of cloud only files or like on demand files didn't come until I think years into this product being a thing. And of course that introduces lots of complexity. Like the file might not be there. You might not be able to get it there, etc. That's when the whole like file provider thing started becoming more necessary. that whole API, all the complexity behind that, all the problems behind that. Certainly, I can see, like, today's world having Backblaze try to deal with what is really cloud storage now and not just synced local storage. That is a lot more complicated. I don't think Backblaze handled it particularly well in terms of messaging or, you know, warning or things like that. But I do kind of sympathize with the position they're in with the complexity of this. but I do think like what we are asking these tools to do now is, is no longer just take this folder on my computer and sync it. That is how many of us choose to use it. Like, you know, I have mine set up to always keep everything downloaded. Like I never want a cloud only file on any of my computers, but I'm also only storing, I don't know, I think 20 gigs in my Dropbox. Like it's not a huge amount of data. So I can kind of see why, you know, obviously this is not the common case for a lot of people, But I think another solution that might be relevant here is back when I was using that third-party program Maestral, which is a third-party Dropbox open source client. I haven't tested this, but I bet Maestral would be backed up by Backblaze because I think it only supports downloaded files. And it's just basically like a background process that they're running, pulling the Dropbox API for changes and downloading those files to a directory on your Mac directly where it appears to be. So I bet there are things like that or like accessing Dropbox through other like third-party tools that can access it, that if you want Dropbox to be backed up by Backblaze, maybe a third-party tool like that could be a route that would work. And speaking of ARK, Daniel Luce writes, here's how ARK handles cloud files along with the default setting. And the screenshot is not spectacular, but it appears to read when a data list or cloud only file is encountered, and then there's a dropdown and there are three options, report an error, ignore, or materialize. So Daniel continues, if a file gets evicted after successful backup and ever changes, ARK won't force it to be materialized back, nor will it error out. Materialization or failure only occurs if ARK does not think it already has a backup of its current contents. Yeah, Arcus is also claiming to do the same thing as Carbon Copy Cloner, which is like, hey, we can pull down the file if we need to back it up. And I think that's the route that Backblaze is probably going to end up going down after this whole fiasco. They're just behind the times with it and communicated it poorly. Yep. Alright, let's talk about Neo-ing all the other things. So, last week's Overtime, we talked about, hey, should Apple do more MacBook Neo-style products? And, John, I presume this is you, wanted to ask us some more questions about that. We had a bunch of different people suggesting. Obviously, in the overtime, we talked about a lot of different Neo ideas and decided that the products were Neo-able or not. But there are some things we didn't discuss, and these were suggested. There's a couple that were suggested by a lot of people. One is the Vision Pro. I don't think we talked about that, but obviously in the past we have talked about that, albeit not in the context of the Neo, which didn't exist at the time. And the idea there is basically I bet a lot of people want a Vision Pro because it's neat and cool, but they can't pay that much money for it or don't want to pay that much money for it, just like the MacBooks. And the Neo came along and was like, hey, you wanted one of those really nice Apple laptops, but you didn't want to pay a lot? Now you can get one. Could they do that with the Vision Pro? And I feel like the answer is a resounding no right now. They can't. They just can't. I mean, they can't even air the Vision Pro. Like, the Neo is so many steps down. Yeah, that was my reply to the toot. The person who tooted this, I replied back to them. They're still working on trying to air the Vision Pro. They're trying to make anything that is less expensive. Oh, you made the same joke? Yeah, I mean, the Vision Pro is so far from accessibility and mass market pricing. Like, you know, there's been big markets for many years for laptops that were $900 to $1,200. That's why the MacBook Air has been so successful. It didn't go straight from the $7,000 Mac Pro desktop to nothing. We've had mid-priced laptops as a big, healthy category for a long time. The Vision Pro is still in the $7,000 Mac Pro territory and with just nothing below it. Yeah, and the key thing about the Neo is you may be saying, well, there's all sorts of VR, AR headsets that will cost way less money. But the key thing with the Neo is the magic of providing, essentially, the experience that everybody wanted. I want a nice Apple laptop like the ones that I see that cost too much money. Can I get that experience but pay less money? And with the Vision Pro, you can make a cheaper headset, but it won't give you the Vision Pro experience. That's the magic of the Neo. Not just, hey, you made a cheaper product in this category, but you made a cheaper product in this category that the people who buy it feel like they're getting away with something. Like they're getting what they previously couldn't for less money. and you know if and when apple comes out with cheaper uh various cheaper glasses type products or whatever we'll know if they match the vision pro in quality just because you know the screens have to become cheaper um it has to be able to do all the things the vision pro can do but you know way less or whatever like oh and cost less money and all that other stuff so i think they'll get there eventually but the the technological progress on the underlying technology of the vision pro in particular has been really slow like it seems like nobody has vision pro quality screens at a massively lower price than Apple. And obviously Apple overprices a little bit with their very fancy industrial design and all sorts of other stuff. And the cameras on the outside. And we, you know, see past episodes, we've talked at length about how to make a cheaper Vision Pro. But Neo is not just like, oh, it's instead of a MacBook Pro, it's a MacBook Air, as we just said. It's like, no, now you're competing with the lowest price competitors. And there's not that many really low price competitors. Like competing with those X-Real glasses, they're like a few hundred bucks or whatever. But that's not, that's like so far from the Vision Pro experience. So, yeah, we're still waiting on tech for that one. I would say, though, the difference is even more dire. Not to beat a dead horse that, for some reason, everybody still thinks is not dead, but I assure you it's dead. The Neo was giving people an experience they already wanted at a lower price point. The Vision Pro is giving people an experience that most people are not actually wanting. And also at a very high price. Oh, that's such a good way of looking at it. I'm so mad at you. I don't know. I think the whole idea of the Neo is it's for people who already wanted a nice Apple laptop, and a Neo Vision Pro would be for people who already want a Vision Pro. Like, I know it's a much smaller market, but that's my idea of, like, Neo-ing a product. It's not like the Neo suddenly made people who weren't interested in laptops interested in laptops. It's like you said. They already wanted a nice Apple laptop. They're just like, I'm not paying $1,000 for a laptop, so they got a Windows one. This is for people who are like, I really want a really nice VR headset. Now, granted, that's a tiny group of people. but for those people and they're just like oh i would love a vision pro but 3500 forget it it's like well what if i told you you could get something that you will think is just as good as a vision pro for 800 they would leap at it that narrative makes a lot more sense if what we see from people who do have the vision pro is that they're using it all the time and loving it and getting lots of things done in it and that's not the narrative we're seeing so i i think the reality is worse i just said people who wanted it i didn't say people who owned it but well i mean you're a great example you have one but it's not like you're dying for a cheaper vision pro because you just love the vision pro so much that's like i think the vision pro has has many challenges price is a big one but it has many more fundamental challenges that i don't think have great chances of being solved the next one uh that we didn't talk about that was suggested by a lot of people was the imac which is an interesting case because i mean we did talk about the Mac mini in overtime. Um, and that one makes a lot of sense from a bunch of different angles. But the problem with the iMac is like, once you swap out the SoC for like an a something SoC, um, it's really difficult to push that price down because the screen is just, just dominates the, dominates the price and everything else about it. And you can't, like the iMac screen is fine, but it's, there's not a appreciably cheaper screen just waiting to be switched to. Like, what are you going to do to downgrade the screen that's it's basically the bottom of the barrel already i'm not saying that it's bad but it's not hdr it's not high refresh it's not you know it doesn't have a lot of pixels it's not super bright it is it's already a neo level screen it's just pretty big um you could i guess make the case out of plastic or something but honestly how much money would that save could you could you do a little bit of different stamping instead of machining to take a little bit off um it's it's similar to the mac mini case except that in the case of the Mac Mini, we came at it in the overtime for people who aren't members. We came at it from two different directions. One is looking at the Apple TV, which is already kind of like a mini Neo, and the other is taking the MacBook Neo and chopping off all the parts until it's a Mac Mini and seeing what you end up price-wise. And I don't know how much you can chop off of the iMac, especially since I think the current iMac should have an adjustable stand already and it doesn't. So maybe we put that on and then we take it off again. But anyway, those were two common suggestions for Vision Pro and iMac. We'll see. Obviously, the Vision Pro as Marco has stated many times, has other problems. I'm not really waiting for a Neo anytime soon, and the iMac seems kind of unbudgeable, but we may talk about, we will talk about, I think, the iMac later in the show from the other angle. So just on the iMac, on a Neo iMac, or iMac Neo rather, the monitor, yes, the screen is an expensive component. It might even be the most expensive component, even though screen tech has gotten really good, and it's not a very particularly high-end or large panel. I bet even today, like, you know, how much do you think the iMac screen panel actually costs? Now, a 24-inch, like, 4K monitor is around $200 to $300 retail. Like, and that's a complete monitor with the whole case and everything and ports and everything around it. So, like, I don't think we're talking about more than probably a $200 part on Apple's standards. It's still the most expensive part. I can't imagine the case costing more than that. Yes, but the iMac starts at $1,300. And, you know, so they tend to have, you know, call it a 30% or 40% profit margin. You figure there's probably about $1 to $200 more stuff in there than a decent monitor would have. And you've got to also do the keyboard and mouse or trackpad, which the Mac Mini doesn't come with, obviously. That's fair. But I think you're looking at, I think they could make an iMac, you know, right now it's $1,300. I bet they could make a comparable one for, say, $700 or $800. Would you get rid of the aluminum on the case and go to plastic? I don't think they necessarily need to. I mean, look at what they did with the Neo. I think that's the next biggest place where the money is, has got to be the case, right? Because there's just so much more aluminum in the iMac, right? And it does have the stupid stand, even though it's not technically adjustable, it just tilts, you know, it's not height adjustable. But I think the aluminum case is number two on the price list. Well, but with the Neo, what they showed is that they could still make an aluminum case. They just had to make it differently. Yeah, but there's so much less aluminum in the Neo than the iMac. I bet they could get the iMac down to $700 or $800 as a Neo version if they wanted to. Now, that being said, I don't think the iMac is a high volume enough product for them to care that much. And it's not because of its price. Like, I don't think like we knew there were there's a million there's a billion people wanting to buy a cheaper Apple laptop because everyone wants a laptop for almost everything. And cheaper Apple laptop is the best of all worlds for most people. I don't think that many people are dying to have an all in one desktop and saying, you know what, for my all in one desktop, I would get the iMac, but it's just too expensive. I just don't think that's that big of a market. I think most people who buy iMacs are doing it for like aesthetic reasons in an office. They don't care. And most people, most consumers who are price sensitive probably aren't looking at a desktop. They're probably looking at what's the cheapest laptop I can get, because that can be my only computer. Yeah. Two separate questions is like, could you make a new version of this product? And does it make sense to? And I think most people were asking, like, is it possible to make one of these? But I think just the iMac, like a lesser case of the Vision Pro, it's like, to what end are you going to massively increase demand for the iMac by doing this? Probably not. Yeah. All right, let's talk about Mythos. William Moran writes, I am very senior in tech at one of the firms that has access to Mythos and Nightwing. What is significant about it compared to previous LLMs like Sonic 4.6 or Opus 4.6 is not the ability to find bugs. It is the ability to chain them together into actual practical compromises. Some of the chains are 10 or more vulnerability steps long. And to recap the context of this mythos was the LLM that's so amazing at finding security flaws that Anthropic didn't want to release it to the general public yet because it would be too dangerous. They just wanted a select set of security researchers to have access to it so they could shore up their software. And, of course, it probably leaked due to Anthropic's own security flaws and everyone has access to it. But anyway, that's one person chiming in on what makes Mythos special. then uh with regard to the preview and some new stuff from chat gpt kyle orland at ars technico writes new research from the uk's ai security institute or aisi suggests that open ai's gpt 5.5 which launched publicly last week reached quote a similar level of performance on our cyber evaluations quote as mythos preview which the group evaluated last month. On the highest level expert test, GPT 5.5 passed an average of 71.4%, slightly higher than the 68.6% achieved by Mythos Preview, although this was within the margin of error. GPT 5.5 also matched Mythos Preview and its progress on an AISI test range set up to simulate a 32-step data extraction attack on a corporate network. 5.5 succeeded in three out of 10 attempts on TLO, compared to two of 10 for Mythos Preview. No previous model had ever succeeded at the test, even once. The new results for 5.5 suggests that when it comes to cybersecurity risk, Mythos preview is likely not, quote, a breakthrough specific to one model, quote, but rather, quote, a byproduct of more general improvements in long horizon autonomy, reasoning and coding, AISI writes. Yeah, so William was saying that what makes Mythos special is that it can chain together vulnerabilities. And this test was a 32 step chain that no model had ever passed. But now Mythos passes it and so does GPT 5.5 so it's not the mythos is particularly special like this review says it's just that this is the new state of the art in these models and guess what Anthropik's latest model and OpenAI's latest model both are way better at this than past models additionally Daniel Stenberg I can read I swear Daniel Stenberg writes with regard to curl I complained and I complained about the high frequency junk submissions to the curl bug bounty that grew really intense during 2025 and early 2026 to the degree that we shut it down completely in February 1st of this year. Since March 2026, the nature of the security report submissions have changed. The slop situation is not a problem anymore. So does that mean that they're getting better quality AI-based submissions? That is my understanding. Here's my summary of this blog post, which you can read in full because it'll be linked in the notes. They're getting more security and bug reports than ever driven by AI, but now they're much higher quality than they were last year so basically it's like they were being overwhelmed by garbage reports it was like this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong and you'd waste your time looking at it and be like no it's not wrong these stupid ai reports are coming in they're just flagging stuff that's not actually bugs and it's wasting all of our time even if they find some because they're overwhelming us with this you know garbage input it's terrible but you know apparently since march of this year suddenly now they're getting tons of submissions and the quality is really high. They're finding legit bugs. And so Daniel was early on, on the curl is a library that does HTTP requests, essentially, that's simplifying it greatly. It is the library. It's what everyone uses. It's used in tons of software. It's obviously security flaws there are really pivotal because if you find a security flaw there, it affects so much software because like every software that does HTTP requests probably uses this library. And finding bugs is valuable to him as the maintainer of this project, but the slop reports were terrible. But now they're finding legit bugs and giving high-quality reports. Unfortunately, there's also more of them. But fortunately, hey, they're finding even more legit bugs. I think the theory is, again, you can read the blog post. I think the theory is that eventually this will sort of die down more because there's not an infinite number of bugs in code. There's some number of bugs per line of code. Not that you're finding all the bugs, But eventually it becomes much harder to find bugs when you've found all the quote-unquote obvious ones. But we'll see. As evidenced by both Mythos and GPT 5.5, these tools continue to rapidly advance. So it may be a while before we feel like we've got all the low-hanging fruit and all the libraries that we're using. Kind of tangentially related, Stevie Bonifield writes at The Verge, Nearly every Linux distribution released since 2017 is currently vulnerable to a security bug called CopyFail that allows any user to give themselves administrative privileges. The exploit uses a Python script that works across all of the vulnerable Linux distributions, requiring no per-distro offsets, no version checks, no recompilation, according to Theore, the security firm that uncovered it. Copyfail was identified by Theore's researchers with assistance from their XINT code AI tool. Yes, I don't know what XINT is based on, but anyway, people are just pointing these tools at just existing code bases and finding just really embarrassing, really like obvious in hindsight, really dangerous security flaws. Like this is like nearly every Linux distribution since 2017. No special tools required. Just run this Python script and give yourself root. That's pretty bad. Obviously, you still need to be able to execute code on the thing. It's not a remote exploit, blah, blah, blah. But stuff like that, you would think, well, surely none of those bugs probably exist. Or if they do exist, they're probably only one distro or something. It's like, oof. Yeah. So, you know, people, these tools exist and people are using them and they're finding problems. And then, you know, fingers crossed, hopefully we're all fixing them. All right. Then with regard to AI ruining everything from a hardware perspective instead of software, Joe Rosignal at Mac Rumors writes, Apple has stopped offering the 256 gig storage option for the Mac Mini worldwide. The Mac Mini now starts at $800 with the M4 chip, 16 gigs of RAM and a half terabyte of storage, whereas it previously started at $600 with the M4 chip, 16 gigs of RAM, both the same, and 256 gigs of storage. Yeah, this is my overcast Mac minis continue to appreciate an aftermarket value. Mac minis have never gone down in value, Marco. I did a quick eBay search earlier today for the sold items for my configuration, which was the former base of 16-256 regular M4, which I paid an average of around $550 each for. They're currently selling in used condition for around $700. I didn't save this link, but I think, what was it, Paul Haddad of Tapbots posted some eBay listings for Mac Studios with the big RAM configurations that Apple no longer sells, and some of them are going for $35,000. Oh, yeah, I saw that. Because you can't get it. You just can't like supply and demand. Hey, do you want a Mac Studio with 512 gigs of RAM? They used to exist. You used to be able to buy them for what we thought was a huge price, but now you can't get them at any price. So check out eBay, $35,000. It can be yours. And you can kind of understand because like suppose you're a business and you need that for something. Suppose, you know, you're like, you know, maybe a post-production house. You need more workstations or, you know, like the kind of business that actually needs high-end computers and like bills out client fees that can pay that kind of price. A lot of those businesses exist. A lot of people need that for their business. And so it actually is potentially worth it for you to get one for $35,000 that, you know, if you have the alternative is not getting it. I mean, honestly, who would actually buy that? I would imagine it would be some AI company with a huge and existing investment. And to them, this is peanuts and you got to spend that VC money somehow. But, yeah, well, I mean, to be fair, I believe these were listings and not completed sales. So I'm not sure what they're actually going to sell for. But the bottom line is the supply and demand curve on Macs that Apple no longer sells, that Apple used to sell with a lot of RAM, is looking rough these days. Yeah, listings don't matter. But you've got to scroll down and check that box that says sold items, not just completed items, sold items. And that will tell you the prices they sell for. I do have some saved eBay searches for really weird stuff, like the bent piece of metal that holds the hard drives in my Mac Pro. Remember we were complaining about that all these years ago? For a while, I had an eBay search. I still do have it set up, but I set up an eBay search to get that bent piece of metal for less money. And I've left it running because I'm like, surely at some point, this stupid bent piece of metal for this obsolete computer, like it's going to come down in price. It's not going to be $400 anymore. And I can tell you as of like this afternoon, they're still going for hundreds of dollars. Again, there's probably not that many buyers of that. But I do think, though, like the situation we are in now with component shortages, there is not a clear end in sight. I think this is going to be very disruptive. It already has been, but it's going to continue to be very disruptive that I think many products are going to be delayed. Many products are going to be unavailable. Many low-end products are going to just not be worth making. I think one of the things that kind of strained NVIDIA's gaming business is that as the rise of AI started up, first, I know Bitcoin miners ruined GPUs for gamers first, But like it it became not necessarily that worth it for NVIDIA to serve the gaming market that much because they were having all these giant orders for their giant chips for their other stuff. And I think that that kind of thing, we're going to see that in the entire industry now, because in the entire industry, the entire components and hardware business, it's worth it for them to serve the very high priced AI customers right now and the very high priced data center customers right now. and all of us on the consumer side, we're going to get squeezed in a bunch of different unpleasant ways, title. We're going to face dynamics we haven't seen before. Like actual shortages of computing equipment mostly haven't happened in our entire lives. The RAM market always has those things where they misestimate demand and RAM suddenly goes up and down. RAM used to fluctuate a lot more than it has recently. It did, but it was, you know, oftentimes that was out of, you know, like some awful earthquake would hit Taiwan or something and that would crush RAM prices for a little while. But I don't think that wasn't really this big of a swing or for this long of a time or this broad of an effect. In this case, what we are facing industry-wide here is significant shortages of lots of components for probably at least 18 months. Like that's wild and pretty unprecedented. So I think that's going to create some strange and difficult dynamics that, you know, if we're not really planning for them, they might catch us by surprise. I think, for instance, if you think you're going to need a computer this year, buy it right now. Like, do not wait. Like, right now, you can still get, like, if you want, say you want a new Mac. If you want a MacBook Pro, you're in luck. The MacBook Pros, they just got their M5 update, and you can go today and order any configuration of MacBook Pro, all the way up to the max 128 gig RAM, the max chips, you can get any configuration of MacBook Pro delivered in about two weeks. Nothing else you can get right now. And, you know, the air probably too, but like, you know, no desktop, it's going to be rough. And I think this is only going to get worse. If you need a computer anytime soon, get it now while you still can, because in three or six months you might be facing delays of three to 12 months to get that computer And it is also obviously very important for businesses Businesses are going through the same calculus of like well if we need to get a new laptop or whatever for everybody we hire maybe we should buy a few in advance. Think about how the problems this creates for businesses too. It's massive. So we are going to have to be very aware of this dynamic as consumers. We are kind of last priority for a lot of these products and there are shortages already and they're going to get worse. And so on the silver lining front, maybe having a direct large financial incentive to eke more power out of the computers that we already have might result in other good effect in the industry. Maybe we'll have things become a little bit more efficient. Maybe we'll have people, you know, care more about things like repairability. We'll see. You know, those kind of effects might happen as a result of this. But in the meantime, we're all going to be crunched. And I think we need to be prepared for that, which is one of the strangest excuses I've ever given anybody to buy a MacBook Pro. But here we are. You are the king of good excuses. This reminds me a lot of when you couldn't get a car or a new car anyway because of the chip shortage. There's a chip shortage, you fellas. And, you know, you couldn't get a new car, not easily and not quickly during, you know, the height of COVID. And I feel like this is that, but much worse and much more universally applicable. Yeah, totally. Tim Hardwick in MacRumors writes, Apple's considering dropping the cheapest MacBook Neo configuration as one possible response to the rising cost of building the popular laptop, according to Tim Colpan, a former Bloomberg reporter. Shipping estimates on Apple's website currently set at two to three weeks across the lineup, following stronger than expected demand, and the company is said to have instructed suppliers to increase production capacity to 10 million units, roughly double the original forecast of five to six million. I mean, good news for the Neo. It's selling really well. But this could be a problem. I mean, you can see why Apple would really not want to say anything negative or cause any negative press about the MacBook Neo right now, because it's a hit. It's a runaway hit. It's doing great. And for the Neo to either have to cut its cheaper price option, which is one rumor that I saw blow by, or to have just extended wait times for it, those aren't great looks. And, you know, not Apple's fault. like they have a hit on their hands, you know, which is otherwise great news. But I bet Apple would bend over backwards to avoid having to say or do anything negative about the NEO right now. Tim Colpan adds in his own post, the renewed commitment to meeting demand means Apple must also ask TSMC for a hot lot of A18 Pro chips. The initial production run was at least two years ago. John, what's a hot lot? Is it when they're stolen? I don't know. Yeah, I italicized it in his thing, too. So maybe it's a term of art in the industry or maybe it's just Tim Culpen being spicy. But, yeah, you got to go back to TSMC and say, can we get more of these? Yeah, I also agree that one of the worst things that Apple could do to the Neo right now is cut the low end model because that's like that's the whole point of the product. Don't do that. But, yeah, I mean, as we're going to say, a lot of the situation out there is that like suppliers are telling manufacturers, is we don't have any more of these things to sell you until x number of months in the future so what are you doing that it's not like it's like oh how much like it's even if you had infinite money like we they're all bought like there's no more you have to wait for more to be built and we the ones we have we have already sold uh or the ones that are coming are already been bought and you know so that's that's supply and demand makes prices go up it's not great i think apple will hold the line on this one because this is definitely the type of thing that apple can absorb uh but it's uh it's not fun for anybody. Apple's capital expenditures. Let's talk Apple Car and what other companies are spending on AI. So capital expenditure is, or capital expense, is the money an organization spends to buy, maintain, or improve its fixed assets, such as buildings, vehicles, equipment, or land. It is considered a capital expenditure when the asset is newly purchased or when money is used toward extending the useful life of an existing asset, such as repairing a roof. Capital expenditures contrast with operating expenses, or OPEX, which are ongoing expenses that are inherent to the operation of the asset. OPEX includes items like electricity or cleaning. The difference between OPEX and CAPEX, or capital expenditure, may not be immediately obvious for some expenses. For instance, repaving the parking lot may be thought of as inherent to the operation of a shopping mall. Similarly, the cost of software for a business, either software development or software as a service licensing, might fall into either OPEX or CAPEX. That is, is it merely business as usual, or is it something new, an investment with multi-year return? The dividing line for items like these is that the expense is considered capex if the financial benefit of the expenditure extends beyond the current fiscal year. So during my career having a regular jobby job for 25 years, whether or not the work that I was doing, software development, was considered capex or opex has changed several times in ways that has affected me at my job. Because this is just from the Wikipedia page. You think what is capex and what is opex? And as I think the Wikipedia page makes clear, it's not always cut and dry. Like you can argue both ways. And the real answer is like, what do our lawyers slash financial people tell us we either have to do or we should do to optimize whatever the hell it is the CFO optimizes, tax burden or whatever. Right. So at various times that has been like, you know, you're a software developer. You don't have to worry. You're pretty little ahead about this. This is all taken care of for you. And other times it's like log everything you do because we've decided that we're going to count all software development of any kind as CapEx. And we need to have a catalog of it for tax reasons because we've decided this is the way we're doing it. And sometimes it's been in between. Oh, well, this group does it. When these people write code, it's CapEx. But when these people write code, it's OpEx. Again, like the, you know, is repaving the parking lot, CapEx or OpEx. It's like, well, is this just an ongoing expense like electricity or cleaning? or is this like a new thing where like you know you're making the parking lot fancier to like i don't even know i'm i'm not interested in what goes into this what i'm saying that it's not always cut and dry but what if you pave it really poorly and you have to do it every year right but like the reason this comes up is that i think this was a couple of shows back um we were talking about um i think it was probably in the like tim cook turnus like turnover episode um like what is apple you know what does apple spend money on and the tim cook era that wasted all this money in the car One of the points I made was like, yeah, Apple burned a lot of time and money and people and goodwill on the car. But now, nowadays, looking at the current landscape where Apple's peers in the technology market, they're spending so much money on AI stuff that everything Apple has ever spent on the car in the past decade is dwarfed by what people are doing with AI right now. And that's all talking about CapEx. And the people who are financial nerds who are into this, like this blog post we're about to read here, I think it's from M.G. Siegler, or eventually we'll get to it. They've been looking at Apple and saying, hey, Apple, why are all your competitors massively increasing their CapEx on AI stuff, data sensors, chips, RAM, $100 million salaries for fancy AI people or whatever? whereas when we look at your capex it's you're not doing that and you're out of step with your industry are you falling behind and blah blah we often have the is apple falling behind discussion in the realm of like consumer facing why does siri suck why are apple's hardware products being delayed because siri sucks um how can they not deliver the the stuff that they announced in wwc 2024 that type of thing but then the financial people are like apple why aren't you doing the things your competitors are doing and so they're getting it from both sides here so i did pull out some info about Apple's CapEx and put hard numbers to the thing that I just vaguely alluded to in the earlier episode. So Marcus Mendez writes at 9to5Mac as part of its fiscal quarter two of 2026 results. Apple reported $11.4 billion in R&D expenses, up 34% from Q2 2025, making it the highest quarterly figure in the company's history. So $11.5 billion is as high as it's ever been. Tim Cook says we are clearly investing more. You can see that in the OPEX numbers. And if you click down on those a step deeper and look at the R&D areas separate from SG&A, which is selling, general, and administrative, you'll find that R&D is even accelerating much higher than the company is. So we're clearly investing and we're investing in products and services. Yeah, so this is talking about OPEX. And SG&A is another one of those terms that comes up in your eyes glaze over about expenses. I'll link to the Wikipedia page on that as well. But these are the numbers they're talking about, and they're saying they're up 34% from Q2 2025 to $11 billion. And there's a chart in the 9to5Mac article which shows like 2022 to current. And you can see it's been slowly going up. And then 2026 has a bit more of a bump. But then we get to MG Siegler's post about CapEx. Right. So MG Siegler writes, in 2021, Apple spent $11.1 billion on CapEx. In 2022, that number fell slightly to $10.7 billion. In 2023, it was back up to $11 billion. By 2024, it was down a bit to $9.4 billion. 2025 saw a jump to $12.7 billion. In 2026, with half the fiscal year in the books, Apple's on track to spend $9 to $10 billion on CapEx. One could imagine a banker in Wall Street conjuring Matthew McConaughey in days being confused. That's what I love about Apple, man. Their big tech peers go crazy on CapEx, but they stay in the same range. The dichotomy is so wild that it now gets written about every single quarter. But the dichotomy also keeps growing every single quarter as big tech keeps ramping CapEx and Apple stays the same. This chart, which is in his blog post, which is in the show notes, says it all. So this chart shows 2020 through 2026 CapEx of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. And Apple is the first blip. They're dark blue and the little bar chart things. And if you look at the dark blue bump, as TNC just read the text, little dark blue bump in 2020, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25. It's like the same. It doesn't move. It goes up and down a little bit, but stays about the same. The other lines in the chart, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, go bonkers starting in like 2024, 2025, and 2026 to the point where the Amazon line is at, what is that, 200 billion? In 2026, Facebook is at about 150. Google and Microsoft are both about like 180 or so. And Apple is, as we said before, 9 or 10. They're just so incredibly out of step. And speaking of the car project, looking on this graph, the car project ended in 2024. That is not visible on this graph. The end of the car project. Now Apple's no longer wasting billions of dollars on the car. Surely their line will change in a appreciable way. Maybe it does if it was just Apple being shown here. But in the scope, like this was my point, in the scope of what everyone else is spending on AI stuff and CapEx, money that they're laying out for things that are not just like ongoing expenses, But like we need to, you know, buy tons of GPUs, build new data centers, like new stuff or whatever, whatever rules they're using to consider a CapEx. Apple is not doing what everybody else is doing. And there's you know, we've had debates about this from again from the product perspective. Are they falling behind for what reasons are they falling behind or whatever? But on the financial side, this is the other side of it, which is like, is Apple investing versus is Apple smarter than everybody else? and everyone else is going to waste all this money. And when the bubble pops, they're all going to be left holding the bag and they're just burning through cash. And Apple's going to be sitting on the sideline going, we didn't have to do any of that. We saved our money. We'll see how this turns out. But as M.G. Ciglo says, the dichotomy is clear. Like looking at this graph, one of these things is not like the other, and it's Apple. We know that historically Apple is pretty stingy with how and where it spends money. So there could be an effect here. And I would say, referring to the car project here as like, oh, it didn't matter if they blew all that time with the car, I think this is the point of why the car, I think, was so damaging to the company. It wasn't about money. Apple has plenty of money and has for a long time. It was about talent drain and opportunity cost. The car pulled a lot of talent from other areas of the company. They hired a lot of people for the car project, though, too. It's not like they took the macOS people and put them on the car. No, like they also hired people, but that was a significant talent drain. And while some of it probably resulted in some things they could use after the car project was killed, most of it probably wasn't. So it was that was the bigger opportunity cost. Apple is limited way more by like talent and bandwidth, so to speak, than they are by money. but I think if you can fault them for not having enough CapEx or whatever R&D costs I think it's not necessarily that oh they wasted money on the car and then wow look AI dwarfs it it's more like AI is a huge deal Apple is nowhere in it and they also separately had a car project that drained a lot of talent and was a big distraction for a long time Yeah, my main point is not to say that Apple didn't waste money on the car project. It's to say that everyone else is potentially wasting so much more money on AI. Or maybe it's not a waste. Like, what I'm trying to say is that, like, again, if this graph was just Apple, you'd talk about the car project and you'd talk about the money wasted, the time wasted, the opportunity cost, all this other stuff. You know, obviously, it wasn't a successful product, although I still say it was successful in that they thankfully didn't ship something that they would be embarrassed by or whatever. But, like, it was misguided. It was mismanaged. It was rebooted too many times. Johnny Ive insisted not have a steering wheel. They wanted a dragon. They didn't have one like the whole nine yards. Right. And it was a waste of money and everything. But Apple is notoriously stingy. So even though over 10 years they spent billions of dollars, still generally drop in the bucket. But what this chart shows is what the rest of Apple's peers are doing right now. And essentially how it either looks like they all know something Apple doesn't or it shows that they are panicking and Apple isn't. We'll find out which one of those things is true, because I don't think they can both be true. Right. Like they're spending so much money, just astronomical sons. I mean, they have the money like these are very wealthy companies. It's not like they're bankrupting themselves by spending this money. But like they're not just outspending Apple by a little bit. Like AI is different than any other. Like if you go back to any other trends or boom that Apple didn't follow, like everyone's investing in netbooks. These bars were not like this when netbooks were popular, right? Like whatever the thing is, even if you went back and looked at it, like this is always funny when we talk about this number, like in these the smarts, revolution how much money was uh you know microsoft spending on the mobile devices versus how much money was apple spending and the bars would have looked pretty similar i think like the estimate i always see in those various stories about like how much money did apple invest before they could ship the first iphone it was like 150 million or something to get the first iphone out the door which at the time you know you're taking people off teams or whatever but like how much additional money did you have to to drop in before you ship the first iphone 150 million dollars to get that business started was a really good deal. That was $150 million, extremely well spent. And I bet during that same time period, Microsoft probably spent more on mobile than Apple did. They just made worse choices and didn't get the same end result. But then, again, those lines wouldn't show up on this graph at all because these are in billions, right? This would be the thickness of the x-axis. It's just astronomical how much money is being spent. And by the way, all those hardware shortages, you can see that in these lines too. Who's buying all the hardware so I can't get RAM? These bars, this right here, this is where it's all going. That's why you can't get the Mac that you want. We are sponsored this episode by Factor. Factor helps you hit your nutrition goals this season without the planning, grocery runs, or cooking. Factor gives you ready-to-eat meals that are ready in just two minutes. They shop, prep, cook, and deliver these meals straight to your door, so you have more time for everything else you want to be doing this spring. And Factor has nutrition as their highest priority. Their meals are built around your nutritional goals, whether it's weight loss, more protein, GLP-1 support, even strength and workout recovery. 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Either way, they are ready so quickly, and you didn't have to do any of the work. They've sent me a couple of sample boxes over the couple of years they've been sponsoring, and I've been very impressed every time, and my family's been very impressed every time. They are really good for the whole family, and again, I can't express enough how convenient it is. So head to factormeals.com slash ATP50off. Use code ATP50off to get 50% off and free daily greens per box with new subscription only while supplies last until 9-27-2026. See website for more details. Once again, thanks to Factor for sponsoring our show. We talked about MacBook Neo-ing all the things, but John, you want to go a different direction this week. What are we talking about? Do the pun. Do it, Casey. Do it for me. The Age of Ultra on Apple products. Thank you. I worked hard on that one. I'm here to serve, John. I mean, I'm making dated references. The kids remember those movies? It was a long time ago. No, they're so good, though. But this really is what this is about. We did talk about New-ing, but what this topic is specifically, sticking the word Ultra on Apple products, which is different than, I mean, we weren't talking about sticking the word Neo. we're talking about new wing in terms of we have the macbook neo which is a real product and it's the first one to have that suffix and kind of do it to other products but there are existing apple products with ultra stuck on the end of it uh this the question here is and these this is based on a whole bunch of rumors the rumors are swirling and people love to see a pattern apple's going to stick the word ultra on the end of a bunch of products maybe products that we've already talked about but suddenly when you stick ultra on all the end of them is this the age of ultra on apple products all right so we're starting with the iphone ultra and john's favorite youtuber max tech shows off some i guess they were like aluminum or some sort of metal models that looked very accurate and if you're to believe the video and i have no reason not to uh the same leaker that came up with these specs or printed or whatever made these metal objects did it a year ago for the iphone 17 they've done this for the past several models you can get these essentially down to the fractional millimeter accurate models of the iPhone months before they come out. So I have no reason to doubt these. But if you want to see the foldable phone in someone in physical form, this is it. But the the the reason this is part of this section is, hey, you know, the foldable phone we've been talking about. One of the names that's been remembered for it has been iPhone Ultra. It's a pretty obvious choice since since the very first time that the foldable phone was rumored years ago, iPhone Ultra was thrown out there along with iPhone Fold, iPhone Duo, whatever. But in the light of this new Apple's going to stick Ultra on all their products, it's really cementing iPhone Ultra as the favorite name for this particular phone. And it is an interesting start to the Ultra family of products that is rumored here because, I mean, the reason I put a link to the thing with showing the models of it is when I see that little, you know, aluminum model in the hands of the person and they're, you know, manipulating it and folding it and using it. it looks to me like and i've seen other people say this as well this is kind of the spiritual successors of the iphone mini and you're going to put ultra on this product now in one respect ultra will apply because rumors are that it will be ultra expensive because hey screen's the most expensive part and this has two screens one of which is twice as big as you would expect and it's obviously expensive and fancy to make the folding screen and you got to make the sides thin and all you know it's gonna the rumor is it's gonna be more expensive if you look at all the folding phones in the industry they tend to be very expensive models so ultra makes sense but when i look at the actual phone i'm like oh look it's a phone for people who miss the iphone mini because it's so small it's so short when it's i mean it's thick it's fat it's chunky when you have it folded up but one of the points that's made in the video is like look how easy i can reach everywhere on the screen with my phone when it's folded up it's like the fat nano of iphones i mean if you don't know that way or the iPhone mini. So right away, I feel like this is a weird product to be called ultra because when I was in, it was iPhone ultra was that term was being applied to phones many years ago, even before the foldable phone was a rumor. And people were like, Apple's going to come out with another phone. It's even more expensive than the iPhone pro max. And they're going to call it the iPhone ultra. And here's the ways that it's going to be better. And there was like sort of a combination of the iPhone air rumors with maybe the, the nascent iPhone folding phone rumors or whatever. But that made sense to me. It's like, can you make a high-end phone that's higher end than the Pro or Pro Max, and you call it Ultra and you spend more money for it? But the folding phone, other than the fact that it's going to be the most expensive iPhone ever, Ultra seems like a weird choice for the name. But rumor has it that's what they're going to go with. Yeah, I don't – it doesn't quite fit the foldable for me, if the rumors are correct about the size and everything. I do think that this is less especially for the iPhone mini than you think because first of all like I took out that 3D printer model that I have that everybody made a couple months back and like I can't reach the corner at all. I can reach about three quarters of the way to you know diagonal end to end. So I still have a big sweep up there that I cannot reach because it's wide. Do you have a mini to compare with? Yes. also for what it's worth max tech had said that the initial read on the ultra was that it would be much taller than people are saying it is now i think the model you had matches what he had but yeah i don't know if it's like the model the ones that he's got are the ones that they make when they're like when they like the case manufacturers use these like that i'm pretty sure they're accurate i'm not sure if the 3d print was close but it might be yeah so the mini compared to this model the mini is a little bit taller but a lot narrower yeah i guess it depends on the size of your hands and thumbs like i don't know how big the max tech guys hands are i mean i don't think i have giant hands by any means but they're not like tiny trump hands but anyway um calling this an ultra is is a little bit of an odd move because first of all it is going to be very different than the others like it's not going to be better in all ways it's going to be worse in a few ways when you look at previous uses of the name ultra um you know the m chip ultras and the apple watch ultra those are like we took what was good about the thing before and just increased everything as much as we could like we gave you everything that's not what the foldable is doing the foldable is increasing some things a lot like the unfolded screen size is going to be dramatically increased but then the fold enough screen size is going to be shrunk and weird and take away a camera most importantly right they're going to probably take away cameras it's going to be questionable on things like how the battery life situation is going to work out what other kind of limitations or sidesteps it's going to have and other features. Will it have things like magnetic charging? Who knows? Will it work with cases? Who knows? You know, will it have all the other, you know, will it have like the heat management features of the Pro line? Probably not, because I don't know how it would fit in there. Like there's all sorts of trade-offs. You can look at the iPhone Air for, you know, a preview of probably what kind of trade-offs were required to get the thickness, you know, required in there. And like, I think we're going to have a similar number of trade-offs. I think it's also going to be, you know, it's going to be mini in some ways sometimes, but one way it's not going to be mini is how it feels in your hand, because it's going to be not only wide, but I would also guess heavy. Because this is a lot of mechanical parts, a lot of mechanical complexity. I think it's going to be dense, and it's not going to feel mini at all. It will feel ultra. And thicker, obviously. Yeah, obviously very thick. So I think it's going to be a bit of a sidestep. But what Ultra tends to mean in Apple's usage so far is we gave you the best and the most of everything. And that's not what this is. This is kind of a sidestep. So I don't think they're going to use that name for this. I think they're going to use a different name. Well, I agree with you about what Ultra has historically meant, but I don't agree with you with the logic leap. Therefore, that's not what Apple is going to do because Apple does not care about logic or past patterns. they just name things whatever the hell they want and we're like but wait that doesn't make any sense your your past two things were like this and now this thing is like this and apple just goes and they shrug and we get it so but anyway these are just rumors so the iphone ultra and steven hack at it when he put his money down on iphone ultra i think he thinks that he was early he's like i'm putting this is going to be called the iphone ultra but he was like you know probably a year after the first time that was name was connected with the phone but he's very convinced apparently uh i don't think he has any inside info but there you have it iphone ultra potentially one of the ultras and and to be fair to the iphone ultra this has been the leading contender for the name people have basically been calling it the iphone ultra when they didn't just call it the folding iphone duo has not caught on among the rumors and iphone fold no one seems to really believe that's going to be a thing so if they don't call it ultra i'm not sure what they're going to call it but that's that's our first ultra product all right moving on macbook ultra otherwise known as the m6 based oled macbook pro with a touchscreen and dynamic dynamic island and maybe marco arment maybe cellular we'll see this is the macbook pro we've been talking about they're like oh i remember when it was like and and they're gonna have the m6 macbook pros of this year too that's the rumor i would say i think we talked about this last episode like based on the component shortages the having the m6 based macbook pros come out in calendar year 2026 seems vanishingly uh likely at this point so yeah too bad for that but this this product's been for a long time we're like oh you can get the m5 ones if you're comfortable with the oma design again before the component shortages gave you another reason to it but like hey if you just want something that's tried and true and tested and you know what they're like the m5 macbook pros are great you can get one they're available right now um the next one is going to be fancier in so many ways it's going to have the oled screen right it's going to be m6 space it's going to be a new design for the case which we haven't had in a long time supposedly also thinner it's going to have dynamic island then a touch screen and maybe cellular like wow i should wait for the the m6 base one. But all of those rumors were kind of like, you know, we have the M5 Mace MacBook Pro, and every once in a while, Apple redesigns its things. The Mac Mini gets a new case and becomes smaller. The current MacBook Pro design was a redesign of the previous one. Like, it just makes sense. But the current rumor is, oh, no, they're not just going to roll out this thing, this M6 OLED base, blah, blah, blah, touchscreen, dynamical, and MacBook Pro as the successor to the M5 ones. No, they're going to call it the MacBook Ultra, as in this is not the MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro has an M5, you see, and a non-OLED screen and no touchscreen and no dynamic island and no cellular. But this is a new class of MacBook, presumably for more money. I feel like this is the only consistent theme of Ultra so far for more money. And we'll keep selling the MacBook Pro with the M5 in it, I guess, in the old case. But if you want a MacBook Ultra, which is somewhat disappointing to me because I just assume it's like this is the next best, greatest MacBook Pro. It's no less a MacBook Pro than any of its predecessors. Yes, they occasionally go through these, you know, redesign, revision things. But we don't change the product line to say, OK, well, now this is a whole different product. No, it's just the next late. It's the next evolution in the MacBook Pro. Why do you have to call it Ultra? And when I see the name Ultra Rumor for this I think well they either want to or have to charge massively more money for it or they love the idea of having an even higher priced higher margin model in the MacBook Pro line So they can keep selling the MacBook Pro for the people who can tolerate how massively we're going to gouge them for this new one. And by the way, this new one will be way nicer than the old one in a lot of ways. Newly redesigned thing, much better screen, touchscreen, the dynamic ion cellular. Like these are all features that just didn't exist before on the line. So I see that if you're going to make this split, now's the time to do it. but it pains me a little bit to see them trying, again, assuming this is even true, trying to split the line in a way that I think is not justified by what I see as simply making the MacBook Pro catch up to modern specs in all regards. See, I think the MacBook Ultra idea makes a lot more sense than the iPhone Ultra being the foldable. Like this, to me, it's like you want to give everybody the most. And again, look at the Apple Watch Ultra for a precedent here. The Apple Watch Ultra didn't need to be the thinnest, sleekest Apple Watch model. It was the one that was like, if people want absurd battery life, much higher durability, much brighter screen, much more depth rating, all the different things the Ultra gives you. Things like the siren and the speaker and the extra button and all this stuff. The ultra was like, we are going to prioritize giving you the most that you could possibly want out of this device. And we are that that allows us to make something that is thick and blocky and has expensive metals in it and stuff like that. And that will that will help achieve that goal because this product doesn't need to be the thin, sleek, mass market thing for the more mass market targeted price. So when you take that attitude and consider how could you make a MacBook Pro Ultra with that style, so you can brainstorm things like, yes, it would have the higher-end component, the OLED screen. Maybe it has a higher-end tier of chips available. I don't necessarily... Oh, that's the other thing about it. Does that mean the MacBook Pro is never going to get the M6? Or will it just get it on a staggered pace? Like right now, the MacBook Air has like a staggered CPU, you know, from the from the pro line. Maybe there is another subdivision of chip. I don't know if the I don't know if it's feasible for the laptop thermal envelope to include like the actual ultra chip. That seems unlikely. Yeah, that's the only thing I think would justify the ultra ultra name is if they actually did have an M6 class chip that is unprecedented. Like that is just bigger and hotter than has ever. But I don't think it's going to be the case because, again, the rumor is that the rumored MacBook Ultra will be thinner than the existing M5 MacBook Pros. Maybe they're achieving that through things like a more expensive metal. Maybe it'll be titanium. I don't know. It's been done before, not recently, and not without its problems. But, you know, we have a different world now. Is it going to be that fancy metal that we talked about in the earlier episode? Yeah, right. Like, I don't know how it would work out cost-wise. But certainly, like, you can imagine, okay, a MacBook Pro that has the best possible screen they can ship, the fastest chip they can ship. Maybe it has higher resource limits on RAM and storage also. What if it's only available in 16-inch, and that gives them a few more options of the configuration options they can offer? You know, what if it is titanium? What if it is, you know, better battery life than all the other ones? Because it's a little bit bigger, a little bit heavier, but it's ultra. It's allowed to be. there's a lot of freedom that's offered by the concept of making something of having an ultra line and i think the apple watch ultra i think has been a big success in in a lot of those ways so hopefully there is something to that besides just a higher price yeah i think if the ultra actually was like the watch where it was actually bigger thicker and had higher specs in all regards i would accept it the thing that burns me up about this though is that i feel like the macbook pros are overdue to have oled touch screen is not a high-end feature it's on 300 laptops right the dynamic island is not so amazing that you need to have be the high price thing and i don't think they're going to put a bigger faster hotter chip in it i think it's just going to have the same chips it just it just kind of annoys me to like essentially uh fence off what used to be like we used to when the new macbook pros came out they got the the the the pro and the max version of the plain the pro and the max version of the latest m chips and that's just what we accepted and now it's like okay well now there's this staggered thing only the ultras get the latest version of the pro on the mac ships you got to wait for the other ones that trickle down and by the way this is an excuse for us to to to keep tech from trickling down like basically the apple trickle down thing is we have to have a somewhat they try to have a somewhat sensible line where the higher end ones have options lower end ones don't which is why the non-pro phones took so long to get promotion because it was just a differentiator for the pro phones what this would mean is that don't hold your breath for the MacBook Air to get an OLED screen, because that's like a 2029 product. I forget what the rumors are for that, but it's like, that's got to trickle all, it's not even going to go on the MacBook Pro. It's only going to be in the Ultra. Pros still don't get it. Then eventually it has to trickle down to the MacBook Pro, and then you go, fine, it's not going to be exclusive to the Ultra in this third generation of the Ultra product. Now the MacBook Pro will get it. And then you've got to wait another three years to just say, fine, a MacBook Air can have an OLED screen. And that's how Apple essentially gets embarrassingly behind on technology that is found in commodity products where the OLED screen, the price of OLED screen is one of the few components that is not going through the roof right now. Although I'm sure everything is increasing a little bit because of carry-on effects. But like screen prices do go down. Screen quality does get better. But Apple just holds the line and says, no, OLED is an ultra feature only. And it has to stay that way for years. And that just that annoys me. So I'm not happy about this rumor if it turns out to be true. I'm happy about it if I get my cellular MacBook Pro. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, that's the other thing. You think like, oh, we want cellular so much. Guess what? Your only choice for cellular, which is like, again, a thing that you can get on like a base level iPad, right? Your only choice is the three starting at $3,000 MacBook Ultra or something that that feels gross, too. You know, it's funny when I bought my current computer that I'm using to speak to speak to you right now, which is an M3 Max MacBook Pro with M3 Max in it and 64 gigs RAM, eight terabytes of storage. I thought it'll last me a year or two, which has been typical for me for the last several years. And now, I think three years in, I'm expecting that I'm going to hold on to this until the MacBook Ultra, whatever they call it, is something less than your Mac Pro in terms of expense, because it's going to be a doozy, particularly if RAM and SSDs are still incredibly expensive. Next on our list, AirPods Ultra, or otherwise known as AirPods Pro with cameras to feed visual intelligence to Siri. And there was some news about this just earlier today. In fact, Mark Gurman writes, the earbuds, which rely on cameras to see the space surrounding a user and provide information, are in advanced testing. The cameras essentially act as eyes for the Siri digital assistant and aren't designed to take photos or video. These components, located in both the right and left earbuds, allow the device to capture visual information in low resolution. Other than longer stems to accommodate the cameras, the product will resemble the AirPods Pro 3. The idea is to let users ask questions about an item they may be looking at. For instance, they could be facing food ingredients and ask what they should cook for dinner. The device could give the wearer a reminder based on something the camera sees, or it might use external visuals to provide more advanced turn-by-turn directions. The AI could cite specific landmarks ahead when telling users when they should turn. The new AirPods aren't designed to support hand gesture controls. They do have a small LED light in the earbuds that will turn on when visual data is being fed into the cloud. Apple had planned for the earbuds to go on sale as early as the first half of this year, but the launch was postponed after delays to a revamped version of Siri. Everyone take a shot. While the hardware is nearly ready, concerns about the AI elements could further hold back a launch if Apple isn't pleased with the quality of the visual intelligence features. Surprise, surprise. So this is a weird one. They're applying Ultras to the AirPods with cameras in them, which, again, is a long-rumored product. Do you stick Ultra on these? Well, it's surely differentiated from the AirPods Pro. This is not just like the next logical revision of the AirPod Pro. It's just the cameras on them. I don't think that follows. Like we've had AirPods Pro, AirPods Pro 2, 2.5, 3. Cameras were not really on anyone's list of things that everyone else is doing on their earbuds that surely Apple will have to do. But this is apparently their plan. So if they want to stick Ultra on this one, I give them a pass because, I mean, they're not AirPods Pro. And sticking a camera on something that didn't previously have one, it sounds pretty Ultra. whether or not this will be a good product or work or ever shipped because they can't get their syriac together we'll see but i you know i could and obviously it's probably going to be more expensive too because you're adding cameras to things that didn't have them and there's not a lot of stuff on airpods to begin with so the addition of a camera is a significant addition to the parts that you need to make an airpod uh but if you're trying to make a family of products with ultra suffix this and it's the same question i said before if they don't call these ultra what do you call yeah i guess because they already have pro airpods camera or it could just be well it could be airpods vision but it was remember when they did the ipod photo they just put stuck photo right in the name i mean you could just make a this is what we were just talking about uh with regard to the macbook pro versus macbook pro ultra but it could just be the new airpods pro you know they just get more proy yeah i mean they would they would just make it four i guess like they're up to three and they use the numbers in marketing right airpods both three right yeah i I mean, yeah, I don't know. I mean, this this is not a product I'm particularly excited about, but we'll maybe maybe a little change my mind. But honestly, I still am not good with the AirPods Pro 3. I still use my twos the vast majority of the time because I still find the three is uncomfortable. Sorry. Even with the tips, you went through the whole different tip thing. Yeah, I went to the comply tips and they're they're less uncomfortable, but they're still uncomfortable. Really, after a long time, I still use the twos the vast majority of the time. Losing the ear lottery sucks. Yeah, it does. But yeah, I think that, you know, we we went through the proification of their product line over the years and now everything has a pro. And so if they wanted to go higher than that, ultra is the word they tend to use. So, yeah, I think that's very likely to be used here. Well, just to briefly kind of echo what Marco said, I don't feel like I need cameras in my AirPods. AirPods. However, this is one of those things where I would be very unsurprised to see, oh, Apple came up with something really clever and I must have this in my life. It's not the hardware, though, on these. It's like any other AI type thing. You need the sensors there to provide input, but it lives or dies entirely based on these much smarter thing living either on your phone or in the cloud or both that does something with those. Because as this rumor says, the cameras aren't going to be like good camera i mean it's an airpod what do you think you can fit in there it's not going to be it's going to be a low resolution camera from which you the user will probably never see any output you will never see what these cameras are seeing it's probably some just garbage thing but it's input to what you hope is some kind of smart thing that can say like now now we can see what's around you and maybe we can do useful stuff with that like i said directions turn left the next tree or whatever like when you're walking around like if the thing at the other end of this is smart and useful, it's not the cameras that are doing it. It's the smart and useful thing. And it's just like, it just needs access to some cameras. And these are already in your ears and they have a pretty good view, depending on your haircut. So, yeah, there are challenges here. But, like, as the end of this says, there are concerns about the AI elements that could further hold back and launch if Apple isn't pleased with the quality of visual intelligence features. Yeah. Apparently they haven't been pleased with any of the AI features because they haven't shipped them. And they continue not to be pleased. And so I'm not optimistic, Casey, that that Apple is going to bring you around on these or I'm not even that optimistic. They're going to ship anytime soon because so many things have been delayed. And especially for something like this, where it's like the only purpose of these cameras is to feed some smart thing that's going to do stuff with them. It's not going to take pictures. It's not going to take video. You're not going to see the output of these pictures, according to this rumor. Its whole purpose is to hook up to that smart thing. If the smart thing is not smart enough, don't ship this product. wait and it sounds like from this rumor like the people who did the hardware is twiddling their thumbs like yeah we we delivered the hardware on the schedule that you said you wanted it and now it's just sitting there waiting for the software people to get their act together for years yep all right next on our list ipad ultra otherwise known as the 20 inch foldable oled ipad which has been uh reportedly shelved yeah we talked about this on several shows ago the rumors about people didn't know whether it was going to be mac or whether it was going to run mac os or iPad OS or whatever and then there was a rumor a while ago that I think we also reported on oh yeah they've decided not to do this one basically this is like imagine a foldable phone but massive and presumably running iPad OS it's like an iPad that I you know you can fold down the screen is really big and I guess you could make it in like an L shape and it could have a an on-screen keyboard to be kind of like a laptop like this rumor was always just going all over the place but yeah the rumor is that they've decided for now not to do this one but had they done it it might have been called iPad Ultra. And this is another one where I think the Ultra name fits because it's like massively expensive iPad that's way bigger that can bend in half, which is a thing iPads can't do. That one definitely... Well, they can. Marco did it once. I did not do it. Excuse me. There was a butt in the household that did it, but it was not Marco's butt. That's correct. All right. Apple Watch Ultra 4. What do we think about this, John? It's already got the name Ultra, and this rumor is the worst because they're like, maybe there's an iWatch? presumably there will be an Apple Watch Ultra 4. Like, they're up to three. They're going to make another one. Probably not going to be redesigned, but, like, maybe – the rumors are so bad about, like, maybe it will have newer updated health sensors. Maybe it will have a redesign case. Maybe it will have Touch ID on the side button. And maybe it will have a new S12 SoC. But none of these, none of these maybes about the Apple – like, the fact that there will be an Apple Watch Ultra 4, I would put money on. but the fact that nobody can come up with anything that they're willing to say yeah it'll probably have this feature and it's just like what could they do for an apple they could do all these things but it doesn't seem like any of them are even rumored it just seems like people are guessing based on like well if they do make one with a four it probably has to have this stuff so this is only in here as a courtesy because it's already got the name ultra and it is as far as i know the only product obviously the the chip but that's not a product like it's an ingredient in a product Apple Watch Ultra. It was out there with the Ultra name, out ahead of everybody else, being all Ultra. And they keep making them, and they've been getting better a little tiny bit, but nothing dramatic. And that was the first Ultra, right? The Apple Watch Ultra? No. So I double checked. The M1 Ultra came out first. Yeah, the chip. Oh, sorry. I meant the product. The chip is not a product, it's an ingredient. Yeah, they were both the same year. They're both 2022, I believe. But yeah, they were... The M1 Ultra beat the Apple Watch Ultra by like six months yeah i was thinking product product not chip but that is a fair point nevertheless uh john is still in the bargaining phase with regard to his uh mac pro bargaining i'm just i'm just i'm just saying mac ultra question mark and john himself has put an upside down smiley in our internal show notes because honestly you know what kind of mac would you put a name i know we're talk about the macbook pro ultra right but like what about a mac which means desktop mac because the laptop ones are called macbooks of various kinds what would a mac ultra be yeah i think we know the answer to that question apple does not want to make it but i'm just saying apple if you're going to put ultra on all your products i hope someone in some pitch meeting says hey what if we made a mac ultra and then someone someone wearing one of my shirts just glares at them so his name It was Stampy. You loved him. That's a Simpsons reference, Casey. Nope. I actually got that one. Mac Ultra. You can rename it someday. The case for a true Mac Ultra successor. I don't know. Mac Ultra. Just going to leave that out there. Let's move on. I think there is room for Mac Ultra, but I don't think it's ever going to be the form that you want it to be. Well, like I said, I'm not married to the form, as I've made the pitch in the past several episodes. More transistors, bigger, hotter, more heat dissipation in exchange for more computation. There's a lot of flexibility within that framework. A lot. Yeah, I think if such a thing were to exist, it would be another tier of the Mac Studio. In a similar way that when we had the iMac Pro, externally it looked like a 27-inch Retina iMac, even though internally it was very different and had much higher end components, totally different cooling, etc. But it was like a pro form of a product line they already had. I think if they're ever going to do a Mac Ultra, it would be basically a pro edition, like a higher end edition of the Mac Studio or something that looks very similar to the Mac Studio. Yeah, but they'd call it the Mac Ultra. They wouldn't call it the Mac Studio. Right, and they probably wouldn't call it the Mac Pro because that name is now Tarnished Forever. Yeah. I mean, it seems like they're moving towards Ultra as their high-end name and leaving kind of Pro as the middle, kind of what they did with the, actually, with like the Super Cores and the Medium Cores and stuff like that. You know, by all means, I have quibbles about which particular products they put into these slots, but if they want to change their naming and make Ultra the new top, Pro the new middle, and I guess a four-level one, which is like Neo Air Pro Ultra, and then somewhere in there is the non-suffix one, somewhere in between. Like it's that anyway, I'm fine with them going through that. But yeah, whatever they make, if they were to make a Mac, the whole idea is a Mac that can do more than the current highest end Mac studio because it has more transistors, uses more power like a desktop. Right. You know, it's plugged into the wall. You don't have to worry about battery life on the thing. You're only using 300 watts now. Take some of those excess watts and turn them into computation because, hey, we have this. you know there's plenty of things people want to use computation for even more so now than there has ever been please use that please you know and if you can fit it in the same mac studio case and call it the mac ultra with using the special metal or some fancy heatsink fine but if you have to make a bigger case a taller mac studio whatever yeah i'm not tied to the form factor again the trash can was not you know if they had been able to scale that it would have been great like i like the idea of a chimney thing there's lots of directions you can go but like mac ultra like i i've speaking of like me being like in a morning period i feel like there is a i don't know a latent period or something there is there's necessarily going to be a multi-year gap before apple even looks in the direction of anything resembling a mac ultra simply because they just finally got the you know the will to can what was everyone was it was a dead product the mac pro so you got to wait many many years for them to revisit this if they ever revisit it it's not even clear that they ever revisited but i do think the odds of them revisiting this in many years is increased if they actually do this rumored sort of ultra uh you know what's essentially a marketing rollout of like hey we're defining a new tier of product that was pioneered by the uh the apple watch ultra which is our existing products with ultra on the end which are more expensive fancier better more blah blah blah things if they do that it's inevitable that in five years someone is going to go up to the whiteboard and write mac ultra question mark with an upside down smiley face like that's got to happen but not not now it's too soon uh iMac ultra i i am not in the market for this but i love this idea uh reading from mac world uh roman loyola writes of all the desktop max the iMac is the most likely candidate for an ultra version would it be the fastest most powerful mac available No, but Apple isn't necessarily defining Ultra that way. Ultra applies to the product in a particular line that goes above and beyond a typical feature set in some way, like an iPhone that folds or a MacBook with an OLED touchscreen. An iMac Ultra could have a 6K 32-inch display and a Pro or Max chip to set it apart from the standard model. I don't think they would sell any of these, and I still think they should do it because it would be awesome. So if it's not time to look at the Mac Ultra because it's too soon, I think it's about time to look at the iMac. It's been a long time since the iMac Pro. And, you know, again, Roman putting his stake in the ground of what he thinks Ultra should mean. And I would caution again that just because your definition makes sense doesn't mean Apple will do it. In fact, maybe the opposite, the more sense it makes, the less likely Apple is to do it. But anyway, that is a valid definition of Ultra based on history and logic to say we're not, you know, the whatever Ultra is not the best whatever Apple sells. It's just the best whatever within that line. So the iMac Ultra would be a bigger, more powerful iMac that has a bigger screen and a faster CPU and dissipates more heat and blah, blah, blah, blah. We've already done this. It was called the iMac Pro. It was great. It was incredible. Yeah. And Apple decided a long time ago now they're not interested in pursuing that. But I feel like the time enough time has passed for them to at least consider, hey, this Ultra thing is going great. if it turns out that essentially we're able to drive wealthy people up market and get more money from them like that what this boils down to from a products perspective is like yes we're making cooler better products and i'm not setting that aside because i like those products but also as you go higher end isn't it nice that you get nicer margins too you know like you get you much lower volume but you do get higher margins so like that's that's the play here like all for all their product lines they want to have a good spread they don't you know they want to go down low with the neos and make sure they're selling as much volume as they possibly can and they'll also go up high to some degree to try to get to see how much money there is to extract from the market right they've always done that so yeah again i don't i don't see because desktop maps are so our max are so unpopular relatively speaking this doesn't seem likely uh i know there are people who would love this product uh but i don't know if there's enough of them for them to develop it especially since the only product in the imac line currently is the imac and it is extremely unfriendly to ultra-ing in its current form, which is so thin you can't even put an Ethernet port on it, right? So, you know, unlike because the iMac Pro had the advantage that they could take the existing case and make it a darker color and stick better internals in it, and it was done. You can't do that with the current iMac case. They would have to make a new case, and then that basically kills the project. So, like, no, it's, you know, or a 32-inch screen. Like, you've just killed the project because we're not making a separate case, separate bigger case with better cooling just for this product that no one's going to buy, that's not even going to be the fastest Mac because the Mac Studio will still be faster. So sorry, Roman, I don't think this is going to happen. But I think it is about time we're able to consider this before deciding that they don't want to do it. We are sponsored by DeleteMe. DeleteMe makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. 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The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeliteme.com slash ATP and enter code ATP at checkout. That's joindeliteme.com slash ATP, code ATP. Thank you so much to Delete Me for sponsoring our show. Let's do some Ask ATP, and Pat Murphy writes, I got a new laptop, an M5 Pro, 4TB SSD. I usually start a new time machine backup with a new machine. Do you have an opinion on how big of a time machine drive to get. I used to get a time machine drive 2X or 4X, the size of the drive it is backing up, but the current costs are making me pause. The price of a 4TB external SSD micro center is about $1,100 for the love of God. Wow. Just three years ago, that drive was $200. Yeah, I would generally say get at least as big, if not 2X, the size of your drive, but in this case I would do one of two things. I would either get a 4TB drive and no bigger SSD, that is, or just get a spinning disk. It's fine. For a time machine, it's fine. Not really that fine. I wouldn't recommend that. But here's been my philosophy for time machine backup drives. It's always been my philosophy, and it's just served me well for multiple reasons, one of which is sad. Get a time machine drive that's the same size as the driver backing up. And I know you're thinking, that's not going to work. What about, like, because there's overhead for the backups themselves and everything, and I want to have multiple versions, multiple backups, not just one backup, yada, yada. But here's the thing. First of all, you shouldn't actually be filling the drive you're backing up to, like, the brim. It should have less, your 4-terabyte drive should have less than 4 terabytes in it. Like, not, you know, a reasonable amount less. Because macOS flips out when there's no free disk space, okay? Bad things happen. Do not fill it as much as you possibly can. Which means that you're not backing up 4 terabytes of data. And also, Time Machine doesn't back up every file that's on that drive. It skips over stuff. uh you know like the read-only system volume and crap like that i forget what it slips over these days but i i don't know if it's doing the whole system volume or not but like but it's not getting everything so my point is that your four terabyte backup drive should handily hold a complete backup of the data that's actually on your four terabyte disk that you're backing up plus a couple days weeks months of churn depending on how often you change files and also my practice has been to get the biggest drive that I can afford is my main drive, which means that I can probably barely afford to get a drive the same size. The reason you don't get 2x or 4x the size, say, wouldn't that be great? I could have years and years of backups because I've got my first backup and then just all these iterative diffs for the subsequent backups. I could have this huge backup history. The reason you don't do a 2x or 4x is because Time Machine will corrupt itself long before you were able to a 4x the size drive thing because time machine is reliable for spans of a year or two but eventually it will say oh no your time machine backup like it's corrupt in some way there's no real error your only recourse is to erase the drive and start over that happens to me every few years so i think before you're able to fill certainly a 4x size drive of the one you're backing up time machine will be corrupted as for spinning discs these days especially with apfs on the spinning disk it's just too slow it like setting aside the noise and everything it's just it's a brutally slow because apfs is not optimized for spinning disks in any way whatsoever and time machine does lots of little ios and it's just i do not recommend it where i know it's cheaper to get the storage use that storage to hold your massive video files backing up you know 50 gig blu-ray rips that are in single mkv files great for spinning disks backing up the tiny little files that make up a time machine backup of your active main system drive not a good use of this so my recommendation get what drive that's the same size as the one you're backing up or maybe a little bit bigger getting something even 2x as big is probably too aspirational with respect to the historic reliability of time machine yeah i would also say definitely get the one that is the matching size. That's how I've operated my time machine discs for over a decade, and it's been totally fine I never had a problem with it And as for spinning disc versus SSD man those prices hurt I don feel for the choice you have to make on this Go back in time and buy the SSD when it was $200. Yeah, like John is right that spinning disks are really slow by today's standards. That being said, Time Machine is one place where as long as you could tolerate the noise potential of where it is, that's a place where I would say it doesn't matter that much for the speed. Exactly. But it does, though, because you think it doesn't matter because you're like, I don't care how long the backup takes. I'm not waiting on it or anything. Here's the problem. It will take so long that if you tell it, like, it's scheduled to, like, backup every hour, forget about that. A single backup is going to take many hours, and you will get to the point where a single backup takes more than 12 or 24 hours. So now you're not getting good backups because, oh, I modified that file an hour ago. Let me get it from Time Machine. Sorry. It's still running the backup that it started at noon yesterday. Oh, John, come on. I'm telling you, I used to have spinning disks inside, directly attached inside my Mac Pro that I was using as my Time Machine volumes. That's how I know this is the case. It's so bad with APFS and Time Machine. on spinning disks like that bad where i'm backing up a four terabyte ssd to like whatever it was an eight terabyte spinning disk it was just brutally slow such that first of all it was never not doing a time machine backup which was bad right because it's just it's not like it's swapping my main drive with io because it's so stupid slow but it's just it's always doing it and the the interval of my backups like how how many different versions of this file that i've been working on for the past two days, can I get it out of the backups? Massively spaced out because it just took so darn long. It is close to the worst case scenario for spinning disks. I guess spinning disks are great. Use them to store giant media files. Don't use them for time machine if you can possibly help it. Now, it could also be that I am stressing these drives more. Again, I will say the two underscore separated words that everybody knows, node underscore modules. How many files can you create? How quickly and how quickly can they churn and change over the course of doing development of a week of work node underscore modules directory will really abuse your time machine backups it's easy to end up creating and modifying and deleting literally millions of files on a daily basis that will brutalize your time machine drive if you limit yourself to excluding certain drives folders or whatever maybe you can help but you know i'm still saying like i know the cost feels bad but uh i don't know try for yourself again maybe i'm a pathological case but i had i've had many years experience in the 2019 mac pro backing up to time machine and this spinning disk and i do not recommend it that's just because it's a piece of crap intel computer that's why it was a fast internal bus it was fast a good fast uh drive 7200 rpm high quality you know it's just spinning disks plus tiny files plus apfs equals sadness thanks to our sponsors this episode factor and delete me and thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week, we're going to be talking about Adobe's, let's say, they have recently forgotten to make good software UIs, especially. So we're going to be talking about that. And Overtime, you can join or listen to atp.fm slash join. Thank you, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm. And if you're into Mastodon, You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. That's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G. Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Marco, you are in the office in your home. Did you walk into the office or did you roll in your wheelchair into the office? He sauntered in. So I've mentioned in past shows that I was training to do a very long walk called The Great Saunter. This is a once a year walk organized by the group called Shorewalkers. around the perimeter of Manhattan. It is one day, you walk about 32 to 33 miles around the perimeter, all from like 7 in the morning until 7 to 9-ish p.m., depending on how quickly you walk it. I've never done any kind of extreme, if you could call it that, extreme athletic event before, really any athletic event longer than a 5K run. And I've never done anything bigger than that. This was a pretty big effort for me and the group I was with. And I'm really proud of all of us for doing it. Here's the recap. So first of all, if we can go on a brief aside, just for a minute, bikes and pedestrians should never share the same paths. I know this is going to annoy all the bikists out there. But if you could just... They're going to be so mad at us. I know, but I think I have an angle that they will appreciate. Cars can't coexist with bikes gracefully because of the inherent differences in their size, their speed, their physical needs. Well, neither can pedestrians. Now, it's not as bad as it is with cars because drivers of cars often kill cyclists. And I don't think it's super common for cyclists to kill pedestrians. I'm sure it has happened, but it's probably not very common. Whereas I know that cars pose a much greater danger to cyclists. So I know that I'm not comparing the level of danger. But between cyclists and pedestrians, these two modes of transportation do not share the same path. Well, I've been training for this walk for about seven or eight months, something like that. I have had cyclists scream at me, threaten me, come within inches of hitting me at very high speeds, intentionally at least once. all while I was in either a shared lane or on the pedestrian side of a split lane. So my view of cyclists having now done a lot of long walks on shared paths is now I think similar to the view that cyclists have of car drivers. Not every cyclist is a problem, just like not every car driver is a problem cyclist. But there's enough bad cyclists that they pose a menace to pedestrians when they're in shared paths. They are entitled, reckless and inconsiderate of pedestrians, and they have no concern for pedestrian safety or the fact that we tend to have the right of way. Again, this is not all cyclists, but there's enough that are like that, that it's a problem. um interestingly when you posted your first instagram picture about this and it showed the big like crowd of people walking and then to the right there were like two cyclists i think i commented to my wife i'm like boy i bet these cyclists love this day of the year when their bike path is invaded by a gigantic crowd of people walking along it but it's not because there's a dividing line but look i want bikes out of my walking paths just as much as they want me out of their bike lanes. But there's oftentimes a shared path, especially in a city like New York. Bikes and pedestrians do not coexist well on an eight or 10 foot wide path. And it is best for everyone's safety and happiness for motor vehicles, bikes and pedestrians to each have dedicated spaces that are not shared with the others. And sorry to all the good cyclists out there, but the bad ones of you are a menace to pedestrians again not to the not to the same degree of life threatening that cars are to you but definitely physically threatening uh to a point where i i hate to say it because i never cared about cyclists before but i really don't like them now um and i have very good reason not to and that's that's on the on the bad ones i know that but uh it is best for all of us to have our own spaces i am advocating for bikes cars and pedestrians to all have separate spaces and wherever possible anyway that's a that's an amazing future because currently cars have a place sometimes pedestrians have a place and that's basically the state of the u.s every once in a while pedestrians and bikes have a shared space which is what you're complaining about but the utopia of cars pedestrians and bicycles have each having their own separate place boy what a fantasy not in this country in most places yeah it's it's tough and it's tough in this country, but other countries have done it. It is possible to do. Yeah, no, it's totally possible. It's just we have consistently done everything we possibly can to prevent this from happening. Yeah, so anyway, consider this advocacy for everyone to have their own lanes. Anyway, all right, so going into this, a few weeks back, I did two walks in consecutive weekends that were each about 22 miles. The first one was in Manhattan, and it was on pavement, and it was fine. and afterwards I felt tired, but everything physically was fine. The second one was upstate, and it was faster paced. In the middle of that walk, I got significant pain in my left rear end, and it progressed as the walk went on into significant problems with my left ankle. And this was a few weeks before the Great Saunter. Was this on pavement too upstate? No, it was on a gravel path. So it was like a packed gravel, a beautiful, the Ashokan Rail Trail. It's a beautiful path. I've been to Ashokan. Yeah, and that path is like 20 feet wide, so it being shared with bikes is fine. And there's also just not that many people or bikes on it. It's a very wide, fairly sparsely populated path. It's a great path, but I took it, it was on gravel, I took it too fast. And that combination really inflamed my left side and especially for the following couple of weeks, my left ankle. So I went to physical therapist and got some advice and got some stretches and stuff like that. But what it basically boiled down to is for me to get through the Great Saunter, I had to take extra care for my ankles, especially the left one. And so what I did, based on everyone's advice and a couple of tests, I had these little like heel cups that you put in the shoe that are like little squishy wedges so that it cushions the heel. The problem is it slopes the foot more forward as a result, which I knew going into it, this is going to make it more likely that the front of my toes might hit the front of my shoes and get blisters. But blisters heal a lot faster than tendons. and so i thought and based on every you know everyone agreed like all the physical therapists and the doctor everybody agreed like okay yeah this is this is what you need to do to get through it anyway going into it the ankle was hurting but i but i made it through the ankle never got past medium uh hurting but boy did i get blisters and that really made the last 10 miles very challenging um i i'll get to the better news in a few minutes there this is this has happy happier news but um i did have a really hard time getting through the last 10 miles it was just the hardest like mental pain endurance activity i've ever had to do because it was literally 10 miles of every step hurting very painfully because of significant blisters. So I got through it, and there were a few nice things along the way that I wanted to mention. First of all, the day before, I made a Saunter map app. Well, rather, I should say Cloud Code made a Saunter map app based on about four prompts that I gave it. The great Saunter published an online map and a GPX file. and you could use the web app. But I'm like, you know, I would like to have this as a native iPhone app for lots of reasons. I think I could make it work a little bit better. And also be able to do things like estimate my finish time. Because, you know, we were targeting like we want to finish by about 9 p.m. Got to keep a certain pace throughout the day or, you know, manage the breaks, etc. And I wanted to know things like, am I on track to meet that time? And where is the next bathrooms and refreshments? Like how far? Like are we three miles from the next bathroom? Maybe that will affect the choices I make, things like that. So I pointed Cloud Code at the web page that hosted their public map. And I said, basically, make an iPhone app that has this map in it, that puts my location on the map wherever I am, estimates the distance to the end and how long that will take at the given pace, and make a dropdown to pick the pace and show the points of interest as little descriptions that pop up and tell me where the next bathroom and next refreshment stops are. It just did it. I refined it over the course of like three or four prompts over maybe a half hour. I never looked at the code. I never edited the code. I submitted it to the App Store. And this was the afternoon before the event. So I'm like, all right, a first-time submission of a Vibe-coded app that requires location access, what are the odds this is going to get approved in the next 18 hours it didn't need it to be approved right you could just put it on your phone right I could put it on my phone but like you know TIFF wanted it on hers and I'm like alright well I could plug your phone in and add it to my developer account but I'm like let me see it would be a lot easier especially if anybody else asks if they can have it it would be a lot easier if I could just get it on the app store so let me try and I submitted it and later that day it was approved first try i had to like make a privacy policy i had to answer all the questions about whether it's designed for kids and how much data it collects none no you know like all the like the answer was very simple it was it just collects no data that you know this doesn't have anything in it as far as you know yeah as far as i know fair but it was remarkable it was and the app worked great the entire day and i'm happy and i emailed the um the on to organizers just to say, hey, I put this up in case you want to tell anybody, feel free. If you want me to take it down, I'll take it down. No problem. Whatever you want. And they were very happy. But it was too late to actually tell anybody about it. However, somehow, the app got nine installations. For a one-day event that no one knew about the app, and it was only existing like 12 hours before the event started, that's pretty good i'm pretty happy i mean you're walking along with them you got nothing but time on your hands you just chat them up say i'm using this app you should try it that's how i got one of the installations yeah they can install while they walk it's fine as long as they don't wander into the bike lane oh my god so anyway um so that was a fun like five coding story here's an app that like you know the day before i'm like on the train on the way there this was never going to be worth me taking time to spend, you know, three or four days making this app, especially, and there were some parts of it, like, you know, the source is a GPX file, which is basically a series of points on the map and lines between them. And it's like, okay, well, I want you to tell me where I am along that map. But like, what if I'm not on one of the lines? Or what if I'm between two points? There's a certain amount of math you have to do to figure out like, okay, well, what is the point on the route closest to where the person is actually standing. And I know I could look up how to do that math. We're not talking about like really difficult calculus here. Like that's, you know, we're talking about like trigonometry and stuff. It's not that complicated, but I didn't have to. And if I was making this map myself, I would have had, I would have spent three days on it at least. And so it would never have, not only would it not have gotten done on time, but it's also something I shouldn't have spent three days doing. you know it just wouldn't have been a good use of my time and i didn't have to i just submitted it and you know claude wrote it i tweaked a couple of things it took me longer to make screenshots than it did to make the i even made an icon i didn't ask you this before and i'm kind of afraid of the answer but who made the icon oh i made the icon it's rough oh i was afraid that was the answer because it looks not great the icon is two sf symbols spaced out to make it next time please it's the icon's bad um but again like i'm like the that icon took me like a half hour and i'm like this is not a good use of my time i was gonna say you're you didn't want to spend time but i bet you spent more time putting two sf symbols on a opaque background in some arrangement man it's yeah it's it's a rough icon and even but even like you know stuff like the screenshots um you know of course an itunes can and i hardly ever do screenshots i know there's tools, you know, to automate things, you know, fast lane or whatever. Like I'm sure there's a million things, but like, I don't use those things for my own BS. And so I, but I hate doing screenshots because inevitably, like whatever device or simulator I take the screenshots on, I go to upload them to iTunes Connect. These are not the right resolution. And it's, and it gives, these have to be this, this, this, this, this resolution. Now it doesn't tell you in iTunes connect. Well, what devices are those? So I was in a rush. So you know what I did? I took a screenshot of that error message and I pasted it into Gemini and I said, what devices are these? And it told me, oh, this is what you want to do is use the iPhone 13 Pro simulator or whatever it was. I'm like, perfect. Like it saved me some time. I didn't. I was going to say, why do you need to know what device it is? But it's because you're actually taking screenshots on the device in the simulator. Yeah. Like I'm taking screenshots in using the simulator. I'm taking screenshots because with the simulator, I was able to simulate my location. So I was using the simulator to take screenshots, but then App Store Connect is like, no, these are the wrong resolution for the 6.5-inch screen size or whatever. Well, what device is that? As far as I can tell, though, in App Store Connect, they're not asking you to upload screenshots. They're asking you to upload images. I think you can upload basically, I see a lot of variety in what people upload. Oh, that's true. Yes. But you can do just a picture of a smiley face and the text that says, please give me money. as long as it's the right resolution I think it will go through that is true and that's why people will do things like zoom out and show the frames of the device and make big marketing messages that span across the screenshot grid it's this whole thing anyway I got all that stuff done it was great I think it was a really fun experiment for me of like if I literally don't have time to look at the code or it's so not worth doing could I make an app that is minimally useful and functional? And the answer is for a simple test like this. Yes. Obviously, it's not going to work for all app types, but I was very pleased that it worked for this one. And it did exactly what I wanted it to do. It was very helpful while we were actually on the saunter. It worked perfectly. I was very happy to have it. And it helped eight other people, or at least eight other people tried it. I don't know if it helped them, but they at least downloaded it. Another fun thing to mention at the beginning. So I had mentioned on this show months ago, one of the reasons that I wanted to do the Great Saunter and one of the like one of the things that drove us choosing to do it was when we lost our dog Hops last summer. I wanted to kind of honor him by by having like a big walk because I was the dog walker. We took a lot of walks together. I walked thousands of miles with Hops. And so kind of honoring him by doing this giant walk. At the beginning of the saunter, when everybody was picking up their hats and stuff like that and maps and everything where everyone gathers at the beginning, a fan of the show just came up to me and said, hey man, let's do it for hops. And a little fist bump. And I thought that was the most kind, awesome, touching thing. And to you out there, I'm sorry I didn't ask your name. I didn't say, I was kind of just so blown away buy it. Also, it was seven in the morning. And I was about to embark on this ridiculous thing. So my mind was quite elsewhere. But that really meant a lot to me. And so thank you for doing that. That was really awesome. And the people I was with, I told them about it. And they were also like, wow, that's really cool. You should have put a picture of Hops into the app. He could have even been the app icon. Yeah, well, that would have taken a lot longer, especially a liquid glass version, you know, adapting your dog to liquid glass is not that easy. Anyway, so thank you to that fan. That was really cool. Sorry, I was weird. I was very, very blown away and a little bit tired and distracted. Finally, for the technology side of things on the watches, the stats, it was 33.7 miles total for our walk. It took almost exactly 14 hours, 74,000 steps for the day and Pedometer Plus Plus on the Apple Watch Ultra worked fantastically. The battery life at the end on an Ultra 3 in low power mode was still 33%. So that was still that wasn't his expedition mode. That was the watch in just regular low power mode. So what that means is that the always on screen was turned off basically. Like that's what low power mode does mainly on the Apple Watch. So always on screen was off but the GPS was full blast. The heart rate was full blast, like all of that. And I never paused the workout the whole day. So it was running the entire 14 hour span. And at the end, it was 33%. So that's pretty great. The Suunto watch that I have also did great. I believe it ended the day with somewhere in the 40s. I didn't quite remember the number, but it was somewhere in the 40% range. Both watches did great. And all the tech prep I did was worth it. It was all fantastic. Like, you know, like Like Tiff was trying to install a pedometer on her watch, but she didn't actually start until like that morning. And trying to get an Apple Watch to do to install new software when it's not on Wi-Fi is challenging, to say the least. So it was difficult to have all that tech work for other people who hadn't like done it already. But because I had done all these practice walks, I wasn't really trying anything for the first time on this walk. it all made it very smooth running for me. So I can strongly recommend Pedometer Plus Plus for these amazing long hikes or even short walks. It's still great for that. I'm also very happy with the Suunto. The Race S is the one I have again. It's kind of their smaller one, but even it had ultra-level battery life, even a little bit better than ultra-level battery life. So it was overall a success. We made it. I did it. I'm proud. It hurt like crazy at the end. It was really hard, but we got through and I'm very happy about it. Would you do it again? I think so. If it was always going to be like that at the end, no. But I know from doing the 22-mile good training walk that I had zero blisters during that one, and it was fine. So I know that I can walk 22 miles on a pavement with these shoes, these socks, these pants. I know a way that it works that ended up working way better than what I had with the heel wedge modifications. So I think if I can just keep my ankle in good enough shape during training, I can avoid needing those heel wedges and then have a much better outcome with the shoes. So I think it is possible to do this better. So next year, I am certainly interested in trying. I don't know. I mean, the only downside with with training for something like this is that walking is just really slow. It takes a very long time. Like if you want to walk 22 miles in a day, that's going to be most of what you do that day. It's a very time consuming training process. You're basically it's like, you know, every Sunday you're taking a giant walk somewhere. So it is it is a big commitment to train for it. Now, you can also just kind of YOLO it and not train at all. I don't recommend that path. That's not something I would suggest. But people do it. You can YOLO it if you're a young person. It's the magic of being young. Yeah, if you're young and if you don't mind things like maybe losing toenails afterwards, go ahead. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend that path. The training method tends to have significantly better outcomes. But it does take longer. I do get that. Did you sit at all during the day? Oh, yeah. We took breaks. Like, I think if you if you walk it straight at our pace, which our average pace was around like when we were moving was like, you know, 21 minutes per mile ish. So, you know, if you don't stop, you can do it like, I don't know, an hour and a half faster or something. But but we, you know, we stopped to like, you know, 10 minutes here and there, even simple things like, you know, there are certain spans where there are not that many bathrooms. And so when you finally get to one, there's a big line. so like there was one where we had to wait in a bathroom line for 15 minutes so that like well this is our break i guess you know but but you know there's like a lunch break in the middle they do a nice job they have like snacks and stuff like along the route so it's really cool but yeah there is there is some stopping but it's not you're stopping for like five or ten minutes at a time you're not stopping for long spans and roughly how many people completed this just from what you know um there were 3500 registrants and about 2200 finished So it was like about a 62% finish rate. So that's pretty good, I think. For something that really guilty long, that's pretty good. I put a link in the chat room to the Barclay Marathon's Wikipedia page. There's an older documentary about that that I think you can find on YouTube, and there's a bunch of newer videos on YouTube about the newer iterations of that race. Maybe Marco will have a newfound appreciation for it if he ever checks it out, especially based on his upstate walking experience. Yeah, and to be clear, there's a whole world of extreme athletic events. I am not considering doing any of them. I don't really have any interest in doing marathons, ultra marathons, Ironman things, most of that stuff. The reason why I was interested in this is because I really like walking. I hate running. Like, I'll do it, but I hate it. Every minute of a run, I can't wait for it to be over. Biking is fine until you have to go up a hill. Then I hate it. There's parts of most exercises that even if I could train myself into the requirements to do them, I just don't like them. walking i really like so that's one of the reasons this appealed to me so much whereas the others i just i don't care enough about the exercise to actually train for them enough to do it good news you can walk the barclay marathons check out the uh the documentary i'll put the link to that in the chat room as well if you haven't seen it it's enjoyable to watch even if you're just sitting on your couch but yeah running is not required okay i mean it also this looks like a trail thing i also i also should clarify like i really like walking on pavement It's really nice. I'm not a big hiker. Like, I know hiking is just walking, like, but up things and in the woods. But I like walking on flat pavement a lot better than that. Yeah. Barkley Marathons is not for you, to be clear, Marco. But you should watch the documentary. It is eye-opening. Great.