680: A Lot of Holes in That Cheese

I just got a notification that my Mac Mini is offline in the garage. That might be because I might have sprayed some snow on it today. Snowblower, thrower, whatever? We've been complaining that the laptop should be waterproof, but I don't think anyone has really thought about the Mac Mini being waterproof. Right? So, I mean, you know, so me using the snow thrower, snowblower, I know snowblowing is a dirty thing somewhere, but that's what they call them here, so I'm going to keep calling it that. Do they not call them that somewhere else? So I understand snow thrower being the more technically common term, but I thought it was like nationwide. Snow blower is the common term. Some population is giggling, and I just don't know which one. Look, I know about it. I just don't care. Okay, so anyway, you know, I bought this thing, geez, five years ago at least. I've only used it a handful of times. I'm not good at it because it doesn't snow that crazily that often. I thought you meant the Mac Mini for a second. I was like, what are you talking about? No, that one I use a lot, actually, which I'll get to another time. But, yeah, so, and it has snowed so much in the last few days. Like, me trying to use this thing has been comical. Everything is a mess, and I'm trying to clear the driveway, and, like, I get about five minutes in, and it just stops. Now, this is a two-stage snowblower. It's hundreds of pounds, and it normally... Two-cycle, you mean? Two-cycle engine? It's a four-cycle engine with two stages of stuff it does to throw snow around. Got it. Um, so anyway, uh, it just stops and I'm like, oh my God. And I'm trying to like pull up my, what am I going to do? I'm in the middle of the driveway. This thing is huge and heavy. And I'm like, gee, and then I'm, I realized like, I'm like, wait a minute. It might've should be out of gas. I'm so bad at operating. This is my last gas powered thing besides tips, cars, range extender. Um, and so like, I'm like, I don't know how, I don't know how to deal with this. Like I've never even bought like regular gas for it. I just use true fuel, like the stabilized gas you're supposed to keep in it all winter. I use so little of it, I've paid like 50 bucks total of gas that the thing has ever used. So I literally have never even bought real gas for it. So I'm so disconnected from that process. But yeah, it turns out it just was out of gas. I just poured more true fuel in and it was fine again. On that topic, by the way, I remember this came up maybe on this show or in some other. No, it was probably like when we, the cultural we, were watching like the first season of The Last of Us or something and debating how long gasoline in cars wouldn't last or whatever. And I think I might have mentioned this then, but like I continue to think about it. Like we've had really mild winters for the past several years here. Now, this one's not mild, but it's not the worst. But anyway, we had mild winters. And so I hadn't used my snowblower in literal years. It had been in the garage. and I also have, you know, there's no gas in it, but there was a, you know, a red plastic, I don't know how big it is, a four-gallon thing with gas in it that I filled at the gas station. And I was just sitting in my garage for years, for literal years, just in the plastic, sitting there waiting, and then, you know, we finally get a snow after several years that I think I'm going to use the snowblower on. Because honestly, I think doing it by hand is easier most of the time because our slowbar is so old and so terrible and so tiny. But anyway, we pulled that out again, and every year I pull it out, I'm like, this is it. This is the year. It's not going to work. This is a 20-something-year-old snowblower, by the way. It has had zero maintenance. And I'm putting into it gas that had been in my garage for four years. I'm like, well, the Last of Us debate tells me that this gas should be dead after six months, so surely this won't work. It always freaking works. It works. Put it in. The thing, fire. Mine is actually too psycho. They don't sell these anymore because they're too polluting and terrible. So I think it has burned maybe a total of four gallons of gasoline in the 25 years that I've used it. But I can tell you that if you leave gas in your garage for multiple years in a plastic container and put it into your two-cycle snowblower, the stupid thing will keep running. Yeah, and I'm sure you aren't doing it any favors, but it sounds like you are trying to kill it so you can get a better one, maybe. I've been trying to kill it by doing zero maintenance on it. It just will not die. Yeah, so anyway, so I'm so bad at using snowblowers that, like, because like i also like i gave up lawn mowing years ago i have literally never used a gas-powered lawnmower growing up we had one of those like spinning push manual ones oh my word and i hated it so much and so when i finally like you know i went through apartments as a young adult and like when we finally got a house i told tiff i'm like listen i'm not mowing the lawn because i i always hated doing it i will buy a lawn service from day one and she's like no i want to try one of those push mower things and i'm like okay but i'm telling you i will never use that thing she wanted to use the little thing with the blades. Yeah, like the thing I grew up with hating. Well, I can tell you, you grew up hating that, and it is fairly inefficient, but it could have been worse, because the thing I grew up using was a gas-powered lawnmower that was way heavier than this mini-blade thing, and I had to push it myself, because it was not, as they said back in the day, self-propelled. How did it move? You moved it, and it is so much heavier than this mini-blade thing, let me tell you. Oh, yeah, I mean, for sure. Anyway, so all this is to say, I have no experience operating like these heavy gas-powered things that, at least now, they are self-propelled. You hold down the right handle, and it turns. But as a result, and you have all these different controls in a snowblower. You have the forward and back thing, the engaged and disengaged thing, and then also how to aim the chute that you're throwing snow out of. And sure enough, I'm back into my garage in one of the maneuvers that I'm clumsily, clunkily executing, and I just throw a huge amount of snow into my garage all over, like, the network area, like, where all the 3D printing filaments are stored. Wonderful. It's a disaster. Maybe you like my snowblower because it has two controls. Go and where you aim to shoot. Yeah, those are the two controls. But I'll tell you what was all of the clumsiness and all of the just absolute disaster that was me trying to clear snow out of my driveway a few days ago and today was nothing compared to the clumsiness and disaster that is the watchOS 26 workout app. What a transition. So smooth. Oh, my God. Welcome, Marco. I'm so glad you're here with us now. Okay. Granted, this is a very hot take. I'm just finding all this out today. I was holding out on watchOS 26 because I had it on a test watch during the betas, and I didn't like the clear buttons to enter your passcode. I never used it for workouts, so I never really saw the workout app. So I was like, eh, why upgrade to watch OS 26? It seems like it adds nothing. I'll just wait and wait. And it bugged me every morning when I put the watch on, and it's all probably dirty, and I would just dismiss it. I just always wait. And with 26.4 betas, now it yells at you pretty badly if you don't have it. It refuses to connect to the watch now. so I'm like okay fine I guess I'll run the update so I'm just seeing watchOS 26 for the first time as of yesterday and today and I did my first workout today and I'm looking at Garmin's online now like that's that's how like I again this is the hottest of hot takes I think watchOS might be the worst 26 update like of all the you know and Tahoe's bad but Tahoe like I'm also now I'm on Tahoe now on all my Macs. I finally gave in on that as well because the latest Xcode requires it. Tahoe is a mess UI-wise, but it does add some things that make my life a little bit faster and easier. So there are, like, productivity and speed boost things despite the crappy interface. Like what? Well, I mean, the biggest thing, honestly, is now that I switched to Chrome, it does autofill from text messages and emails. That's a big one. And there's a couple of small things that work a little it better. I mean, there's lots of features that it adds, but the reason I ask is because I was under the impression that all of us already use third-party applications that fill those roles, and so it's kind of an academic improvement for us. It's like, oh, it's a clipboard issue. Well, we were all already using that. Yeah, I'm not using that. Yeah, but Tahoe overall, it's been, you know, certain things are working a little bit more smoothly because it's the latest version. So, like, okay, fine. But watchOS 26, like, I've been missing nothing by not using it. It seems to add nothing of value to me. And it has so brutally murdered the basic usability of the workout app, which is one of the most common things I do on an Apple Watch. Yep. Like, I'm shocked at how buggy and unusable, even just like, you boot the watch up after the update, and it does what all the 26s do. It wants to take you on a tour. And like, what? On a watch? I don't want to see your stupid liquid glass off tour. like yeah you're really great good job alan dice team look at how glassy and awesome you are i as the user do not care to see you and i and let me tell you for reasons that we'll get to another time i've seen the tahoe setup screen a lot of times so i've been i've i've seen like the stupid welcome animation and have to sit through it and then do you want to take a tour no skip i've seen these things a lot now and i'm i'm so over apple showing off how cool they are like because they're so not at this point. And so to see it, to see the tiny version of that on the watch, I'm just like, oh, screw you. And then to be, to be trying to do like the most basic thing and have this thing interrupt me on the way and try to do the most basic thing. Okay, fine. Just open the freaking workout app so I can start this workout. And then to have the workout app show me like three different interruption screens before it would even show me the UI, trying to promote different things about the new workout app. Hey, take a tour. No. And then do you want to try the new guide? No. And it's full of so many promos and upsells before you even get to the UI to actually create a workout. And then when you get to that UI, it's like, has anybody ever used this inside the company before? How to God did this ship? Like, I am so blown away by how utterly hostile and terrible this app is. It takes the Alan Dye era of UI crappiness to a new level that I didn't even know was possible. So great job, Ghost of Alan Dye inside of Apple. Like, I'm shocked at how bad this is to the point that now I am seriously looking around at alternatives to the Apple Watch. Because this is one of the most common things I do with it. It is so, so bad that it makes me question the entire platform, and it makes me resent the entire platform and want to just drop it. All right. Now, hold on a second. If you're going to say that the workout app is bad, you're going to have to use more words because it's so freaking bad. It's so bad. The thing of it is, in short, the way it works today, it's been long enough for me that I've forgotten exactly how it worked in previous versions of WatchOS. But the way it works today is you go to the workout app, and it presents you with a vertically scrolling list of workouts, which is fine. And it's pretty, I think, and you might not agree. And to be clear, that wasn't great before. Like, over the last few OSes, it has gotten more and more, like, crapped up. But it was at least, like, you know, you could still, like, do it. It was just less ideal than it used to be. But it was still, like, in 18, it was still usable. Right. So as you're scrolling this list, all you see is the different workout types, right? And then what will happen, if you're anything like me, is you'll see the workout type you want appear at the bottom of the, like, three different positions that they sort of kind of show on this list. And so what you'll do is, let's say I'm about to do a HIIT workout, you know, an HIIT workout. I'll see that appear on the bottom, and I'll mash the icon. But in the time of stop scrolling on the digital crown and go to tap that bottom-most icon that, to be fair, is ever so slightly off the screen, then magically a play button appears. But Marco, is that the play button for the high intensity interval training workout? Oh no, my friend. That's the play button for the one above the hit workout. Because it's in, I don't want to use the I word, but it is bananas. It is utterly bananas that you have to wait for this animation to appear before you can hit the play button. And by the way, why is there a play button in the first place? Let me hit the damn workout type in the first one. Which is how it used to. Oh, and by the way, I just opened up the workout app on my watch to review this interface so I could comment more intelligently on it. And I was interrupted on launch. Welcome to workout. New navigation. I launched this app this morning. And it's given me the first run welcome screen a second time now. Like, this is so bad. Like, this is. Okay. In a recent member special, I told a story of when I left Windows because it just reached a point one day that I was just so irritated by how little it respected my time and my direction. And I felt like I was being taken on a ride by Microsoft as the experience of my computer. Apple is a thousand percent there. Using Apple software now feels like you're being taken for a ride, that it's not your watch, it's Apple's watch. and they want to show you some stuff and they want to do what they want to do. And it used to be aligned with, well, what will be best for users? Like how can we make this the best product for them? And we will benefit from selling good products because we will make the best products for the users. And today's Apple doesn't do that. Today's Apple does A, what they feel like, and B, what will be the best product for Apple? and whatever the users want is now a very, very distant third in that list. We used to always joke that Apple would do what was best for Apple, what was best for customers, and then distant third, what was best for developers. But now Apple does what it thinks is best for it, and then users are their own very, very distant thing after that because the way Apple views us now is either as an audience for their wankery of what they're doing with their design, or more commonly, as a resource to be extracted for upsells. Yeah, a mark. And that's what today's Apple is. And I mean, I have just lost so much faith. And meanwhile, I have to say, I am really happy about technology right now because I've been doing some vibe coding, and we'll get to that maybe another time. But I'm really happy with tech right now. And as happy as I am with other parts of tech, it is putting my dissatisfaction with the state of Apple in stark contrast because it's just showing like how they are, they are still making some really good stuff, but there's a lot of holes in that cheese now. There's a lot of things that are not so good. There's a lot of things they just don't care about or areas that they used to have, you know, priority in and things they cared about that made good products or treated their users well that they just seem to be throwing away or no longer caring about in recent years. and just like this stupid work I had this morning was just like one of the last straws. I'm like, I'm like, I think I'm done with a lot of this stuff. Like, again, switch to Chrome. I'm much happier using Chrome. I think I'm going to switch away from the Apple Watch for a while and see how that goes. Like, there are certain things that they do a really good job with and I'm happy to keep using those. I think, you know, obviously the hardware for the most part is in a great spot. I still love the Mac as my primary computing platform and I still love iOS as my primary phone platform. And I still love Apple's development APIs and platforms for making my software. But there's so many other areas now where they're just making me mad and disappointed and sad. And I don't need that in my life anymore. And so if the Apple Watch is going to now be one of those things where every time I start a workout, I want to throw out the window, maybe it's time for a change there too. And I'm going to keep looking for those opportunities for change because I don't owe Apple loyalty. I don't owe Apple buying all their products and saying they're all the best when they're not. And so part of what I want to do now is start really evaluating things that I haven't been evaluating in a long time. And is this still the best thing? And sometimes the answer is going to be no. And that's not their problem. That's not my problem. My problem is I want to use what's best for me and be able to talk about it on the show for anybody else who might have similar feelings. And Apple has had a long run where they've been the best in a lot of categories. and I think they are so not the best in a lot of categories now. I don't think they've realized yet, but I'm realizing it, and look, it's their problem to solve. We need to move on, but very quickly, by pure coincidence, I went to lunch with Tyler from Goose on Monday, not a member of the band, but the one who went with us, too, Goose, and we went to lunch, and I noticed immediately that he had on a watch that was, get this, circular. Imagine that. Instead of a round rack, it was a circle. And it was one, I couldn't tell you which Garmin watch specifically, but it was a Garmin watch. It was something like 47 millimeter, maybe even bigger than that. So it looked kind of ridiculous on my wrist, but I briefly did try it on. Yeah, most of them are very big. Yeah, I tried it on briefly, and it looked really nice. Admittedly, I barely messed with it. I don't think I even really messed with it other than to put it on my wrist, but it looked real nice, leaving aside the fact that my wrist can't support something that big. But it was tempting. for a minute there. I tell you what. We are sponsored this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings to the professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place. I love Squarespace because so many times people will come to me and say, hey, I want to make a website. Can you help me out? And I don't have to help them out. I can just say, check out Squarespace. Give it a shot. Use our coupon code, please, ATP. But give it a shot. And they always can end up doing it themselves. Even people who are not technical, who are not computer experts, who are not programmers, doesn't matter. They do it themselves, and they are empowered, and they love it, and they don't need me for that. And this scales to so many different kinds of businesses now. So, of course, non-business sites, they've had that covered for over a decade very, very well. Business sites, though, they have such an amazing offering these days. So obviously, if you have a storefront, they've got that covered. They've had that covered for years. Physical goods, digital goods, all the different checkout options you might want, payment processing, every payment method that you might want, things like Apple Pay, of course, and then every credit card around the world, support for all these different things. So they have all that covered super well. But also, they now support things like paid newsletters, paid podcasts. If you're a consultant, you want to book time slots, you can do that. Gated member areas, so much support. For any kind of online business that is at all common these days, they probably support it. It's amazing what you can do in Squarespace. It's all backed by all the tools you might need. Obviously, things like SEO tools, analytics, email campaigns. You can have an email marketing, email newsletters, so much. Global shipping options, tax integration. There's so much in Squarespace. See for yourself at squarespace.com slash ATP. Start a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Once again, squarespace.com slash ATP, code ATP. Thank you so much to Squarespace for being so awesome and for sponsoring our show. All right, let's do some follow-up. I have had a terrible, terrible thing happen to me. I've received the Verizon cable card email. Oh, no. I got it. I got it last week. There's still no date on it as to when the cable cards are expiring. And actually, by pure coincidence, It's been a very busy social calendar for me today. I went to lunch with John from Channels today, and we were talking about this. But anyways, it has come to me. There's no date involved. As far as I know, even the first people to get it, which I think a lot of them were in the New York and Boston region, none of their cable cards have died. As far as I know, John, your TiVo is still chugging along. Yeah. Is your plan to just ride it out like me and just wait for the day? It doesn't work? Yep, pretty much. Because who knows? That could be a year from now. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it will come at some point or another. But, yeah, that's my plan to ride it out. The very, very short version is I was thinking about maybe just cruising along with paying Verizon for cable service, even if I don't use, like, their new IPTV app or anything like that, and just using TV Everywhere in order to stream things and suck it into channels via TV Everywhere. But in the last, like, week or two, Disney has pulled all of their channels, including, importantly, ESPN and the associated properties, off of TV Everywhere. So I don't know what I'm going to do. I suspect that, if anything, what I'll probably do is upgrade my Disney Plus package to include ESPN and all that for sports, and then maybe pay for Peacock for Bravo and one or two other channels that we watch, and then maybe that'll be it. Oh, and use Mantenna for local stuff. But it's a bummer, man. It's a bummer. Oh, Peacock and TiVo-related complaint. We subscribed to Peacock this month for the Olympics because my wife wanted to watch it. She was away on a work trip. when she came back from the work trip is like, I want to watch X, Y, and Z events that I missed when I was on my work trip. I'm trying to find it in the Peacock app. Can't find it. She searched for it. I searched for it. She eventually looked it up online. Turns out replays of Olympic events are only available for one day after the event. Why am I paying for your streaming service if you will not show me a thing that happened more than one day ago? You know what doesn't have that limitation? If we had T-voted. But we didn't. We were like, oh, we'll pay for Peacock. We had all the stuff. Just pay for the streaming service. We should get used to this post-cable, post-TIVO world. This was not a problem with TIVO. If we had set up a TIVO to record the Olympic event she was interested in, maybe it would have been a little bit more work to set up. But when she came back from the work trip, she could watch the events. Yep. It's the world we're living in, and it's worse. It is worse. All right. Yolink alternatives. Joe writes, you were talking about Yolink sensors, I guess it was last episode, whatever it was, 16 weeks ago when I last spoke to you two. And Joe continues, and I wanted to share that Ikea has come out with some new matter-over-thread devices that are mind-bogglingly cheap. They have a leak sensor for about $8, a scene controller for about $6, and a motion sensor for about $8. I think they have a contact sensor as well as some light bulbs, but I haven't bought any of those, says Joe. So far, I've had these for about two months, and they're rock solid. I especially like that these are all integrated with HomeKit, so I just need to go to one place to look at the status or inspect alerts, which, by the way, these three products, and I cannot speak Swedish, are called Klipbach, Bilressa, and Mig Spray, which I did literal translations of the three of them, and allegedly, as per Google Translate, they are called Scrapbook, Car Trip, and Mosquito Spray. Something may have been lost in translation there, but maybe not. I don't know. Right. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, but that is good to know. I have heard through some acquaintances that these are, at least at first glance, pretty good, to corroborate what Joe has said. I personally haven't used any of these, but it is very interesting and worth checking out. All right, with regard to, we talked, I think it was last episode as well, about home batteries and generators and things like that, and Russell Prowse writes, I enjoyed listening to your conversation about battery backups and solar. One thing you didn't mention is vehicle-to-home, or V2H. This allows your EV to act as your backup battery as long as it's connected to a home charger that supports bi-directional charging. A few EVs already support it, including the BMW iX3 and the upcoming i3, Nudge, Nudge, Marco, and more on the way. Also, it's worth noting, and I think, John, you've put this in the show notes for us, to talk about. There's vehicle to load as well. John, what's the difference between V2H and V2L? That's the little part that I put there for you to read. It explains it. Well, I was trying to give you the credit, John. I'm not right there. You're still stumbling over the JS. No, no, no, no. I just wanted to make it clear that Russell wasn't saying this, that I was. No, no, I know. Genuinely, hand to God, you know I will fess up if I stumble over it. I've done it a million times. This time I was trying not to steal your credit for once. I put all this in the show notes. Just read it. All right. I'm leaving it all in. Screw it. Marco, if you want to clean it up, that's up to you. All right. So anyway, I happen to know, and it has nothing to do with John Syracuse whatsoever, that there's also a vehicle to load, or V2L, where the AC inverter in the EV is used to supply power that is, you know, plugged into the generator inlet or whatever. V2L does not require a bidirectional charger to operate. And by pure coincidence, I don't know why I didn't bring this up last episode because it's fresh in mind. my friend Brad who has the F-150 Lightning he had just installed in the last couple of weeks a generator inlet for him to plug his F-150 Lightning into because that has 220 I'm probably getting the details wrong but it's basically got a NEMA 1450 or whatever outlet on the back of it that you can plug into a generator inlet that's exactly the point and so as best I know he has not yet tried this but in theory he can use the battery in his Lightning in order to power at least some subset of the house Going back to Russell, to me, this removes almost every downside of a battery backup system and keeps all of the upside. Most TVs have batteries in the 80 kilowatt hour range, so you're starting with way more capacity than you get with a Powerwall or equivalent battery backup system. If it's a car you already own or were planning on buying anyway, that's an enormous amount of money you can save versus having a car plus the equivalent amount of battery storage. Which is a great point. All right, with regard to fans in the M-Pro line. No, I meant enthusiasts. Sorry. Should have been clearer. All right. With regard to... See? You know, not even you were perfect, John. Who knew? I didn't even think about the whole, like, spinning thing that blows air. Right. With regard to enthusiasts of the M-whatever Pro, Rick Baumhauer writes, I think Marco was confusing the M3 Pro with the M4 Pro when he said the latter wasn't a good value. The M3 Pro is a terrible chip, basically an M3 Plus rather than an M3 Max Minus, as the M1 and M2 Pro had previously been. I don't see how M4 Pro with two and a half times the P cores and two times the GPU cores of the base chip can be called poor value at $600 more than the base M4 and $1,000 less than the M4 Max. The Pro chip, except for the M3 Pro, is for people who want near-max performance and core count but don't need all those GPU cores. Musicians are one such group. Yeah, that's the problem with all the chip lines is, you know, you don't generally get to pick what comes inside the SOC. How many P cores? How many E cores? How many GPU cores? You get to pick from the three or four sets of stuff that Apple gives you, and if you really just want a whole bunch of CPU cores and don't care about GPU, you end up paying a lot more because you have limited choices. So, yeah, the M-Whatever Pro chips do apparently have fans, especially people who do not want to pay for all that GPU that they don't need. Yeah, we did get a lot of feedback kind of, you know, defending the M-Pro chips because I was kind of crapping on them last episode. And I think I did a poor job of explaining my main point, which is that the M4 base chip has gotten so good that if you're looking at, like, performance per dollar in CPU performance in particular, the M4 is way better than the Pro or the Max. What I was saying was, like, you know, the Max usually at least has the benefit of, like, if you need really big RAM or, you know, other very large resources, sometimes you have to go with the Pro or the Max chip to do that. But neither of them, in terms of, like, CPU performance per dollar, Neither of them are good values compared to the base chip. So I think, like, you know, the Max makes its case that, like, you know, if you need the biggest of everything, the Max is it. And, you know, if you need the best bang for your buck, the base chip is it. And the Pro is, it is between those two. My thinking was not fully considering the pricing aspect because, like, I didn't realize, like, because I haven't bought one in a couple of years. Like, I'm still using M3 Max for my main Mac here. So I didn't realize, oh, the price difference is actually pretty big between them. So it is a middle step in terms of you can pay some more and get some more, but in terms of sheer computing power for the dollar, neither the Pro nor the Max are good values compared to the base chip, which is a very good value. By the way, the biggest of everything is still the Ultra, even though it is still the M3 Ultra. It is definitely the biggest. Well, I mean, yeah, but almost no one should buy that. It's true, but it's the biggest. All right. With regard to Tahoe window resizing, Nathan Muntzopano writes, on the topic of resizing windows in Tahoe, you can actually enlarge the exterior clickable area. Just run this command and then log out and back in, and we'll have it in the show notes. But it's defaults, right, hyphen G, Apple Edge Resize Exterior Size, 8. The default seems to be 4. You can revert the change with such and such, which will again be in the show notes. I haven't tried that, but I'm glad to know that these, you know, little undocumented P-list things are still lurking in there for you to mess with the UI. Indeed so. All right, let's talk Mac OS document model. First of all, apparently our timeline was a little bit wrong. The new document model was introduced in Mac OS 10 10.7 Lion, not 10.8 Mountain Lion, as we, I think, stated last episode. And, John, you're eating crow in our internal show notes, writing, in fact, the first sentence of this section of the Mountain Lion review that we linked last episode was, quote, Apple's far-reaching changes to the document model in OS 10 Lion. Yeah, it's my bad. Like, I did the Google link because I didn't remember off the top of my head. So I'm searching through my old reviews to find out when they introduced us, and I found the Mountain Lion section that explained their document model. I'm like, this must be it, but I didn't read literally the first sentence, which linked back to my 10.7 review and said, here's when it was introduced. So my bad. I do think the Mountain Lion section does a better job of explaining it, but it is interesting to look back at the 10.7 review and see what I thought of it then and how my thoughts had changed even just a year. And by the way, it's also fun to look at the fact that Apple could not get it back together marketing wise on 10.7 and couldn't decide whether it was Mac OS 10 10.7 or whether it was just OS 10 10.7. The 10.7 documentation, marketing materials and everything had both of those things in it, which to this day, I still remember being like, well, which is it? Are you dropping the macro? You know, eventually I believe they did drop it. I forget. But in my reviews, I always tried to do whatever Apple said was their official. Like, here's what we call our thing. So I'll call it whatever they call it. And 10.7, they just couldn't decide. Or they decided too late, and they couldn't update all their materials. So even in these notes, like you can see in my Mount and Myer review, I call it OS X Lion. But then in my notes here, I called it Mac OS X Lion. Anyway, Apple and naming has never been great. No, it is not. Ian Robinson writes, and I don't know why I didn't say this on the episode. This is one of those things that either you two were on a roll, and I didn't want to interrupt. I asked you about it. Oh, then I don't know what my deal was. But anyways, Ian Robinson writes, Final Cut Pro does autosave on the Mac. Of course it does. Where were you on this, Casey? You have to choose the name for the project when you first add it to a library in the app. I don't know how long this has been the case. I've only been using it for about five years. And that's pretty much exactly the same for me. Again, apologies. I don't know where I was on that. Video Alex writes, ever since Final Cut Pro 10 launched 14 years ago, you do not need to save as you work. File format is a database of incremental changes, so you can undo back to the start of your edit. I did not know that. That's very cool. When you quit, it commits the changes to the file, which is a bundle. Eric writes, when you're using Microsoft Office 365 apps on Windows with files in OneDrive, the apps have the default option of autosaving all you're doing without asking anything. I did actually test this one, but this feedback makes it sound like if you're using Office 365 and your file is in OneDrive, then it default autosaves. And I'm wondering, is it not default autosave if the file isn't in OneDrive? That would be a weird behavior that users would never guess. But anyway, it's just another example of an app that we traditionally think of as a file-based app deciding, you know what, autosave is the sensible default for this situation. Alex Kent writes, does Xcode work on files? How often do you hit Command S every day when working in Xcode? There's no number that can measure, that can go that high. A billion times? A trillion times? Wait, what? I hit Command S constantly. In Xcode, you hit Command S? I do, too. Absolutely. I have never hit Command S in Xcode. Yeah, oh, no, absolutely. What are you hitting Command S for? To save my work? To save what? The stuff I just changed. The source code that you're adding? Yes. If you didn't do that, what would happen? I mean, what if the computer... See, now I'm exposing my Windows priors. But what if the computer crashes spontaneously after I've just written a block of code that I don't feel like rewriting or asking an AI to do foreign. So Xcode, finish this thing, but I'll tell you what my impression of how Xcode works is. All right, so let me, I'm going to back up to the beginning because I interrupted Alex, if you will. So Alex Kent writes, does Xcode work on files? How often do you hit the command desk every day when working in Xcode? Autosave feels totally natural in some apps and totally foreign in others. I have no solid rule for which is correct, but it's not as simple as shoebox versus files. I agree with pretty much everything Alex is saying, whether or not it makes any sense whatsoever. I agree with that. Yeah, because Xcode, I mean, so clearly it works on files. Most IDs are very much file-based. Like in certain situations, where the files are and what their call is actually significantly important. And in Swift and Xcode, it's not as important as in other languages and other APIs. But it's still kind of important where the files are and what they're named. But it's certainly a file-based app. My impression of the way Xcode works, and the reason I don't ever hit Command-S, is the only thing that I care about is, like, if it was, let's pretend it was like old-school file-based and you had to hit save. I would be like, okay, I'm typity, typity, typity. All right, now Command R because I want to run my changes. But wait, you forgot to hit Command S. So when you hit Command R, actually what you're running is the version of that file that you last saved three minutes ago. And so now you're running the app. You think you're running it, but really you have unsaved changes that were not part of your build. That never happens in Xcode. My impression is that when you hit Command R to run, it doesn't matter if you hit Command S in the last hour. When you hit command R to run, every single one of your buffers is going to use what is in the file at the time it gets to compiling that thing. In fact, I will continue to type crap while it's building, confident that it will get, you know, that it's probably already picked up the chain. Like, whatever point it hit that file, especially if I'm adding a comment or something like that. So, essentially, I treat Xcode like Apple Notes, where I never have to hit save. It is always saving my thing when it needs to. I'm also under the impression that it's constantly auto-saving in the background. I don't know if that's true, but that's my impression. My sort of the equivalent of Command S is commit and push because then if the meteor hits my house and I'm dead, my source code will be like, I always want to push as in get it out of my house, get it off of my computer get it somewhere that is not here but anyway all I can say is that I never have to hit Command S and it doesn't affect my life And so far, I haven't lost any work because of this, but Marco and Casey, you are hitting command S because you think, is that like, well, Casey said he's hitting it because like, well, what if my computer crashes? I'll lose that code. I just typed Marco. Why are you hitting command S? Because I grew up in TextMate doing web development. And TextMate. I mean, so did I. I know. So TextMate is basically an IDE for web development, sort of. It's a text editor, then you can open a whole bunch of files in, and if you're working in a web app, you're dealing with a directory tree full of files. And so in TextMate, if you don't hit Command-S, your data is not saved. And so when you go back to the browser and hit refresh or rerun the script or whatever, you will not have whatever is unsaved being run in your test. So I just developed the habit of whenever I go to run whatever I've written, I hit command S first. I mean, I grew up in that same environment and have that exact habit, but I did not bring that habit with me to Xcode because it was so clear that it worked differently. So I am a little bit more loosey-goosey about it in Xcode. Like, for instance, I will, if I do like a find and replace across multiple files in Xcode, I will do that find and replace, and then I'll just hit run. I won't think, like, are all those files saved? Whereas in TextMate, I actually have to think about that. You have to do, like, save all or whatever the command is. If you did think about it, would you go to all the files that have the little M next to them in the sidebar and click on them and hit Command S? I don't even know what Command S does in Xcode. Does it save every file without standing change or just the one that's in the currently active text editing thing? I think it's just the current one. But because... It's not connected to anything like the elevator door close button. You do it in Command S because I'm happy. Well, but it doesn't... If you hit Command S in notes, it'll beep at you to kind of yell at you, like, don't save me. What are you doing? I feel like Xcode should do that. I mean, I would probably stop doing it eventually. Like, I don't do it that often in Notes, but, yeah, it's that same character we have. Because, like, you know, the thing with Notes, again, Notes makes more sense not to do that because there is no explicit save action that the app is doing, like, on your behalf, like, to a file. Whereas Xcode, it is still working on individual files. And until you hit Command-S or build and run the app, those files are not saved. Are you sure it's not constantly autosaving in the background? I haven't tested this. I'm just asking. Hold on. I'll tell you. I should check. I should check an assignment out there. I spend 10 minutes writing code, and then I have not yet hit command R. I will go look in the file system and see. I'm not 100% sure, but I am like 90% sure. All right. I just tested it because you can tell, like, whether it shows up in your Git diff. And, yeah, if you just type some code, if you just type something and alt tab away, sorry, command tab away, and, you know, look at, like, it won't. Oh, wait a minute. Oh, my God. Now it's there. It autosaves every two seconds, doesn't it? Gracious. Oh, my God. Maybe. This is a year of efficiency. You can stop hitting Command S as much. I think it might just be autosaving like whenever you switch away or do anything. I think it's autosaving like every 10. I think it's constantly doing it. Oh, my God. That's amazing. All right. Moving on. We learn something new All right All right Eric DeRoyter writes you can get back to the old Save As model in macOS I use a hybrid of auto save and save as so I have the benefits of auto saving with the mental model of using save as In system settings first of all in desktop and dock you disable closed windows when quitting an application This will be in the show notes. I don't want to add, by the way, that setting is a thing that nobody would guess at. I think Glenn Fleischman had an article about this, but, like, why would you ever go to desktop and dock and look for a setting that says close windows when quitting an application and think in any way that's going to mess with the document model. But it is an essential part of this. Yep. And then secondarily, in keyboard, then keyboard shortcuts, you should create an entry under all applications for save as and assign it to command shift S. And you might want to get a true-to-form ellipsis by hitting option semicolon. Again, that will be in the show notes. You have to because the keyboard shortcut things that works in the menu system on the Mac, you have to write the menu item exactly as it appears in the menu. So if you don't know how to type in ellipsis and you just type three dots, you're not going to figure out why it's not working because it's just like a text-based matching thing. Right. I forgot about that. Thank you. And then finally, for this portion, Emily Campbell writes, No Pad Plus Plus on Windows presents a pretty basic text editor. You open existing text files or make new files, and they don't save unless you save them. The tabs for each document show very clearly which files are unsafe, so you're never confused. But here's the best bit. You don't need to save the files. It will remember forever the edits you have made to the unsaved files. It's obviously storing your copy somewhere under the hood. If you close the file, it asks you if you want to save your changes with the options save, don't save, or cancel, which is the close action, or cancel the action of trying to close the file. If you close the application, it doesn't ask you anything. It just remembers all your state without touching any of your original files. In my ideal world, every application would work this way. It's literally the best possible combination of both models. It never loses any of my data, but everything feels 100% intentional. This is how BBEdit works. You know, like Marco was saying, like, you have to hit Command S because if you go refresh in the browser, you won't see your changes if you didn't hit Command S. But I never worry about losing anything because for years and years and years, I forget when BBEdit started doing this, but it's been many years. I have so many, as we've discussed in the past episodes, I have so many BBEdit windows open. Half of them have the little dot of them that they have unsaved changes or whatever. When I quit BBEdit, it never asked me anything. It just quits. And when I launch it, every window comes back to exactly where it was. It doesn't retain undue history across launches, which I believe TextMate did at one point. And is that a feature or a bug? I'm just kind of used to it at this point. But this, I don't know if it's the best of both worlds, but it is the system I prefer. If you don't want autosave, but you also want sort of the quote-unquote protection of autosave, be it yet it is effectively autosaving your documents off of the site everywhere, but still presenting the model of, oh, you didn't say these changes, so they're not going to appear in the actual file. They're just in my file off to the side that I'm using. And it works for untitled windows, too. Like, you can have, like, an untitled window open for months and just use it as a scratch pad, and every time you quit, restart, whatever, the untitled window is always exactly where you put it, size the way you made it. It's just there. It's just called untitled 1572 or whatever huge number is on there. That is a great system, especially if you love having lots of windows open. So I'm glad to hear that Notepad++ does that on Windows. I'm telling you the BBF does that on Mac, and there's probably other Mac apps that do it as well. All right. Finally for today, with regard to repeating reminders for Marco, Patrick DeMontel writes, yes, DUE app is fine. Do is fine. But good task is what you want. It uses the reminders data, but keeps reminding every five or otherwise configured minutes. I am an avowed do super fan. So I personally like having a different section for all this stuff. But if you really like the reminders app and want to just kind of supercharge it, apparently a good task is what you need to look at. and we'll put a link in show notes. I actually downloaded GoodTask years ago. It was in my App Store history because I've been ranting about this need occasionally for years. It is a very involved app. Like, it does a lot, and it kind of does, like, its own version of a lot of things. And it's, you know, it's a full-blown, full-featured app. And that's not really what I was looking for. I was looking for something much, much simpler that basically still, like, left reminders to be reminders to a large degree or like left, like I didn't want somebody that added that much on top of it. So that's what I've been vibe coding for the last day or two. Oh, nice. I decided, you know what? I need to learn these AI tools beyond just very quick little dumb tests. Let me actually, you know, set up. I'm using Codex for this. I first tried the Xcode integration. It's fine, but I like the full Codex app better. So I've been using the full Codex app. And it is, it has been a remarkable experience. I'm very impressed by it. We can talk a little bit more about it now if you want. I have some thoughts. But suffice to say, I've made my own app to do this, and I do plan to release it. I don't expect there to be a lot of users necessarily, because I'm making, like, what's best for me. Sometimes that works out, and sometimes other people want it to. That's, you know, that's not a guarantee with things I make. So it might not have any other users except me. But I am making it. I am going to release it. It's very, very simple. It's almost done. I basically need to make screenshots and fix one screen of kind of a bad UI. But this is exactly the kind of thing that makes me excited about AI coding. It's exactly, you know, like what Drama is making. It's the kind of thing that if I had to do all this from scratch, I just never would have made it. Like this app just wouldn't exist. but now by lowering the bar to how much work it is to make it, I was able to make it in like a day and a half while also doing many other things in my life. Like it's been, you know, coming back from the vacation and catching up on everything. Like, you know, it's been a lot in the stupid weather. Like there's been a lot going on in life. There's just like stuff to do. So it's not like this has taken me a day and a half of constant work. This has taken me like a day and a half of occasionally like, oh, do this, do this, do this. And then, you know, oh, I have to do something else now and come back to it later. and it's been kind of amazing. I guess, do we have a minute to talk about it now? Yeah, I mean, I think we have a lot to get through, but if we can contain ourselves. Oh, no. You and I did not contain ourselves about Apple Watch, so if we can contain ourselves about this, please. Okay. Let's do it. Maybe I'll save it for when I actually release it. I will say. Oh, that's a good idea, actually. The reason why I want to release it, first of all, why not? I mean, if it can help somebody else, great. Again, I think it's going to be pretty specific to the way I like things to be done, which is a banana system that no one else should use. Everyone else should use more discipline and be more organized than I am. But this ridiculous pile helps me with my life such as it is. But also, a while back, one of the apps that I made to learn the basics of SwiftUI was called Coffee Ratio. And it was like whenever I go upstate to my in-laws, They have, you know, pour over cone and a big air pot that I brew coffee in for everybody up there. And it's always a different number of people depending on, like, who's around that day and who still wants coffee. And I never remember, like, how much water to beans do I use for this number of people or whatever. So I just made a really simple one screen app called Coffee Ratio. And I actually made a really good icon, if I can say so myself. I don't know if it stands up today, but I liked it at the time. This was probably four or five years ago at least. The problem is, if you make an app for yourself on your iPhone, even if you have a paid developer account, the way that works is you open it up in Xcode, you build it and run, you deploy it to the phone. Well, if you change phones, that app is gone. And the only way to get it back is to go to a Mac, download the app, figure it out, register it with provisioning, and turn on developer mode, and, you know, make sure, like, add that certificate to the privacy permissions thing so it trusts that developer account, you know. And so it's a big pain that isn't always possible. And so when you're making little personal utility apps for yourself for iOS, it's actually easier to just release them to the App Store than it is to try to manage that. So, like, in many ways, like, even if no one else ever installs it, as long as it's something Apple will approve, it's actually way easier to just have it in the app store than to try to manage that developer thing over time for an app that you only occasionally use. So that's why I actually am going to release this app. It's not going to become a big part of my business, I don't think. Again, I don't think it's going to fit what most people want. But it is so far fitting very well what I want. And I've been very impressed with the AI coding, and I'll get to that another time. We are sponsored this week by Aura Frames. So if you're anything like me, you've got a gazillion photos on your phone. Photos that in a lot of cases are actually really good. And even if they aren't really good from a photographic point of view, there are people that you really truly love. And they should live somewhere other than that phone. They should be out in the world. And you can think to yourself, well, you know what I'll do is I'll get one of those god-awful crappy photo frames that I used to buy 20 years ago to give as gifts that I hated because they were ugly and the screens were worse. Well, I have a better idea. How about you check out Aura Frames? So imagine those crappy, like, digital photo frames from 20 years ago, but done to 11. They're just done incredibly well with beautiful physical features and an incredibly good screen. Not only that, imagine that the way you loaded this photo frame is not via an SD card or anything like that. It's via a really genuinely well-done and well-designed iOS app, or Android too. And you can load up the photo frame remotely because it's all via the app. And you might be thinking, oh, Casey, but I surely only get like 10 megs of storage, right? Oh, no. You get free unlimited storage. What's more, if you're giving this as a gift, you can personalize the frame before it arrives at the recipient's house. And so you can preload it with photos. You can have a little welcome message like, you know, congratulations or I love you, mom, or whatever the case may be. All done without really opening up the box. It's incredibly well done. We have a couple of these. I genuinely, genuinely love them. So, Aura Frames has been named number one by Wirecutter, and you can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com. For a limited time, listeners can get $35 off, $35 off their best-selling Carver Matte Frame with the code ATP. That's A-U-R-A-F-R-A-M-E-S.com, promo code ATP. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Thank you so very much to Aura Frames for sponsoring the show. All right, so as we record this, it is Wednesday the 25th of February, and in a week on March 4th, Apple is going to have an experience, an Apple experience. And so Jess Weatherbed at The Verge, Apple is hosting a special Apple experience in New York City on Wednesday, March 4th at 9 a.m. Eastern, instead of at the Apple Park location it typically uses for events. It's also hosting press in the cities of London and Shanghai at the same time. The invitation includes the words, you're invited, and an Apple logo depicted in segmented disks of yellow, green, and blue, the rumored colors of the new low-cost MacBook. Otherwise, it provides no hints about the purpose of the so-called experience. However, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has previously said that he's expecting Apple to launch a low-cost A18 Pro chip-powered MacBook and new MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, and Mac displays over the course of the next several weeks, alongside the iPhone 17e, a new base model iPad, and an M4 iPad Air. And maybe we'll even see a preview of Apple's new AI-infused theory, which we'll find out later is probably not so likely after all. But, yeah, this is happening a week from today. I know I was not invited. As far as I know, neither of you two were. Nope. Okay. Unless I didn't hear John, but maybe. I was not invited. So they didn't mention in this story, but, like, a theory that I saw Gruber speculated about, and then Gurman either echo Gruber's speculation or confirm it with sources. I couldn't really tell which, was that it would be like a week of press releases. Like on Monday they'd press release some stuff, and Tuesday they'd press release some stuff. On Wednesday they'd press release some stuff and then have the experience, which is why it's not an event on the Wednesday because the idea – and they've done this before where they do a press release each day announcing some products, culminating in an in-person thing where presumably they'll get to have – people who are there will get to have hands-on experiences with some hardware. But just look at this list in the Verge thing. That's a lot of stuff. I mean, there is a backlog because the M4 Pro and Max MacBook Pros essentially got delayed. They were supposed to be the end of last year, and the chips weren't ready, according to the rumors. So they kind of get shoved out into spring. But even if you ignore those, having new low-cost MacBook, new MacBook Air, new displays, which in itself is a momentous adventure for Apple because it happens once every decade, iPhone 17e, new base iPad, new iPad Air, that's a lot of products, even for three days' worth of press releases. And then you add on top of that, which is what I have to assume was going to be the headlining feature, which is our new most powerful laptops, which are our most popular. Our laptops are the most popular Mac line. I don't know if the most powerful laptops are the most popular, or surely the MacBook Air is. But anyway, the highest profile, the highest glory level of laptops are the ones with the biggest laptop chips in them, and this would be them. And so it seems like it's going to be a really busy week next week. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I'm very excited to see whether the low-cost MacBook is interesting. Oh, I'm sure it'll be interesting. It's just will it be interesting in a good or a bad way? Well, right. But, like, you know, like there's been some rumors of, like, you know, what could happen. I really did enjoy our theoretical thought experiment months ago about, like, you know, how would we, you know, cut down or what would we expect to be cut down to make this, you know, significantly cheaper? Do you remember what we said? Someone was asking about that before the show. I've already forgotten what we said because there was a rumor story that we don't have the notes for this episode saying, like, oh, here's what we think will be cut. And at this point, I'm like, we'll just wait until next week. We'll find out. Like, there's no reason speculating further. But we did long ago talk a lot about things we thought they could cut. And so we'll see next week what they actually have cut. Yeah, I believe my big thing was obviously, like, I was pretty sure they were going to cut Thunderbolt. I forget. I forget what else. We'll have to go back and listen to the episode to see. And to be clear, I don't think it wasn't a predictions episode. It was a brainstorming episode where we were like, what do we think they could cut? Like, if you had to do this, what would you cut out or what could they cut out? It wasn't a, like, we're now predicting. Like, we didn't have any inside sources and we weren't saying this is what Apple will do. I think we were more exploring the space of things that could be done to make a cheap laptop. What can you remove to remove cost? Yeah, because I remember, like, one of the things that I was, you know, kind of theorizing a lot about was, like, they don't want to cannibalize sales of the MacBook Air. and so they actually might restrict it more than they have to just so that more people don't choose it who would have bought the Air otherwise but just like the colors or the size better. So one of my theories was like they would make it App Store only apps or something like that. I don't think they would do that really but like I was trying to figure out like what would they do to make sure like for instance that businesses don't buy this. You know, having no video output would be a big one like so you can't connect it to projectors and stuff like that. I know we weren't going to talk about this but I guess now we'll have to link it. One of the rumors was, like, you can't get an SSD. You can't get a one terabyte or larger SSD. Which has been rumored today. That's not true today of the MacBook Air. No, no, I was saying that was rumored today. Yeah, I know. That's what I'm saying. This is the story in the Netflix that just came out that I guess we'll now have to link. Sorry, Casey. Yeah, that's right. But it has a whole bunch of rumored things. Again, I don't want to speculate, but that aligns with what you're saying, Marco, of, like, artificial segmentation. There's no reason you can't put a one terabyte SSD in this low-cost one. like Apple would charge through the nose for it and it would make the price go up. But like to your point, okay, well, then once you, if you, if you spec this out so that it costs way more than a MacBook Air, wouldn't you rather have these people buying a MacBook Air? Anyway, well, we'll see, we'll see what they do. There's also rumors as you would imagine about like how low cost will it really be now with the RAM prices going nuts because of the whole, you know, AI server farms and everything using all this thing. So we'll find out next week. Presumably they will announce pricing as well. I'm actually most excited about the color rumors. I mean, this Verge story mentions that there's a whole bunch of rumors of it coming in colors and what those colors might be. And, yeah, as we always do, we look at the invitation and, like, does this tell us anything? Well, it does. It's a bunch of – like, it's got a spectrum of colors from yellow to green to blue. Those are the only three colors of this thing, yellow, green, and blue. It seems weird. But, you know, I'm open to any kind of colors in laptops that are visible to the human eye, unlike the sky blue MacBook Air, which is, it's visible to the human eye, but it's tough. Yeah, like, at least these won't just look like weird white balance differences. We'll see, and maybe they will. Maybe they'll look like pea-colored white, but it's green. Is that green or is that yellow? And, like, we'll find out. But, you know, there's some signs of hope with the orange iPhone 17 Pro and also the rumors of the deep red iPhone 18, which maybe we'll talk about in a future show. So, fingers crossed. But, yeah, of all these things that they're talking about announcing, I am actually the most interested in the low-cost MacBook Pro because I think it's such a good idea. Like, I think it's a product they should make. It's just all about kind of like the 16e. It's all about execution. What do they lay it out? What do they put in? I still think leaving MagSafe over the 16e was a terrible mistake. Will they make a similar terrible mistake with this thing, or will they get the balance just right for, you know, for a thing that is cheaper than the MacBook Air and less powerful than the MacBook Air? but this is the time for that because MacBook Air is so massively overpowered for the things that most people do with it that there's room for this to exist. Yeah, this is by far the product that I'm most interested in seeing what it is because it has all these unknowns. And what I've always hoped for this product was that it would be kind of like when the 12-inch came out. Obviously, it had a lot of problems, limitations, as we've talked about at length. especially that damn keyboard but it had a lot of other problems but a lot of people bought it despite that because it was so much smaller and lighter than everything else that everybody was like oh my god I would love a smaller Mac to fit some role in my life or just to be delightful when you pick it up if this doesn't have too many significant trade-offs I could see a lot of people maybe myself like wanting it for its fun color and its small size that could be enough like if it is if it is a delightful looking and feeling product many people will want it and so you know one thing that we heard a long time ago i don't know i don't know if this was true we heard a long time ago that phil schiller was responsible for pushing up market some of the details about the 12 inch macbook um i believe things like memory capacities and stuff like that like and like he he apparently was like the champion of that in the company of like making the small the small computer not just a bad low spec computer but giving it like some premium options or premium capacities it would be a bad high spec computer yeah but like because the idea is like yes some people will buy something if it's the smallest cheapest one but also some people would buy a small one because it's nicer to them in some way, and they want it, but they would also either need or want a little bit higher spec in some way. So, you know, if the rumor is true that came out today that the thing maxes out at 512 gigs, like, you know, that's going to limit some things. You know, I'm sure there's only going to be one RAM option, maybe 16, you know, we'll see how that goes. But if it's a good enough product, if it's really interesting, if it's really visually or tactically, or what is the? Tactically. Yes. if it's visually or tactically appealing to people, many people will buy it who don't necessarily need to be the cheapest Mac. They just want something that they can use. And the better it is possible to spec it, the more people that will fit in its range. So I'm very curious to see this from that point of view. Also, I've been saying for a while that, like, one thing I was hoping for with the Apple Silicon era was for them to make a successor, or spiritual successor at least, to the 12-inch MacBook with the Apple Silicon Era. Yeah. But they really, they haven't quite done that. Like, the MacBook Air has been made closer to that, but it's still not close. They still have not really flexed and shown, like, what is the most amazing, very small computer we can make with our new technology that we have now. Again, the MacBook Air is very good. and it has almost no compromises. It's a great computer overall, but it's not nearly as small and light as the 12-inch was. It's not even close. So if they give themselves permission to make more trade-offs, to say we're going to make a computer that's more compromised than the MacBook Air, which is almost not at all compromised, we're going to make a computer that's a little bit compromised in some ways, but that will allow us to make something really awesome in some other form. you know, typically the form factor, the size, the weight. I feel like there would be so many fewer trade-offs required to do that now with Apple Silicon and all their modern components and stuff now. I was hoping this computer would be that. I don't know that it will be. It sounds like it's mainly there to fill the cheap spot, and they're going to market it a lot next week, and then we'll never hear about it again. Like, that's probably the more likely outcome. You know, similar to, like, when they released a new base model iPad. You know, the new base model iPad, they sell a ton of them. No one ever talks about them. They're not interesting. They do sell a lot, you know, mostly like to schools and stuff. They sell a bunch, but no one cares after the day it's announced. Like, we get a one-day present, and we're like, oh, cool, you updated the new base iPad. Now it's $5 cheaper and comes with the A-whatever chip. Okay. And then no one talks about it again. I hope that's not what this Mac will do. I fear that it is. But I hope this is actually a more interesting Mac model. And hopefully we'll know in a week. I think it actually might have more staying power than the base iPad or even the base iMac or the iMac period, which is a great comparison because the iMacs became colorful and they all love them, but we don't talk about them. But we don't talk about them because nobody buys desktop Macs. That's why we don't talk about them. But with laptops. Why would you, John? But with laptops, everybody buys laptops. And most people I see in the world do not have a MacBook Pro. They have a MacBook Air because it's cheaper. People buy the cheapest Mac laptop because they need a laptop. They don't understand why they should pay thousands of dollars for a bunch of crap they don't understand. So they say, well, what's the cheapest Mac laptop? And then maybe they get, you know, option crawled by a salesperson into getting a bigger SSD, which they should probably do anyway, let's be honest. Or, you know, whatever. But mostly, like, base MacBook Airs are everywhere. But that's because that's their cheapest laptop. what happens when there is essentially the equivalent of an iMac, a colorful, interesting computer that is also cheaper? Assuming it is not compromised in a terrible way that everybody hates, I can see it being very popular based on the fact that it is colored. And unlike the iMacs, it's not a situation where it's like, well, I was never going to buy a desktop anyway. So, yeah, they're cute and everything, but who cares? Because this is very relevant to people's lives. But it all depends on, like, what are the balance of features and price that this thing comes out with. And in terms of the size, the rumor is that the screen will be a little bit smaller, like diagonally a little bit smaller. But I haven't seen any rumors saying one way or the other about, like, will it be thinner? Because I feel like they could make it thinner because an A18 Pro is going to be even less hot than an M anything. So you have the space to make it thinner, but to the point of the Phil Schiller thing before. But is that, can you make it thinner and cheaper? Like, I'm not sure that they're going to go for the old 12-inch MacBook. look like this is the thing that fits inside underscore David Smith inside jacket pocket. Like, if they can do that and also make it cheaply, and that's one of the rumors, by the way, they've come up with some new process for making the unibody aluminum case that is also cheaper, a way to pull cost out of the thing. But I just, like, the thinnest you can possibly make it tends not to be a cost-saving maneuver. So we'll see. Like, they have some inherent thinness savings by using an A-level chip, I feel like, because, you know, you're producing less heat, right? So that is in there. But I don't know if they're going to really push it. Because, again, you do need room for the battery and everything. I don't want them to use Scout batteries again or something because that's also expensive. So we'll see. It'll be a very interesting computer on multiple fronts. And then I guess the 17e is in there as well. Because, you know, again, 16e, I think, should absolutely have had MagSafe. Will the 17e have MagSafe? Will they fix that one mistake? We'll see. You know, can you imagine if the new low-cost MacBook also offered a cellular chip? I will say outright, I don't think that'll happen. I don't think that'll happen. That doesn't seem like a low-cost option, but I can see where you're out there hoping for it. Well, if this rumor is true that they're only using one NAND chip, they're not even using their own Wi-Fi chip, there's no way. Yeah, they're not even using the N1. It makes me say no see anything in there either. Agreed, agreed. No, again, I'm not trying to say I expect this, but holy cow, that would be so hilarious to watch Marco and I have a crisis of whatever. as we look at this. If we had a crisis, Marco would buy one instantly. We're talking about no crisis. But, you know, here's something that's pretty underpowered and arguably not very good in a lot of ways. We'll see how underpowered it is. We'll see. I mean, I don't anticipate them making a cellular nanotexture version of this with a one terabyte SSD and 64 gigs of RAM for me. That would be amazing, though. No, just very briefly to kind of build on what Marco was saying earlier, I had a 12-inch MacBook. I think Underscore and I were the two biggest 12-inch MacBook fans and possibly the only 12-inch MacBook fan. You guys and Matt Alexander. Yeah, that's right. That's right. But I loved that thing. Like, it was a piece of trash. It was one of those things, like, when it was brand new, it was awful. But I loved it because especially compared to the contemporary machines at the time, it was impossibly thin and impossibly light. and the fact that it was woefully underpowered, and the fact that, to my recollection, the battery life was not great, and more than anything else, it had only one USB-C port, not Thunderbolt, mind you, USB-C port, which made everything difficult. I still love that computer. I absolutely adored that computer because it felt portable in a way that no other computer I've ever owned has ever felt that portable. Aaron has an M1 MacBook Air. I also really like that computer, but it feels like a boat compared to the 12-inch MacBook. It was just unbelievably light and cool and fun. And I would love for them to go that route, but I think this is just going to be something that's smaller and cheaper and mostly unremarkable. Yeah, just to give some perspective. So the current 14-inch MacBook Pro is 3.5 pounds. The 13-inch MacBook Air is 2.7. The 12-inch MacBook was 2.0. Yeah, that's a big difference. That's a huge difference. It's about the same difference between the 14-inch and the 13-inch Air. So it's about that same difference, but in relative terms compared to the Air, it's even bigger. Like 2.7 to 2.0. That's a huge difference. Absolutely. And nothing else has come close. The old 11-inch MacBook Air, I think, was a 2.3 or 2.4 or something like that. So that was kind of between the two. But yeah, 2.0 pounds. Nothing has been like that. I mean, now, I mean, if you have, I think, if you have an 11-inch iPad with a magic keyboard, I think you're somewhere above that. I think you might be. The 11-inch iPad, because, like, that's, you know, I think part of Apple marketing's argument in the meantime has basically been that the 11-inch iPad covers that role. And it sort of does, but it doesn't cover it well. It doesn't cover it nearly as well as the 12-inch did for people who wanted that kind of form factor. It's not the same. The Magic Keyboard and iPad is a brick. I do love the Magic Keyboard and iPad combination, but you're right. It is not light by any stretch of the imagination. I'm excited to see how next week turns out. I'm very curious to see what they do launch, what they do announce. I'm starting to get a little bit of the itch to replace my M3 MacBook Pro and my M3 Max MacBook Pro. Only a teeny bit because it's really an incredible computer, and I have nothing to complain about. See also my car. but I'm starting to get a little bit of the itch so I'm starting to kind of think to myself well maybe, and I don't think this is happening next week, but when the like OLED touchscreen allegedly launches, I think German has most recently said at the end of the year maybe I'll do something then so I can try the touchscreen even though I don't think there's anything about that, like I don't want a touchscreen MacBook Pro, but I feel like for the show, if nothing else, I need to get one and try it, so we'll see what happens, but I'm very excited for next weekend to see even if it's kind of silly stuff that is just press releases or whatever. I'm still excited to see what Apple has to say. So we'll see. We are sponsored this episode by DeleteMe. DeleteMe makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data from hundreds of data broker websites out there at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. So here's how this works. There's this gross business called Data Brokers. These are the sites that when you search for somebody's name in a search engine, you get all these sites advertising like home address, phone number, family member's name, like basically trying to give you, trying to dox this person for a fee, basically. And you're out there probably, because what these sites do is they collect as much data as they can from as many places as they can, so they have records on as many people as possible. And these sites each have some kind of individual opt-out or takedown procedure, but they're all different, and you're never going to know as an individual what all these sites even are, let alone have the time and ability to go opt yourself out of all of them. And there's new ones popping up all the time. So Delete.me is a service that you sign up for. you give them the information that you want deleted from those data broker sites, and then there's an ongoing process where they are constantly searching for new sites, and they have an automated process that opts you out of all of the ones that they can find. And so you sign up for DeleteMe, you give them the information, you authorize them to say, hey, please go remove this from all the data brokers that you know about, and DeleteMe will then go and do that for you. So you could never do this on your own because that's just way too much work for a single person, but having a service that automates this in bulk is amazing. So Delete Me is great for this. I personally was looking for one of these services a few years ago and I found Delete Me before they were a sponsor. They were the best recommended. They were the best rated. So I signed up for them. They're great. Check them out today. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for our listeners, get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeliteme.com slash ATP, enter code ATP at checkout. That's joindeliteme.com slash ATP, code ATP. Thanks to Delete Me for sponsoring our show. All right, moving on. Apple apparently has been planning to and continues to plan to make some Mac minis in the United States. They put up a newsroom post about this as we record this thing yesterday, the day before yesterday. Yeah, yesterday. So Apple on February 24th announced a significant expansion of factory operations in Houston. Sorry, I'm reading from the newsroom post. Bringing the future production of Mac Mini to the U.S. for the first time. The company will also expand advanced AI server manufacturing at the factory and provide hands-on training at its new advanced manufacturing center beginning later this year. This newsroom post was mostly unremarkable. Basically, hey, some of the Mac Minis are going to build here. Which ones? Who knows? But it's going to happen. but John you had found and maybe somebody pointed it to you I don't know but you had found a Wall Street Journal video that I think was like 8 to 10 minutes somewhere in that neck of the woods there's also an article we'll put a link to the article in the video in the show notes but the video was fascinating can you tell me about this yeah so this is clearly like Apple invited Wall Street Journal to come you know to pair with their press release and again the press release is we're going to be making some Mac Minis in the US eventually just before we get to the video just to talk about that obviously you look at it through the lens of like a piece of it to the Trump administration but setting all that aside it's a good idea in general for Apple to try to make some stuff in places other than China. They're increasing their manufacturing in India a lot and there's some tension on that with China trying to do things that stops Apple from increasing their manufacturing in India. And yes, manufacturing in the US is much more difficult for a variety of reasons but it is a good idea for Apple to try. And historically, it has always been paired with this distasteful appeasement of the Trump administration. But setting that aside, no matter who is president, I think it's a good idea for Apple to try this. They can only do it for really low volume, simple to manufacture products, yada, yada. But you're never going to get anywhere if you don't start somewhere. So yes, do make trashcan Mac Pros in Texas or the bigger Mac Pros, which was also in Texas. I guess they do everything in Texas, probably for tax reasons. Yes, do try to make some MacMinnies here. Not all the MacMinnies, but just some of them. I think it's a thing they should do. And this video is part of their PR push for this. And so, like, I don't poo-poo this just because it's also a bonus appeasement of the Trump administration. I think it's a good idea. Please do try to do this. Figure out it's not a good position for us to be in where all the manufacturing is concentrated in one place and it's not a good position to remove all the manufacturing from our own country these are some skills we should have presumably these can you know anyway that's that's my position on the manufacturing angle which is what apple's uh promoting but the video is interesting for many different reasons very quickly before we get to the video i'm sorry a friend of mine pointed out to me an apple insider article from i guess yesterday as well which says i i didn't prep for this for the show and i apologize but my recollection is that it said basically this was planned during the biden administration now Obviously, they're really ramping all the rhetoric up because of the idiot in charge. But this has been in the works for a fair bit of time. Yeah, like these things don't happen. And, like, in general, it's a good idea, like, to start moving down this path to try to do more manufacturing here. And the fact that they're taking their PR wins for it or whatever as a political advantage, like, is the least of the bad things they're doing. But I think this is a good idea. Please do try to make stuff in the U.S. Figure out where the gaps are, and we'll talk about that in overtime. and let's shore up our ability to do things that we think, you know, manufacture things that, you know, we think we should be able to manufacture here. The video is, you know, it's a companion to the press release. Let's invite the Wall Street Journal and let's just take them on a little tour of a bunch of stuff. And it doesn't just cover what Apple is doing. It covers a bunch of stuff in the region of, like, tech, high-tech manufacturing stuff. And as some people put it in the chat room, this is mostly, like, final assembly and stuff, but not entirely. So one of the things they talk about is a silicon wafer factory in Texas that makes the – if you've ever seen this process, it's not as cool as the ASML machines that we talked about before, but still, when they get these big disks that they print the chips onto, those silicon wafers, how do they get the wafer? And the process is delightfully analog in that they melt down a bunch of silicon and then goop it out into a big cylinder, and it ends with, like, a little, like, soft-serve tip on top of it. It's molten. You know when you get soft serve and they turn off the machine and it makes that little tip? It does that, but with silicon. It's fascinating to look at. It's this lumpy. It's like the most imprecise, wavy, lumpy thing you've ever seen to make the most precise things that human beings make on top of it. So that's fun. And the Apple angle there. So there's this company. What is it called? Global Wafers. No space. Capital G, capital W. It's a Taiwan-based company, but they have manufacturing facilities in Texas. And Apple, I forget. I didn't get the details. I put scare quotes. Apple encourages its suppliers to buy wafers from the global wafer manufacturing facility in Texas. Again, this is not a U.S. company. This is a Taiwan-based company. But they do manufacture the wafers in Texas. So Apple gets TSMC to buy their wafers from global wafers in Texas. So they ship the wafers from Texas to Taiwan. And then TSMC with its machines from ASML and wherever they were. It was the Netherlands, I think. Anyway, it's a global operation. But, like, Apple is doing this because they're trying to build up more of a manufacturing base in the U.S. And they really are. Global Wafers really is manufacturing these wafers in Texas. Like, they're not just final assembly or anything. Same thing with the TSMC Arizona plants, which I've had stuff in the show notes for. I think it's probably over a year now. Maybe we'll get to it eventually. But suffice it to say, TSMC, another Taiwanese company, is building huge plants in Arizona to make stuff. It's just not cutting edge. Like, they're building the A16 there and a bunch of other stuff that's done older processes. But anyway, this is what Apple is. They're throwing their weight around to try to do things like TSMC would otherwise not be motivated to buy wafers from Texas. It's far away from Taiwan. Why would we buy wafers from you if there's someplace closer where we can get them probably for cheaper? Why wouldn't we do that? But Apple, through its deals, apparently is using its weight to make that happen. So that's interesting. Another thing that is in this video thrown out as a fact with no sourcing, but it's a Wall Street Journal video. But just saying like they didn't even say like Apple told us or whatever. They just said flat out, Apple sells fewer than one million Mac minis per year. Like, does Apple know you're saying that? Because Apple never tells you how much they sell of anything anymore. They used to, years and years ago, in earnings calls, tell you, like, break down their product lines. And they said, why are we doing that? We're not going to tell you anything about how, you can try to back solve, good luck, but we're never going to tell you how many MacBook Airs, how many MacBook Pros, how many, you know, they do not break down their stuff like that. But I found it fascinating, like, because that's a small number of Macs. Obviously, Macs don't sell as many as iPhones, but less than a million. First of all, that could be 10, that could be 900,000. Less than a million but like were you any of you shocked by this number I would have put the number of Mac Minis at way higher than that Yeah I was surprised by that I mean I don know if this includes the current open claw like surge in Mac Mini sales Yeah, right. But, yeah, that's not a lot of Mac Minis. Another thing that I found exciting in this video is when they, so, like, there's this press release, oh, we're going to be making Mac Minis or whatever, and they do on these tours. They did a tour of, like, the Global Wafers factory, and they show video of the Arizona TSMC stuff, and then they also go into the place where they'll be manufacturing the Mac Minis. And it's a giant empty warehouse because nothing is there yet. And it really undercuts the press release. It's like, we're going to be making some Mac Minis in the U.S., and here's where we're going to do it. I'm like, oh, in this big empty room? It's like, well, it won't be empty eventually. But suffice it to say, it's not like tomorrow they're going to put the lever and Mac Minis will start coming out. It's a giant empty building. So still, they have to put the stuff in that building and hire the people who work in the building to make some of the one million Mac minis that they sell per year. Less than one million Mac minis that they sell per year. So I feel like that part of their press tour was ill considered. Don't show me the empty factory for the thing you just announced. But the most exciting part for me and the part, of course, they talked about the least was and they mentioned in this press release of like, where did it say in the press release? Like, they were also increasing their AI server manufacturing at the factory. They're already doing this. Like, this is rumored, and Apple's, we build AI servers that run, you know, private cloud compute, presumably, or whatever. But, like, they're calling them AI servers, not just servers, right? So they're built. Why would Apple ever build its own servers? Well, the rumor was they were putting M2 Ultras in them to run AI workloads, and it was their private cloud compute thing or whatever. And everyone was like, what are these Apple servers? Like, what, you know, we know nothing about them other than they supposedly exist. Even Apple wouldn't tell us what they're running. I don't think they ever mentioned anything. It was just rumors about what's in them. This video shows you Apple servers being assembled at this factory. And so I'm going through the video and freeze-craming and, like, the whole thing, I press things. I'm like, what are these things? What is in an Apple server? Do they look like Apple hardware? And I have a bunch of images in the show notes, but just go watch the video. We're just going to link the video because these are all essentially screen captures from the video or the Wall Street Journal article. John went full zip-ruder, or however you pronounce it on this. It's hilarious. And by the way, it looks like the answer is they have eight Ultra Chips in each one in about a three or four U tall case. Two U, maybe. That may be two U. Yeah, and also the answer to the question of whether this looks like an X-Serve, no. No. It is not a beautiful Apple piece of machinery. Like, maybe it's... But you know what? What's funny about it, though, is like, have you seen other servers? Like, if you compare this to like a Supermicro or whatever, this is way prettier than those. Everything is symmetrical. Everything lines up. Everything is like centered and aligned. It's like... It's not outside the realm. There are some... I've seen servers that look equivalently good, but the point is, it is not the XServe. The XServe was styled by Apple's Industrial Design Group to look nicer than any other server you've ever seen. This looks like basically slightly better than average rack mount system. So to give you an example. Oh, this is way better than the ones I've seen. It has holes for ventilation on the front and the back, as servers do, because they bring in the cold air from one side and they shoot out hot air on the other side. You've got the hot aisles and the cold aisles. And the holes are just, it's a flat piece of metal with holes in it. Apple doesn't do that anymore. Every hole that Apple makes has to be. They're completely hidden like it is on like the studios or whatever, or like carefully machined and made aesthetically. So, nope, these are just the normal holes you would see. Like, there's no real branding or styling of it at all. It's just like bent pieces of metal, as it should, because it's a certain. I'm not saying it should be fancy looking, but it's fascinating to see that when Apple makes stuff of their own internal use, they don't necessarily deploy the full force of their hardware design group to make them beautiful for such a utilitarian thing. But then, yeah, as Marco pointed out, you get to see what's inside them. and there's very clearly eight little things in there that look like presumably each one of those eight things is like a compute unit of some kind, maybe each one. There are eight giant heatsinks, and it looks like heatsinks for ultra-class chips. Yeah, they're big. The heatsinks are large. If you look at the guts of a Mac Pro with the ultra chip in it, it kind of looks like that. I do wonder if it's not two chips under each one of them because they're kind of split in the middle. But yeah, it's weird that they allowed video crews. But you can see them assembling. You can see them sticking things into it. You can see, like, the presumably redundant power supplies and, like, you know, how large the things are and them sliding into the racks and all this other stuff. And, you know, of course, the Wall Street Journal people have no interest in this. This is totally only of interest to, like, you know, hardware nerds who are interested, like, what kind of things is Apple making for itself, especially if you were, like, an XServe fan when Apple stopped making, for people who don't remember this long ago, Apple used to sell rack mount server hardware that they made themselves and advertised on their website. And they stopped. They got out of that business. But now they're back into making hardware just for their own. Because you can't buy these. No one is buying these. I mean, they're just Apple manufactures them for itself to put in its own data centers. And as Marco talked about in an earlier episode, we'll see how long that lasts with the Google deal and them running on Google's TPUs and everything like that. But here they are in the flesh running off the assembly line. And Apple says it's expanding this manufacturing. So for right now, anyway, they're milling more and more of these things. And I think they're fascinating, especially since, like, if you've got one of these, if it really has eight Ultras inside it, first of all, it's an expensive computer, obviously. And second of all, how do you address those eight Ultras? Does it present as eight individual addressable? Like, is it running eight copies of the OS? Or is there one copy of some of OS that's running, that's powering all? I just would love to know everything about these. Are they running Linux against the Ultras? Oh, I bet. My best guess is that each one of these eight units is basically like a Mac studio with an Ultra, like, re-engineered to fit into this enclosure, and they're just eight individual computers. And they're just addressable? Like, how are they addressed? Like, what is the KVM, like, interface situation? Like, are they completely controlled from the command line? Is there a virtual display thing running on them? And, like, because, you know, as Marco will talk about in some future episode, I'm sure, like, even though Apple makes lots of things that people, like, put in racks, like the little Mac minis and everything, they're not really designed to be headless computers. There's lots of affordances to make you be able to use them that way. But when you have, like, a Rackmount Linux server, like, at no point are you bringing up, like, a virtual screen on the thing to do anything. Like, you don't even bring up the console these days unless you're, like, really in deep doo-doo trying to debug something in the data center. So I just loved how they manage fleets of these things when every, like, what is this, like a two or three U rack mount thing with eight individual virtual Mac studios. Like, how do they present themselves? Like, what are their, you know, what OS do they run? Are they running a custom variant? Anyway, if you want to stare at the frames in the video and see if you can discern anything, check out the Wall Street Journal video. Fascinating brief glimpse into the inside world of Apple hardware that no one can ever buy. I mean, OS, it's probably just running the private cloud compute OS, whatever that is. Well, I know they gave that to security researchers, but I don't know how security researchers run it. Is that entirely headless? Do they run it? I don't understand that whole situation. Well, if you have insider information, please feel free to reach out. We're good for it, I promise. Yeah, there's seven people who know how Apple's RackMath AI servers work. Please tell us. You never know. Yeah. Normally our beat is we get rumors about like USB ports and stuff like this. This is a little outside of that, but I'm still curious. Yeah, we don't even know the right questions to ask about these. That's the problem. Speaking of questions, let's do some Ask ATP. And Cigar Patel writes, can you talk about your current phone setups on iOS 26? I'm curious to see your home screens, lock screens and widgets, etc. We did a member special about this way back in the olden days of July 2024. For ATP Insider, roast my home screen. I have put my home screen and lock screen in the show notes. John has put his home screen and lock screen in the show notes. I don't believe in homework. Marco Arment has yet to do so, but it's okay. You don't get reminded about it five times because he's not on his app yet. I uploaded it, though. It's in the CMS. You need to give us the link to it. All right. Hold on. Let's start with John, and let's start with your lock screen. So we will take a look at that first. I'm seeing what appears to be a very, very cute picture of your dog, Daisy. You have the flashlight in the bottom left, as you should, the camera in the bottom right, which I also concur with, and no widgets whatsoever. I'm a little surprised by that. So my lock screen is a picture rotation thing. I have this collection. I have a collection of photos that I have made for myself to be nice vertical lock screen images, and that Apple tries so hard every time they have to let the OS to destroy, and it's successful a lot of the time, to destroy. I make these images. I carefully align and crop them and every new version of iOS is like I know you carefully align and crop these but I don't care what you did. I'm screwing up all the crops. Good luck getting them back with this interface where you have to like touch and drag with two fingers but not zoom but just drag with two. It's the worst interface in the world when you're trying to like nutty. Let's talk about workouts on the watch. Well anyway trying to align the crops of these images with pixel precise you know being pixel precise on a phone. The way they make you do it on this thing is maddening I just noticed recently they screw up a crop on another one of mine. So I do not respect the work I do to try to make well-composed lock screens, but I do. There's like, I don't know, seven or ten pictures. It's mostly my wife, my kids, my dog. That's what it is. That's what I pictured that, so I didn't want to put any of my kids in my life up here. This is one of the many pictures of my dog that is my lock screen. I do no customization lock screen other than I think I've changed the numerals and the clock to be a little bit bolder than default. And it's not the liquid glassy like I turned off the, you know, you'd notice they're just like white things. They're opaque. They're not glassy. But no, no widgets, no changes to any of the other default stuff. That's my lock screen. It's very boring. And my home screen will also be boring. Again, not everyone has heard or can hear the member special because not everyone's a member. But we go over the lock screen in detail on that. And I can tell you it has essentially not changed since 2024, which honestly some things about it probably should change. I think in that 2024 special, you guys both asked about a Google Authenticator being on the home screen. I'm like, well, I'm transitioning away from it and the transition is not done. The transition is done. It's still on my home screen. It's in a place that is very difficult for me to reach the way I hold my phone, kind of like calendar, which as I discussed in the member special, I never use Apple Calendar. It is purely there so I can see the words Tuesday and 24 on my home screen. That's it. It is a graphic display that shows the date, but I never tap it. And Authenticator is right next to it and is really hard for me to reach. I basically never tap it. I should evict that and put something else there. But if I'm going to put something there, it has to be something that I don't ever want to tap. And so I'm not sure what would go there. So Authenticator is still there. All my other apps are basically the same. If you want to understand the logic of them, picture me holding my phone with my right hand, with my thumb sweeping across from my thumb sort of coming from the lower right corner and sweeping in a radius across. And you'll see that it is easy for my thumb to find messages, Overcast, Ivory, YouTube, Slack, Instagram, Find My, Calendar, Reminders. Those are the hot items. Those are the items. And I guess Gmail I can reach a little bit too. Those are the hot items that I am reaching all the time. Instapaper probably shouldn't be there. I do use Instapaper a lot, but I don't access it. I mostly add things to it. They don't access it that much, but again, it's been in that spot on the home screen for ages, so I tend not to move it, and I'm not sure what I would replace it with. And also, part of it is aesthetic. I know there's no, like, I don't have widgets, and my background is 100% pure black, as that has always been, so I'm not doing anything styling-wise there, but the way the icons sort of form a complete thing, like, I put it this way, I wouldn't want an icon on this home screen that, like, stands out and doesn't fit in with the other ones in a way that I find ugly. And so Instapaper with just a black eye and a white background is inexpensive and doesn't really upset the balance, so it continues to stay there. I do still have Twitterific in the dock. I find the dock incredibly difficult to reach the way I hold my phone, so those are items there that I essentially never tap. And Twitterific, when you launch it now, just says, Twitterific is gone. Sorry about that. Try this app. I'm leaving it there as essentially a tombstone, a memorial, a place of honor. I love this so much. For my most used iPhone, I mean, it's going to be another decade before some other app replaces this as my most used iOS app. But Twitterific was, before it was discontinued, before Twitter was destroyed, was by far my most used iOS app. These days it's probably Ivory, which has essentially replaced Twitter for me. So it's down there and it's a little place of honor. Everything else is nothing interesting. There's Maps and Google Maps because I tend to use both. There's camera in the camera spot. FaceTime, App Store, the Kindle app when I read stuff. Like, you know, it's not exciting. Google Home, I guess, replaced Nest. I think I might have had Nest there at some point before Nest, the Nest app went away and got replaced by Google Home. But, yeah, it's my home screen. All right. So for me, I have a very similar story with regard to my lock screen. This is a rotation, and it just so happened that a picture of Penny came up in the rotation. To be clear, I don't have any particular album or anything like that. I have faces that I say, whatever you want, Apple, just pick photos that are either Aaron or the kids or Penny. Not carefully composed individually. No, goodness, no. Ain't nobody got time for that. I have time for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, so I do have a couple of widgets. On the bottom left, I have Carrot Weather showing me the next several hours of weather. And then on the bottom right is my calendar. You see here that there's a notification that the price is right would be recording from 10.59 a.m. to 12 p.m. That's adorable. Why is that on a calendar? Because one of the many calendars I have is that channels emits an iCal set of calendar entries for the things it's recording. And it just so happened when I took this picture that that was the next thing on my calendar because I work for myself. I should actually put a weather widget down there. Like, I'm not opposed to having widgets. I just don't. I don't know. I like the fact that the weather thing is fairly unobtrusive and, like, lightweight and doesn't make up a lot of room, although it probably would mess up some of my compositions. So I'll think about that, but I would definitely never put a calendar thing that would show me what my DVR is recording. Yeah, I mean, this is me. I like to be informed about these sorts of things. Do I need to be? No. Do I ever take any action on it? Nope. But I don't know. I like having, I like knowing. You like the glassy digits? Yeah, I don't mind them. I mean, I never really thought about it until you said something a minute ago. I just found them physically hard to see, like contrast-wise. Yeah. Like, that's why I changed it. Yeah, that's fair. I like the look. To be clear, I think the numerals, this glassy sort of smoke glass look, I think it does look very attractive. I just found it harder to read. All right, then my home screen. I don't think this has changed in a couple of years with the exception of maybe Home Assistant. I think Home Assistant was already there. I have adopted a two-screen approach for my launcher. It used to be I had like four or five pages, and I curated where everything was, particularly in the first two. and then the third and fourth, I still curated where things were, but to a lesser degree. Now I have just two pages, and you're only seeing the first one here, and there's a giant carrot forecast widget at the top. That's a two-row tall widget, so it shoves my icons down. So let's pause here. So you have on your lock screen, you've got the carrot weather widget, and then on your home screen, fully a third of the icons is taken up by another weather widget. For someone who never leaves their house, how much do you need to know about the weather? Partially, the problem is that I never look at it on the lock screen, even though it's there. And I know it's there. I just never look at it there. And so I more often look at it on the home screen. I mean, nothing you're saying is unreasonable whatsoever. You're completely right. But I don't know. It's just the way I like it. Are you just a weather enthusiast? No, not really. Is something good to be like, how should I dress when I go out to pick up the kids or something? Yeah. What is it going to be like if I leave the house? But to your point, do I leave the house every day? No, I don't. I have no logical explanation for this whatsoever. So if you're seeking one, you will not find it. I'm just saying it's a lot of real estate for that. Like, in my life, what I found is that I actually use, like, either my thermostat has the outdoor weather on it or, like, my e-ink display thing I have hanging on the wall because that's near the door. And so then I'm deciding what coat should I wear. And so I'll just glance at that and see, like, what is the temperature this morning or whatever. But, yeah, it's a lot of – it is an area that I imagine you would find hard to reach. It's at the top. So it's not like you're sacrificing things. But, anyway, it's a lot of space for the weather. Again, you are not saying anything I disagree with. Nothing you're saying is unreasonable. It's just the way I like it. Is that a smart widget? Like, can you swipe that up and there's more stuff besides weather? The word you're looking for is fact, and no, it is deliberately not, because I always want the weather there, because if I want to see the weather, I want it to be right there. And, yes, again, I know it's on the lock screen, but I very rarely look at it there. The other thing I will note is that this is, I think it's called the forecast widget on tarot weather, and what that does is, depending on what's about to happen, it can look very different than what you see there. So it'll show, like, rainfall expectations if it's about to rain or snow or whatever. Sorry, trigger warning, YouTube. But anyway, it'll show vastly different things depending on, like, time of day. So, for example, now that it's late, and I took this this morning, but now that it's late in the day, it shows me the current temperature on, like, the left half of that same widget, the current temperature, what today's high and low were, and then the right half of it, it shows the next five days' worth of weather, right, because it's late in the day. So today's weather has basically already happened. It's very, very cool if you're a tarot weather person, which you should be. Like I said, I think it's called the forecast widget. It'll rejigger itself in order to do what it thinks is best to show you. But anyways, on the home screen, a home assistant may or may not have been there when we last did the discussion in 2024. That's in my same spot as Google Home was for you. The only other highlight that I think might have changed is a couple of friends of ours, Ben and Aaron are working on a app called Indigo which they're kind of sort of talked about a little bit and what that basically is is a Mastodon and Blue Sky like joint app and I don't think I should probably say too much more than that. They knew I was going to talk about it a little bit today. I was going to say like why doesn't it have a dot next to it but you have the titles hidden on your icon. Correct. So it is very good. I don't know when it's going to be out but I think soonish and it has replaced ivory for me on my home screens and on my Mac. It is not 100% the same as Ivory. There are definitely some places that there needs to be a little bit of work, but it's a beta. But it's really good. So I think they have, I'll see if I can remember to put a link in the show notes, but I think they have a place where you can sign up for a little mailing list about release. But you should definitely check it out once it is out. It's really good. It's the same folks. Maybe they'll finally remember to use Blue Sky that way. Right, exactly. They're the same folks that did Croissant, which is the app that lets you cross-post. and the croissant doesn't let you read anything. It just lets you cross-post. And so that's what that is there. But otherwise, I think it's all basically the same as it's been for at least a couple of years now. Yeah. Can you say in your home screen, Casey, which icon I would find unharmonious? Probably the Sonos one, right, because it's all black? You got it. Big black hole punched right now. I know you're going to use it because you frequently use that, but that's what I mean about, like, if I was in that situation, it would be a tough decision for me. Because, like, look, it's a frequently used app. I want it to be my home screen, but it doesn't fit in aesthetically. And my other question for you is, what is your background? Is that one of the Apple-supplied ones, like a gradient? I think it is a gradient, and I think I just tweaked it. Like, it's not an image, you know. It's just like I messed with sliders. I did it so long ago, I don't even remember. But there's a built-in Apple thing where you just pick it and then can mess with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least to the best I can recall. I set that up forever ago, like years ago. But, yeah, I mean, there's nothing too remarkable here. I should go, to your point, I should go and see if there's a different Sonos icon available. I really, truly have no idea if they offer an alternative icon. I couldn't believe I got a Sonos Roam 2 a while back, and I could not believe they de-emphasized one of the only cool hardware things they have going for them, which is that their logo is the same right side up or upside down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so on the Sonos Roam, I would get it in black, and it would come with a white Sonos embossed on it, but like the little letters that stood out from it, and you can look, it works both ways. No matter which way you put it, it works. And then on the current black Sonos Roam 2, they made the Sonos logo also black, so you can't see it anymore. Yeah, the same thing with the Arc Ultra. What are you doing? It's the one cool thing you have. Anyway, the icon is, it's not a bad icon because the logo is cool, but it does not fit with the rest of the icons of your home screen. Yep. No, no argument there. But, I mean, this is my home screen. There are many like it, but this one is mine. All right, Marco, let's start with your lock screen, please. Sure. I use the built-in weather lock screen from Apple, So it's a constantly changing animation of my current weather conditions. As you can see, when I took this screenshot this morning or last night, it was gray and cloudy. Because New York in the winter, we get a lot of that. Oh, and you can also see I took this on a train. And as a result then, I had one bar of 5G plus, whatever that means. An AT&T Turbo? Oh, Turbo, yeah. What is that? AT&T has all these different modes that they advertise their service to be. There was the 5G-E that still exists in some places. There's 5G Actual. There's 5G Plus. I think there's a 5G Ultra. Like, who knows? They have a lot of branding of their various service levels. But on this train corridor, I was in a spot where no matter what it is, it's one bar. I just realized this. Never mind. All right, it's fine. I was like, why do you have, like, Casey has Verizon spelled out on his lock screen. I have VZW space Wi-Fi. That's because I wasn't at home at the time. Because I was home, right, okay. And then you've got ATT Turbo. Yeah, whatever that is. So, yeah, so it's a fairly boring lock screen. I use the top widget, so to speak, to be the calendar thing. So it normally shows the date and then the next, you know, reminder or calendar entry. I have the non-glass, like plain old white flat digits clock. Below that I have the three overcast lock screen widgets, like the medium-sized one, the small playlist-specific one, and then just a second one for my two different main playlists. What is that overcast widget trying to tell me? Resume comma 54M ellipsis? What is that trying to tell me? It's 54 minutes left. Of what? That podcast. What's the ellipsis telling me? Is there's more text off after the 54 minutes? It was cut off. I don't know, man. I should probably, yeah, I should probably, like, redesign that so it doesn't get cut off. But when you see that, like, when you parse it, you're saying, there's 54 minutes left of what I was listening to. Is what you were listening to what now with something or other? Yes, with Trevor Noah. And then Prime Minister is the title of the episode. Okay. All right. So it's, like, it's, you know, it's new versus resume, time left, podcast title, episode title. So, yeah, I mean, it's difficult to put, you know, arbitrary length podcast information to a widget of that size. I was just asking if you could parse it. Yeah, that's, like, when it's a show that you have been listening to, you know what that is. Right. You know, so, like, if the second line said accidental detect, you know, you would have figured it out, you know. Anyway, then the other two are just playlist selectors. And then for the bottom two, like, what used to be, like, flashlight and camera, I don't need either of those anymore to do those things. because flashlight I assigned to the lock button, or the, sorry, the action button. So did I, but yet my flashlight still remains on the bottom left. For no reason, I never use it, but I don't know what else to put there. Yeah, so I have flashlight as the action button, and now that we have the camera control as a camera launcher, I don't use either of those anymore. So for the left, I put the magnifier. Such an old man thing to do, and I might do the same thing. I keep forgetting that I have that there. I'll tell you what, like, so we went on vacation last week, And at one point, you know, we were going to like sit by the pool at the hotel. And so it was out in the sun. I want to wear sunglasses. And I have not yet gotten myself a pair of progressive sunglasses. I don't have any kind of reading glasses ability in my regular sunglasses. So I can't see anything up close with my regular sunglasses. So I either have to have sun on my face and wear my regular progressive reading glasses or wear sunglasses and not see anything. So I thought as I'm sitting out by this pool on vacation, you know what? I don't really need to bring my reading glasses. I'm just going to hang out. And, well, that was short-lived. And I very quickly needed it. So I'm like, now I want to use my phone. I don't want to go all the way back to the room, you know, a substantial walk away. So I'm just going to increase the font size on my phone. And I tried different ways to do this. What I found the best was actually to turn on Display Zoom, which still exists. and display zoom that was the feature when I believe was it when the iPhone 6 came out when they first made the screen substantially bigger display zoom display zoom was a feature where you could basically make your phone have the display layout of the next size phone down from it so when the 6 came out you could simulate the look of the iPhone 5 screen or something like that whichever one introduced it You can increase the font size regularly in accessibility, but that doesn't increase the size of everything. It increases the size of text in many but not all places. But I was having trouble seeing the keyboard very well. So I'm like, let me just increase. And I was trying to type emoji in certain text fields, and that was hard to do even with the bigger text size. So DisplayZoom was actually better. And this, by the way, I still, go back to the Apple Watch, I still wish they would add display zoom to the larger sizes of the Apple Watch because the font size accessibility on the Apple Watch is terrible compared to the phone. It has the same dynamic type APIs, but way fewer things use it on the watch compared to the phone. So if you need a bigger than usual tech size on the Apple Watch, you're mostly out of luck. It doesn't do a very good job of it. Again, you can see it in some places, but not nearly as many as you would want, especially, like, the watch faces themselves. No luck. And so what I really think would be a very good accessibility option for the Apple Watch is if you have either of the two large screen models, the Ultra or the 40, whatever it is, 47 now, whatever that is, if you have either of those, Display Zoom could render the interface of the smaller, the 42 or 41, whatever. It could render that interface size and blow it up to the bigger screen size. That would be a great accessibility feature on the Apple Watch larger sizes. And why they haven't done it yet, honestly, is baffling. Because, again, Apple usually is very good with accessibility options, especially visual and text size options. They're usually very good at that. And the Apple Watch is just a giant black hole of text accessibility where it's just terrible. Anyway, all this is to say, I need magnification sometimes when I'm not wearing glasses. And so that's why I have the magnifier on that left thing, which I keep forgetting is there. And then on the right, I recently put the Google Gemini shortcut. I also tend to forget that's there. I've only used it a couple of times so far. But that is a quick way to launch into Gemini and ask an AI question. Before we move on, a real-time follow-up from Dr. Calhoun in the chat. AT&T has a new optional feature for some of its plans. It's called Turbo, and for $7 per month, it provides, quote, better speed and stability, quote, for a line of service by upgrading your data plan to, quote, performance data. So I'm paying $7 a month for whatever that is. That's what I'm hearing. It's just for the word. Displaying that word, it's like when you get one of those badges on your car. That doesn't change any feature of the car. It just adds a badge. And I'm sure, I'm sure of performance data. I'm sure they must have added something new. I'm sure it wasn't them just downrating everybody else's data. No, no, of course not. Your ones and zeros go fast. Yeah, I'm sure. All right, your home screen, please. All right, my home screen, as home screens go, it's like a boomer home screen. It's pretty boring. There's a lot of stock Apple apps in their default places, all the regular ones that are the top two rows. I have never touched that camera icon in years, And so I should probably replace the camera icon with anything else. So maybe I'll do that soon. Otherwise, you know, compared to what we did a couple years back or a year back in the member special, Waze, the navigation app, has been replaced by Google Maps. Apple Maps is nowhere. As I mentioned a couple episodes ago, I'm all in on Google Maps for the time being. And that's been going fine, by the way. Otherwise, I have, like, you know, my car app. I have a folder full of some games that I occasionally will. Is that new? I don't remember the games thing being there last time. I think that might have been on page two last time. I think I might have promoted it. Are you playing more iOS games lately? No. I just had a spot that I wanted to fill. That's what I see in there. I see threes, watermelon. Yeah, the Suica game is the watermelon. Hold Down is the little blue one. Threes, and then the eight ball is like that. Zach Gage's billiards game. I haven't launched most of these games in a pretty long time. Golf on Mars or Desert Golf, one of those things. Yeah, Desert Golfing, Flip Flop Solitaire. A lot of Zach Gage being represented there. Anyway, yeah, so unread, my RSS reader. It's, I kind of. Unread is this entire f***ing home screen because you've got 37 unanswered phone issues, two Slack messages, 15 text messages. Unread is the summary for this entire home screen. Yeah, that's my life. That's because he's not showing the unread count on mail anymore. I think he was last time. Yes. It's currently 221 on my desktop, if you're a good one. Oh, good God. Anyway, yeah. So, yeah. Slack, WhatsApp, train time is the Long Island Railroad thing. Audible, Amazon, Gemini. Basically, you know, quick access stuff. So, I have – I also use the Carrot Weather widget. I use a different one than UKC. But the way you were describing yours sounds interesting. I might switch to that one with, like, the dynamic changing. I think it has to be full width, though. The same height is what you've got there. I think it has to be full width, but double-check my math on that. I'll see. One thing I do the smallest widget size, which is in icon grid measurements, 2x2. I wish there would be a 2x1 widget size. Because I would like to use more widgets. They just are so big, I don't have room for them. So you're saying two wide, one tall? Yes, exactly. That way you could stack two on top of each other. But that would still give you a wide canvas to display information on. Like, I think a lot of apps could do a lot of good with that size, which, by the way, that's about the same size as what you get on the lock screen. Like, if you go to the lock screen, you have, like, those two wide, those double wide lock screen slots. It's about that size, and I think you could do a lot with that. You can see people do a lot with it. I would love to have that available on the phone home screen as well because I would love, again, I'd love to use more widgets, but they're just too big. So, yeah, please, Apple, two-by-one size, please. Otherwise, I have Flighty there because I had just taken a flight and I haven't moved it off yet. And Reminder, which is my VibeCoded Reminder sound. And that's it. Are you reading that much using Audible? What is Audible there for? It's mostly like if I'm going through an audiobook, I don't want to forget about it. I want it to be kind of in my face so I remember to go play it, basically. So I'm not using Audible frequently, but when I am using it, I want it to be very visible. Fair enough. I don't know, John, any complaints about this? No, I'm glad to hear that Flighty was just there for the flight, because I was like, really, you're taking flights that much? Do you have Flighty up there? But apparently you're a swap certain things onto the home screen when traveling and then swap them back out when you're not. Yeah, especially, like, in those bottom slots. Like, Reminder has just been there for a day, so, you know, that's – who knows where that's going to end up. But, like, usually those bottom two slots rotate out a lot. So, like, you know, like I was flying on a certain airline, I might put the airlines app there during the trip. Or if I'm on any kind of trip, if there's a specific app that is very relevant to that trip, usually I have one or two open spots at the bottom of that home screen that I'll put that app there. But it's not that interesting. I presume neither of you mess with the custom home screens for a focus mode thing. Do you know what I'm talking about? No, honestly, that whole system I find very convoluted. It is. It is. And I think it's a whole system designed for, like, CGP Grey to optimize his every moment of everything. And I respect that kind of desire and system building, but I don't do that myself. Like, I don't build that complex of a system for myself, generally. I use a lot of things in their basically default ways. I use a lot of things very unstructured or very loosey-goosey, much to my detriment sometimes. but I don't have that level of structure and discipline to my process most of the time. So I don't use almost any of that stuff. I use the sleep mode at night just because I don't want my screens turning on and being bright in my face next to my bed as I charge. But that's about it. I don't really do any of that stuff. The reason I ask is because I have embraced it for when I'm working out because I have just a couple of apps there that I use in various different reasons, but most especially for travel. So when I engage the travel focus mode, I have a bespoke travel home screen that has like Lyft and Uber in the last airline I took was Delta. So the Delta app is there. The flighty widget is there. My Apple wallet app is there. So it's even easier access than double clicking the lock button. You know, stuff like that that I have just for travel. Overall, I agree with your approach that it's just one home screen to rule them all. But for travel and for working out, for whatever reason, I find that I really enjoy having a different home screen set up for those two. What is clock there for? Is that for alarms? Yeah, alarms, timers, you know, whatever. And is that Reminders the icon also AI generated? No. One thing I have found is that AI sucks at making app icons. It's terrible. I tried. It is so bad. But I actually, I'll tell you, I spent more time designing that icon than I spent writing code for the app. Because I went through a bunch of different, like, I kept basically recreating the reminders icon. Like, I was like, oh, I want to represent reminders. I mean, it is kind of the obvious icon. Well, but, and so, yeah, basically every iteration I came to, oh, those circles are too big. Oh, those lines are too bold. And then I just kept reverting just to be closer and closer to the reminders icon. And I'm like, okay, that's not going to work. So, also, I'm trying to call the app Reminder, and I think if the icon is that similar to Apple's icon, it's going to increase the odds they're going to reject it. I think you mean Reminder colon Marco's app for his thing. Right, right, right. It reminds you. Well, yes. It's, you know, Reminder colon something like, you know, Never Forget a Note or whatever. There is already a colon in App Store Connect because I couldn't create it without it. But so the icon represents the look of a list of somebody who manages their tasks like I do with a bunch of overdue tasks. That's what the red lines are because when you have an overdue deadline in Reminders, that's what it looks like. So it's my like abstract representation of a list of a bunch of overdue tasks. So, yeah, I tried a bunch of different concepts. I tried like using a checkmark and I tried like creating the shape of a notification in the corner. but that was on the wrong side for the checkmark. I tried a bunch of different concepts. This is what I was doing on the plane on the way home from the trip. The Wi-Fi died, so I couldn't use the coding agent anymore. So I'm like, all right, let me do some icon design and paint code. So this is what I was iterating on. And I must have spent a cumulative total of maybe three hours building the app and probably four hours making the icon. Nice. A couple of complaints about this, which, I mean, honestly, if this works for you, that's all that really matters. but I really hate my BMW icon. Like, just make it the roundel. What are you doing with this cursive my in front of the BMW roundel? The worst part is, like, compositionally, it's just – Oh, it's just bad. They just, like, well, take this and put it in the square somewhere, I guess. Yeah. And you're right. Like, BMW, as discussed, has a great logo. Why couldn't they just do that? Yep. It's really bad. And then having the folder on there kind of irks me because everything else is so nice and flat, and then you have this folder of games. I don't love that, but again, if it works for you, that's all that matters. I mean, I'm not that aesthetic. I'll tell you what, though. I was just marveling the other day. The New York Long Island Railroad MTA Train Time app. That's a pretty good icon. It's a great icon. I hate that icon. Oh, no, it's pretty good. I hate it so much. I think that's my least favorite icon on this home screen. Honestly, I was just saying, like, what a great job they did with that icon. And I'll tell you, the MTA Train Time app is excellent. It is one of the best apps on my phone. And you would expect a transit app for the commuter rail. You would not expect that to be a good app. It's a fantastic app. The design of it is excellent. It's highly functional. I'm so impressed by the MTA Train Time app. It is way better than both it needs to be and that you would expect it to be. Agreed. Real-time follow-up. the forecast carat weather widget. It is available in the 2x2 size after all. I was incorrect about that Okay Yeah maybe I try that Alright I think we good on home screens then right And lock screens If you want to hear an even longer discussion even though it was two years ago not that much has changed but it in the member special Yep All right Zipline writes listening to the conversation about Fender Mix modular headphones in the overtime for ATP 675, it brought a question to mind. What's your current desktop headphones setup and how recently has have changed. I'll start. If I'm following the question literally, what is my headphone set up when sitting at my desk at this computer? It's one of two things. It's either AirPods Pro 3 or Bear Dynamics DT770 Pro 32 ohm, which is what I'm using as I speak to you right now. But in the spirit of the question, which is what are you using to listen to things at your computer? I think we've talked about this a few times, but I was able to score a really good deal on some Sonos stuff. So I have two Aero 100s, which are not the ginormous things that Marco has somewhere in his house, but the more reasonably sized, like kind of vertical cones, if you will, or tubes that are sitting on the corners of the desk and a sub mini, which made a world of difference to make everything sound excellent. And then one of the two Aero 100s is plugged in via the Sonos combo adapter. So that gives it Ethernet and a line in. and that Y-N is then attached to my Calgit TS5+. There is a little bit of audio delay when music first starts, but other than that, like I've watched videos a million times, I don't notice any latency. It works out really well for me. More discerning individuals, except that both of you, probably would hate this setup. I think, Marco, you've talked about having a similar setup in the past and didn't care for it, but for me, it works pretty well. John, I think you'll have fewer opinions about this. Let's go to you and then have Marco finish this off. First, I'm going to say that I think describing your speaker setup is not in the spirit of a question about your desktop headphone setup. Yes, it is. It says headphones specifically. It's in the context of the Fender Mix Modular Headphones. This is a headphone question. But I almost never use headphones at my desk, so it's boring. All right, well, you can say that, but I just feel like your speaker setup is not relevant. All right, fine. Anyway, when I worked at my jobby job, I had various headphones that I would bring with me to work so I could listen to music while doing coding stuff or sometimes just use them as if I was on a plane because that's what you have to do in the office sometimes where there's nothing actually playing and they just have the noise canceling turned on so I can actually get stuff done in the harsh cubicle environment of jobby jobs. And that was, I don't even remember what I used to use there, but that was probably a more interesting setup as things rotated through the years. My home setup is that the only time I ever use headphones when sitting in front of my computer is when I'm podcasting. And I am using the Sony headphones whose name I can't remember, and I did want to take them off to look at it. Marco, they are. The MDR-7506. Sony MDR-7506. I use them when I'm podcasting. I bought them ages ago. I have replaced the ear cups several times, but that's basically it. I don't even know how they sound for music, because I don't think I've ever played music through them. Presumably they don't sound good. That is my desktop headphones setup. I don't use them except when I'm podcasting. All right, Marco, let us have it. This is actually probably going to disappoint you. I also, for podcasting, what I'm wearing right now is, for what I've used for a very long time, the Beardynamic DT770. I use a 250-ohm version because it comes with a coiled cable, and I find coiled cables for desk use are far superior to straight cables because you don't have a whole bunch of excess dangling everywhere. That's the whole point of the coil is like, you know, you can be like close to the thing and it just rests on the desk. But if you want to like, you need to like lean back or turn around and get something behind you, the coil will just stretch a little bit and then go back. That's why phone cords back in the day were all coiled because it allows you movement flexibility without having a whole bunch of excess dangling all the time. So at a desk, I find that very valuable. And by the way, the Sonys also have a coiled one. And speaking of the 770s, I also have a pair of those same 770s that I got at one point where I was like, you know, I should upgrade my desk headphones to be something better. So I bought a pair of those and I tried them and I bought alternate ear cups for them. And I just I just went back to the Sony's like they just didn't fit my head like they have circular ear cups, like literally circles. Right. And they just don't sit on my head right, which is weird, because the reason I was interested in buying them is because these stupid Sony ones, they're so old. I like the design is very old and the ear things are smaller than modern things and they're too small for my ear. So I'm like, let me get one with bigger, you know, you, everyone recommended the 770s. And I think I got the one with the cold cord and I don't, you're right. But I just did not find them comfortable on my head. And that's, that's the fact of life with like with AirPods or even with over your headphones. If they don't feel comfortable sitting on your head for a long time, you're just not going to like them. So they're, they're currently sitting in my attic. I'll probably have to give them to one of my kids or something when they want them. But I do have 770s. I just don't use them. Yeah. With desktop headphones, everything is very comfort-dependent, and it varies by person. Like, you know, different shaped heads, different preferences, you know, whether you wear glasses or not. And this gets me to my other point in a minute. But just to be clear, I love the general, like, the old Beardynamic shape, which was the 770s, the 880s, the 990s. They all used, like, the same yoke, the same kind of driver ear cup shape. Like, they all used it, and it fits me very well, and I find it very comfortable for long spans. That being said, these are not headphones that I enjoy a lot of music on because, frankly, they were great for the time that they came out, which is a very long time ago. but we've gotten a lot better since this. Like, headphone design has gotten way more sophisticated. Headphone drivers have gotten way more detailed, way nicer. So these, like, for the time they came out and for their relatively inexpensive, like, $150-ish cost most of the time, they sound great for that, but we can do a lot better now than we have. So they don't sound good enough for music for me. That's why I don't listen to music on these. I also, for my podcasting use, I much prefer a different pair of earpads that actually they come with the DT-1770, which is a newer model that I really did not like. But I love their earpads, and you can buy them separately. So you can order from Germany the Veridynamic EDT-1770D earpads, which are like a memory foam pleather kind of thing. And I find they are a substantial upgrade to the 770s in both comfort and a little bit in sound quality. So I use these. And I got these earpads as well on Marco's recommendation. They did not help my comfort level. But, yeah, this is one of the good things about headphones that you can mix and match pieces of them to try different stuff out. Yeah, because especially, you know, this is like Bear Dynamics, like standard round earpad. They've made a lot of different headphone models over the years that have that exact ear cup shape. So there's a lot of, like, aftermarket and different earpads you can put on and everything. So that's what I do for podcasting. And for music, my main music headphone when I'm at my desk is still the Hi-Fi Man HE6, which is positively ancient by today's standards. I think it came out in, like, I don't know, 2011 or something. It's a very old headphone at this point. I've not found anything that I like more. There are a lot of high-end headphones these days that cost way more. Like, I think it was about $1,100 or $1,000 when it was new. Modern flagship headphones are well above $3,000 now. I have never found anything in that range that I liked better than these. That being said, I haven't looked in a long time. So that's my high-end music headphone. However, I really hardly ever wear them anymore because I usually am using speakers to listen to music at my desk these days. When we moved, I no longer shared an office with TIFF. I had my own office. So I can play music out loud without bothering anybody else with my terrible jam bands. And so I do that a lot more often now. And also, I have recently crossed the threshold of needing reading glasses at my computer desk. So I use a pair of 0.5 magnification glasses for my computer desk, but I do need those for clear vision of the screen. So now that I'm wearing glasses at my desk full-time, it is a little less comfortable to wear headphones full-time. And I have very thin-framed, thin metal-templed glasses. Like, I've optimized them as much as I can, but it's still not as nice as not wearing headphones. So I now greatly prefer speakers. And my speaker setup at my desk is a pair of KEF or KEF. I still don't know how I'm supposed to pronounce that brand. But a pair of KEF at the Beech Q150s and here in the Long Island house, the LSX2s, which are very expensive. They used to be less expensive before all the tariff BS and all the recent inflation and stuff. They were never cheap, but now they're more. And I have the KC62 subwoofer, which is, again, it's like $1,700 now. It was, I think, $1,200 when I got it, which I thought was obscene then. But, you know, this is not a cheap setup. I think, frankly, I think the Q150s sound better than the LSX2s, but they are just much larger. And for a desk, they are kind of an imposing size for a desk. I would say, if you don't mind the size, the Q150s, which are actually not made anymore, but you can probably still find them, are by far my favorite desktop speakers I've ever had. They're just massive, but they sound amazing. They really could use a subwoofer, though. And the KC62 does work really well. It's really good. It's a shame it's so expensive. It does work really well. But really, any desktop subwoofer would be fine for most people. is there a KC62 in both houses or just one? In both houses. Oof. Good for you. I bet that sounds incredible, but woof, I feel bad for your wallet. It does. And I did for, you know, I did the Sonos thing you were saying. I tried it with, you know, I had mentioned I had bought a pair of Aira 300s for a different roll in the house, and I just hadn't installed them for a few months, and I kind of borrowed them from my office for a few months. And a pair of Aero 300s with the Sonos sub is also an incredible sounding setup and costs less than this. The main problem I had with it was you mentioned briefly the brief turn-on delay and the latency. The latency is bad enough that you really don't want to use Sonos speakers as desktop speakers for anything where real-time sound alignment matters. Things like watching videos or playing games. I find it really annoying. You see, I don't have that problem. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm not saying you're wrong, but for me, I've never had that issue, but I cannot sit here and in good conscience say, oh, it's perfect because there is like the one that actually has the physical line in connected to it will turn on. And then there's like a beat probably between a second and a second before the other channel turns on. I've gotten used to it. It doesn't really bother me, generally speaking. But for more discerning individuals, and I'm not going to be snarky about it this time, that may not work for you. But let me tell you, even the Aero 100s, which are like half the size of the 300s, even those with the subwoofers sound freaking incredible. The 300s, which are freaking massive, I'm sure those sounded just astonishing. Oh, they were amazing. I was so happy with those. But, yeah, ultimately, like, that weird startup delay. Like, I hate when things, I hate when speakers auto-sleep after a while. Yeah. And then when I try to play sound, it doesn't play because they're still asleep and I was still waking up for the first second or two. And then so I missed sound effects or I missed the first part of music or I missed the first few words of a video. Like, I find that very annoying. That's true. So what I do, like, at the Beaker, I have the KEF Q150. Those are passive speakers, like regular old speakers that you plug into a powered amp. And the amp I have, I forget, maybe I'll dig it up in the show notes. It's one of the many $60-ish dollar Amazon Class D digital switch amps. And I think it's from Topping or one of those brands. Like, there's a handful of brands on Amazon or SMSL. There's a handful of brands that make a whole bunch of these, like, $60-ish power amps that are very small, like, you know, the size of a few decks of cards and produce certainly enough power for desktop speakers. And usually, you have to get one with the subwoofer output if you're going to have a subwoofer. But, like, it's a whole class of very good products that don't cost a lot of money. And it's just on. So my computer, when it plays sound, it just plays. There's no latency. It works 100% of the time. it just plays. And I love that about that setup. It's one of those things where, like, as technology has gotten more sophisticated, certain things have gotten worse. You get more features, more flexibility, whatever it is, but certain things are worse. Like, you know, one of the common things that I hear, you know, our friends talk about, like John Gruber talked about this a lot, is, like, when you, like, turn on a TV now and switch channels, like, there's so much delay, and, like, everything is, like, laggy, and you have to wait for things to boot or wait for things to, like, sync up digitally, and it's so much less responsive than it used to be, even though we have all these new features and capabilities these days. To me, speakers largely have not benefited from becoming more digital. If you want things like to be able to connect AirPlay or Bluetooth to them, you can do that with these little amps or desktop input kind of products and still just feed regular passive speakers through a regular passive amp, and that's usually better in all these little tiny ways. I don't like all these paper cuts with the new product when they go to sleep or have latency or whatever. To me, that just makes it work worse. And it's a constant irritation to me. And as much as I loved how the Sonos speakers sounded on my desk, like a pair of ERA 300s on a desk, I've never found anything that sounded that good in most ways. But it was just too annoying. And there was no – like I even got the little adapter for both of them. So they both had Ethernet in. And I was like, I had it on the lowest latency settings. It was still too much latency and still too irritating with the stupid auto-sleep and auto-wake-up thing. All right, and then as for the actual headphone amp, going back to the question that we were actually asked. Sorry, Zipline, for being this far. I use the brand S***. I'm a big fan of their products. And I use the, well, the way it's said by Americans is the Jottenheim 2. I believe they're now up to the Jotunheim 3. What Americans say that? No one says Jotunheim? I mean, not no one, but certainly no one in New York probably. Also, I'm just going to say that the YouTube channels that I watch always say KEF and not KEF. Okay, there you go. So it's probably KEF. But I love KEF speakers. Anyway, yeah, so I use the Jotunheim headphone amp, and the reason I use that one, not only does it have enough power to power the HE6, which the vast majority of headphone amps do not, but also it has a really nice little switch input thing and volume knob on it so that as I'm doing things like switching between podcasting input and computer input or switching between speakers and headphones, the front panel controls on the Jottenheim are very nice for that and it has a nice big analog metal volume knob that I like a lot. So it's a great little amp. Over time, I've owned a lot of gear from shit. It is a little bit buggy sometimes. Like the USB sometimes will flake out and I have to turn it off and turn it on again to get the USB to work again. Or sometimes you'll get a little bit of noise being picked up if your phone's too close to it. It's not something I can recommend without conditions, but it is still what I choose to use because I like it the most. You want to spell the name of that brand? S-C-H-I-T-T or I-I-T? I-I-T. I love how you always bleep out Casey's curses, but every time you talk about your amplifier, it just goes out there. Look, that's how they look. They're a California company run by a bunch of nerdy guys. They know what they're doing. It wasn't like an accident. It's fun. They have fun with their name, and I like that. And they make good products. I've had many of them over the years, and they're overall still my favorite product for this category. So you've had some good s**t. I've had some good s**t. Since you two insisted on talking about your speakers, I will just point out that I'm using the Kanto Aura 4s, which I talked about on ATP episode 630 a year ago. If you want to hear more about them, listen to that episode. My update is that I still like them. So everything I said there, they've worked out great. As you'll hear in the episode, I don't really use speakers at my desk, but for the purposes that I want, they're great. And kind of what Marco was saying, like, you turn them on, they play sound, there's no latency, they're directly connected to USB audio, they're just very simple. Yeah, and I would say, like, for most people, that is probably a better setup for most people. That being said, I've heard those speakers. They sound okay. It is nothing compared to the Q150. I'm sure. I mean, they're an eighth of the size, but, like, I keep them powered off most of the time, which tells me how important speakers are on my desk. Yeah. And, like, the LSX2, the reason I have the LSX2 here is because, as I described, I think, two years ago when I bought them, I don't need or use any of, like, the wireless features. It was more of an aesthetic choice. That, like, the way this desk is set up in the room, it's kind of floating in the middle of the room. having the full-size Q150s on this desk would look ridiculous. And so I got the LSXs to be smaller, and they do sound close to the Q150s, and they are way smaller and way nicer looking. So it did solve that need for me. But you don't need these if you can tolerate larger speakers on your desk and you want the amazing sound quality of these amazing drivers that Kef makes. you don't need the LSXs if you can get something bigger. All right. Thank you to our sponsors. This episode, Squarespace, Aura Frames, 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. Every time I say this, I make, like, jazz hands. These words. Weekly bonus topic. I think that three-word phrase is actually very good that you eventually came up. The weekly bonus topic does accurately describe it, and I don't think you need to characterize the length at all. Okay. Well, anyway, it is usually a length of additional content that we put at the end of the show for our members. You get an entire additional topic that we talk about every week. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about skill shortages, Apple Silicon, and AI, and how those things are related to each other right now. So join APU.fm slash join to hear it this week. And you can hear all of our other wonderful exclusive content as well, member specials, everything like that. Thank you very much for listening, 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. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey List, M-A-I-C-O, A-R-M-N-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A-T-R-Q-U-S-A. It's accidental, they didn't mean to, accidental, checked, but kept so long. All right, so I have what I think is the conclusion of my scratching of an automotive itch. Oh. I went, per your recommendation actually, Marco, I went to a dealership that's like half an hour away from me that has what I consider to be an astonishing collection of used electric cars. There was Lucid. I didn't even see it. I'm sorry, John. I ran out of time. There were a couple of Audi e-tron GTs, which is basically a Taycan by another name. I think there was a Taycan or two. I don't recall if I saw them or not now that I think about it, but I believe there's a couple of those there. But more importantly than anything else, Marco, ask me what was there. Was there a BMW i4? Not only was there an i4, but there was an i4 M50, two of them, in fact. Oh, the fast one. The really, the faster one. Indeed. So I went down there, and I was very clear about my intentions, and the gentleman I was working with was very, very nice and very patient with me, and we took, like, I don't know, a 15, 20-minute test drive. And let me tell you, I so desperately wanted to get rid of my beloved 335 when I got rid of it in 2018. It was a 2011 335i X-Drive M Sport 6-speed. And I loved that car for the 10 minutes it was working, but it was constantly broken. Go back to, like, six years of ATP to hear my sob stories about this car. I loved that car, though, when it did work. And even though BMW has changed quite a bit since 2011, and particularly the front of modern BMWs is, generally speaking, pretty homely. Like, the kidneys are just obscenely, just too big, too much. It's too much. This is not a good era for the front of most car designs, honestly. No, but nevertheless, I sat in that car and a little part of me was like, you're home. This is where you were supposed to be. And then I drove the car and it got worse because, oh, my God, that thing is so nice. So nice. I told you. I've never even been in one, but I'm like, obviously, this is the right car for you. It's so nice and so fast. It's ridiculous. Oh, my word. Like, I've been in fast electric cars. I've driven fast electric cars. One of the things that I personally love about Rivians, particularly the launch edition ones or whatever it was that had the three motors set up, is that they're stunningly fast in things that are as big as a house. Like, you're breaking physics. Physics is bending to your will at that point. I absolutely loved it. I thought it was incredible. There is a lot of things that BEV drivers, that people who have been driving full electric cars for a while find deeply distasteful about this car. The electric car snobs, which is basically everyone who drives an electric car, would tell you that it's garbage that this was originally a chassis and drivetrain and platform designed for a gasoline car, and then it was retrofit for a battery situation. Can you believe there's still a transmission tunnel? Exactly. That is exactly what I was going to say. That is kind of a big deal if you care about the backseat space. Obviously, from the driver's seat, you don't care. But the fact that there is a giant hump in the backseat that serves no purpose is annoying if you're in the backseat. This is true. But, I mean, when are you really ever putting three adults in the back of a sedan? It's not often that that's not true. Even for a kid, it's a big transmission tunnel. And also, the other one is that, obviously, no frunk. Right. It's just the kind of, like, and there's not much. The worst part is that there's not actually that much stuff in the front of this car. It's just that it's arranged in such a way that it precludes having a frunk. Like, if you take off the plastic cover, you'll see there's lots of cooling lines running here and there. But it's like, if you're taking the same amount of stuff and just shoved it to the sides, you could have had a frunk. But they were like, nah. I mean, to be clear, like, my iX, which was designed from the start to be electric, doesn't have a frunk either. Yeah, lots of car companies are sort of anti-frunk these days, mostly because I think people just don't use it or whatever. But like for because the backseat is so small on the i4, like I understand what you're saying. I'm like the purists are like that. Like those are compromises in this car. The compromises are that it's an internal combustion chassis and they didn't bother trying to give you a frunk. But if you're in the driver's seat, none of those things really matter. Exactly. And the other thing is you have to consider what my priors are. My priors are gasoline cars or plug in hybrid gasoline cars. And so not having a frunk, okay, and? Like that doesn't offend me. Like it offends people who are like all in on BEVs. There's another, like a lot of people wrote in, and some of them were former Tesla people or current Tesla people, and they're like deeply offended. Sometimes they're Tesla people who went to M50s or, excuse me, I4s, and they're like offended that the garage door doesn't automatically open based on geographic proximity to your house. Okay. I think only Tesla has that feature. I don't think I've seen that with anybody else. You could probably do something with Home Assistant there. I mean, mine just has a button. This is my point, right? I had that feature on Tesla's for a while. It was kind of fun, but also now I have a button in it. That's also fine. My garage door raises when I pick it up with my hand. Of course, John. Of course. But no, this is what I'm saying, right, is that my priors are regular old cars. And so for me, it's like I don't have a frunk. Okay. What have I lost? Nothing. Who cares? Not to say that these people are wrong, but like, again, given my priors, I know I've said it like four times. Not to say that they're wrong, but they're a little wrong. I guess it depends on what you use them. Like I said, the trend is anti-frunk. Like the trend in all, especially fancy EVs is like, we're not going to bother. But, like, it is, you know, it does seem like it's kind of a shame, especially when they make the back trunk thing. I don't know if you looked at this when you were there, but, like, did you open up the back and see, like, that was going to fit all your stuff? Because it's going to be nothing compared to your Volvo, but probably also smaller than your Golf, maybe? I think it's probably roughly equivalent because it's certainly squatter vertically, but I think there's more depth there. Actually, probably a fair bit more depth now that I think about it. And it did have, like, a gully where you can put the charging cable and all that. Yeah, yeah. That's really what you need. That's why people get away with not doing the front, because the little lift of the false floor in your trunk, and there's some little thing there, because they take away the spare tire, for you to put your charging cables in. I guess also on the i4, it's a long hood. It fits into a combustion engine. That's such a long hood. I understand. This is where people are coming from. They say, well, this is what I'm used to, and so I'm not going to go somewhere where I don't have this because I've become used to it. But to your point, you have never become used to it, so you're not missing out on anything. Exactly. I don't think there's that much more to say about it, truth be told. It was an astonishing car. I loved it. I threw up a couple trial balloons with Erin about what she thought about me going back to a BMW, and the answer in summary was basically, if this is what you want, then so be it. That's the end of a conversation where it's basically like angry resignation more than endorsement. Exactly. And so I left that test drive. Oh, well, I skipped a step. So I pretty much immediately fell in love with the M50. It is, I think, the perfect electric car for me today. Not to say it's a perfect car, but it's the perfect electric car for me today. I forgot to mention the other downside that everyone complains about that you haven't mentioned yet. Crappy range. Oh, yes. But I mean, again, so I mentioned earlier that I had lunch with John from Channels and he drives an R1S and we were discussing this whole experience. And, you know, what I was saying to him is in the almost eight years that I've owned my Volkswagen, I think I can count on. I know I can count on one hand and I think I can count on one finger the amount of times that car has been more than an hour away from my house because it never has the need to. It has 30-some thousand miles on it in eight years, almost eight years. And one time I took it to my alma mater, which is like three and a half hours away from home. Other than that, A, I don't think it's ever left Virginia, period. And I don't think I've ever been more than Charlottesville away, which is an hour away, since I've owned the car. So for me, I need, what is that, like 60 miles range? You know what I mean? Like I don't need a 400-mile range car. So I think this is like, and the range on the M50, I think depending on which wheels you get, is somewhere between 200 and 230-ish miles. No, it's like 300 almost. But the reason people complain is it doesn't matter for Casey's purposes. He's never leaving, you know, he's never going far away. Who cares? But the thing is like for the size of battery that it has, like its range is not, it doesn't have a lot of range. And also I believe it is still 400 volt architecture. So it charges more slowly as well. Well, and so, again, for the – I wouldn't say EV purist, but for the EV enthusiast, this is not a state-of-the-art EV. But for Casey's purposes, I never go far away. I don't care what the range is. I just want something that's fun to drive. Like, it fits for your needs, but these are the complaints about the car, that it is not – like, as compared to, for example, the Lucid, which has a fantastical range, and it has more EV-friendly features than a huge frunk and all this other stuff. But that's not – obviously, that's a no-go for Casey because he doesn't live anywhere near a Lucid dealer, and they'll probably be out of business soon anyway. Allegedly, the mobile repair people are a couple of times over. Yeah, I would not rely on that. Agree, agree. So anyway, so I drove the i4 M50, freaking loved it. And then I very quickly, I said to the gentleman I was working with, look, I've already driven a Taycan. I'd love it if you wouldn't mind. If we could go, you know, we took like a 20-minute test drive in the i4 M50. Can I do like five minutes in an e-tron GT just to really verify that I really don't like it? And I got in. It's unquestionably a nice car, unquestionably not for me. I just cannot get past the fact that the view from behind is a slit. I just can't abide it. I was going to get you a Ferrari, but now I guess I'll just cancel that order, and you don't like the view out the back. It's just not good for you. Well, I mean, obviously in a Ferrari I would make exceptions. I'll get you the Ferrari SUV. In a Ferrari, get me the, what is it, the Luce or whatever is coming out? But the Puro Sangue is their existing SUV. Either way. But, I mean, in a Ferrari I would make do. But for a regular car. I don't think you would. I think you're, like, because the Taycan is, I mean, the eTron I don't like either. But the Taycan is a really nice car, but you can't get over the view out the back. And that's going to be true of every low-swung, you know, sports car. Oh, and I did briefly put it from, what did the Audi call it? I think from, like, regular to dynamic, if I'm not mistaken. I would say that, like, the settings in the Audi are probably not the same as the settings in the Porsche. Just keep that in mind. Yes, but moving from normal or comfort or whatever the default is to dynamic definitely did exactly what I expected. And what I thought I remembered from the Taycan when I put it in Sport+, which is it made the transmission situation way better. But I still just freaking hate the fact that it's there. I get it. I'm not saying it's wrong. It's just not for me. So the Taycan, the e-tron, both off the table. And I'm back, you know, thinking about the M50, and I'm driving away from that test drive, and I'm thinking to myself, this is a phenomenal car that is not cheap, but it's like half off MSRP. And, you know, for like a two- or three-year-old car, I could afford it. But rather than dropping something like $15,000 or $20,000 on a car that I don't need, what if I just took the family on a vacation or two or three or four instead? With that money. And that's where I'm currently leaning. And I'm pretty sure that is my final answer. But with me, you never know. I'll concede. But I don't need a new car right now, new to me car right now. My car is in great shape as far as I'm aware, as I knock on wood. I just I can't get around. I'm solving a problem that I don't have just because I'm being me. And I think my final answer, play this back to me in like a week when I end up driving one home. But I think my final answer is it's just not something I need, and it's just not worth it. Like, I'd rather do other stuff with that money rather than, or, well, I mean, you know, whether I finance or whatever, I think of it as having that money, right? And so I don't think of that as a useful use of money, and I think I'd be much better off doing things with the family than getting a car I don't need. Experiences versus possessions. Obviously, there are also experiences in having a possession. and you get the experience of driving it, but still, I think a family vacation is probably a better choice. And also, I will add that, you know, the 2030 i4 that you used in 2032 when your Golf finally dies is going to be way better than this car. It is. You're right. Maybe also uglier, but just, you know. Also true. Yeah, because what's coming also, like, you know, the Neuer Klasse, however you pronounce that, the new class of BMW electric vehicles coming online, like, you know, over the next couple of years, and the i3 is Tiskar and that's a very weird little thing that they haven't made in a few years. The new thing that they're going to be apparently using the name i3 for is the 3 series version of the new platform. Presumably there will be an i4 updated to that platform probably a year or two in or something like that. That is going to have some pretty substantial upgrades to the electric powertrain. You know, it's going to be, first of all, designed for electric from the start, so maybe you get rid of the transmission tunnel. There would probably also be, you know, it's a higher, it's an 800-volt battery system, it's higher battery capacities, higher ranges. So that platform is going to be a pretty substantial upgrade to the cars. So you can get one now, you know, get one of the used i4s or get a new one now. Like, you could do that, but if you don't need it now and if you're willing to wait, you know, three more years maybe, there would probably be more options on the market. And either you will want those options or they will depress the price of these options. Yeah. And so, you know, if you don't need it right this second. I don't. It's – you can make a pretty clear argument. Like, you are better off probably waiting if you can. But, you know, I still stand by – this is not going to help you at all. I still stand by that, you know, you are a working professional and this is a thing you're very passionate about. And so I don't think you should feel guilty about wanting to indulge this to a degree. But I also think it's very wise of you to consider like total enjoyment for the dollar. You know, bring bring your family on some nice vacations is probably higher. you know for that and i mean obviously you know you can spend thousands of dollars on a vacation and in or on a vacation or many vacations it's all depending on where you're going and what you're doing and so on but it just and i'm not even saying that it's like a one-for-one trade between a car and vacation but it just feels that way you know what i mean and so um i i really feel like it's it's a silly waste of money that i probably shouldn't do so when i drive one home a week you can you can just help me forget that i ever had this conversation but uh let me tell you incredible car, though. I really think of all the things that I've been interested in and driven so far, far and away my favorite. Not even close. And I would have one tomorrow if John was buying. So I was right? Yeah. No, no. I think you were right. Oh, what a surprise. Oh, relax. There's a way for Marco to drive one and find out he hates it. Right? Actually, it could be. Very well could be. That would be funny. You should drive one just for Grimms and Giggs, but whatever. So for our vacation, we rented a car. We were driving it around for like a week. And it was a Hyundai Sonata. I always go to the rentals and I'm like, give me a full-size sedan. I love a full-size sedan. Those don't exist anymore. Sorry. Well, they do. It's the Hyundai Sonata, unfortunately. And it was, I mean, in every possible way, really mediocre. But, like, it was fine. And because I've been driving SUVs for the last few years, I wasn't sure, like, can I, Am I still going to be comfortable in a regular car-shaped car? Because my plan has been whatever I buy next after this lease is over in a year and a half, my plan was to go back to cars again, like not SUVs anymore. But I was worried, like, you know, am I still able to sit in the car comfortably without, like, irritating my weird, like, leg and knee problems I've been developing slowly over the years? or am I still able to see at night without too much distraction from headlights and stuff like that, stuff that happens when you get older. And so I was worried, can I still get a car, basically? And we did a lot of driving in the Sonata, and it's not a great fit for me in terms of its seats were not really super comfortable. I couldn't really adjust it the way I wanted, and it was fine. It was totally fine. I loved being in a car-shaped car again, and I had no problems with my knee or anything like that. So it was fine. So I think I am still car compatible and I look forward to, you know, in a year and a half when I get to figure out what to do next. And I'm looking hard at possibly the new BMW i3, if it's any good. Even maybe the i3X, because like I was comparing like, you know, it is still an SUV, but it's like it's their smaller one. I don't think we're going to get the... There's like a one-series version of their SUVs, like the iX1, I think, that is not available in the U.S. I don't think it will be available in the U.S., but all the Europeans who have it say it's amazing, I think, if I remember correctly. Anyway, the iX3 is a very possible thing because it is smaller than the iX, but it still has big cargo capacity, which I do enjoy. but I look forward to being able to look at these options in a year and a half and see what they are.