702: Isolate the Evil

Well, the show is so short, we really can't fit it in. We're known for being a really, really tight schedule and very aggressively edited. No time for flab, just quick hits. The TikTokers love us. Can you imagine us, any of the three of us or the three of us together, trying to do that quick hit short form video? Like, nope. What works on TikTok and YouTube shorts? We'd be so terrible at that. I mean, I know you're slightly tongue in cheek, but also serious. No, no, I'm serious. I think we would be horrendous at it. I think we would be horrendous if we set out to do that. But I think there are clips from the show that could be turned in, like, leaving aside the fact that there is no video. With heavy editing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I agree. But you could take, like, a two to three minute, you know, one of you two making fun of me or vice versa, and turn that into a TikTok-friendly, Reels-friendly clip, leaving aside the fact that we have no video for this show. Well, but even that, like, I feel like people wouldn't get it. It wouldn't be funny when you, if you're just breezing through your feet and you don't know any of us, you've never heard our show and you've never heard our banter and you don't know any of our personalities. I feel like there isn't any like brief little quick hit that you could put in a clip, even if it was heavily edited, that would be as like funny or interesting to even come close to representing what our audience feels like. You know, if we make a back reference to a joke that we made 10 years ago, or we're, you know, playing off of something that we think is funny about each other or whatever, Like, no one, like, if you just breeze through and you see five seconds of, you know, me and John making fun of you, Casey, you're like, we're just going to be dicks. Like, that's not, we're not going to be, like, endearing and fun friends. We're just going to be jerks. Not everything is bite-sized. Yeah, right. And that's true. I bet you, I bet you that somebody listening with talent in a way that none of the three of us have talent could put together at least a passable, again, leaving aside the lack of video, So I could put together a passable like 30 to 90 second clip. That would be amusing and fun and funny. But no. Well, it's a good thing that we are also known for constantly bringing in external talent and hiring jobs out. We're really good at that, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have no time to waste. Let's do some follow up. And yet here we are wasting it. Yeah, exactly. we spoke last week slash two days ago in our time about a truly incredible I think John had counted or had computed 2500 plus word email that deserved to be a blog post about FileMaker and this was by Adam1 and Adam has posted that email to his brand shiny brand spanking new blog so you can go to the link in the show notes at Adam1 A-D-A-M-W-U-N-N dot com and you can check it out. And so Adam wrote again after the last episode and said, thank you for your kind words and ATP 701 about my FileMaker email. I sent that to you with the intention of helping by giving some background information on FileMaker for the podcast, but I didn't consider making it a blog post. I have a website with a blog set up, but while I have never used it, it has always been my desire to do so. John was right. I was once a professional writer of sorts. I have been a, having been a journalist in another era. More recently, my writing skills were seriously reinforced and polished when I went back to college. That was so much work for an old guy. Since the three of you were so encouraging, I decided to turn on the blog and create the post, as I mentioned. Thanks again. It was fun to help contribute to ATP's discussion on FileMaker. It brought back so many memories. I love geeking out with you guys. Moving right along, with regard to MacAsk the Mac Apps, Ingmar Witkow writes, Regarding MacAsk the Mac Apps, today I was blown away by how you share files between two Macs when using the screen sharing app. You just drag them out of or into the screen sharing window to the other Mac, which is something I've known for a long time. I didn't consider as a good example of Mac S, Mac app. And it is a great example of that. So, yeah. So let's say, like, I have a headless Mac mini here in the office. And if I wanted to move a file to or from it, I could drag from my MacBook Pro onto that window. So the desktop from my MacBook Pro onto that window and drop it. And it will transfer the file. or I can drag from the Mac Mini desktop onto my desktop, and it will transfer the file. And it's very slick, and it's a great example of, there's no way this will work. Well, let me try it. Oh, my God, it did work. It's a really great example of that. Yeah, well, I remember when I discovered that feature many years ago, and it was exactly the same thing I was describing. It's like, well, this probably should work, so let me try it. Because I had an expectation. I was like, yeah, like, it seems like this should work. So it's at least worth trying to see if it does. And lo and behold, it did, and it was great. And the second thing I'll add, this is one of my hobby horses that I should maybe formalize at some point because it's just getting worse and worse over the years. But I think screen sharing to another Mac and dragging files from the screen sharing window to your local Mac or from your local Mac into the screen sharing window is actually easier than using file sharing in the Finder because file sharing in the Finder is so bad and so inexplicably slow and so inexplicably terrible. And, like, with a screen sharing app, it says, look how easy it is. It's just – why isn't just – they really need to, like, 100% completely overhaul the UI and apparently the back end for screen sharing between two Macs – for file sharing between two Macs that are literally in the same room, feet from each other, connected to the same Ethernet switch. like it's just so hard and so slow and so many bugs like i filed this bug ages ago where like i can't connect to my wife's computer as her through um file sharing without typing her password every single time there's a checkbox that says oh should i remember this in the keychain does nothing uh filed the bug they're like oh if you do x y if you don't put the username in it'll work fine like yeah but i have to put the username in because i don't want to connect as me and they just never responded. That was like three years ago. Anyway, so maybe I should just use screen sharing. Because screen sharing opens up real fast. If you've connected to it before, it remembers the thing. You just hit connect and then I can see my live screen and I can just drag files onto it and it's actually faster than using file sharing. But yeah, if you think of something that you think should work in a Mac app, try it. It might. Yep. All right, this next thing we're going to talk about is a pretty long email from Jason Griffey. and I asked John to cut it down and I took a look at cutting it down and neither of us succeeded because it's so chock-a-block full of fascinating information. I did cut it down. The first version that you complained about was the cut-down version. I cut it down further when you requested it. Well, I appreciate it. I did put down cut-down versions of this and the other item that was too long that will probably be for next episode. But then I cut it down further because you can always cut it down further. I appreciate your efforts. But honestly, this is fascinating. So bear with me. I'm going to be reading a lot, but I think this was really, really great. So Jason Griffey writes, I'm sorry, this is within the context is the overtime segment a couple episodes ago about Sony no longer selling PlayStation discs. So Jason Griffey writes, I've spent my career in library technology. So when you got into game preservation on the show, I figured I'd write in with some information about the legal landscape. The first thing to know is that libraries get their own copyright exceptions, separate from fair use, which also still applies. It's Title 17, United States Code, Section 108. And the key thing about it is that it's format neutral. A video game is just a work, like anything else. So under Section 108C, a library can legally make up to three replacement copies of a published game in its collection if the copy is damaged, deteriorating, lost, stolen, or stored in an obsolete format. The catch is that digital copies made this way can't be made available to the public outside the library's physical premises. There's also Section 108H, which opens things up further in the last 20 years of a works copyright term for anything that isn't being commercially exploited. Again, format neutral. A game qualifies the same way a novel does. So far so good. Here's where it gets more complicated. The DMCA. Section 1201 makes it illegal to circumvent DRM full stop, even to make a copy that Section 108 explicitly says you're allowed to make. You have the right to preserve the game, and a separate law makes it a violation to do the thing you'd need to do to preserve it. This is American law in a nutshell. My word. Congress eventually realized this was a problem, so they built in a pressure valve. Every three years, the Copyright Office takes petitions, and the Librarian of Congress grants temporary exemptions to the anti-circumvention rule. This is the one place the law stops being format neutral because each exemption is argued and won for a specific category of works. The good news is that libraries, archives, and museums currently have an exemption to break DRM on video games and other software for preservation. The bad news is the access restriction. Preserved games can only be played on premises. In 2024, the Software Preservation Network and the Video Game History Foundation petitioned to allow remote access for researchers, and the Copyright Office said no. So a library can legally crack, rip, and preserve an out-of-print game, and the then-researcher has to fly to the building to play it. Also, every one of these exemptions expires and has to be re-won every three years. The next round is 2027. All of the above is exactly why libraries are aware this work needs to happen. Every legal privilege I've described belongs to libraries, archives, and museums specifically. That's not an accident. Libraries are neutral parties with no commercial stake in the works they preserve, so nobody has to trust a publisher's promise that a game will stay available, or a fan site's ability to survive has ceased and desist. Libraries are community resources with an institutional mandate to preserve things for decades, not until the next corporate reorg. Publishers abandon games all the time. Libraries don't abandon collections. The infrastructure, the legal standing, and the mission are all already there. What's missing is money. The best way to make sure this preservation actually happens is to lavishly fund libraries around the country at every level from your local public branch to the big academic research collections. There are dozens of gamer librarians out there dying to be able to build an archive of out-of-print games. Let me just quickly add that I am extremely lucky, and I know not everyone is, and I've said this before on the show, but I'll say it again. Where I happen to live has exceptional libraries. And if you are in a place that even vaguely values libraries, I bet your libraries are great too. They're wonderful places to work outside the house. They're wonderful places to go to just have somewhere different. oftentimes the internet is surprisingly good because there's not all that many people all trying to use it at the same time. You should really check out and support your local library. I bet it's better than you think. Yeah, last week's example I gave of like the publishers, you know, people, game publishers are, you know, the companies that make and own the games have some responsibility and perhaps we could be convinced that, you know, the things they made are culturally important and they have the things. They have the server code that we were talking about, like, oh, even if you have the game at the servers or not, but it doesn't matter. So they have the server code. They have the game code. They have everything. They should, and I gave the example of like, you know, giving Disney, giving their important, culturally important movies to the Library of Congress to preserve them because they realize this is an important cultural artifact. And yes, we, Disney, will save it somewhere, but it's better to also have the Library of Congress do it. And what I didn't emphasize enough was the companies that own the games have to participate in this because they have to give them, I mean, this is an example of cracking them with whatever, but like for server stuff, it's like that stuff doesn't exist out in the world at all. So those companies have to give it to somebody and say, you never had access to the server code. It wasn't on the disk. You can't use it. Only we have it. So they have to give it. But who are they giving it to? In my example, I use the Library of Congress. And the important part of that was library. More important than I had even realized because I didn't know these very specific laws applied only to libraries, actually allowing them to crack the DRM. But yeah, libraries, as Jason points out, not only do they have special laws applied to them, but they are correctly incentivized. They are not trying to make money from this. They have no connection to any specific company. Libraries, as pointed out many, many times on the internet, and it is no less true every time it is pointed out, if libraries were proposed today, no one would ever do them because they sound too good. You're like, what? Is there going to be a place where anybody can get books for free? It doesn't make any sense. It's completely unsustainable. It's ridiculous. What is this? Communism? Libraries are great. They already exist. Thankfully, they already exist. And if you fund them, they can do amazing things for you and your community. And video game preservation is just one thing. And I hope eventually they get to the point where it's like, you know, don't make people go to the physical buildings, look at the games that libraries are preserving. They can do like they do with e-books where they have this, you know, artificial scarcity system where you can check out an e-book from a library. And when you have it checked out, someone else can't check it out. But you should be able to do that with video games as well and not have to, you know, go to the physical building. But as the case is going out, the physical buildings are often great as well. So I guess the answer is support your local library and vote for people who will change these laws. Right. All right. Jason Worley writes, with regard to Marco's overcast servers, you should move most or all of the Mac minis into half the Macs on A power, half the Macs on B power. Don't put them on an ATS. And also, you should get a big boy ATS for the network firewall and critical equipment. Walk around and look at what everyone else is doing or using and ask the data center neckbeards. you'll have two or three names come up, Eaton, APC, or maybe Triplite. You won't see CyberPower or other consumer brands. Yeah, so I've gotten a number of messages from people. Jason Worley was the most extensive. This was actually his TLDR version, but he wrote a longer message also. And what I like about this advice is, and everyone's basically saying the same thing, that, like, the Mac minis, having them all and all the other equipment be on a single ATS was not great, because what I did was create a single point of failure. And the whole thing about data center hardware is avoid creation of a single point of failure. So what I've decided to do instead, I've ordered some Ubiquiti gear, including their wonderful memory surcharge. Ubiquiti did not, they didn't raise their prices directly. Instead, their products now, most of them have a memory surcharge added to them. So they did raise the price, but they're trying to make it appear as though they didn't until you check out. It's both clever and evil. Yeah, I don't think it's clever. I think it's just misleading. Like in most states, having those kind of surcharges is illegal. But anyway, so what I'm going to do is the ubiquity gear that is basically single points of failure. I'm I'm I placed in order to make it less of a single point of failure. So there is one fiber optic connection coming in. That is the WAN connection. Ubiquity sells a WAN switch that can split one WAN connection into two routers. All of their modern routers support something called shadow backup or something like that, like shadow backup mode, where you can basically have two identical ones, and they kind of monitor each other. And if you feed the WAN from the WAN switch into both of those routers and then connect your switches to both of those routers, they will automatically fail over if one detects a problem. So I've ordered a second DreamRouter Pro with its memory surcharge, a WAN switch with its memory surcharge. Now, if the router fails, I will have a second one. I haven't installed them if they haven't come yet. But also, all of these recent Ubiquiti things support a second power input, but not through, like, an AC plug. They have this weird custom DC connector on the left side, And then they sell basically a separate power supply that you can plug in that will then power all of those DC connectors for, you know, a group of things. So I've ordered that thing, too, like the rack power distribution thing. So what I'm going to do is plug all of them with their regular AC cords directly into, you know, side A or whatever. Plug the new DC power thing into side B, and so that will back up all of their power. So that way I'm bypassing the need for an ATS for the main Ubiquity rack gear. Also having the shadow mode failover for the router. And then for the switch, I just got a second, you know, smaller switch, and I'm going to plug in half the Mac minis into one switch and half the Mac minis into the other switch and plug each switch directly into each router. I won't have the switches doing active failover quite because the Mac minis only have one network interface, So that would be difficult unless I got a second network thing for every single one of the 48 Mac minis. So that's not amazing. And then I'm going to do what Jason and others suggested here, which is just plug half the Mac minis into side A and plug half into side B and just see how that goes. And hopefully then I wouldn't, in that scenario, I wouldn't actually need an ATS for anything. So I canceled my ATS order, which wasn't going to ship for, you know, eight to ten weeks anyway. And we're going to go from there. Good deal. I think that makes sense. All right. We have an update on passwords, quote, unquote, doing the hard thing. We have a couple of posts from our friends at Six Colors. Jason wrote with regard to macOS Golden Gate, Passwords app gets an injection of agentic AI through a new feature that offers to change your compromised or easy to guess passwords for you, navigating various websites and generating new high-security passwords automatically. It's a clever idea, but the most unfinished of any feature in the beta. It managed to change three of the 39 passwords it attempted. Additionally, Dan, also at Six Colors, writes, with regard to iOS 27, my experience was uneven with just five of 18 updated. Better average than Jason's. Yeah, this was the feature we talked about a little while ago that when it was first announced, and, like, surely they're using, like, you know, dot well-known APIs and other stuff, and if the site doesn't have that, oh, well. But then eventually we learned, no, it's going to like start a headless browser and navigate web pages and use that technology. We talked about it many episodes ago, like whatever it was, like a scientific paper or patent or something about like the tech Apple was using to read screens and understand like where the fields are and everything in them. Presumably, they're using this technology to basically do what you would do as a human. OK, I got to change my password on this side. OK, I'm going to go to the website. First, I have to figure out how to log in. Is it sign in? Is it log in? Where is it? Do I have to pick on the little icon head? Like, people are making it so hard to log into sites. And I know ATP.fm is not great in that regard either, but I do try to improve it. Anyway, then you get logged in. Is it under settings, security, change my back? Like, that's what these agents are doing, the same thing that you would do. And when you have trouble finding and they get frustrated and can't find the page where you change your password, I'm sure it's doing the same thing. Now, it's really weird and sketchy because, like, okay, so an agent's going to do this with a headless browser behind the scenes? Like, what if it screws it up somehow? Or what if, like, it thinks it didn't change the password, but it really did, and now I don't know what the password is. Like, in the end, it's probably a forgot-my-password thing with email and blah, blah, blah. So it's not the end of the world. But I still haven't decided whether I'm going to try to use this feature. Obviously, Jason and Dan decided to do it in the beta just so they could write about it, which is great, taking one from the team there. But its success rate doesn't look great so far. I mean, is it really that hard? Three out of 39, are those sites really that hard to navigate? Are some of those sites just gone entirely? Is there some kind of rule that sets off the site redirects don't even bother? So I'm not sure about this feature, but boy, it really is doing it the hard way. Like we're, we are going to try to do the thing that sounds like science fiction, which is just let the computer wander the website and figure out how to change your password. I'm sure it will be fine. And we'll do all of them at once. You just, hey, hey, we found, because we all get those messages in everything. You get them in Google's thing. You get them in Chrome. You get them in passwords where it'll be like, you have 7,500 passwords that are garbage. And you just look at those and you just feel bad. You're like, well, I've been on the Internet since the 90s, so, yeah, I've probably got a lot of records in my keychain that are really bad for sites that no longer exist or whatever. But what can you do about it? Are you going to go through them one by one and change them? No, you're not. Well, enter Golden Gate where it's like, you know, you want me to try to change all those? And some people are like, yeah, sure, go for it. And if it comes back and it's changed three of them, well, it's three more than you had changed. But we'll see how this feature looks in release. But, again, I still haven't decided whether I'm going to click that button and say, sure, go for it. Change all those passwords or at least try to. Yeah, I don't think that I would be too keen to try this personally, but I mean, I appreciate the Six Colors boys for doing it or trying it, so I don't have to. All right, with regard to the way you paste in Mac OS 27, friend of the show Steve Trouton-Smith writes, you can paste things from your clipboard into the file system. Who else has been asking for this one? And then there's a video where you can see that Steve is copying image data from an app and then using the paste item context menu or context menu item in Finder to create an image file, and that file name is pasted, you know, date at time, et cetera, et cetera. Now, John, you tried to do this as well? Yeah, like, oh, that looks interesting. Let me try it. And this, I think this was back in an earlier beta of Golden Gate, and I just didn't have that context menu item. I would copy an image, and then I would right-click in the Finder, and there was no paste item in the context menu. The context menu would appear, and it would have the expected stuff in it, but no paste item. So maybe I was doing something wrong. Did you have a different experience? Well, so I don't have macOS 27 on any of my computers because I don't trust it, and I am not that keen to try macOS Betas. I have a story about that. Maybe I'll save it for the next episode. Okay. But I can tell you, I think I might be misunderstanding what Steve's trying to say because I, not always, but oftentimes I can copy something like an image and then paste it on my desktop and it will create an image. So I tried this with somebody had sent me an image in Messages or perhaps I had sent an image, I don't recall. But one way or another, I copied an image in the Messages app in Mac OS 26 and then I went to my desktop and I made sure the desktop was active and then I just hit Command V and then a file appeared. So again, maybe I'm misunderstanding what Steve's driving at here. It's more or less what he was doing, but I do wonder if, like, messages. When an app copies something on macOS, and I'm sure on all the platforms, it puts multiple representations on the pasteboard. And then when you paste it, the thing you're pasting into can decide which one of these representations do I understand and can handle. So maybe messages, because a lot of the stuff in messages, like you also get, like, the download icon next to it. So it's like I can download this, I can add it to your photos library, I can put it in your downloads folder. You have lots of options. So I do wonder if there's some temp file that there's a URL for, and that when you paste it, the finder says, oh, I see there's a URL version of this in the pasteboard. Let me get that URL version and just copy it over here with the file name that it has in the temp location. I don't know. I'm just speculating. But the thing this reminded me of is a thing that's been in Xcode for a while now, I think. I don't use it, but I know that it's there. I've used it occasionally, which is if you, like, copy a class or a struct or, you know, whatever, like in text from a source code file in Xcode, and then you put the input focus on the sidebar that, like, lists all your files, and you hit paste, you're like, what does it mean to paste a wad of text into the sidebar that lists all my files? That shouldn't do anything. Well, what it does is it looks at the text that you're pasting, and it says, well, that text, it looks like it's declaring a class. So I'm going to make a file called nameofthatclass.swift because it was Swift code. And in that file, I'm going to put the thing that you just pasted. So it will create a file intelligently based on the text that you pasted into the sidebar, which is neat and convenient. Instead of you having to go to Xcode file, new, empty source code file, pick Swift, yes, click on the file on the sidebar, put the input into the text area, and hit paste. That's what the Finder is doing here. It's like, do you have data that could be in a file but isn't currently in a file? Go to the Finder and paste. And I think it's using, oh, this just said pasted month, day, year, or whatever. But I think there might be some context where it, like, looks at what it is. Or maybe just Siri does that, where it looks at the content of it and it gives it an intelligent file name, like picture of dog or whatever. because it's a picture of a dog. But anyway, this is an interesting twist on copy and paste where I think what you're seeing, Casey, is like it has been spottily supported in various places. But I think with the advent of, you know, agentic stuff running locally or in the cloud even, being more pervasive in all of Apple's OSs, the idea of taking something that is not in a file, just data, raw data, whether it's text, image data, whatever, and pasting it and making a file out of that paste becomes a lot more plausible because I think making a file called pasted, year, month, day, hour, minute, second, is not a great file name, and you'll never remember what the heck that is. Kind of like screenshot with year, month, day, hour, minute, second. Like, you know, there is a date on the file already. We don't need to put it in the file name. But what are the choices it has? Well, now we have different choices. So this is something I'm keeping an eye on. Yeah. All right. Apple is reportedly looking to acquire some AI chip companies. So reading from Hartley Charlton over at MacRumors, Apple is looking to acquire AI chip companies as a part of an effort to reduce its dependence on NVIDIA for demanding AI workloads, according to the information. Apple's own AI server chip, internally codenamed Baltra, B-A-L-T-R-A, had been expected to ship this year, but has been delayed, according to people said to be familiar with the project. Apple has historically limited its acquisitions to deals in the hundreds of millions of dollars and avoided large purchases, but that approach appears to be shifting. Apple signaled a change in financial strategy during its most recent quarterly earnings call when CFO Kevin Parekh, is that how you pronounce that? I hope so, told analysts the company would no longer target net cash neutral status, a policy under which it had kept its cash reserves roughly in line with its total debt. Apple did not explain the reasoning behind the change, though the added flexibility could free up capital for larger acquisitions. So there's a couple of parts of this. First, Apple's AI server chip with a code name. Presumably that is not any of the previously rumored or previously confirmed to be used Ultra chips, because those are, I wouldn't call those server chips. They may be used in servers. Apple uses the M2 Ultras in its servers, but it is not a server chip. This makes me think that maybe they have a plan for a chip that they would not ship to customers, but would instead use just in their servers. Unclear from, you know, the story and then the code name, but that's something to keep an eye on because I hadn't heard about that before. I heard more vague rumors of it. Once you get an actual codename, like, oh, this must have either been a project or someone's idea for a project. So that's interesting. And the second thing is, I think I mentioned this on earlier. So looking to acquire AI chip companies. What is an AI chip company? What does that mean? Doesn't Apple make chips? Why do they need, why are they even interested in another company that make chips? Don't they already make great chips that do great AI? They always tell us they do. Well, there is a subsection of chip making companies, most of them small and newish, that are trying to figure out a way to make a chip that is good at doing the one very specific thing that companies need to do right now with AI. And you might be thinking, isn't that what NVIDIA is doing? But they mostly make general purpose, you know, GPUs, graphic private. They're very general purpose. You can do lots of stuff with NVIDIA GPUs. And granted, they are tailoring them towards the needs of AI, but they're big and complicated. So the small companies are like, we're not going to out NVIDIA NVIDIA. We're not going to make a general purpose GPU that's better than what they're doing with our tiny startup. And they have all the money in the world and decades and decades of experience. But what if there's an idea that they're not thinking of? Let's try some weird stuff. One of the ones that comes to mind is the wafer scale chip companies, where normally you take like a big circular silicon wafer and you print a bunch of chips on it. And then you cut them up and you get however many chips can fit on the wafer. They're like, but what if we make the chip the size of the wafer? The wafer is one chip. And so you just print the entire chip on the way. And it's massive. Obviously, it's made up of little individual units. Like, you know, the repeated units, like, just like there are in an NWD GPU, or just like there are in any kind of thing. But it's like, just make one chip the size of the wafer. It's like, well, how can that be economically viable? Because every one of those little chips cost so much money because the wafer costs so much money to make it, the current process size. But there's at least one company out there doing this and saying, actually, the math works out. because even though this thing costs so much money, also it's incredibly powerful for this one very specific task because it's so huge. So that's one example of an AI chip company. I don't know if that's a good idea. Maybe it's a terrible idea. But NVIDIA is not currently doing it. So companies are out there trying things that nobody else is trying in the hopes that their startup hits on something, and then presumably NVIDIA will buy them. But maybe not if Apple buys them first. Again, Apple bought PA Semi, which I think was filled with a bunch of like ex-PowerPC people who wanted to make really cool PowerPC chips, but they're either IBM or Motorola, whoever they used to work for wouldn't do it. So they started their own company and then Apple snatched them up. Fast forward many years, Apple Silicon. So that worked out really well. I think they're looking for the AI equivalent of PA Semi, which is some company with really good people and really good ideas that is currently undervalued out there in the world, doing something other people aren't doing and to snatch them up. and presumably they would use it to make their own AI server chips so they could be, as the story says, less dependent on NVIDIA. Again, see the story last episode about apparently they're supposedly still going forward with their own Apple Silicon servers, even though they're doing the NVIDIA deal. So the dream of Apple servers is still alive in Apple, just not once they'll sell the customers. For the record, if anyone at Apple acquisitions or whatever it's called is listening, I just read that Apple has historically limited its acquisitions to deals in the hundreds of millions of dollars, ATP is available for a deal in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Just letting you know. We are within your price range, Apple. I don't think we have any innovative AI chip technology, unfortunately. Not yet, John. Not yet. I cut out the part where it said their biggest deal was Beats for X number of billions, but they have done bigger deals. I think Beats is the biggest, but I don't remember. I think that's right. They've done a couple of pretty big deals, but yeah, they usually mostly buy lots of small companies. You could even call us a pretty big deal, John. You could. All right. Now, with regard to chip deals, there's actually an announced chip deal from Apple itself from their newsroom earlier this month, actually on July 8th. Let me read it. On July 8th, Apple announced a new multi-year commitment with Broadcom to design and produce custom silicon components and cutting-edge wireless connectivity technologies for a wide range of Apple products. The new agreement, expected to exceed $30 billion, will lead to the production of more than 15 billion U.S.-made chips and support hundreds of American jobs. Quote, Apple and Broadcom have a long history together, and this new phase of our partnership further accelerates our commitment to American manufacturing and innovation, said Tim Cook, Apple CEO. The cutting-edge components built in Fort Collins are essential to delivering the incredible performance and connectivity our customers expect. Again, with Hartley Charlton over at MacRumors, Apple is one of Broadcom's largest customers, believed to account for about 20% of its annual revenue. Apple's been steadily bringing chip design in-house, such as with its own C1 and C1X cellular modems, but many of Broadcom's wireless connectivity and radio frequency components remain in use. Broadcom's chips cover custom radio frequency components, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and other networking semiconductors found throughout Apple's lineup. Apple and Broadcom signed a multibillion-dollar agreement in 2023 covering 5G radio frequency components manufactured in the U.S. So I have two minds about this as well. So on the one hand, you can look at this and say, it's more like trying to bring manufacturing back to the United States, supporting a U.S. company, making the Trump administration happy, all those things. And I'm sure it is all those things. It's already been, like, leveraged in that, I think, we cut out parts of this press release where it's like, oh, this is great. We're bringing jobs back to America. You know, the current U.S. government administration loves it. Apple loves it. It's all making nice, okay? On the other hand, as Mac Rumors points out, isn't Apple kind of making all their own chips these days? Like, Broadcom used to make all sorts of stuff for Apple. not Qualcomm made the cell modems and Broadcom make the Wi-Fi stuff, but, like, Apple has its own Wi-Fi chips and it's making its own Bluetooth chips. And, like, isn't Apple kind of like, yeah, we are slowly but surely making everything in-house so we don't have to go to Broadcom? So I do wonder if this is like, you know, oh, it's just like window dressing and, you know, in the meantime, while we're working on our own chips to replace everything Broadcom makes, we'll do this deal and it looks good. Or Apple has drawn some kind of line that says we'll make the cell modem chip because we hate Qualcomm. will make the Wi-Fi chip, will make the H1 and H2. But at a certain point, we get down to dinky little chips that we don't care about. Like maybe, I don't know, Bluetooth. I think Apple might have a chip that does that. But like maybe there's tiny, you know, the thread radio. Does Apple want to make the thread radio? Maybe they don't. And so I do wonder if they're deciding, you know, whatever the Cook Doctrine of own and control the primary technologies, blah, blah, blah. And they say, well, is that radio chip a primary technology or is it just a commodity? because if we don't think we're ever going to make that, let's strike a deal for the next X years that Broadcom will sell them to us at a good price because we're 20% of their business. So we'll see. But the past several years has been a steady march of Apple rolling out chips with a letter and a number in front of them and slowly replacing all of its devices with Apple Silicon. And so this Broadcom deal kind of feels weird in that context. 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 with a professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place. 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It's all backed by amazing tools that businesses need these days, things like analytics, email campaigns, global shipping options, SEO tools, the works. And anybody can do it, whether you are a nerd or not. So if you are a nerd, first of all, you shouldn't be spending your time hand-coding websites anymore. And if somebody asks you to make a website for them and they're not a nerd, it's also really easy for them to use, too. So you don't have to be the middle person going between this person and their website. you can just have them use Squarespace and they can figure it out themselves. So check it out. See how well it works for you by building a site in trial mode. Go to squarespace.com slash ATP for that free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So try it out in trial mode as long as you want. See how Squarespace works for you. I bet you'll stick with it. And when you do purchase, use code ATP for 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show. We have finally heard Slate Truck price and availability announcements. We first discussed this way back in May 2025 in Episode 641. Reading for The Verge in Jess' weather bed, we now, as of June 24th, know the price of Slate Auto's affordable American-made electric truck almost a year after the company warned it wouldn't hit its initial under $20,000 target price. The no-frills pickup starts at $24,950, matching the revised mid-$20,000 price range it promised last year after the Trump administration announced it was putting an end to the $7,500 federal EV tax credit. Pre-orders for the Slate truck are live now, with production scheduled to begin in autumn of 2026. Customers can pay a $300 non-refundable deposit within the next 30 days to lock in a delivery date, which is expected to start in late 2026. Yeah, this one just dodged price increase corner because it was actually increased back when the tax credit was ended, which was dumb, but it's one of the many dumb things happening in our country. Anyway, pretty good on them to come in at, you know, just under $25,000 when their original target was $20,000 with a $7,500 EV tax credit. So I wish them luck. We talked about the truck. You can go listen to that episode. It is, first and foremost, a very low-priced electric vehicle. It also happens to be a truck, which is kind of dumb, but Americans love trucks, so give them what they love. There's lots of reviews on YouTube you can check out. It actually is a very clever and interesting vehicle, and I wish them luck. Yeah, it does look pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's for me, but I really, really want it to be a thing. I think that would be incredible. Well, like, a huge number of vehicles sold in America, especially, are fleet trucks. You see, like, a lot of white Ford F-150s out there. You know why? Those are fleet trucks. Like, it's a very, very common vehicle need, and people who buy those need them to be cheap, durable, serviceable, plentiful, and customizable. And that's exactly what Slate is promising, so it could be really interesting. But getting a new car company off the ground is very difficult, so we'll see how it goes. Yeah, there's some funny things I think I posted them to our car channel, one of our slacks, where they show this flight truck, which, by the way, it looks very, very tiny. It is a very tiny vehicle. It looks hilariously small, not just small compared to today's pickup trucks, but even small compared to, like, pickup trucks of decades past. It is a small vehicle. And they showed it next to one of those giant $70,000, like, you know, thing the size of a house. And they said, just pointing out, the Slade has a larger bed. And I think they just meant length, maybe not width, but still. The monster, the gigantic pickup trucks we have in the U.S. today are essentially for people who really should have a sedan or probably a minivan but want to have a truck anyway and so they make this huge vehicle with a four cab on these terrible uncomfortable back seats and they like i guess we have to have a bed so it looks like a pickup truck and they put this tiny little bed on the thing it's totally useless it's never going to be used anyway it's always going to have a cover on it don't scratch up my bed there's no bed liner it's just like i don't know it's very depressing but the slate truck is like utilitarian it's like the little what whatever they are k vehicles from in Japan, tiny little truck, mostly bed, two doors, you know, it is, and this way you can turn the bed into, like, rear seats and stuff and, like, sacrifice that room, but lots of, sort of, like, it kind of reminds me of Marco's talk last episode about 3D printing, because, honestly, this entire car, the interior looks kind of like it's 3D printed, and I'm sure people are going to be 3D printing a ton of stuff to augment the interior, because, like, it doesn't even come with a radio. Like, there's an extra you can buy where you can mount your iPad. Like, it's just so customizable on the inside, and it's all plastic. And again, you can customize the back and turn it into, like, an open-top thing, like a Jeep KC where you have just a roll cage and open seats or, like, a cap on it. Like, it just it's very interesting, and it comes in one color. You know, it's like the Ford Model T. You can get any color you want, as long as it's black. Well, these are gray. Get it, Slate. But you can wrap them, and so they'll wrap it for you or you can do your own wrapping. I can't wait until I see one of these on the road, because I feel like if I see one of these, it's like somebody who really wanted a cool, interesting new thing, and especially if I see it customized, like it's like an art project. It's like a kit car where, like, this is the starting point. And then if you're the type of person who wants to add personality or custom abilities or 3D print crap and stick it to your dashboard, this is the car for you as long as the company stays in business. So speaking of car companies and older car companies in this case, there was a newsroom announcement. Shoot, it was a day or two ago. I'm sorry. I didn't capture the date. But I'll put a link in the show notes to the actual newsroom post. And it reads as follows. Apple and Ford today announced that Apple Maps will be integrated directly into Ford's upcoming Universal Electric Vehicle or UEV platform through Apple's new MapKit for Automotive SDK. Let me take it aside. Did we know this was a thing, the MapKit for Automotive SDK? I think you just read the announcement of it. That's what I thought, too. I mean, it's been new. Yeah, I mean, it's fine. I'm not, like, upset about it. I was very surprised. And I had assumed I had either forgotten or missed something. Unlike CarPlay Ultra, which was announced but no one ever used, they figured, why don't we wait until someone's actually going to use this before we announce this one? So continuing from the Newsroom Post, coming to Ford's UEV platform in 2027, this integration will deliver a navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle's displays. Leveraging Apple's new map kit for automotive SDK, Ford's UEV platform will offer drivers turn-by-turn directions using natural language, real-time traffic and incident information, intuitive search featuring detailed place cards, and routing options to help users easily find the best route. their destination. Additionally, Ford UEV drivers will benefit from an intelligent EV routing functionality, including battery preconditioning. Again, let me take a little aside here. All I hear about from people who are real electric vehicle nerds, and I mean that I think so far complimentary, is that they can't, there's reasons that car play can't be a thing, and one of those reasons is it's very important for an electric car to precondition the battery before it's going to get charged. It needs to know when, the navigation needs to know when the car needs to be charged, et cetera, et cetera. So when you repeat, let's go argue with me. I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, if you know, but I believe that preconditioning the battery is much more about like heat and like the temperature management of the battery to prepare it for fast charging. If you don't precondition the battery and you just pull up to a fast charger, you will still fast charge. It just might, you know, it might take a few minutes to like warm it up or, you know, whatever it's doing in that preparation. That's all. So what you're doing is like, I believe what you're doing, if you don't precondition the battery, is just artificially capping your charging speed for the first few minutes. I got it. So it's not like a huge difference. It's a minor thing. Yeah, but that's what Casey's saying. People complain about it. It's like, that's why you can't do your car play because it doesn't know about the battery, but my car's built-in system does and it preconditions it. And how big of a difference preconditioning is in terms of your charging speed depends entirely on, well, how fast is the charger you've been connecting to and what is the weather like and what temperature is the battery. But their point still stands, which is there's an integration with the car system that is smart about the battery, and then CarPlay's out there being dumb, like, oh, I'll route you to a charger, but I can't do anything about your battery. So you're going to get there? How are you going to get there? Whatever the temperature of your battery is when you get there, oh, well. And this is a new technology that Apple has that apparently integrates with at least Ford cars. It says, guess what? Apple software can tell the battery to do the thing that the built-in car system does. Yeah, so I will read that last thing one more time just so we have it fresh in mind. Additionally, Ford UAV drivers will benefit from an intelligent EV routing functionality, including battery preconditioning. Ford will also use road-level information from Apple Maps as part of the development of its next-generation Blue Cruise hands-free highway driving capability to deliver a more seamless on-ramp to off-ramp experience. I can't help but wonder, does this intuitive search include ads? Hope not. You never know. It'll read the billboards along the road and speak them out to you. Yeah, right. And take a cut some way, somehow. Well, but it's also worth pointing out, like, you know, again, once you have an ad revenue stream, you're only one soft quarterly projection away from twisting that knob a little bit more. I'm sure they probably have deals with the manufacturers of what they will and won't do in this situation and everything. but how much do we want to count on those over time? How much would you assume that would never happen? If it was a company other than Apple, especially an ad company like Google, if they were doing this, we would definitely say, well, yeah, they're probably going to have ads and maps the way they have ads and maps everywhere else, right? Apple can, the way we know Apple today, maybe the John Turner's era will change this. I don't think it will. The way we see Apple today, We cannot say for sure that they will not junk up any of their properties with ads because they have already been doing that. The App Store is junked up with ads. Maps is about to be junked up with ads. Apple News has always been junked up with ads. And these are all significant revenue streams for Apple. We have already seen that they will throw the user experience out the window to juice services revenue. Like, try using any of their apps without being an Apple One subscriber and getting everything. You see upsells constantly for their own stuff, even beyond the ads I was just talking about that are like direct ads for other things. Not only is Apple definitely an ad company, but they're a bad ad company. App Store search ads are terrible. I know. I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years on App Store search ads. They're horrible. But as a developer, you kind of have to buy them. It's a terrible system. They're not good at it, but they win by being the gatekeeper, not by being good. when it comes to stuff like this, if they are creating new properties within which they can serve ads, they have not shown that we should trust them at all not to. So in a situation like this where we're like, oh, maybe somebody will put ads. What we know today with our current level of trust in Apple around this particular topic, we have to assume that every service that can have ads in it for Apple eventually will until and unless they show us that they have been thinking different about that. But that has not been the case so far. See what you did there? Well, that same is true of Ford, unfortunately. And GM, like the whole reason they don't want to let Apple in is like, we want to control the ads and subscriptions and stuff like that. So, yeah, I'm not sure Apple is any worse than letting Ford control this because, you know, they would sell sponsorships to the same spots. I'm sorry, can we just go back a step? Did you say hundreds of thousands of dollars in Apple ads? I did say that. Jesus Christ. I'm not going to interrogate you further because I don't think I can handle that conversation, much less you, but holy God. Apparently, I don't think I want to think about it anymore. Anyway, let me get back to this newsroom post. So continuing, our new midsize electric vehicle will be priced around $30,000, said Jim Farley, Ford Motor Company CEO. The map kit for automotive SDK also enables automakers to deliver a cohesive navigation experience for drivers that is consistent with the look and feel of their vehicles and provides road-level information to help automakers build hands-free driving experiences. The SDK follows the same privacy principles that the Apple Maps app provides today. Apple does not collect users' location details and activity on the vehicle's map in a way that can be tied back to the individual user. I'm going to read just the beginning of that again. Apple does not collect users' location details. That's kind of doing a lot of work there, I think, because who knows what Ford is going to be doing, but that's all right. Also, good for them, good for Ford for saying it will be around $30,000, because we just said the slate is $25,000, so we'll see what happens. Well, I mean, there's been a long and storied history of people promising $30,000 EVs, and it's historically proven very difficult at that price point. Yeah. But we'll see how they do. Yeah, no argument. All right, finishing up. In addition to the integration of Apple Maps into Ford's UEV platform, CarPlay will continue to be available on Ford vehicles, providing drivers with a safe and smart way to use their iPhone in the car. Let me translate that from corporate speak to real person. Hey, Rivian Tesla GM, haha, go f*** yourselves. So good. I loved it. Loved it. Anyway, I think this was very interesting. I'm very much interested to see how this looks, you know, aesthetically and how it operates. Is it good? Is it not? But I really hope that this is a further step in the direction, as much as I snark, a step in the direction of Rivian and GM and Tesla. Hopefully, finally getting over themselves and adding CarPlay. Because as a wise man once said on CaseyList.com, CarPlay is additive. You don't have to use it. If you don't want your users to use it, they don't necessarily have to. If your stuff is that good, they won't use it. But for someone like me that pretty much demands it, that won't buy a car without it, it sure would be nice. It's also nice to see that Apple Maps, Apple Maps has come a long way since it's a very difficult launch. Yeah. And these days we don't say, oh, I can't believe Ford's putting Apple Maps in its car. Now it's going to not know where it's going to go. I still think Google Apps is better in certain ways, but one place that Apple has really excelled in the past many years is the actual visual appearance of the maps. Not only does it look pretty, but I think it does a good job of, like, information communication. What is a road? What is not a road? What is a sign? Is a stop coming up? Like, that type of information is easier, at least for me, to read on Apple's display than on Google's Maps display. and also a lot of the native in-car mapping things that I've seen on like rental cars and stuff that we've used I'm like oh this map is not good looking like the roads are just thin and don't let me know what they're really doing and the things that I want to read are too small or in a weird font or you know or just like the contrast isn't good. Apple Maps is I think does a pretty good job of both being readable and attractive. It's not always the win versus Google ones you can find on the web when we've talked about them on past shows I think lots of people saying I'm going to compare Google Maps to Apple Maps, not the driving like 3D flying through thing, but really just the 2D looking down like the Maps interface. And sometimes Google does things better. But in all those tests, I always feel like Google looks uglier. And there are some areas where Apple excels. It's one of the reasons I use Apple Maps mostly in my car, even though I think Google still has better traffic data. And Apple Maps still sometimes takes me on routes. Like when I use it, you know, just when I'm going in the local area, not because I don't know how to get there, but just because I want to know when some stupid construction is closed down a road, I want to know that before I get to it. So I'm like, oh, Apple Maps will tell me that. That's why I have navigation on when I'm driving to places I already know how to get to in my local neighborhood. But it also means that when Apple Maps tells me to go a certain way and I know how to get there, I'm like, no one would ever go that way. That's insanity. Apple Maps still does that sometimes. I guess it's probably like technically shorter or faster or whatever, but there are intangibles that Apple doesn't know about. I think maybe Google uses a little bit more crowdsourcing of like when most people go from A to B, they use this route, and the traffic's good, so I recommend that one. But anyway, I'm also kind of like Casey, would love to see how this looks. Because they described in one section of like, oh, it's going to like integrate it into the vehicle's experience. Like, is it going to be like themed? Right, right, right. Color change, so it's, you know, looks like the color of the vehicle or matches the Ford branding or something. But yeah, this seems like a more fruitful path than the CarPlay Ultra thing, which still, lo these many years later, has, let's say, extremely limited adoption. That's one way to put it. You're exactly right. I don't know. I just, I want so badly to get a different car, and we're not going to turn this into a whole conversation right now, but I think I'm ready to get rid of my Volkswagen. I love the car. There's nothing wrong with the car, as I sit here today, but I think I'm ready for a full electric car, which is very sad for my left leg, but that's neither here nor there. But there's just nothing on the market that I think that's it. See, now you know how I feel, and also about Max. I would say, for whatever it's worth, I know that BMW might be a hard sell for you, but I think the upcoming i3 is potentially very interesting. The SUV or the sedan? I can't recall. The sedan. Just close your eyes when you walk up to it. Yeah, the electric 3 Series. I think it looks very good in the previews and everything so far. Like, we'll see when it comes out. I suspect, Casey, as much as you love the i4, I suspect that new i3 is going to be very tempting for you. I 100% agree with you. I'm really – I want to move on because this is not a little neutral. But I 100% agree with you. I mostly think it looks good with the exception of the front. The front is real bad. but I don't think I'm going to want to pay $80,000, $90,000, whatever they're going to charge for this to get into it at the time frame. You can get into it like $65,000 probably. I don't think I want to pay that much either. I agree with you. It's not like driving a $25,000 car. I agree with you. I don't think I'm going to be able to get into this. Well, I will not choose to get into this car until it has fallen in price, it's coming off lease, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, get one after it's gone down or you know, a used one or whatever. Right, but I don't think I want to drive my eight-year-old car, which is in great shape, only has like 35,000 miles. I don't want to drive this eight-year-old car for another three-ish years, four years before I get this. So I think there's, I need to figure out what to do in the interim, and I just, I can't figure out what that is. And I think the answer may be the i4, but it's, it's, I'm not sold. There's nothing that I can look at and point to and say, yes, that's the one. And that makes me sad. Anyway, let's move on. let's talk Safari 27 and there's a post by Jeremy Keith at adactio.com I will put a link in the show notes so you don't have to worry about it it's pronounced archive Casey we learned that about the ARXIV.org site and everyone told us it's pronounced archive which is cute and clever they have an explanation involving Greek letters unfortunately there is a website called archive.org and it's not that one and it's a well known one Yeah, it's kind of popular. Yeah, so if everyone's saying, oh, my scientific paper is up at archive.org, which one? Yeah. Exactly. Because conceivably, scientific papers could be at either one, because the actual archive.org holds lots of stuff that may have left the web elsewhere. And anyway, it's silly. You know, I think, speaking of silly, I think your pronunciation of letterboxd is silly, but I think in this case we need to go that route to take a page out of your playbook, and it needs to be rtv.org. Yeah. Anyway, coming back to Safari 27. So at Adactio.com, Jeremy Keith writes, the upcoming version of 27 of Safari is looking very good. That's not because it's at the cutting edge of the latest web standards. Quite the opposite. Most of the changes listed for this release are bug fixes. That's what I want to acknowledge and applaud. And John, I believe it was, found WWDC session 204. What is new in WebKit for Safari 27? We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Where Jen Simmons says, I hear from web developers that it's challenging when you have to work around a problem in our browser engine. You expect more. We hear you. And we set out to greatly improve the quality of existing web platform features. We put our focus there this year rather than on implementing a whole lot of brand new ones. They showed a pie chart saying, like, here's the work that we did, and the large Pac-Man-sized piece of the pie chart is resolved issues. And then in the Pac-Man's mouth, the majority of the mouth is improved features. And then there's a tiny little sliver that's brand new features, and then an even tinier sliver that's deprecations. So this was, again, the thrust of this WWDC session about WebKit was not, look at all these new APIs we implemented. It was like, this is a rebuilding year. You're annoyed that we, you know, have longstanding bugs that are stopping you from adopting a feature, or there's some feature that we didn't implement all of or whatever. This year, we're going to concentrate on that work. We're going to fix all our bugs, the top bugs that you complain about, and we're going to find whatever tech that you're like, oh, I would use this because Safari doesn't have it, And we're going to put that one in. And this whole session is all about that. And a lot of people watching the session and applauding, because if you're a web developer, it's kind of like being, it's worse than being like an iOS developer. You're like, oh, they added this cool new feature on iOS, whatever, but I can't use it until most of my users like migrate. But iOS users migrate pretty quickly these days. But on the web, you're like, you know, this caniuseit.com website. I may have been getting that URL wrong. It's like on the web, it's like, okay, when can I use this feature? because web browsers have much more diversity than iOS versions, and people do not upgrade as quickly. And so you're like, and by diversity, I don't mean different browsers. I mean 800 different versions of Chrome and so on and so forth. Again, Chrome auto-updates itself, so it's not that bad, but you've got Firefox and blah, blah, blah, and back in my day, WebTV 1.0, which could barely read HTML. So when Apple rolls out a feature like this, then you can start your clock. It's like, great, in four years I'll be able to put this on our website. It will make my life so much easier assuming I'm still working at the company at that time. But still, you know, the best time to plant a tree is 25 years ago. The second best time is now. So thumbs up for adding these features. Yep, agreed. Then there was a contrarian take from Alex Russell. And Alex says basically, Safari is so far behind, it doesn't even matter. So this is on infrequently.org. And Alex writes, don't get me wrong. It's great that Apple is focusing on quality. it remains a persistent issue for Safari. But how much relief should long-suffering web developers expect? The best comparative measures come from the communal web platform test project. Comparing the current experimental builds with stable channel releases can illustrate the scale of change we can expect when the next major version of each browser launches. 90% is the minimum Apple requires across all WPT tests for competitors' engines in the EU and Japan, where it has been forced to allow them, in theory anyway. Safari barely clears the bar, and the source for that is WPT.FYI. Yeah, and then they show the WPT test pass rates, and you can see Safari just barely clearing the 90% line. It's hilarious, by the way, that Apple's thing to make to discourage people from using alternate browsers, this whole browser kit thing they made, like, oh, it's for security, blah, blah, blah. We can't just let you run Chrome because that would be too insecure, which is probably true, but also it's yet another system like the alternative app stores. It's like, it's so onerous to implement this, nobody wants to do it. Anyway, they threw in there, oh, and by the way, your browser has to pass this WPT test by at least 90% because we don't want people on our phones using crappy browsers. But then you look at the competitive browsers, and Chrome is pushing up against 98%, and Firefox is like 96%. So, yeah, if there's going to be another browser, if someone did actually make an alternate browser for iOS in the EU, it would probably be based on the Chromium Engine or Firefox, and it would easily clear the 90% bar. It's almost like they put it at 90% to say, well, you have to at least clear the bar that we cleared. Well, and I think this – I don't think Safari is ever going to be the browser for people who care about cutting-edge web standards. I mean, it hasn't been. And there was actually a time when it was that competitive. It was a long time ago. But there was a span in, like, you know, like the mid-2000s, 2010s. like there was a span where Safari was very competitive, very standards focused. And that was a time when Apple was not dominant. So it was very important to Apple, especially early in the Safari project, but, you know, also kind of midway through it. It was very important to Apple for the Mac to succeed that Safari had to be really good. And they they made it really good. Like those early versions of Safari were great. And Safari was like a leading, like beacon of awesomeness for web standards for a long time. But that was when Apple had to basically play catch up with the world like that, you know, it was mostly when they were still mostly about the Mac, like before the iPhone, or even in the early days of the iPhone, like they were still mostly, you know, Mac and early iPhone company. And so they had to comply with the standards to be competitive. And now Apple is so successful that they are dictating terms to the rest of the world most of the time. As I mentioned before, like Apple does not know how to negotiate, they just know how to dictate. And with web standards, what that means is other people are dictating to Apple what Safari needs to do. That's just not going to play well with Apple today because Apple doesn't need to listen anymore. Again, there was a time where they needed to listen, so they did, but now they don't. And you can also kind of see their point on a lot of these things. A lot of modern web standards, like just because something is declared a standard doesn't mean it's a good idea. It also doesn't mean that the people who declared it a standard aren't doing so for reasons or for interests that Apple might consider maybe unfairly biased or invalid or bad ideas on Apple's point of view. So for instance, if any of these web standards have implications on device security, battery life, or privacy, Apple's going to have possibly a different opinion on whether they're a good idea or how much of them they want to implement than somebody else might have. Also, if any of these web standards try to bring web apps up to levels of functionality that native apps have that Apple doesn't think web apps should have. Apple's going to have a problem with that, too. And maybe you could argue that part of the reason is their apps grow monopoly, and that might be part of the reason. In many cases, that probably is part of the reason. But also part of the reason might be they don't think it's a good idea for security or for device privacy. So they're going to have their reasons. And, again, just because something is declared a standard doesn't mean it's a good idea, and it doesn't mean that Apple agrees that every standard is necessary to implement. I've given my own opinions on this, on podcast quote standards that people try to launch, and I see both sides of the argument. So for Apple, something like this, it's like Safari's way behind. Well, behind in what? Is it behind in a way that Apple agrees is the definite right inevitable path to go on? Probably not. Now, that being said, I mean, obviously, Safari can always get better, and as somebody who converted to Chrome earlier this year, I see lots of ways that Safari can get better. Certainly, though, when I'm using Chrome on my laptop and I see the battery life burning down, I'm like, oh, jeez. But Apple has their reasons. It isn't just that, like, you know, they're not good at engineering. Like, that's not the reason here. If Apple does not implement a web standard, some of that is possibly because they don't have their foot on the gas, because that is true. Apple does not have their foot on the gas, and most areas they're not forced to compete. But a lot of it could be they're actively choosing that the quote-unquote standard that someone dictated at some other company, Apple thinks we don't agree that that's actually something that's a good idea for us. Anyway, all that is to say, if what you're looking for is the most standards-compliant browser, and, you know, again, who determines the standards? It's a lot of Google people. So the most standards are going to be things that Google people design and, of course, Google's browser is going to do them because they're the ones who design them. And, you know, Apple's going to not be competitive in that game if that's what you're optimizing for. So if what you want is the web browser that will work on the most websites possible, doing the most features possible, what you want is Chrome. and that's going to be the case probably for the foreseeable future. And again, Safari is a great choice for different reasons and different priorities, but that's the trade-off. Well, when it comes to web standards, nobody is dictating to Apple anything because Apple is on the same W3C committees as Google and the Firefox people that determine these standards, and Apple is notorious for throwing its weight around to put the kibosh on the standards that it doesn't like. So it's not as if these standards fall from the sky and Apple's like, oh, another stand, oh, great, we have to implement it. But they don't always succeed. Well, they're there in the room, and they succeed a surprising amount of time. They are powerful, all out of proportion, I think, with their market share, which is the next factor, which is like, okay, Chrome is an increasing problem for Apple as Chrome becomes so massively dominant in market share, where people don't even test their websites in Safari anymore, and they're just relying on these specific features and bugs that are in Chrome, works in Chrome, I'm done. And even if Safari, in the case where Safari is doing something correctly that Chrome is not, the Chrome behavior is considered correct because it's the Internet Explorer effect. There's been some posts about, oh, Safari is the new Internet Explorer because it sucks and people have to design websites for it. But no, the one with dominant browser market share is always the Internet Explorer because whatever that browser does, that is the default, and your website has to work with it. And especially as the market share becomes more and more dominant, whatever Chrome does becomes the standard, setting aside the web standards. And, yes, there are web standards that they fight about or what they should implement or whatever. But I think this, you know, this WWC session about the features implementing is not so much about features that Apple disagrees with that they're somehow changing your mind about. It's almost entirely about, and that's why this Alex Russell's post is so snarky and upset about this, features that Apple claims to have implemented years ago with much fanfare. Hey, there was a W3C decided on this thing. Apple participated. Apple said, yes, we agree. This is a great feature. We're totally going to add it to Safari. And they added it to Safari in 2021 and declared victory and moved on. But guess what? Safari's implementation was incomplete or buggy. And Apple just never revisited it. Let me know if this sounds familiar. Apple just said, well, we did that already. It's done. And it's like, well, Chrome, A, had a better implementation out the door, and B, Chrome has a new version every two days. And when they found these little bugs in their implementation back in 2021, they iterated and iterated and iterated. And by 2023, the Chrome implementation was fast, rock solid, had all the features in the standard, and Apple's hadn't been touched since 2021. And that's where people are like, I can't use this feature. Not because Apple disagrees with it. Apple supposedly implemented it, but, oh, this one method, there's a bug in it. It just basically makes it unusable. And actually, there was a minor revision to the standard, you know, three months later that Apple never picked up. And then you're just sitting there waiting. Well, surely this WWC Apple will fix this thing. And it just never happens. And people get frustrated. And so when they say, like, I can't do this because, you know, that test is like Safari has a 90% or whatever. Those tests are always like not only do you have to implement it, you have to actually implement it correctly and sometimes also in a way that doesn't, like, massacre performance in terms of, like, computational performance or whatever. Like, has it implemented in the same way? There was a couple of things that have gone like this in the past. I forget the particular technology. It might have been IndexDB or something where Apple had a notoriously bad implementation and just never changed it. And people, like, there was these warnings among web developers, like, yeah, they say to implement it, but don't try to use it. You'll just, you'll lose your data and it'll be terrible. Wait until they fix it. And there was some battle about that, about it. XD versus a different standard or whatever. But anyway, Apple in this situation, again, they throw their weight around in ways that I don't quite understand how they have this power and some kind of bureaucratic, like however the W3C works because market share wise, they should barely have a say in anything market share wise. They should, they should be out there doing like, like you said, what they had to do back when Safari was being written, which is whatever currently works on the web. we need to make Safari deal with that like before Safari 1.0 that was their thing it's like we're not dictating to anybody just the web is out there and people are using browsers that work with it probably at that point Internet Explorer maybe Mozilla or whatever we have to make Safari do whatever they're doing even if what they're doing is dumb or stupid or buggy we have to make it work with that and then they were like Safari is going to be a web standards thing but then it was like just well there's a lot of web standards and they keep coming out with new ones and even though we fight against the ones we don't like sometimes things come out and even if we are in favor of it it's like well But how much money are we going to throw at Safari this year? And as you noted, do any of these features threaten our app store dominance by making it possible to have web-based apps look like native apps? And Apple is so weird about that because Apple did do the thing where you can put apps on the home screen that are actually web apps. No one made them do that. They did that on their own so long ago. It's like, well, so clearly someone at Apple at some point thought, hey, this is a cool thing. You could have a web app. It's a website, but it will show up on your home screen on your phone like it's an app. It'll launch like an app. It won't look like a web browser. And we will support that. I think they might have supported that even before there was a standard for it. And then when there was a standard for it, they supported the standard. And it's like, okay. But on the other hand, Apple's like, yeah, look at the things we argue against at the W3C. Look at the features that we say no to. And you're like, boy, a lot of those look like things that would make web apps be able to compete with native apps. So which is it? Is it just two different groups inside Apple, right? I'm sure Jen Simmons wants to support every single web standard. She is a web developer through and through. She wishes she had all the money in the world and could support every web standard better than anybody. She wants 100% of all those tests. But Jen Simmons is not the CEO of Apple, right? So as with all these things, it comes down to like we were talking about with like the bug fixes. Yes, having, you know, LLMs help find bugs is great and everything. But the prerequisite is someone who determines what resources are going to be spent on what has to say, you are allowed to spend this year mostly doing bug fixes. If without that permission, yeah, you can try to sneak it in under the covers and it makes you more efficient. I could fix 10 bugs in this time. I could fit one. But if your bug fix allowance time was 1% of your time, it still doesn't make that big of a dent. So you need permission for management and resource allocation to say, this year, we're going to be responsive to our customers, responsive to web developers, and find out, like find out from them because, you know, Apple could be insular. What are web developers fists about? Is it that one feature from 2021 that's been buggy? Like, which one is it? This is a whole bunch of features that we didn't implement or we have implemented or there are bugs in. But we have to know which ones would have the most impact on customers. And in that respect, I don't think Apple is looking at these WPT test pass rate things because those probably weight all the features equally. What Apple wants to know is which are the features that are hurting web developers the most, which are the features that are making it so that when someone goes to a website in Safari and it doesn't work, which features are causing that to happen? Works fine in Chrome. Why does it work fine in Chrome? Which feature does Chrome have that we don't have? Or which feature does Chrome implement in a different way than us? even if we're quote unquote right, they need to go back to the Safari 1.0 mode and say, whatever Chrome is doing, we need to do exactly that. Because otherwise that website won't work right in Safari. It's one of the main reasons I use Chrome. And it's one of the main reasons I sometimes encourage my family to use Chrome. Is this website not working right to you? In particular, I always say to do it on government websites, which you would think that would be the opposite where it's like, well, government, don't they have to support all these web browsers? There's probably laws that say they do, but there's laws that say a lot of things. Probably they're testing the website in Chrome. So if you're having any, the jankier the website is, and it's not working in Safari, try it in Chrome. Very often it works. And that is one of the things that they have to fight against. So, you know, I feel for the Safari team because I know the people who are working, actually working on Safari and WebKit are 100% aligned on everything that Alex is complaining about, but they don't decide the priorities at Apple. like it's great that they get to work at Apple but I'm sure they argue internally all the time let us do X let us do Y let us do Z and then I don't understand whatever shadowy cabal is at the W3C arguing against the features that Apple apparently doesn't want again sometimes for good reasons about privacy and you know battery life or whatever but sometimes for clearly nefarious reasons who are those people what are they like literal lobbyists that their only job is to go to the W3C and screw things up for the web I don't know sometimes someday there'll be a tell-all book But I think there's a lot of people at Apple fighting the good fight, and I'm happy to see this year that the Pac-Man-shaped thing has resolved issues. Honestly, I think everybody at Apple should have that same pie chart for the next five to ten years, and things will be a lot better. But, again, I'm not the CEO of Apple either. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. This blog post, I think it made some very good points, but it was clearly someone who was very angry about Apple wanting to continue to be angry about Apple. Yeah, I mean, I was angry about IE. IE6, you know, angry was about IE6. You cannot imagine the anguish. It would just stop you from doing anything good on the web. And Safari has filled that role in that, like, you know, everybody's using Chrome, and all these features are available, and this feature is 10 years old, and Apple was totally in favor of it and touted it when they rolled it out, and it's still broken. And you know it's like talking to Apple. It's like a brick wall. It's like, hey, Apple, you like this feature. You implemented it. You told us to go and use it. Here's the WWC, and it's been broken for five years. What the hell? And you hear nothing. Indeed. All right, and then finally with regard to Safari, Apple has released a Safari MCP server. There is a blog post over at webkit.org where Saren Yitbarek from Apple writes, in Safari Technology Preview 247, we're introducing the Safari MCP server, a model context protocol server for web developers. The Safari MCP server gives your agent the ability to know how your code actually renders in the browser by connecting it to a Safari browser window. Any MCP-compatible client can connect to the Safari MCP server. By connecting your agent to a Safari browser window, your agent can emulate what your users experience, giving it the information it needs to debug more autonomously, like access to the DOM, network requests, screenshots, and console output. It speeds up your debugging process and lets you stay in the comfort of your terminal, which means fewer rounds of hopping windows and typing prompts to debug your code. There's a section in the blog post why we built this. There are many ways to build for the web, both with and without AI. If AI is part of your workflow, we think this tool will help make it even more productive. And if it isn't, that's okay, too. If you end up giving it a try or if this is your first time using an MCP server, let us know what you think. You can find these individuals on Mastodon and Blue Sky. If you run into issues, follow WebKit bug report. Filing issues really does make a difference. So says everyone at Apple. And WebKit actually has an open bug tracker, unlike feedback and radar. So that's nice. So at least you can watch your thing not getting picked up. But, you know, it's open source so you can contribute fixes yourself, but it's a little bit of a challenging code base. So I like that part at the end where it's like, you know, MCP, it's for, you know, agents, LLMs, coding agents to use. MCP basically like exposes the functionality of your application in a programmatic way using the standard so that agents can essentially puppeteer your app to make it do something. That's what MCP is for. And they say, you know, why do we add this? We added MCP, you know, because we think if you use AI, if AI is part of your workflow, we think this tool will help. And if it isn't, that's okay, too, because they don't want to be like, look, we're forcing you to use AI. AI is still a difficult topic for a lot of people. And Apple is hedging. They're, you know, unlike the rah-rah AI is great at everything. Whoever wrote this blog post is like, some people aren't AI, some people aren't. If you aren't, fine, this is not for you. We understand. We still like and support you, right? Like, so I thought that hedge was interesting. But on the flip side of this, this is really like if you're doing web development with some kind of agent, very often the agent will be like, okay, there's a million libraries for various languages that will essentially make a headless Chrome using the Chrome, open source Chromium engine. And, you know, a headless Chrome I can run on doing web development, which is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the back end. And I can all run all of that headless with this headless Chrome thing so that I can actually execute the page where the JavaScript will execute it. And it'll be a DOM, you know, like essentially automated testing of a real web browser. The next level up from that is, okay, but what if I could control your actual web browser? Not as headless Chrome or a headless Safari, but like literally Chrome or Safari. And Chrome, there's like a flawed Chrome plugin that does this. And Safari, same deal, where you would see a Safari window appearing on your screen. I don't know if they can hide the window. Maybe they can. But anyway, it's puppeteering the actual running Safari. And the reason that's important is because in the absence of this, you just perpetuating the cycle where someone using a coding agent and they making a website and the coding agent is dutifully writing tests and checking things out and it got unit tests and it got integration tests and it got end tests where it runs the actual browser engine and blah blah blah And you know what the agent's just made for you? A website that works in Chrome. And someone goes to your website for the first time and they go, oh, your website didn't work. You're like, what are you meaning? Oh, my test pass is great. I tried all the time. It's wonderful. It's like, well, I'm using Safari. because the agents can only iterate on failures that they see during their tests. And if they never test in Safari, I mean, this is the same exact problem that humans have, where if someone makes a website, they're using Chrome, they're testing in Chrome. Once it works in Chrome, then they're done with your project, right? The same is true of agents. If the agent can't test in Safari, it will never know what's broken in Safari. And so Apple's out there going, please, please, agents and developers, we've made an MCP for you. please at least consider trying, consider telling your agent that we exist. We'll register our MCP, and maybe on the off chance they'll look at that, and, you know, if someone writes in their problem description, and by the way, this website should not only work in Chrome, then maybe the agent will be like, oh, I see you have a Safari MCP server. I'll try it in there, too. Oh, it breaks in there for this reason, and it can fix it. So they're trying to do what they can, but it is an uphill battle given Chrome's market share. I wish I had looked this up, but whatever the market share is for Chrome, it's big. And for Safari, especially on the desktop, it's very, very small. Safari on mobile, doing pretty good because of the iPhone. But even there, Android is still pretty big. Finally, Federico writes with regard to this, I asked Codex about comparing Safari's MCP to its own Chrome extension and the older Playwright. The verdict, although Chrome has a richer API with Chrome DevTools when it comes to network requests, Codex actually preferred Apple's leaner, more direct approach for letting an agent drive and debug a browser. I love asking the coding agents their opinion on things. It's like they don't have an opinion. But, yes, you can ask them to show you the pros and cons in the feature lists and so on and so forth. But all this is showing that Apple is apparently, you know, again, putting in a good effort and trying to do a good job. And it's just a question of, you know, who will adopt these tools we are laying out before you? We want to participate. We want your website to work in Safari. What can we do to make that happen? They're trying. This podcast was made possible by contributions by listeners like you. Thank you. Hey, so we don't have a whole bunch of ads this week, and we thought we'd take a moment to talk about ATP membership. So if you are interested in avoiding moments like this one and all the other ads on the show, then you can go to ATP.fm slash join, where you can be a member. It is just $8 a month or $88 per year, at least in American money, and you get all sorts of perks. You get ATP over time, which is more ATP. The only way you can get ATP over time is by being a member. And that's where we do some topics that just keep sliding down the show notes or we just don't have time for. And it's actually really, really fun. It's about 15-ish minutes there or thereabouts. And it's the only way to get it is being a member at ATP.fm slash join. You also, like I said, get ad-free versions of the show. You get the bootleg, which is our unedited version of the show that Marco publishes literally minutes after we hang up the phone. So we typically record on Wednesday nights by first thing Thursday morning. If you're an American, you will have an ATP waiting for you, often one to two days before everyone else gets it. There's also bonus episodes. We are just shy of 40 bonus episodes. I just counted and I might have missed one. So maybe it is 40. We have the ATP tier list, which are my personal favorite, where one of these days it will probably become the end of the show because we typically nearly murder each other during the process. But they're fun. We also talk about inside stuff with our work and, you know, convince each other to do or not to do things. We watch movies. We do all sorts of fun stuff. And you also, if you're an ATP member, get a 15% discount on our time-limited merchandise sales, which there's one every few months. So if any or all of this sounds exciting, and it should, go to ATP.fm slash join and check out the membership options. You can do this by month or by year. You can do it in dollars, euros, or pounds. So go and check it out, atp.fm.join. Thank you to all of you for making ATP possible. Let's do some Ask ATP, and Pete Ottery writes, Marco, can you share how the reception of transcription and overcast is going? I love the story of you setting it up, and I applaud the execution. But I find myself never looking at it or needing to. Do you feel it was all worthwhile? Before Marco answers this, let me throw in my two cents. Oftentimes, I have used transcription for a couple of things. One is, and this was such a brilliant thing that you added, and I can't remember if I complimented you publicly, privately, or not at all. I think the answer is not at all. Publicly. What did I just say? Publicly, privately, or not at all. I know. I'm answering you. You complimented him publicly. I already know what you're going to say. Oh, about the musical thing? Okay, okay. Then never mind. All right. We'll fix all that in post. Yeah, you've got to leave it in. It's wonderful. I know. We'll see if I'm wrong about what you're going to compliment him about. No, I was going to say the music notes on the side. I was right. Okay, you were right. Okay, good. I thought I'd put something publicly. Let me double down on it or reiterate or whatever the turn of phrase is. I really love music notes because a lot of times there will be musical beds on something I don't care about. Now, that could be ads, but it could be other things. And going to the end of the music notes is so wonderful. The other thing that surprised me that I really like about transcriptions is a lot of times when I'm getting ready for bed and I'm not like having a conversation with anyone because I'm brushing my teeth. I'll pop in an AirPod and I use a motorized electric, whatever you want to call it, toothbrush. And even with an AirPod in, unless I make it absurdly loud, it's a little difficult for me to tell precisely what people are saying because I listen at like 1.7x or something like that. However, if I have the transcription running and I'm vaguely looking at it as I'm brushing my teeth or what have you, it makes it so much easier for my brain to put together what the heck people are saying. and so I don't have to blare my AirPods, or AirPod, oftentimes I'm running mono at that point, I don't have to blare it, and I can actually follow along with the conversation at the speed in which I want to follow along with it. So for me personally, a triple plus would use again. Thank you. 1.7x. Yeah, that's actually, I took note of that as well, that's actually faster than I would have guessed. That's a little fast. It took a long, long time for me to get to that point. Yeah, I think the fastest show that I run is about 1.6, but my usual speed for most shows is like 1.1 or 1.2, depending on the show. I just listen to too many darn podcasts. That's the problem. I'm over here down in the slowness, Werner Vingy, I think. Anyway, I'm at 1X. The only thing I do at more than 1X is WWDC videos because Apple's publication style makes those people talk so slowly and deliberately that I go 1.25 for all WWDC videos. I'm 1.5 on most of those. So transcription. Casey, I think you nailed the biggest use cases that I use it for. Basically skimming a show. So that's like for me, whenever there is part of a show that I'm trying to skip past, usually it's an ad. Like, if you listen to any big shows, like, from big publishers where the ads are all just DAI, you're basically hearing radio commercials stuck into podcasts. Like, they're not even a host read. They're just like, here's another ad for Ice-T and T-Mobile. Like, oh, God. So I listen to a few shows that do that. And so it's very easy for me to swipe over the transcript and scroll to the end using the music notes or my little cut icons or a combination of both. and I can quickly look at the text and say, oh, tap right there and boom, I'm right at the segment start of the next segment. I also will occasionally use this even for shows that I'm not skipping an ad for that I just kind of want to skip a topic. And they don't have chapters. Or if I'm trying to skip part of a chapter, like I don't care about baseball, scroll, scroll, scroll. Yeah. What show could you be talking about? I find that the transcripts are a much easier, faster, and better way to skim past something in a podcast or to find something in a podcast, or if I have a podcast playing and I realize, oh, I zoned out for the last couple of minutes because maybe I was distracted by something else, and I want to go back, I will often use a transcript to skim back, too, to see what did I just miss, and it helps me more easily find the place that I want to go back to or to skim back and see what I did just miss, and maybe I don't have to go back. So generally speaking, transcripts for me are, an assisting technology for skimming through different parts of a podcast, usually skipping past things I don't want to hear, but even sometimes going back and seeing what I did just hear. And because that's the role of them for me, they work very well, even though that, like, from an accuracy point of view, they're still pretty bad. But for what I'm using the transcript for, the accuracy almost doesn't matter at all because I'm not reading it as a replacement for listening to it. I'm using it as a visual cue to skim around in it and now that I'm accustomed to skimming around in a podcast that way when I have to skip it by just the audio skipping I feel like I'm a caveman this is the most primitive awful tool to skip around a podcast using seat controls and audio now that I'm accustomed to the transcript it's painful when I'm in the car and I have to skip around because I don't have the transcript from the car, and that's, oh, that's tough. But that's the use that I find for them is skimming. And from the feedback from people, it's actually, I don't get a lot of feedback about it, to be honest, but the feedback, the little feedback that I do get is pretty positive. That being said, I think part of why I don't get a lot of feedback is it is kind of buried in the UI, and I don't know, I don't have any firm plans around this yet, so I don't want to guarantee anything, but at some point I would like to explore integrating the transcript better into the now playing UI. Like, what I was just saying about how basic seek controls now feel primitive to me, I think there might be something there. Maybe the transcripts should be involved in seeking more directly. I think, you know, the even easier solution there is all these, you know, Instagram reels and TikToks or whatever, just do the thing where whatever is currently being spoken is shown in little text that goes, sometimes they do one word at a time. I'm sure you've all seen them. Like the reason you can watch a reel with your phone muted is because they show the transcript one or two words at a time with the current word being bold. And sometimes the transcription is not accurate, but that you can figure out what they're saying. And that's on the now, essentially the quote unquote now playing screen for whatever short form video you're watching. So I can imagine a now playing screen in overcast that when I hit play, if I were to glance I would see the words being spoken flashing two or three words at a time just constantly underneath the thing. And if I were to tap on those words, it would take me to the full transcript. That's just one possibility. But I know what you're saying about speaking in terms of, like, can I get a textual, a visual textual search for speaking instead of the essentially modeled after, you know, CD players or whatever, back, forward, you know, skip or whatever buttons. That sounds more ambitious to me than the much simpler one of just essentially show me the closed captioning of this podcast. Yeah, and the way I originally envisioned the UI for this was I just wanted to put a CC, you know, closed caption button on the main screen, and you would tap it, and it would stick it over the artwork. I ended up doing that for no good reason. I don't know why I didn't do that, but that was how I was envisioning this feature for many years. But I do think that, like, yeah, those CD player style controls, we haven't rethought those in a long time. And now that we have this technology that is way better for skimming through a file, maybe that deserves some rethinking. But that's more of a down-the-road thing. Well, speaking of not down-the-road, I hope you mentioned using the transcript for skimming and for skipping over stuff and going back to where you left off. But you also mentioned finding things. And every time I go to that screen, I'm like, where's the search box? Where's the search box? Oh, yeah, you want to search. Please, it's just text, Marco. Please let me search. One thing I want to explore with that is, you know, all of the search I have in the app so far is basically old style search. It's like, you know, SQLite FTS, you know, full text search. It's keyword based, you know, very loosely phrase based, maybe. I'm curious to explore like the on-device foundation model stuff for AI based search, basically. of like now we have better search algorithms that can take things much more abstractly. Like what episode did John talk about? So and so like, you know, like that, that kind of search. I think I think that's what people actually want out of a search these days. They probably do. But also, I just want actual text search within the one transcript I'm currently looking at. Well, the so my challenge with that, though, is the accuracy is not very good. So it might not find what you're looking for. I understand. I'm willing to battle through the words that sound similar. All right. All right. I just want a fighting chance. I can try the three different words that it might be misinterpreted as. I just want to find within the thing. It just, it kills me. It kills me all the time. Because I'm like, because then I do what you're doing, which is like, okay, well, the alternative is, how well does my brain work? How fast can I scroll this? Skim, skim, skim, skim. And you're hoping the unconscious part of your brain is going to spot the word Mac Pro in the things on the section. and usually it does but it's like we have the technology we can type mac space pro and hope the transcription worked and you know for most of the times i'm looking for it does i i didn't complain too much about this at 1.0 but as time progresses i'm like where's my search box where's my search box all the stuff you're talking about is awesome great good ideas i agree it's harder than this this is just literal plain text substring no regular expression search maybe i'm the only one who would use it but when i want it to be there and i find myself resorting to skimming I do feel like the caveman you described. Don't you all wish you could lobby for your favorite app directly to the developer? The privileges of podcasting. Oh, yeah. All right. Let's move on to our second question. Elijah writes, a year ago, John posited that Apple could, under new leadership, pursue, quote, growth the hard way. With the Neo, Apple is indeed pursuing Mac growth. But John's Apple turnaround article or post focused on growing the iPhone. ATP 689 now acknowledged, quote, they've been trying to Neo the phone like crazy, but it's hard to Neo. Alternatively, in ATP number 641, we asked Apple to consider, quote, why did that person choose a Samsung Galaxy? Do they have a different feature set? So Elijah says, what strategy sees Apple winning over Android users? A privacy screen, a DEX-style desktop mode, replaceable batteries? The current feature set, crash detection, satellite connectivity, Find My, etc. doesn't seem to be doing the trick, nor did the pre-neo $430 iPhone SE. What do you think, John? Tech nerds who are listening to this episode and tech nerds in general who are interested in iOS versus Android or are always like, the feature that I love about Android is what iOS would need to add to win me over there. And the feature is always some nerdy, customizable thing that most Android users don't use. And so even though that's what they want, you know, like, oh, some, you know, replaceable batteries or some feature like the privacy screen is obscure or better configurability or the ability to customize is one thing that I care about. Those are advantages of Android, and it's why people who want that stick with Android. But it would be, I would not recommend Apple pursue that strategy to get Android people over because all you would get is that tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of Android users who love that stuff. And honestly, you're never going to satisfy them because they want, they always want more. like they're the Android power users, right? But Android is huge, and people, you know, half the world buys Android phones, and it's not because of all those things that nerds care about. So really I feel like is essentially they have to Neo it. They have to do what they did with the Neo, which is like what's the barrier to entry? Number one has got to be price. Make a phone that is cheaper but feels expensive. And Apple's been trying, and for whatever reason, all their various SE phones, And, you know, from the 5C on, Apple's been trying to say, here's an iPhone. It feels like an iPhone. It looks like an iPhone. It's got the cachet of an iPhone. You're going to love it as much. Everyone who loves an iPhone loves it. But it's so much cheaper that it suddenly enters a price range that Apple wasn't really competing in before. Now, setting aside the price increases with the RAM and storage apocalypse and all the other stuff, the Neo really was their first revisiting of the strategy of, you know, well, maybe we could sell more Macs if we figured out what people who aren't buying Macs are complaining about. The number one complaint I'm sure was Macs are too expensive. And they did it somehow, amazingly, without making a Mac that is crappy because the Neo is not crappy. That's proved hard on the phone. I think the margins are actually probably higher on the phone, but for whatever reason, they haven't figured out the right formula. Maybe they're afraid on the phone of cannibalizing because they make a really good one. they'll cannibalize the other phone sales because unlike the Mac where like people who are buying the more expensive Macs, like they might not be well served by a Neo. If you need a MacBook Pro, the Neo is probably not going to get you to switch. Oh, it's so much cheaper. Yeah, but like it's significantly less powerful. And maybe who knows? Maybe the Neo is cutting into their sales of what were previously the lowest price things like the MacBook Air and stuff. But we'll see what else to say about that, which is probably nothing. And we probably won't be able to into it from their sales. But still, that is a danger. And in the phone in particular, they just all look like little rectangles, right? Like, even more so on the Mac, the RAM and storage and multiple CPUs and local AI, like, there's just not a lot of room for variation in a device that's this small with the battery constraint to be what it is, whereas laptops at least can get bigger and thicker and desktops can go above that. So, yeah, I think it is a thing they should continue to try to do. But I think the strategy is to do, like, literally what they did with the Neo and not do the thing that every Android nerd listening to ATP wishes they would do. Because I'm not saying that it's bad that Android people like that. I'm saying Apple will never satisfy them. And if they want 100% of those customers, they would shift market share by, like, 1%. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, if you look at why most Android users chose Android, it's almost always about price, especially if you leave the super rich countries like the U.S. and you go other places. It's even more about the price, but that's a huge part of it. There is no significant nerd power user market that's choosing Android for its nerd power user features. For Apple, that's not significant enough to be worth addressing at all. If those of you out there who are in that market and who are yelling right now, I don't have to say that there aren't any of you, but that's not going to make a dent in Apple's numbers. And even the form factor argument, which is always like, oh, but Android has so much more variety. You can get them big and small and foldable and this and that. And it's like if only Apple offered more variety. But, like, I think it is secondary. Like you said, Marco, someone's going in there like, I don't want to pay a lot for this phone. And then now when I've decided this is my price range, oh, there's a big one and a small one and a folding one. That's nice, but if there wasn't a big one, a small one, a folding one, they wouldn't say, oh, now I'm going to look at Apple for twice the price. No, they would take whatever they could get. So it is nice that there's more variety, but first of all, I think Apple has been doing a great job of increasing the variety in the iPhone line recently, and they're going to do it again with a foldable one soon, so watch out for that, and maybe the 20th anniversary one. Not that one company is never going to give you all the diversity of the Android space, but for a long time there was one iPhone, and then there was a couple of them, and they were all very similar, just different sizes, and they really have blossomed lately with the Air and even the Mini and the foldable one. I think they're doing a pretty good job, and they could extend that a little bit as long as they're making sure that they, like, you know, when they didn't have a big phone, that was a problem. But I think they're covering a lot of those bases. But I do think the massive variety in Android only becomes a decision point after someone has already chosen Android because that's within their budget. And even then, like, when you look at what most people, like what most Android users are using looks like, you know, a mid-sized phone, just like Apple's phones. Like it isn't the form factor that is making people choose it. It's almost always price. How would Apple possibly address that, the low price market? And I think they are addressing it down to the level they are willing to address it. Or able, because like cameras are expensive, you know, like screens are expensive. It's tough. Right. Right. Like when when people talk about Android having, you know, worldwide, whatever it is, like 75 percent, whatever the worldwide market share is, that's not a bunch of people using flagship Samsung and Google phones. It's a whole bunch of people using some like very inexpensive phones with very inexpensive components that are nowhere near the cutting edge of what the high end stuff and pretty much every iPhone is offering. That's a market that I don't think Apple wants to address because the compromises it would take to address it from Apple's point of view would be so vast. I don't think they're in it. I think Apple is very happy taking the percentage of profit in the cell phone industry that they do. Now, that was very different from the Mac. The reason the Mac with Neo made so much sense to do is that Apple's share of the PC laptop market was way lower than their current share of the smartphone market. And I think they must have seen that as something that, like, from Apple's point of view, the Neo is not very compromised. They really did a very, like, they really kind of nailed, like, what can we make for a significantly lower price than our other stuff that we can still feel proud of? And you look at the Neo, like, it's cool. I don't think Apple could make anything that would be a Neo version of the iPhone That would be like half the price of iPhones today, but still using new components. The MacBook Neo, they really had that opportunity because it was a totally different market. They had totally different tradeoffs they could make that would save a huge amount of cost without making what they view as a crappy product. I think to go back to the question of how do you entice Android users, John stole one of my answers, which was different form factors. Do you want a foldable phone? Well, you can't have a foldable iPhone. Not yet, anyway. The only other thing I can think of, which I will be the first to say, is extremely esoteric and nerdy. And I get that and I acknowledge it. But I was trying to think about, like, what did I covet in the past that Android could do that iPhones couldn't? And the only thing I could think of is that it is possible, or at least last I heard, it is possible to have like a TSR in DOS speak. You could have an app that has a component that still runs even if the app isn't running. And iPhones and iOS has actually gotten much better about this over time. There's very few use cases that I can think of that you can't make work with iPhone software today, with iOS software today or apps today. But that's the only thing that I always thought, man, that would be cool. Now, the question you should ask me is, well, why would that be cool, Casey? And I've got no good answer. But that's the only software trick that I can think of that I knew Android phones could do that iPhones can't. And I don't even know why that would be useful, but I feel like it would be useful. But that's it. And there are some, like, amazing, fun capabilities that Android phones have that people love a lot that Apple is just not going to do. Like, you know, some of the ways that Google is integrating some of their AI features and everything, like the ways things like widgets work. Like, there are just some fundamental differences that people, that many people do just prefer on Android. You know, especially if you're heavily into the Google ecosystem. Like, there's a lot of good reasons for that. But Apple's never going to make those kind of changes because that's just not what iOS is. It isn't how iOS works. It isn't Apple's style. It isn't iOS's style. So they're never going to win over those people. But again, like those people, I don't think Apple has a chance of winning them over, no matter what Apple does, because that's not what those people are looking for. So instead, if Apple were to focus on growing the iPhone market significantly, it would basically entirely need to be about price. And again, as we talked about, I don't think they have a lot more room they could go down and still have it be something that Apple wants to sell. And we can get to that. It's just because phones are still kind of cutting edge. Like, we're still in the phase where, like, everyone can essentially make their phones a little bit better every year, even if it's only just, like, slightly better screen technology, slightly better cameras, slightly better, you know, battery life or whatever, and the CPU, obviously, and GPU and stuff. So they're still, like, getting better. Like, I think everyone, whatever the economic turn is like, the phones haven't completely satisfied the market because everyone has the complaints like, oh, my phone died. I wish everyone would love their phone to be a little bit lighter for the battery to last a little bit longer, for the screen to be a little bit brighter, and for it never to be slow. We're not quite there yet. Whereas with laptops, especially before the dawn of local AI, which most people are still at this point not really using, it does web browsing. You can run a spreadsheet. You can watch a movie on it. Everything is fine. And even the battery life has gotten pretty amazing. So laptops are closer to satisfying. and as laptops approach that kind of like well we're we're starting to be able to satisfy most people's needs it created this section of the curve where it's like well you can make a laptop with a phone chip and most people will find it extremely satisfactory we might get there with phones with advances in technology and solid state batteries and so on and so forth or eventually the flagship phones are so good that you see this little section underneath it's like you know we can make a phone for half the price that most people would find entirely satisfactory we're just not there tech-wise with phones because they are so miniaturized and so demanding and they're on the cell network and we use them all day like they're they are not quite yet completely fulfilling all of our needs we're still advancing on them it's just it's it's just a younger product right we couldn't make these kind of phones at all not too long though whereas the laptop has been around much longer so watch for that this is not a thing that is unchangeable forever maybe sometime in our lifetime, technology will exist to make a phone that is satisfying in the way that the Neo is satisfying for significantly less money. And when that happens, probably five years later, Apple will do it. All righty. And then finally for Ask ATP, in the past, you have mentioned that it is recommended that you create a separate Apple account for doing development. My question is, how does one go about doing this? When I go to sign up for a new account, I'm required to provide email address and phone number. My phone is already linked to my existing Apple account, so it is not valid. I asked at the Apple store and they didn't know. I hit up the Apple support app and it says it's Apple's policy for every Apple account to be linked to a phone number for security and recoverability. How does one go about actually creating a separate account apart from inventing a time machine to go back in time before you were required an associated phone number? I don't have any good answer for this. I genuinely am not sure. Well, let's revisit the premise here, which is creating a separate Apple account for doing development. I think a lot of of the reasons the particular people of our age and our circles do this is because we have a time machine which is called being old and we had apple ids a long time ago a lot of us have apple ids that were not email addresses my apple my original apple id was not an email address it was just a username with no at sign in it whatsoever eventually apple made us change all those to email addresses but because we had that from way back in the day later when the apple id system was you know becoming more advanced, you could create an Apple ID with your phone number because you had whatever your cell phone number and your old Apple ID that maybe didn't even have a phone number, maybe had your home phone number or something. It was like it was just still there. So now you had two Apple IDs. And a lot of us in that situation with two Apple IDs made the decision that we're going to do development on one and the other one will be like our home thing or whatever. And then it's kind of like, you know, back solving and say, well, since I had two of them, I decided to use one for that or whatever. But setting that aside, the reason someone might still want to do this today, in my opinion, and maybe you do have different opinions, is that the account for your apps is so fraught because you never know what the heck Apple's going to do related to the App Store that you kind of want to isolate the evil. to, and I know Apple does all this stuff behind the scenes now to say, oh, you think that's a separate app already, but we know you're the same person using both of them. So this is not foolproof, but it's just one extra layer of defense where someday they wake up and decide your app is banned and in fact it's banned so hard that your whole Apple ID is banned. Then that won't destroy all your iTunes, the movies you bought on iTunes or whatever. Separating your personal from your business in general is a good practice. And that's why I still recommend to people that I say, look, I'm not going to lie to you, it's going to be a hassle. Juggling two Apple IDs is a hassle, especially since Apple still does not let you log in with a passkey with a second Apple ID that you're not going to do on your Mac. Please, somebody fix that. It's going to be a hassle, but having that separation is nice, because I would never want, like, my family photo library, everything I've ever bought from Apple, all of my various iCloud sync notes and stuff, my family plan, blah, blah, blah, that we're in a family, blah, blah, blah, personal Apple ID. and then my apps, developer Apple ID. The only thing the developer Apple ID does is log into App Store Connect and, you know, register for WWDC and do all that stuff. Is that separation really saving me? Apple knows that I have both of these accounts. If they banned it and wanted to ban it so hard, they would probably ban my other one too. But I'm hoping that it provides a little bit of compartmentalization, so that's why I'd do it. That's my opinion on why a second Apple ID might be useful before we get into how you make one. What do you guys think of that? Do you have two Apple IDs? Do you think it's a good idea? Well, there's a huge other reason to do it, which is if you have a company entity to tie it to. Oh, that's right. Yes, Marco, coming with this one for sure. Yes. So if you are developing apps under your own personal name, then that's fine. But it's very commonplace in the U.S. at least. I don't know how other countries work. But in the U.S., it's very commonplace for people to do their side businesses or main businesses in some kind of corporate entity, an LLC, an S corporation, an LLC being taxed as an S corporation, like, you know, something like that. This is how I've always done my businesses. They've always been in LLCs. This makes a lot of things a lot easier. But if you have a company that you are developing the apps under and you want to be taxed through that LLC or whatever it is, you're going to need a company account, a company Apple ID. and a company developer account. If you ever intend to make any money from it, obviously talk to an accountant or whatever, but having an LLC in the U.S. is not that hard, not that expensive, and not that difficult for tax stuff. So that's generally what many people do and what I recommend. But anyway, in that case, you can't use your personal Apple ID. You have to have a second Apple ID for the LLC or whatever. That's why you would do it. But as to what the people at the Apple Store and Apple Support app said, they don't know. They're delightful. They mean well. They can't answer questions like this. Like, this is not within their expertise. This is kind of esoteric. Although, before you go on, there's one point that I thought you were going to make that you didn't, which is, hey, guess what? If you ever want to sell one of your apps, a lot easier when it's confined to its own Apple ID. You've done this more than, you know, I've never done this at all, but I've heard you talk about it. Like, I think that makes that easier as well, right? That's a little bit outdated. Apple has, over the years, developed methods to be able to transfer ownership of an app to a different developer account. When they first did it, there was a bunch of restrictions. Like, if it had ever used iCloud, it couldn't do it. I believe that none of those restrictions are still true. Not even the bundle one? If it's ever been used in a bundle, you can't do it? I don't know about that one. But over the years, they have made it more possible to move apps to a different developer account. That being said, you are right. It is easier to just buy the developer account. But I think in most cases, most lawyers, when you're buying a business, most lawyers don't buy the business entity. They buy the assets of the business entity. So, like, if I wanted to sell Overcast, no one is going to come by and say, I'm going to buy Overcast Radio LLC from you. They're going to say, I'm going to set up a new LLC, and we're going to agree to transfer Overcast assets to that new LLC. Is the Apple ID an asset, though? Well, but the Apple ID is for that business entity. I know, but you can change what Apple ID is. Like, I had a non-business Apple ID that I converted to a business Apple ID. Presumably, I could convert it back. I wouldn't guarantee that. Yeah, I wouldn't either. What I've heard is that the process of changing the business entity or even the name of the business entity on an Apple ID is incredibly difficult to get Apple to actually do. No, I went through it. It is difficult, but it is possible to do it. Maybe it only goes in one direction. I don't know because I only went from not business entity to business entity on my developer account, and that was incredibly painful and dumb and took a really long time, but it did happen eventually. Yeah, so anyway, I think the idea of having it be separate so that people can buy your app more easily, first of all, I think is a little optimistic for most people, but also I think many acquisitions, if that does happen, many acquisitions don't work that way anyway because they'll want to make their own new thing. Did you hand off the instant paper Apple ID or no? You know, I don't remember how we did that. honestly. Stop being old. Because they didn't buy the LLC. They set up their own new company and we transferred everything over. I don't remember what we did for the developer account, to be honest. I think you might have given them the Apple ID because I think that could have been before transfers. Yeah, it probably was. And I don't think Instapaper used iCloud for anything. So I might have been able to do that. Or maybe iCloud didn't exist and I remember back then. Yeah, I don't know. But anyway, as you were getting to, for like, how do you register another one? I came into this problem as well. I think I complained about it on the show when I was like, I want to make an Apple ID for testing purposes. I know you can make sandbox Apple IDs a lot easier, but I wanted to make a real Apple ID. It wasn't for app testing purposes. I think this was me trying to do macOS 10 testing or something, and I wanted to have other Apple IDs that I could do stuff with. And for a while, again, I think I complained about it on the show, I just literally could not create an Apple ID. I couldn't do it. I was getting errors, or it asked me for stuff that I didn't want. The phone number thing, like, oh, they want a phone number for you. Like, one of the answers in the old days was like, oh, get a Google Voice number. but I don't think they're handing them out anymore. And I think Apple rejects Google voice numbers, like basically like synthetic voice over IP voice numbers and things. Like Apple's requirements for what it takes to open an Apple, we call them an Apple ID, sorry, they're called Apple accounts now. Apple's, you know, what does it take to open a new Apple account? And will it actually work on whatever system you're trying to do it on? Those answers change all the time. And to Marco's point, asking somebody, quote, at Apple about it, whether it is customer support or an AI chatbot or a person in a retail store, I wouldn't trust anything they say because it's not a part of the business they interact with frequently like they're just like you know oh you're a new mac user you're going to set up your very first apple you sure that'll work because you've got all the information available and you're just a person although again I couldn't even do it under that scenario back in the day uh but if you're trying to open multiples yeah I don't know get a burner phone use your landline if you still have one I think that's how I ended up doing things I have landline number and a cell phone number like it's difficult but it is possible and if you do it the other order that i did it don't do it the way i did it which is come in with an apple id that is ancient and is not even an email address and then just add a regular quote-unquote regular apple id at me.com or no itools.com or whatever the hell it was and now i have two yay instead start by creating a business entity thing and if you create a business entity i can tell you if you're going to sell things to the app store we all have to have a phone number associated with our business that is not our other number because if you want to sell in the EU, they demand a phone number, and you probably don't want your home phone number posted on the App Store in the EU. So it's kind of like this whole sort of big windup of, like, make an LLC, get a mailing address for the LLC that's not your home address, get a telephone number for the LLC that's not your home telephone number. And then once you've gathered all that and done all that stuff, then you should probably be able to sail through the Apple account creation process because you're creating a business account from day one with business info. You've got your DUNS number. You've got all your address and your phone number, and you've got everything ready to go. I've never actually done that, but I imagine it's got to be easier than what I ended up doing, which is having a weird old personal Apple ID and watching it evolve over the years until I eventually converted it into an LLC Apple ID. Yeah, and there's also, like, if you want to have a phone number that you can use for your business, you don't have to have, like, a whole separate cell phone plan. Like, you could have, like, a cheap VoIP plan, or maybe you could get, like, some kind of, like, you know, one of those, like, very low-use emergency-only cell phone things. My phone number cost me $9 a month. Yeah, like, you can do stuff like that. You know, you can get, like, you know, P.O. boxes at a UPS store as your address or, you know, whatever. I don't think Apple will let you do a P.O. box. Oh, okay. But I'm sure, like... When they were doing the EU thing whatever it was where everyone had to get an address I think you not allowed to use a P box So you do have to Like again there are companies that will do this for you if you pay them Yeah Many times though like if you form an LLC through an accountant many times the accountant will let you use their office address as the LLC process address. Be careful of that, though, if they move or retire it screws with stuff. True, yeah. But anyway, so you have options, but that's generally, like, the way to do it. And as for, I did want to very quickly go on a totally different tangent. Us? I would love the Ternus era of Apple to reconsider the flow of the stores. The experience at a modern Apple store is so crappy in so many ways, because the stores are built with the structure and assumption of a time that has long passed, that like, this will be a place that people will explore our products and talk to a genius, and it'll be so nice. And, like, Apple stores basically are DMVs that look nicer now. DMVs get a number and you know where you are in line. That's the problem. Like, the Apple store functionally is the DMV now. But they are still seemingly in denial about that. And so they don't work as well as DMVs do. They don't work as well as the deli counter. Right. And, yeah, sorry for non-U.S. people. That's the Department of Motor Vehicles. It's the offices here that you go to get your driver's license and stuff. It's RMV in Massachusetts, by the way. Yeah, whatever it is. Yeah, so like Apple stores have tons of people who are fighting for appointments to get their broken phones fixed. Like that is the basic, the most common thing people are there for is like, my phone broke or died. I need a new one or I need you to fix it or whatever. And you tell me it's going to be extraordinarily expensive and I didn't buy the iCloud store and I didn't buy the AppleCare. And you're going to tell me how horrible that is and it's going to suck. most people in the Apple store are sitting around looking sad about their broken phones waiting in cues that are not apparent to them that I think have a pretty high like forgetting rate like you get forgotten because everyone's just identified by the color of the shirt they're wearing another person comes to me with a blue shirt and forget it right or it's like oh go over there and talk to Sam who the heck is Sam and oh it's that person with a blue shirt yeah all seven of them like And you go and it's like, and people, all the blue shirts are like standing around hovering, appearing to be doing nothing. And there's like two of them who are working their butts off. And it's like, it's a really weird setup and system. And it just seems like it is based in fundamental denial about what they actually need to be today. Just in terms of sheer volume, like they need a lot more stores. They need a lot more capacity for appointments. and genius appointments are also never served on time. Like they're always late. So if you have an appointment at 1230, you go at 1230, you're going to be there till two. The whole system is straining under load. It seems like Apple is not maybe aware or acknowledging that. And the experience of the customer, like I now dread having to go to the Apple store for something unless I'm just buying something and picking up real quick. But like if I have a service need, I dread going there. Not because the people are bad, because they're not. The people are very nice and I've always had good experiences with like once I actually get a person, it's always very pleasant and they're very good, but they don't have the capacity they need and the way they organize their traffic and manage their traffic is also terrible from the customer point of view. So I don't know how much they have to change here to make this significantly better, but what they have now has not scaled well at all to its current level. and I hope at some point in this new era of leadership at Apple I hope they think of addressing that somehow and I don't know what that looks like it could just be you need to open a lot more stores but I think some basics like a queue that people can actually see and kind of know where they are and know and be able to figure it out more easily I think would be a pretty big help We've been complaining about the lack of lines at Apple Source for so long now it's hard to believe it's going to change But I want to rewind quite slightly before that tangent just to hear from Casey. Do you have two Apple IDs or one? Yes, I have one that is my personal stuff. And I don't – I'm going to use that one for FastTax. It was so darn long ago. I think I did. But everything else is under a different Apple ID that's held by my LLC, just like you described. I don't think it has an associated phone number because I think I made it long enough ago, like you were saying, that it didn't need one. But I echo what you two were saying, that if you were looking to make money from your app, and even if you're just looking to release your app, but especially if you're looking to make money, I can't recommend enough getting a completely separate Apple ID. Treat that as its own entity. Never the two shall meet, just like you would, at least in the United States, with like a business checking account versus a personal checking account. You want very clear lines between the two just to make sure everything is clear as day. Yeah, definitely. Definitely, if you're going to have an LLC in the U.S., give it its own bank account. It makes everything so much easier because then it's like, what is business expense? Everything that was charged with this account. Yep. It's very, very simple. Very easy. Thanks to our sponsor of this episode, Squarespace. And thanks to our membership supporters directly who can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about some new rumors about the iPhone 18. and family coming up. Didn't make it in the full show, so we're going to talk about it in overtime. You can join to listen to ATV.fm slash join. Thanks, 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. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atv.fm. And if you're into mastodons, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, N-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-H, T-R-A-Q-U-S-A. It's accidental, they didn't mean to. Accidental, accidental, tech podcast so long. So, John, you are sometime in the future going to be going to the beach for your annual beach trip. And I was curious, because I was ribbing you earlier, that it shouldn't take you long to pack because you have so little space to pack into, insofar as your cars are tiny. Have you seen the trunk of an Accord? It's not that tiny. Have you seen the back of Aaron's car? Everything's small compared to a bus. Right, well, and then we put a Thule on top. Anyway, so when you go on a trip, John, and this does not necessarily mean the beach, so I was curious, like, when you pack for a regular trip, say you're going to the Midwest to visit family, how do you, what do you pack, how do you pack, what is your approach? And then I'm especially interested to hear, what is your approach for the beach? And I think that the difference between you and I, I'm going to wager, is that we tend to bring a ton. And a great example of this, I think we've talked about this in the past, is that we bring our own beach chairs to the beach. And my understanding is you typically stay in the same house every year and you know that they have beach chairs there. And so you don't bring beach chairs. And that in and of itself is a ton of space. But I think there's a lot more to it than that. So when you go on a trip, what are you bringing? Are you bringing a ubiquity travel router, John? Are you bringing a Sonos Roam like I tend to do? What are you bringing when you go on a trip and especially a beach trip? Well, the additional context I will add comparing my packing to Casey's was I believe at one point Casey posted a picture of the back of his cavernous Volvo SUV I think I just shared that with you privately I don't think I posted it publicly And the stuff that was in there that we were looking at Beach chairs doesn't even begin to describe the category of things that was in the back of this car that I would never take on a trip with me I don't remember the specifics if you want to enumerate some of the things that our jaws were dropping about Casey Oh gosh, I'm trying to remember I'm also trying to find the photo. Because what we do is. So here's one of the things that I remember. I think you had, like, essentially cases of drinks. Yeah. Whether it's soda or whatever. Yeah. Not just, like, one two-liter bottle of soda or something, but, like, a case of soda from, like, Costco. Like, from, like, a warehouse store. Yep. We're going to pack that and bring it on the trip. Beach chairs. Food, like. And we would look at this and say, you know, Casey, wherever you're going on vacation, you can buy soda. They have it there. It's there already. You can get it. You do not need to, like, think about, like, the bulk and weight and potential danger of a case of soda as a choice to put on the back of your car to go on a trip. It's like on every axis of choosing things to pack in your car, it is like bad, wrong, no, don't do this, absolutely not. And he's got it in there, just so much stuff. Now, look, you got a big car? Hey, you know, and you've got a roof rack on top of the cavernous car? I'll send you a picture of that in a second. Yeah, you do you, because obviously you bought the giant car. At least you're using the giant car, even more so using the giant car. Is your car three-row? I forget. It is, yes. All right, but you're putting down the third row when you go on the sewing? That's right, yes. Yeah, but anyway, it's huge. And you've got the roof rack, which you can probably barely reach because the car is so big. You do you. But anyway, I'm not an SUV person. I don't have one. I've never owned one. I just do sedans. The Accord sedan is a quote-unquote full-size sedan, and the trunk is big, but it's a sedan. The trunk is only big compared to the small to midsize SUVs that people think have a lot of room in them. But actually, when you open up the trunk, the back, the headrests are like two inches from the window glass because the entirety of that car has been taken up with space for the passengers. And they have a little truncated back. And they're like, I've got a big SUV. I've got a lot of storage space. Like, no, you don't. My Accord's trunk is bigger. But anyway, when I pack, this is the thing that I'm sure Marco is already starting to realize in case he will realize soon if he hasn't already. Uh, if you have children, as they get older, the amount of stuff you have to pack decreases. Yes. You would think it would increase like, oh, they're getting bigger. Aren't their clothes bigger? All these big teenage boy jeans are taking them all this room. No babies. Their crap takes up so much room and then toddlers, it shrinks a little bit because you don't need so much stuff for them and it shrinks and it shrinks. So now that both of my children are essentially adults, although sometimes I forget about that. Um, and sometimes they do as well. They actually have less stuff, but still we've had these accords, which actually have grown. a little bit over the life of the kids. We've gone trips in civics. We just had a civic where we eventually got accords. We'd go on family trips, and we would find a way to wedge all that crap in there. And also, when we just had one kid, it was easier than packing for two kids. And anyway, so it all worked out. We always fit everything in. No roof racks, no nothing. It just all goes in the trunk. But what that means is no beach chairs. One beach chair would make it so we can't pack. One. Like, because that's not, because it's just, it is a poor choice for packing. It is not dense. It is incompressible in various dimensions that are bad for packing in the trunk of the sedan. So no beach chairs. We do bring a beach umbrella just because they don't have them where we are. We always bring them and they're sticks and they can mostly fit in. So it's not too bad. So let me stop you right there just very briefly. I'm genuinely curious about this. So if you were to go to a different beach house, which I know you would not do by choice, but let's say the owners of this beach house decide they're not going to rent it or whatever. We've been to different beach houses over the years. It's not always been the same one. Okay. So how do you know if you need to bring a chair? I'm genuinely asking. Well, when you rent a beach house, usually they'll tell you, like, whatever amenities they have. Like, sometimes they have bicycles you can use, and they'll say if they have beach chairs or whatever. And so, yeah, like, we just, you know, you know what you're walking into, and if they don't say anything one way or the other, guess what? You can buy beach chairs when you're there. Oh, gosh. And often you can just leave them at the house. And if you go back to it, you'll be there. I'm way too, I was going to say cheap, but let's go with frugal to do that. Well, this is the ultimate cheapness because, well, think of the other thing, Casey. I don't know if you've run into this. If you really, you know, if you rent a house, especially a beach house, but any kind of house, I would imagine. And this is like we were doing this days before Airbnb or whatever. When you go there, if it's like a house house and you plan on cooking in the kitchen, which we do, because, again, see, like we're not going to go out to restaurants all the time. It's like kind of trying to keep it as low budget as possible family vacation. You know, every single pot and pan in that place is going to be garbage. You know, every knife is going to be so dull that you could not cut anything with it. It's just like a safety knife for a child. And so what do we end up doing? We go to the store. We buy a cheap pancake pan, a cheap knife from the supermarket that is a thousand times sharper than any other knife in the house. And we put it in a particular drawer and we just leave it there. And guess what? When we come back next year, it's still there. And it's still better than all the other knives. And if it's not, go buy another $12 knife from the supermarket. They have things there. So, yeah, we will, you know, what are you going to do if there was no beach chairs? We would go to the store and buy a beach. Like, we're going to beach places. They sell beach chairs, right? But we've never had to do that. We've had to buy utensils and pans sometimes, so we've never had to buy beach chairs. Umbrellas just don't seem to be applied, so we bring ours with us. But, yeah, the stuff we have fits into the trunk of our car for four people for a week's vacation at the beach. It does involve a beach umbrella and sometimes an inflatable air mattress if we're really trying to, you know, pack lots of kids into houses. Although these days as the kids all become adults, no one wants to sleep on air mattresses, so we bring them less. It's just clothes, you know, the stuff you want to bring with you, toiletries. My family apparently finds every pillow in the entire universe unsatisfactory, no matter where it is. It's clean, but I don't bring a pillow because I don't have room for it. Okay, to be clear, Casey, these pictures you just sent include such items as a watermelon. You're hauling a watermelon, fans. Like, you know you can go to a grocery store when you get there. But now you can't get this watermelon. Well, you can't get a Costco watermelon, which is like one-third the cost of the one at the grocery store. I see cans of Pringles. I see a roll of paper towels. I see multiple fans. I see a LaCroix, a case of LaCroix. A huge case of bottled water bottles. Yes, bottled water. Why? So the thing, I'm understanding better. We've had a little bit of this conversation in years past. I'm understanding better that I'm not saying I'm right. Let me just make it plain right now. I'm not saying I'm right. But the approach that Aaron and I take is that the only thing that we buy or things that we buy when we get there are things that are particularly challenging to transport. So typically we'll go to the beach. No, just hear me out. Oh, watermelons? It's so perfect. It's so easy to transport. Well, it is easy to transport. It's just there. But like milk and OJ and eggs and things like that, that we're not going to bring from home. But you would otherwise. But basically everything else we bring. Just wait until you find a refrigerated compartment and you're like, we're bringing the milk. We would if we had a refrigerated compartment. And truth be told, we do bring a cooler with some things in it, but I will always go to the store and get like milk, OJ, eggs, you know, some of those sorts of things, yogurts, whatever. But basically everything else we bring, you know, whatever, whatever, like beach drinks that we have, bottled water, which I 100 percent understand. You're exactly right. We could buy that at the beach. It's like eight times the cost of what it is. It costs. Child sized shovels complete with solid wooden handles. Yeah. I mean, the rolls of toilet paper and paper towels and another fan. Well, because you want the noise from the fan for each person. The pillow thing with my family, we have a four-person family, and three of the people in that four-person family insist on bringing their own pillows. Sometimes they want to bring two pillows. That is a bit expensive. The good thing about the pillows, well, the good thing that used to be about the pillows is like, look, they're the last thing that goes in, and guess what? You can squish them into pretty much any spot because they're pillows. That's true. But then some of them got on the memory foam pillow kick, and those are much more dense, and it's harder to get those into the spots where you want to wedge them. But anyway, I tolerate the pillow thing, especially since worst case, you can say, oh you really want the pillow that's on your lap for the whole drive because there's no other place right and it's not so bad to have a pillow on your lap but it does make you hotter and i can't convince enough to bring i don't bring any pills i just use whatever pillows they have there and somehow i survive but they all have to bring their pillows i am extremely picky about pillows i think we've also talked about this in the past uh i tend to sleep with my arm under the pillow so you know it's like mattress arm pillow head and because of that i like a just paper thin pillow. It's absurd how thin I would prefer my pillows to be. But you know what? For that week, I just steal. By the way, enjoy your rotator cuff problem later. Oh, I'm sure you're right. I have no doubt. They have those beds that I always see those fake Instagram ads for where they have a place to tuck your arm. You ever see those? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do notice that you're apparently only bringing two chairs. That will change too because eventually you could be like, hey, why did Mom and Dad get chairs and we don't? Oh, no, no, no. We do have four chairs. I don't think they were pictured. You're right. But we do eventually end up with four chairs in here. You can bring a whole living room set. Like, why stop this? The thought technology we had for this year was they were selling at Costco. Costco's our jam. They were selling at Costco these Instacrate things. Not a sponsor or anything like that. Yeah, I see it there. But you can fold these to almost nothing when you're not using them, and then they become a fairly stable crate when you do need them. So, like, I put all of my technology into one of those crates. We brought – we always bring and almost never use the Switch 2, the base 4 Pro controllers. We have an Apple TV, which we do use all the time. We have, what else do I have in there? A power strip. Is there a Sonos set up hiding in there? There are two Sonoses. There's Sonos Moon, which is big, and a Sonos Roam, which is small. Because, again, like Casey being the guy from Ponyo who's got to spritz the water in front of him, he needs music wherever he goes. Otherwise, he dries out. We're going to have to do that for a member special. Otherwise, I'm never going to watch that movie. But, anyways, we bring, like, paper plates. And the reason we bring paper towels is because we get them cheap at home. And it just kills me to spend five X what I would have spent at home to get all these things we could just as easily bring because we don't have a little baby car. And I'm saying that actually not to insult you. I genuinely mean that because, like you said earlier, because we have the space as with attics, as with homes, we fill up the space because why not? And then in the Thule, which is the roof racky thing, I'm probably pronouncing it incorrectly. we have like the this all the beach stuff one of the fans uh one of the rolls of paper towels etc etc so i was just curious so it sounds to me like and i'm not snarking at all you with the exception of the beach umbrella and the pillows basically the only thing you're bringing is clothes and very little else is that fair to say well i mean so tech wise uh just to touch on that i don't yeah i don't have a travel router i don't do all that crap although the house we're at doesn't have great internet, but it's gotten better over the years. But I have been bringing the Apple TV for many years. Whatever my lowest-ranked demoted Apple TV is, I bring... Because I take lots of pictures and I want to show them. You know, even just to use it to airplay to the TV, to show the pictures I've taken on the world's crappiest TV with terrible contrast where none of my colors look right. Every year I go there and hoping this is the year. Their TV is so old, it pains me so much. I do always make sure the motion smoothing is turned back off. But, like, this TV is so old and terrible. This, please let this be the year they fix their TV. But anyway, that's why it doesn't have AirPlay built in, which a lot of the modern ones do. And also when the kids were little, you know, you can put their shows on that. Even for the adults, sometimes if there's some series like, oh, you've got to watch this new show, Stranger Things. I've never heard of it. Oh, good. Apple TV is here. I can go to my Netflix and I'll show it to you. You can watch the first episode. It'll get you addicted. So when you go back home, you'll watch, you know, that type of thing. That's the only real tech we bring. Obviously, you know Casey would, like, strap a 65-inch TV to the roof of his car to bring it. Exactly. Why not? He's got the roof right. Oh, I 100% would if I could. He's got the roof right. Didn't you say, John, I think it was, like, last year or the year before, didn't you say that you were, like, on the precipice of buying a new TV for this place, if I remember right? It's like, it would be so cheap, and it would just be so much. But it's like, why? Like, just do it. They're so cheap. You can buy a $300 Walmart TV. It would be better than this thing. Please. Just, it's terrible. occasionally other people bring stuff like my brother has brought his Quest headset which is the only reason I got to try that so the whole family tried that out, this was before the Vision Pro but yeah there's not a lot of technology going, it's mostly just everybody and their stuff but of course every individual person in our family has, because we're all adults now their iPhone, their iPad, their laptop all their chargers and their cables all you know, just like your personal technology stuff, but that's in their stuff every person has a personal bag so every kid has their personal backpack which used to be a cute little kid backpack, but now it's a gigantic one. You know, so that's – and since I'm driving the car, I don't have my backpack with me, and my backpack goes in between the two kids in the seats because, you know, I can't put it at my feet like they do. But, yeah, it's mostly just, you know, clothes and sunscreen and, you know, hairbrushes and toiletries and all the other stuff like that. And we do bring towels with us, even though the houses offer towels. We like to have our own, and we do bring, like, a beach blanket. But here's the thing. I'm looking at the back of your packing your giant cavernous car and your roof rack and everything. The tip I will give, if you do not have a gigantic car like this, because I'm looking at what you're putting in your back here, I would never choose the things, the containers that you have put your belongings in to go, including the Instacart thing. And I'll tell you, if you're out there and you do not have a giant box-shaped cargo place in your huge SUV, soft containers. No carry-on luggage. No Away luggage. I love Away luggage. I have a bunch of it. They were apparently sponsored by the show way back in the day, but I honestly like their stuff. No luggage. Nothing rectilinear. Nothing hard and rectangular because the way you get the most out of the cargo space in a thing that is not essentially a cargo van is squishy stuff. Duffel bags. Squishy things. And, yes, the packing cubes, use the packing cubes, but then put the packing cubes into duffel bags because you'd be surprised how much you can squish a duffel bag and another duffel bag next to it and get things in. and then the pillows that all the kids want wedged on top in that weird uneven space in the top of the trunk of a sedan where there's like, oh, nothing will fit there. Pillows will fit there. And at the very end, you put the hats on top because the hats you don't want to squish. And also, pro tip, when you're going on the ferry, the bag that has your lunch in it, it's got to be easily accessible at the very, very edge of the trunk. So you can just open that trunk, yank out the bag and go up and test it. If you yank out the lunch bag for the ferry and every other thing in the trunk expands to fill that space immediately, you failed reset take the thing out and put it back in when you're done yeah my trunk is packed I always do pack it because like I said you fill the space that you have and I've developed strategies over the years we'll see how we go this year we might have a couple of challenges because people want to bring more stuff but you know I'm always fighting back against that it's like we don't need that much stuff we just need what we know we're going to use when we're there and if we find out we don't have something, we can always go buy it. And the place we're going is not like a beach town or like a tourist trap type of thing. It's actually one of the less tourist trap-y areas on the east end of Long Island if there can be said to be such a thing. It's not like going to Bermuda or something where everything costs astronomical prices. We can just go to a plain old stop and shop and it's just the same prices in the stop and shop everywhere and it's fine. That's the thing. How much are you buying such that a grocery store wouldn't be fine, like price-wise. Like, I know Costco is cheaper, but like U.S. grocery stores are pretty inexpensive still. Well, if you're in a tourist-trappy town, I mean, you live in one, Marco, like your grocery stores are not cheap because guess what? You're trapped on this little island and you're going to pay our prices. Yeah, but that's because you can't drive to one here. Right, well, I think like vacation towns where it's like, hey, everyone who's in this town is on vacation here. The little local market is going to be expensive. Well, yeah, but it's, again, like, when you have a car on regular road, you can just drive 15 minutes to the nearest regular grocery store. I think you might be more than 15. How close is the closest regular grocery store to you when you go on these trips? Usually 10 to 15 minutes. It's not that burdensome. All right, well, then you have no excuse then. No, no, no, I don't. I think ultimately, like, you know, you mentioned a couple times, like, you fill the space you have. Like, I've now owned a lot of different sized vehicles, you know, from the BMW 3 Series, probably at the smallest, to the Rivian, which is the largest. I have found when I take my large trips, especially going upstate for Christmas or whatever, when I take my large trips, I fill them up, no matter how big or small they are. When I've had a smaller vehicle, we fill it to the gills, and we somehow fit it all in. When I have a big vehicle, and I think this will be so much easier at Christmas, Christmas comes, I fill it to the gills, and I'm like, I can't believe I filled this giant new vehicle or whatever. and I've been I've been thinking about this recently as I am thinking you know whatever this leases up for my ix I'm planning on going with a smaller vehicle next time and one of the thoughts I've had has been like can I go down to a smaller vehicle like is that going to make family trips difficult or whatever and and I just have to keep reminding myself like no it'll be fine I've had smaller vehicles it was fine I'll bring less stuff because I'll have to bring less stuff and it will be fine. And I think here, as much as we make fun of you, Casey, you are filling the space you have. And if you ever had to have less space or chose to have less space, you would fill that too and it would be fine. I think having a roof box is ridiculous to add to this. You couldn't bring a case of bottled water. Did we get the count on that? Because when we say a case of bottled water, I'm not sure we're giving you the right idea. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 8 times maybe 40 bottles of water in there? What do we think? I mean, we use most of it. I hear you do. So we're going to say a Costco Kirkland bottled water, 40 bottles, pack it in the trunk. And there's soda. Did you see the Diet Cokes hanging out on the left side of that, just leaning over there? Shoved in there. And another Diet Coke wedged over the watermelon? Well, it has to keep the watermelon from rolling. No, that was something different over the watermelon. I forget what that was. Any fizzy drink that could possibly leak and or explode? Sure, throw it in there. Well, these beaches are a direct shot for us. One of them is like through the Cape Charles is like three hours. The other one we go to is like five or six hours. But there's no turn along the way. What I know what I mean by that is it's not like we're leaving the car for hours on end on a ferry or something like that. Well, I don't I don't trust any any carbonated sugary drink in the trunk of a car. But, you know, so far it's worked out for you. So far. And I do think like, oh, you always fill the space. I would have real difficulty filling Casey's car without the roof rack because I just don't think we have that much stuff that we want to bring to the beach. Like I said, the beach-specific stuff is like sunscreen, which is small. I'm bringing Marco's Japanese sunscreen this time to try it out. Hey! And, you know, a beach blanket, a towel, a towel's umbrella. You know, that's just, there's not much stuff. Like, we're not bringing a volleyball court. I got a case, we'll probably back that. So I think, honestly, if we went on a regular beach vacation with your car, Casey, we would have real trouble filling it. That's fair. Do you, what is your, or let me rephrase, You said an umbrella is your shade of choice at the beach. Has Long Island gotten into the Shibumi thing? Are you familiar with this? I do not recognize the name, Bram, but I can tell you the variety of things that people have had on beaches to give them shelter from the sun and wind is very high. There's lots of different things that exist, including some things that other people in my extended family bring with them. I've never been into them, but I know they exist. Various balloon-y, wind-breaker-y, hut-type things. What is a shibumi? So a shibumi, the idea is let the wind work for you, not against you. And what it is, it's basically a giant piece of like, what's the material that like a parachute or like or something like that would be made out of? Ripstop nylon. There you go. And what it is, is it's you put like a tent style, like collapsible post through the front of it. and then it connects to a bag, or the carrying case becomes a bag that you fill with sand, and you put that in the front, and so you aim it into the wind, such that it's trying to blow away from the bag of sand that's in front of it, but the combination of the bag of sand and all the wind gives you a pretty giant shade that you can sit under, and what's really great about it is this thing, when it's collapsed, is very small and weighs nothing, and this is, this was, I'd seen these for years at Cape Charles, and I always thought like, oh, that seems like it's got to be a gimmick. And I would see more of them and more of them and more of them. And then when we went to Sunset Beach last year with our friends here in town, they got one and so I finally got to like try it out and put it up and take it down with them. And I was like, oh, my God, this is the best thing I've ever seen. And they're not cheap and I'm sure there's knockoffs that maybe are just as good. But Shibumi are incredible. If you're a beach person, we'll put a link in the show notes, these things. For my money, this is incredible. And I cannot imagine going to the beach without it now. It's funny. I would expect to have seen a lot of these because we can see the beach from, like, upstairs here. And one of the great fun things to watch here is, like, sitting at breakfast with coffee in the morning on the deck, looking out and seeing all the dads setting up these ridiculous contraptions, like, for the morning, like trying to stake out a good spot, you know, 8 in the morning on the beach. And you see all the dads setting up there. The lifeguards are digging up their stuff, and then there's like four or five dads thinking like they're living for this moment all year long. They're going to play with all their gear and setting stuff up and sticking out the great spot. And so I see a pretty big variety of shade contraptions. I have not seen these. I'm very surprised. They started in... I'm not surprised because the reason I was giving these a thumbs down is I just don't think Long Island beaches have the consistent winds to make these viable. It's just too... Oh, we do. It fluctuates too much directionally. Like, even if it's steady, speed is steady, the direction fluctuation is enough to make this troublesome. I've seen these on the beach. I've seen people have them, and I've seen the failure case, which is like, well, you want it to always be sort of stable and rippling in that position. But, like, first of all, stable and rippling in the position directed to the wind like a weather vane would be, assuming the wind doesn't change direction, which I think it does frequently, and assuming it is steady. Also, sometimes it means the shade is in a weird place. So then you start doing the thing where everyone doesn't scutching as the sun changes through the day. Because if you're spending the whole day at the beach, you're scutching and you're following the shade around. Whereas if you do one of the other systems, including umbrellas, you can adjust the umbrella. You don't have to move your seats. So that is handy. But the second is the flappy thing. Like the wind dies or changes direction or goes in a weird direction or a gull comes down and starts attacking you and stuff. It's just I just don't feel this is well supported enough. The technology of very light material and a bag that it comes in that you fill with sand is well worn. And there's lots of sort of various little tent, cave, hut things that are like this that are a little bit more reliable. I think this has the wow factor, but I wouldn't put my stake on this for Long Island beaches specifically. Maybe it works better in things with steadier wind and constant wind direction for people who are not going to be on the beach all day long. Yeah, what we see the most of here is whatever, like, Tommy Bahama umbrella Costco is selling this year. Like, that's number one most common. And you can always tell, like, oh, yeah, that's, you can see, like, there's, like, one or two old ones. Oh, that's last year's design. But for the most part, the vast majority of people have whatever Costco umbrella is this year. I think, have you seen the picture? maybe I posted on my Instagram of like, it might have actually even been Fire Island Beach, of just like the beach from the distance. And it just looks like a bunch of umbrellas live there. Like, you can walk across the tops of the umbrellas, especially when you're back in a distance that all the umbrellas are like foreshortened into a single line. And it's just so colorful and pretty. And yeah, like you said, like, whatever the colors were the years they bought them. And I don't know if people buying them like immediately that year, because we are beach umbrellas we've been using for decades now. So sometimes you get some really old designs in there. Well, things don't last very long is the problem. So like, they're still going strong. I guess they don't make them like they used to. Well, that's definitely true. But, uh, yeah. So you see a lot of Tommy Bahama, Costco umbrellas. And then every day there's usually like three of those giant tent things that somebody has four poster tents, sometimes the four, the ones that are like triangles where it's like, like you have like two up front and then it just kind of just slants down into the, like down to the sand. Like a lean to kind of looking. Yeah. Like there's a lot of those. And those are the ones that, that the 8am dads are usually trying to set up is like, some giant thing that like it's way too big like our beach isn't that big here and people bring these tremendous things and not realizing like all right you know in in two hours the tide is going to be under that tent well hopefully the umbrella line makes it so they can't set up anything that close to it but uh let me to go back just a half step you had said what happens if there is no wind uh let me introduce you to the incredible thought technology or really just technology technology that is the shibumi wind assist tm which is two smaller bags that have clips on them and you fill the smaller bags with sand and clip them to the other end of the shibumi so other families kids can trip over that line and yell at you and take down your thing that's right yes because really i like anything that has a line going out to either a stake or a sandbag extending that far from the place that you staked out on a crowded beach on a weekend in long island the kids are going to trip over that and it's going to be bad i just i'm not a shibumi fan i'm not convinced. I'll see if they become more prevalent. In my experience, I've seen a couple of them, and I thought they were novel, but I don't see a lot of them, so I'm like, oh, that must have died. But, you know, maybe their marketing is going to bring them back. Especially if you look at the amount of surface area that you are taking up versus the amount of shade that is created. This is made for very large beaches that are not very crowded. because we're way too crowded here on our small beach here. So here, an umbrella is about as large as most people want to be because if you're setting up this kind of thing... And even if you get there in the morning and can stake this out, people will hate you. You're taking up too much space. You're taking up tons of room to create a very small square of shade, really, for two people. And that you can only walk into most easily through the one big aperture defined by the arc because if you try to walk into it from the sides, you're ducking down and it's messing up and he doesn't really want you to walk into it from the back. It's just not a great idea. Not a fan. Well, I think that's because you are on crippled beaches that are too small. You mean the best beaches in the world, most beaches? Oh, wow. Of course. I've forgotten that there's nowhere that counts in the entire world except Long Island. You think the best beaches in the world are Long Island's beaches? You know, I haven't been to all the beaches in the world, but I have been to Bermuda, which everyone bragged about, and I said, you know what? I prefer to be on Long Island Beach. Bermuda beaches are nice, but the water is too warm. What? The sand is weird. What? Oh, my God. The water is too warm. The water is too warm. I said it. It feels like a bathtub. I do not want to get in an argument with you, so I'm just going to plow forward. But I will say that... I love Long Island. I love Long Island beaches. I love Fire Island even more. But to call these the best beaches on any metric... I absolutely do. I totally believe it. They are my favorite beaches in the whole world. I think they're some of the best beaches in the world. Well, that's different. That's different. I also think they're some of the best beaches. Marco is not really a beach person, as we have established. He lives near the beach, but he's not so much a fan of being on the beach and swimming in the water. Yeah, but because our beach isn't actually that great to swim in, if I'm honest. And there are beaches that are. Like, when you go to the Caribbean, they're really nice. I understand. I understand. Maybe Hawaii would convince me. I haven't been to Hawaii. Hawaii was also really nice. Yeah. They could compete. Very nice beaches in Hawaii. Have you been to Bermuda? No. You should. They have very nice beaches, but I prefer Long Island beaches, and I actually think the Long Island beaches are better. On what metrics? I have to know. Besides the water being colder. I think they're more pretty. I think they're more fun to be at. I think they're more fun to sit on the sand all day and go in the water and come back out and have a nice lunch and play. Because the Bermuda beaches... What makes that... The water is not refreshing. When you're hot and you want to go in the water to cool off and the water is 85 degrees, it sucks. What? And the beach sand being so fine in pink is beautiful, but it's not as good to play beach volleyball on. But one day, one day before you die, which hopefully is not for a long time, I want to hear you acknowledge that cars other than Hondas exist and are good. I love cars other than Hondas. And Ferraris. And Porsches. I like them, too. I also like BMWs. I like a lot of cars. The cars are not a problem. And honestly, one of the things, like I didn't think about this when I moved here, but Cape Cod beaches actually are the closest I've found to Long Island beaches in terms of me liking the aspects of them. The Cape Cod beaches, I think, are not as nice, but they're really close. It's similar. Wow. I can't with you, John. Oh, my God. All right. Everyone wants their beaches with the palm trees, but not me. Not me.