679: An Adversarial Relationship With Myself

So I spent all day cleaning up water damage. That was really fun. Oh, you went to the beach? I did. I meant to send you that Instagram thing that I saw today. I didn't do it because I thought it would be too cruel, but now you're bringing it up. I'm going to find it and send it gone. What I was saying last week about, so we're lucky that the leak at the beach house, it was worse than I expected, but it only affected like the storage basement area of the house, not like the finished interior of the house. Thank God for that, because that would be a very different level of damage. So and most of the things that we store in the storage area are things like bikes, which are mostly waterproof. So there's there doesn't look like there's too much loss there. Plus, it's fresh water. It's actually cleaning the bicycles, getting the salt off. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't only bikes that were rained on for a day and a half, but it was mostly bikes. So it's not too bad. It could have been a lot worse. There's a lot of cleanup to do, but it could have been a lot worse. But you mentioned Instagram, and that actually gives me a really good opportunity here to tell you a little hot tip. It didn't start during my year of efficiency. It started about December, I think. I don't think I've mentioned it on the show, at least not more than two seconds worth. So I haven't really been on Instagram very much recently. There's been a sharp drop-off in my Instagram music starting in December when I made a simple change. I can say I strongly recommend this. So anyway, what the change was, was I moved Instagram to the hidden state on my phone where it requires Face ID. So here's what you do. You go to any app on your phone. They added this, I think, two or three OSs ago. Any app on iOS, if you do the long hold to go to delete it, and one of the options it gives you is require Face ID in that context menu. When you do that, one of the options you get is to hide and require Face ID. And what this does is this puts the app, if you go all the way to the app library, like the rightmost screen on your iPhone, and you scroll all the way to the bottom, the bottom right icon is called hidden. And you can't see what's in it because it's hidden. And if you hide any app and require Face ID for it, it will go into that hidden folder. The only way to get to it is to go to the app library. It won't show up in search. You won't get any notifications for it. Your phone will act as though it's not there at all. The only way to get to it is you go to that hidden folder, you tap it. For some reason, you have to tap it again. If Face ID scans you, then the icon will show up and you can open the app. And you can use the app just normally. But if you leave the app for more than like a second or two, it will not show up in the app switcher. You can't switch back to it. You have to go through that process again. Oh, interesting. And again, so you're not getting notifications. So it's never being promoted to you on your phone at all. So what this does is it creates a situation where you have to think about going to it. You have to want to go to it. And you have to want to go to it enough that you go through like a little bit of friction to get to it. You can't just search for it in Spotlight. You have to go and scroll to it and do the face ID and have it open up. And if you switch away from it, so for instance, if you're like looking at an Instagram ad and you switch out to Safari to be able to save that page for later, maybe use Apple Pay to buy something, it's kind of a pain in the butt to switch back. Also, universal links to that app will stop working. so what it does is it makes using the app totally suck and it makes you not want to do it very often which for instagram means that the compulsion that i had and that many people have they just idly open it up all the time i had it on my home screen and open it up is super easy and then before i knew it i've wasted a bunch of time there and opened up six tabs for shirts i might want to buy that's that doesn't happen anymore it's just gone I have dramatically reduced the amount of time I use Instagram as a result. And I got to tell you, I am so much happier and better off for it. I don't have as many shirts, but everything else in my life is better. And it really made me realize quite how bad for me Instagram really was. It doesn't feel that bad when you're using it until you realize you've spent a lot of time there. and maybe you're just becoming unhappy with your life and you want to buy a bunch of stuff and not having Instagram be a major part of my life and have it be almost not a part of my life at all, it's great. I was keeping it because I thought I was going to be missing out on not only whatever friends are doing, I mean, most of my feed isn't that anymore, but even stuff like at the beach, like what restaurants are doing tonight for their specials or what special events are happening around town. and the reality is most of that stuff I don't miss first of all because it wasn't that important as it turns out and second of all what Instagram mostly is these days is a feed full of stuff to keep me engaged not really a lot of stuff that my friends are actually posting so my life has been made significantly better by having it still available if I have to go look at something but almost never looking at it so it cut it down from using it from probably maybe an average of a half hour a day down to using it for maybe five minutes a week at most. It's amazing. I strongly recommend doing this to social apps because when people say they're stuck in their phone or they're addicted to their phone or their phone's the problem or phones in general are the problem, what they're mostly talking about is social network apps on phones, which is different from the phone. The phone is just a computer. It's an amazing, the phone is like one of the greatest things we've ever invented as a species. The modern smartphone is this ridiculously amazing, capable pocket supercomputer connected to the internet at all times that can do amazing things for us. The phone is great. The phone is not a problem. Addictive social apps are a problem in a lot of ways. So doing steps like that to increase the friction, the best thing is to just delete it off your phone if you can do that. But if you still need it sometimes, that's a way to keep it still there but not have it be very addictive to you. So I can strongly recommend it. Wait, I'm sorry. How did we leap from beach cleanup to Instagram? Did I have a brain fart when that happened? I was sending up the Instagram thing about the burst pipes. It's in the Slack if you want to look at it. I mean, it's not ours. It's just a public thing. So I guess we can put it in the show notes if you want. Although, Marco, I'm glad this change has made a difference in your life. It sounds good. I mean, you made a quitter, the Mac app to help you with Twitter before that. So there's a long history of you doing these things. But every time I hear you describe these systems, I just am glad I don't have that kind of adversarial relationship with myself that you do. You are you are the solution to and cause of all your problems. And you're battling against yourself by writing software to stop you from being you. Hey, I've never been officially diagnosed with ADHD, mostly because I've never really sought that kind of diagnosis. It's never too late to learn to read. Yeah, but this is – I mean, look, if your brain works this way, you know it, and my brain definitely works this way, and we have to develop systems around ourselves. Yeah, luckily it works the other way, which lets you devise systems to thwart yourself. Yeah. You have the other side of that too, which is good. Like the systems I have to do to maintain attention and task doing are ridiculous. Like part of the reason why the snooze options on Apple reminders alerts bother me so much, the stupid like remind me this afternoon and it's 2 p.m. What does that mean? What time? If it's already 2 p.m. and it says remind me this afternoon, what does that mean? And when it's 9 a.m. and it says remind me this morning, what does that mean? I hate like I cannot tell you how asinine those reminder strings are. Like, give me a time or give me more hour intervals. The thing I do with reminders, and yes, I know there's a million alternative apps that we should be using instead, right? But I actually just use reminders, and what I do is I just go into reminders, and I change the time to be advanced by the amount that I want to be advanced. It's the most ridiculous thing ever. I'm essentially manually snoozing because when I set the time forward, I know exactly when it's going to go off again. Yeah, and I know I should be using Do, D-U-E. I know that I tried it. We know all the apps. We know. Yeah, I think maybe one of my, we're not talking about AI this episode, but maybe one of my VibeCode apps will be like, just use the Reminders database, but have better alerts for it. Like, I don't, I mean, there's probably already apps that do that. I'm sure that exists in the App Store already. I know it probably does. But like, I want the Reminders to be the app because that way Siri integration works perfectly. A lot of other system integrations work perfectly. But those notification snooze options are just so bad. And the whole reason I snooze them is because in my terrible productivity system of my brain, If I'm not being reminded of something over and over and over again until I do it, it won't get done. That's DUE. I know. That's the DUE app. I know. I just don't like the rest of the app. And if I accidentally dismiss one of those alerts, it will never remind me again. I have to be so careful when one of those pops up like, oh, God. Oh, no. Don't. Careful. Snooze for an hour. Okay. Or remind me this afternoon, whatever that means. Remind me tonight. That's great, too. It's like, what does that mean? Anyway, I wish those were better, and maybe someday I'll make them better. And I know this system is ridiculous, and this system sounds ridiculous that I get reminded of like four things every day recurring until I do them, and it might take me two weeks to do them. This sounds ridiculous to anybody who is like productive and normal-minded, and that is so not me. My system needs this. Very quickly, I wholeheartedly endorse the app D-U-E, you know, do, but when I pronounce the word do, nobody knows what I mean. So it's dueapp.com. I'll put a link in the show notes. My life would not literally but figuratively end if this app did not exist. I would get nothing done. We have gone far longer on this pre-flight immediately after Marshall and I both said we don't want to go long. What is the result of the beach situation, though? Did you get a plumber to come out? Like, where does it stand? Yeah, a plumber came out yesterday and fixed the leak. I went out there today to do basically just clean up because there was a lot of things in the basement that are very wet and waterlogged, a lot of storage containers that are full of water, plus whatever they were storing. Those light fixtures on the ceiling of nautical-themed basement areas that have a metal cage around a glass dome, but it's all sealed up. Well, we have those all across our basement ceiling, and the ones that the water was above were full of water, like the dome. So I had to get a drill, unscrew the dome, and water just poured down. Obviously, those light bulbs are dead. those fixtures i will probably be replacing um been there yeah so a lot of a lot of that but and and with the added complexity that it was about 30 degrees you know all like as i was like carrying water-filled containers out to dump them on like you know the patio i have to make sure i'm not dumping them where i have to walk because it's all freezing a few minutes later so the patio is covered in ice like it's lovely and my and of course you know whatever gloves i'm wearing are instantly soaked with everything I'm doing. So I had to keep taking breaks, going upstairs, just warming up for a few minutes, then going back out again. It was a hard day. I'm sorry. But at least I didn't have Instagram bothering me. Well, that's true. I did have a couple of reminders though. Did I do the things? No. I actually have a couple, or a related story as I also told John and Marco that I did not want to go long tonight, but here we go. I was sitting in the living room yesterday Maybe it was the day before. And it must have been yesterday. And that's where our Yolink hub is. Yolink. So, you know, the Yolink stuff that we have some leak sensors. We have some contact sensors, which we will probably talk about in the after show tonight. Anyways, the speaker hub sits in the living room in the entertainment center. It's an open entertainment center. And I have, of course, done a bunch of stuff with home assistants such that, for example, when the mailbox is opened out front, the speaker hub will literally say the words, you've got mail, because I'm a child of the 90s. Does it have the old sound effect? No, unfortunately. Why not? It's more robotic. It's more like, you've got mail, or whatever. You've got to get the sound effect from that awesome announcer. He's stydling last year. Yeah, I don't think I can actually use the sound effect, but that's neither here nor there. But I'm sitting there, and I'm watching TV or browsing something on the internet, and all of a sudden, I hear a siren going off. and that indicates to me because the only reason that should happen is based on automations i've done in home assistant the only reason that should happen if a water leak sensor has tripped and so sure enough the siren goes off and it says there's a leak in casey's sink and i go bombing upstairs and i tell you what there was a little itty bitty itty bitty puddle of water under there it was it must be like a little teeny tiny drip but over the span of like a day or something it was enough to trip the leak sensor because the way it works is there's a couple of electrodes or whatever on the bottom and a couple on the top. And so sure enough, the water was able to basically create a connection between the two on the bottom and it alerted me. And so we were able to clean it up lickety split where, you know, we got on the horn with our bathroom people and they're going to come out first thing next week because it's not a pressing issue. You know, it's a very, very, very, very minor leak. But I would never in a million years have noticed this were it not for those leak sensors. So not sponsored by Yolink, but sponsored by Yolink. Yeah, those things, what's great about them, again, as I mentioned last time, what's great about them is that the sensors are cheap, and there's no, like, subscription per sensor or anything. So you can get, I think the four pack is, like, $60 with the hub or something. So it's, and you can just get, you can get as many as you need. So, you know, in my house, I have, I think, like, 10 of them or something. I have a lot of them. So I have them under each bathroom sink trap. Yeah, yeah, that's what this one was. Usually where water tends to collect, if there's a small leak, and under each toilet of the valve that fills the toilet that goes against the wall, whatever that valve is called, like where it comes out of the wall and you have a little snaking up pipe thing to fill the toilet. Those tend to drip over time, too. And sure enough, there was one day. Oh, and the top of the Yolink water leak sensors, they have sensors on the top and the bottom. Yeah. So they have these little metal feet that poke down. So if they are sitting in water, they'll alert. but also they have these two little sensors up top and they're shaped like a little bowl up top. So that way you can place it under something and if something drips, it will fall into that top bowl and alert you immediately before water pools up on the floor. So it's good to place them under things that are most likely to be a problem like valves and traps and things like that. And sure enough, like last summer, we were at the beach and we got a leak alert from one of the toilet valve ones, and we had somebody go over and look at it, and sure enough, that toilet valve had a little drip every few minutes kind of leak. And that's the kind of thing you would never, especially if it's under a sink in a cabinet. That's where ours was. Yeah, you would never know that until you open that cabinet two years later and the whole bottom of it falls out. You're like, whoa, and then you see all this water damage. Like that's the advantage of these things that you could they're so small and cheap and low maintenance. You can you can buy a ton of them and put them all over. I have one like obviously next to the water heater. I have one under the washing machine anywhere that you might have a leak. And let me tell you, now that I have dealt with the aftermath of what was again, like because it wasn't in the finished area of the house, this leak could have been so much worse. Thank God it was not in the finished area. But even just dealing with a storage area leak, which is not that destructive, I am not only incredibly happy that I had these sensors, but I'm adding more. And I'm definitely getting the water main automatic shutoff thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also when I left the house today, I just turned the water main off. Did you empty the water lines as best you could as well? Because people will ask you. Just like the down. I wasn't sure. So, OK, so I turned the water. I was in kind of a rush. I turned the water main off and I went up to the upstairs. I went up to the first level sinks and I just opened the cold water until it stopped running. But I also I'm like, am I going to burn out my hot water tank by doing this? Because if the hot water tank loses water and it's still on, then the top heating element can burn itself out. And I decided. So what I did, I also just turned off the input and output valve to the hot water tank. So I just locked the water in it, whatever was already there. and also the hot water tank being replaced next week. So I figured that probably doesn't matter because it was pretty badly damaged, and it was already near the end of its life. But I figured I'd ask the plumber that when he replaces it next week. I'm like, hey, by the way, did I burn it out, or did I do the right thing here? But anyway, and we've already heard from a few people who are responding saying that either Yolink or there's also a Moen automatic main turnoff thing that a few listeners have written in to say. Like these things basically have saved people's bacon a lot already. And so we can strongly recommend having having some kind of like water leak sensing ability and definitely look into the automatic main shutoff things, too. All right. Before we do follow up, John, you had an announcement you'd like to make. Yeah, obviously, a lot of listeners know this, but we are recording this episode early due to school vacation reasons. So if something dramatic happens before you're listening to this episode, but after we record it, like, why aren't they talking about the new M5 Max MacBook Pros? It's because of the time of recording they didn't exist. So hopefully nothing will happen and this episode will be fine. But because it's like, you know, so many things are imminent and coming soon from Apple in this spring period of time we find ourselves in. We don't know when it's going to happen. If it so happens that Apple releases something while we're after we record this, but before we record the next episode. So that's why we apologize. We'll get them next time. Yep. All right. Last after show, we talked about me looking at cars because I'm getting the seven-year itch. And we talked about a whole bunch of options. I actually intended to – this happens to me so often. I need to take better notes. But I intended to bring up another option that I completely forgot about and one that I knew would pique John's interest. And a couple of people wrote in about this. John, you probably said something to me. I don't remember what was the first thing that happened or maybe I just remembered. But one way or the other, I should have brought up the Lucid Air because the Lucid Air is like $150,000 or something like that, brand new. But they're astonishingly affordable right now if you go use. And there's one in Richmond that I kind of sort of have my eye on that's something around $45,000, $50,000, so cheaper than the Ticons I was looking at. The Lucid Air is very big. And John has done a little bit of research, which I will let you talk about in just a moment. But I really like the idea of the Lucid Air. It seems to be doing everything the way I would want to do it in terms of like car play. And a lot of the switch gear looks like it's made smartly. And they do a lot. I can't think of particular examples, but it just seems like my kind of car. All that said, after my BMW experience, you know, with that car being a disaster and being a little reluctant about going back to, you know, German super performance car, I can't imagine going to like a boutique very young car company with i don't believe any particular local presence would be a good choice yeah like what happened like do you do you have a local service center do you trust the brand to be around in seven years like that's exactly that's those are big questions and with with lucid like i mean obviously you know i bought the first rivian suv but that first of all that wasn't even the first rivian vehicle um and second of all that was with Rivian already having their deal with Amazon with all their fleet vehicles and everything and they were building out service centers and I still had problems with that vehicle being like a version one of its model line and still a relatively young company with with too little service infrastructure but I was like operating with an order of magnitude better service infrastructure than what you'd be operating at with Lucid probably. Yeah and I just looked it up the nearest place for Lucid is exactly where you would expect it to be. It is in Tyson's Corner which is the mega shopping conglomerate where the original Apple store opened. So a couple hours north of here. A couple hours. Yeah. That's I think if you if you're looking for a vehicle that is unlikely to generate very expensive or very big pain in the butt service issues for you down the road. I would not go for. Yeah. And I don't know anything about their their like service record. It isn't about that. It's just about the size of the company and the size of their infrastructure and the likelihood they'll still be here in seven years I don't think is amazing. Yeah. But, John, you had done a little bit of research, despite what the song says, about the differences between the Air and the Taycan. Would you like to run through it? I didn't bring it up just because it seemed like you were looking for a sporty car, and I wouldn't call the Lucid Air a sporty car. It's more of just like a big, nice sedan. Well, yes, but it is astonishingly, absurdly, physics-bendingly fast, which would make me happy. It's like any EV, but you're not going to get the Sapphire one for $45,000. So anyway, the Air is actually only about a half an inch longer than the Taycan, but it's one inch narrower. And for that amount of space, you just get so much more space in the actual car. So cargo room is 32 cubic feet versus 16 in the Taycan. So it's double the storage space. And the rear seat, I could not find good numbers on it. But having sat in both rear seats, I can tell you the rear seat of the Air is much, much, much, much larger than the rear seat of the Taycan. But, yeah, like, you know, if the nearest service center is multiple hours away, it's probably not the car for you. No, I agree. Because unlike, for example, if you've got like, well, who cares? You don't need the service center. You can just take it anywhere. That's true if you get a used BMW. You can just find a local garage. But for a very rare EV, you can't just assume you can take it to the local garage and they'll know what the heck they're doing. yep i couldn't agree more uh but yeah i i don't know i i might go test drive it just for funsies but oh you totally should but i i don't think i would ever in a million years buy it and uh follow up with regard to the tycons specifically um i still am 95 convinced that this is not the car for me however the uh salesperson the dealer emailed me earlier today and was like hey what are you thinking and i was like well you know i was really disappointed with the transmission but that might be a me problem you know and i'm still worried about the garage which i'd spoken to her about when I was with her. You know, is there any chance you could give it to me for like a couple hours overnight or something like that? And she came back almost immediately and said, absolutely. Tell me when. And so I think what I'm going to do is sometime next week. I'm not sure specifically when. It might not be before we air or before we record next week. But at some point next week, I plan to steal the car for a few hours, give it a proper run through and see if I can convince myself that the transmission is livable. Even if I can. Why, though? I just want to know. I just want to know. But why are you trying so hard to make a car work that's not working? We get a fair assessment of it. If it was just a setting that he changed that made the car unappealing and suddenly he turns it on and it's appealing. It doesn't mean he's going to get it. It's just also true. It's just a fun thing to do. It's the same reason I'm trying to test drive cars that he's never going to buy. It's just a fun thing to do. Yeah. All right. Moving along. Marco's move to Chrome. Sarvaganan writes, check out the Helium browser, which is Chromium, but with all the Google stuff stripped out. It also has the bank syntax built in. That's the, you know, like exclamation point mark a for Amazon, for example, that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. If you just want the bang shortcut syntax, you can use the unduck dot link website. And that's also a super fast option. The only thing with this, like this is a very good recommendation if you wanted Google out of your life. But I thought you kind of wanted Google in your life, given that you're using like Gemini and whatnot. Yeah. So, yeah, there's a reason why I don't really want that kind of option. Number one is, yes, I basically do just want Google in my life right now. because, again, this is more not talking about AI this episode. We're doing great so far. But we've gotten a lot of feedback of, like, here's yet another Chrome-based or Chromium-based browser. Why don't you use this instead? I have used Chromium-based browsers over the years. I used Brave for a while, never as my primary, but I always wanted to keep a Chrome-based browser around for compatibility stuff and sites that required it. And I always found those browsers to be not only more of a pain in the butt, but overall not a better experience than using Chrome. It was more of a sidestep. Like some things would be better, some things would be worse. I've never really been that impressed by them. And in this case, with my giving into Google, I'm both seeking Google's direct services, obviously, as I was saying with Gemini, but also I want there to be as few pain in the butt problems as possible. I don't want a single incompatibility. I don't want a single piece of additional friction. And every time I used a non-Chrome, Chrome-based browser, I would have occasional little bits of additional friction. Something wouldn't work right or something would bother me or something would need to be updated in some weird way. And regular Chrome just has never done that for me. This isn't the first time I've used regular Chrome. I used to have it installed for many years. So I kind of know what I'm in for with Chrome. I actually don't see all those alternative browsers as being a better fit for me. It's the year of basic, and Helium is not basic. I don't know. All right. With regard to Windows resizing in Tahoe, what's the recap on this, John? This is the thing where the edges are super rounded, and you can't actually resize by the edges. Yeah, they made the corners of the windows much more rounded in Tahoe, but they didn't move the area of the imaginary rectangular window that you click on to resize it. And so the clickable resize area is increasingly incongruous with the actual outline of the window in Tahoe. And there was a whole bunch of complaints about that. Righto. So Jeff Johnson noted that in the Mac OS Tahoe 26.3 RC release notes, there's a section app kit, a section resolved issues in which it says window resize areas now follow corner radius instead of using square regions. Then later in the 26.3 release, Norbert Hager, who is the co-founder of Objective Development and developer of LaunchBar and Little Snitch, notes the release notes have been updated. The problem went from a, quote, resolved issue, quote, to a, quote, known issue, quote. And there's a little bit of discussion about that, including a very trick sample app that Norbert wrote that you should see like a little gif of. So basically in the RSC, they're like, we fixed it. And then in the release, they're like, just kidding. It's back to exactly how it was before. So I don't know if to fix it. I mean, I was all ready to say in this section, you know, I have this whole big spiel about I can kind of understand why they didn't change the resize region. Because moving that region could potentially mess with content in people's windows and potentially break apps by making certain things in the window unclickable. because they used to not be under the resize area, but now they are because Apple moved it. And so I could understand why they wouldn't want to do that. But then the RSC is like, well, they moved it. So I guess that was a compatibility problem. And then they released, they undid that change. So maybe it was a compatibility problem. Who knows? But yeah, the app that Norbert made is really cool. Like it basically just moves the cursor across the things in like an automated way and maps out a pixel at a time exactly where the resize regions are and then visualizes them. So please do follow this link in the show notes. Norbert was the person who first posted about this, by the way, we just added. I didn't have all his info on him at the time. So, anyways, a well-known developer, just not known to me. But very cool work, very cool app, and very cool visualization of the problem in Tahoe. AirTags 2, there's been a lot of conversation about whether or not it's easier to tamper with them, particularly removing the speaker, which I guess dirtbags want to do in order to track people and not have them alerted. iFixit did a teardown and a video about it. It's very short. We'll put a link in the show notes. And they found basically no improvement. It was still pretty trivial to disable the speaker if you have physical access to the air tag. Sad trombone. Yeah. Again, I don't know. I'm not sure there's anything you can really do in that scenario unless you, like, seal the thing and encase it in carbonite or whatever, or you can't actually get any of the parts, like, seal it into, you know, I don't know. I guess if the battery, you can get it, the battery, and then the rest of it could be encased in acrylic or something. I mean, I can imagine solutions, but it's tricky. But anyway, it's not tricky at all with these things. You just open it up and snap the wires to the speaker, and you're done. We are sponsored by Zapier. Zapier is how you actually deliver on your AI strategy, not just talk about it. There's AI everywhere these days. We're talking about it a lot on the show. Everyone's talking about it. It's a huge deal. It's changing a lot of things. But how do you actually incorporate AI into your actual workflow? It's actually pretty hard sometimes. The AI stuff changes constantly, and you have your established tools and everything that you need to keep using or have AI integrate with. So Zapier helps you incorporate the best of AI into your actual workflow. They have an amazing AI orchestration platform to bring the power of AI to any workflow, so you can do more of what matters. You can connect top AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to the tools that your team already uses, so you can add AI exactly where you need it. You can have entire AI workflows autonomous agents things like chatbots or something else You can orchestrate it all with Zapier It helps you break the hype cycle of AI and actually put it to work across your company for actual real work Zapier is for everyone, whether they're a tech expert or not, and teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier. They've been around the scene a long time. They've been automation kings for so long now, and now AI is making Zapier even better. Check it out. Join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com slash ATP. That's Z-A-P-I-E-R dot com slash ATP. Thanks to Zapier for sponsoring our show. With regard to your journey with Cloudflare and restricting access to stuff, you were talking, I think, about your Vibe Coded. We're still not talking about AI. You're doing a great job. So far, I'm batting 1,000. You do terribly. You're vibe-coded status board. And we actually had George Black write in and say, I work on the Access team here at Cloudflare. While Access falls under our zero-trust umbrella of enterprise products, it actually works great as a standalone service for securing personal web apps. This is how a lot of people use the service. I think you'll find it surprisingly easy to set up. It takes just a few clicks in the dashboard. No need to install or configure anything on your machine. I mean, I made a quick video tutorial for John in case he's interested. This was like a 10-minute video, which I watched and was riveted by. George did a great job explaining it. And if you're interested in this sort of thing, it's very much worth your time. Yeah, very cool. Still isn't really what I'm looking for, but it's good to know that it's there. And setting it up is very easy and does not actually require you to get, like, an OpenID Connect server or do any weird VPN stuff or whatever. It's basically just clicking around. Like so many things, it's basically like clicking around on the Cloudflare dashboard a little bit to get things set up, and then you're off to the races. So check out the video. Even though the video is, like, personally directly addressing me by name, which is weird, check it out. Just pretend your name is John. Oh, man, that's great. In other news, you moved to Fastmail, which I believe we talked about, right? We did. Okay, good. And Fastmail just tweeted, posted on Mastodon, why don't you hear about Pearl in the headlines? Because it works and keeps working, Sometimes the best technology is the most boring. And this is relevant because Fastmail has donated $10,000 American dollar-y dues to the Pearl and Raku Foundation. Raku? Raku? What the hell is that? I would say Raku. Okay. What is that? Sounds like a Star Wars planet. That's the artist formerly known as Pearl Six. They renamed the entire freaking version to a new name? It's a long, sad story. What's the short short? The short short is Perl 6 was taking a really long time, and because it had the name Perl and the number one bigger than Perl 5, it was kind of like stealing all of Perl 5's thunder, and Perl 5 wanted to go ahead, but it felt like it couldn't go anywhere because who's going to pay attention to Perl 5 when Perl 6 exists? And they solved the problem by saying, guess what? Perl 6 is now, they just switched to their code name, right? It's like when you get a pet with a name you think you're going to change, and you don't change it. Anyway, so now Perl 5 is free to go forward with the Perl name and advance itself without everybody saying, why are you working on that? Isn't it dead? Pearl 6 is going to replace it. Now when it's called Pearl and Raku, no one thinks that anymore. Not that it's really particularly relevant. That's the best summary I can give. It's way more complicated and drama-filled than that, as these things always are. But anyway, yeah, the foundation supports both of them, so that's why it's not just the Pearl Foundation. It's the Pearl and Raku Foundation. So what are you using for your projects? Just plain old Pearl, Pearl 5, which has continued to advance and does lots of things. And yeah, whenever I see someone writing Pearl code and I look at it and I'm like, that Pearl code has been frozen in amber since the 90s. Pearl has actually advanced in a line as a language and has new features. And Raku also exists, which is mostly being ignored by almost everybody, including me. But profile is still out there and I'm glad seeing Fastmail donate to it. And why would they be donating to it? Well, hold on. I'm not done interrogating you yet. Is there anything that Raku, whatever it's called, brings to the table that you're enthusiastic about? Oh, yeah, no, it's got lots of really cool features as a language. I used to talk about it a lot on the show. When Swift was being developed, I talked about it a lot because Swift actually takes a lot of ideas from both Perl 5 and Perl 6 and what was formerly known as Perl 6. Raku's got tons of great ideas. The problem is it doesn't really have like a solid implementation and community and everything, like all the other sort of ecosystem things surrounding it. And part of the promise of Perl 6 to me has always been in my mind that due to all the advancements in the language, it should also have higher performance and lower memory overhead and all these great things. And that has not materialized either. So it's mostly just a sort of curiosity, but it's like it is a lesser used language with lots of very interesting features without like a bulletproof production implementation that tons of people are banging on all the time. So I'm not sure what the future holds for Raku. Very interesting language from a language design perspective. I have lots of ideas that every other language should steal, but I don't feel like it has the community or the time and implementation of even Perl 5, let alone all the other more modern languages, to show that it is production-ready and substantially better than its press assessor when it comes down to just running all the time on a server or whatever. Fair enough. Well, I appreciate it. Remember, we're not learning long tonight. Anyway, Fastmail donated $10,000 to the Perl and Raku Foundation. reading from the Pearl.com post about it. Pearl has served us quite well since... Oh, I'm sorry. Let me back up a half step. This is from the Pearl.com post, but this is a quote from Ricardo Cignes, who is the Director and Chief Developer Experience Officer at FastMail. Also, former pump king of the Pearl programming language. If you don't know what that is, you can look it up. But this is... The Pearl connections run deep at FastMail, is what I'm saying. Okay. So, Ricardo says, Pearl has served us quite well since FastMail's inception. we've built up a large code base that has continued to work, grow, and improve over 20 years. We've stuck with Perl because Perl stuck with us. It kept working and growing and improving, and very rarely did those improvements require us to stop the world and adapt to onerous changes. We know that kind of stability is in part a function of the developers of Perl, whose time is spent figuring out how to make Perl better without also making it worse. The money we give towards these efforts is well spent because it keeps the improvements coming and the language reliable. Yeah, there's a very strong sort of backwards compatibility culture in Perl, to a fault where like i remember there was just this huge debate years ago over removing ebcdx support which i'm pronouncing in a weird way you know what i'm talking about though like that nothing nothing that's not ascii for encoding letters as a bunch of numbers ebcdic something like that anyway okay we're gonna like can we remove that from the language is anyone still using it it's like what what century or what where are we what's going on that's that's the kind of dedication that had to backward compatibility and then of course perlo 6 overshadowing it was just making it so it was difficult to advance uh now with that out of the way slowly steadily carefully always with very careful backward compatibility pearl 5 has been advancing and that's great for a reduction system because new versions of language will fix bugs and have better performance and add new features but not break your existing application also if you were interested in throwing john a little affiliate revenue and if you're interested in fast mail which you should be i don't recall if they've ever sponsored the show but certainly they get our okie dokie. Where is your referral link, John? Hypercritical.co slash fastmail. Link will be in the show notes. We have yet another sob story horror story about doing purchase migration with your Apple account. Nick writes that I purchased Final Cut Pro for $500 Australian and Logic Pro for $300 on a secondary Apple ID. I chose to migrate the purchases to my primary Apple ID because I was sick of having to sign in and out of the app store to update the software. Since Apple made it possible to migrate purchases, I thought this was a perfect opportunity. Oh, how wrong I was. Turns out, migrating purchases simply allows the new account to access these purchases, but the licenses remain with the previous account. So when I deleted the old account, the purchases went with it. Apple told me that because the purchases were linked to the old account that was deleted, there was nothing they could do. Apparently, migration isn't migration at all. Seems like a useless feature to me, yet still totally an Apple thing to do. Can confirm. Yes, I am aware now that it does say that if the secondary account is deleted, the purchases go with it in the Apple knowledge base. We'll put that link in the show notes. But I was unaware of that at the time or probably forgot as I deleted the secondary account about a month later. Though this still doesn't negate the fact that migration implies a migration and not simply sharing the purchases. Maybe they should call it purchase sharing instead. I had no idea this existed either, and I would never assume that it did. And I feel bad, like just, boy, how many ways can they mess up these features? A lot of other stories are like, oh, I tried to do it and there was weird bugs and nobody could figure it out. But this is not a bug. This is how the feature works. And I don't think anyone would ever guess if you describe the purchase migration feature at a high level or just hear the name that it doesn't actually migrate the purchases. It just lets you use them. And if you ever delete the old Apple ID, which, of course, you want to do. Like the whole point of purchase migration is like let me consolidate my life and get rid of that old stuff. And now I'll just delete that so I don't have to worry about it. nope, that will take away all your purchases. And as usual for with stories where someone doesn't have a mechanism to quote unquote run to the press, Apple just can't help at all. There's more to the store, which is like, well, no, we can't help you with your whatever it was, $800 worth of software you bought from us. You're just SOL, sorry. But hey, you want to get a free accessory from the Apple store, which was the same thing that said to me. It's probably their big go-to. And Nick was like, sure, I'll take this. And they're like, no, that's too expensive. Now you get nothing. It's terrible customer service, terrible feature. Be really careful. There's a reason whenever these things come up, I'm always so cynical about it. I'm like, yeah, Apple says they have this feature, but anything having to do with Apple IDs or warranties or whatever, be cautious. Because historically speaking, these features have not been implemented well. And because they're a big corporation, there's often very little recourse to get things resolved. All right. We have some semi-breaking news. I think it was either earlier today or perhaps yesterday that YouTube is now available as a native app on the Apple Vision Pro. You get a pretty much full YouTube client. In addition, you can use in a different tab, you can get spatial videos as well as 3D, VR 180, and 360 videos. This is genuinely very exciting. It was an extreme omission to not have YouTube or Netflix on the platform when it launched and hadn't been until, well, at least YouTube hadn't been until a day or two ago. I haven't had the chance to plug in my Vision Pro in the last couple of days. I did want to try this before recording, but I was running around like a crazy person today. But my understanding is it's mostly pretty good. I think the only major complaint that I've heard, I think I've seen on Andrew Edwards, like Instagram or something like that, that you can't download videos, which is kind of a bummer. But other than that, I guess it's pretty good. John, have you had a chance to try this yet? Yeah, I tried it out. It seems fine. It's basically like what you would expect, a very minimal official YouTube client. I never tried Juno, the one from Christian Selig that got booted off the App Store. because Google was like, no, only we can make a YouTube app. Sorry. I'm glad they eventually did. But, you know, the app seems very basic and bad bones. I did go to the spatial tab, and the content there is not suitable for Vision Pro. It's very low resolution, blurry. I don't know if any of it is actually even stereoscopic. It is not impressive. So don't expect you're going to get the YouTube app and, like, finally this world. Because they're all labeled with their thumbnails that say 16K, 360, whatever. It's just a gigantic blurry mess. Anyway, that's not the fault of the client. All I'm saying is that Vision Pro content is not really available in any capacity that I could find on YouTube. So you're still stuck going back to the TV app, Apple's own TV app, and looking at the very limited selection of stuff they have there. And my question about this, like why now? I'm wondering if this is part of the whole deal between Apple and Google to license the Gemini stuff, Or is it just a happy coincidence that they finally relented and released a bare bones YouTube client for Vision Pro? Who knows? Nobody's saying. But I'm glad it exists because it was silly that it didn't before. It would be wild. I do not think this is the case. But it would be wild if, like, maybe the terms of the Gemini deal were, well, you have to put YouTube on the Vision Pro. And they're like, no, we don't want to bother with it. And then Apple says, well, what if we wrote the app? Because isn't that what they did for Google Maps? Yeah, they used to do that for all the things. It's like Apple provided the map tiles, but then Apple wrote the app. And the original YouTube app on the iPhone was an Apple app as well. Yeah, we're saying the same thing. So can you imagine if they were like, fine, we'll do it. Just let us do it. I think Apple would have done a little bit of a better job. I think it's a bad app. It just seems very kind of – it's very basic. There's not much to it. And the little player overlay thing that goes in the bottom of the window did not look Apple-y to me. I felt like the distribution of white space was unharmonious in a way that I detected. Who knows? It just didn't seem apply to me, so I think Google did this one, but who knows? We are sponsored this episode by 1Password. Now, look, if you're a small company, it's easy to assume that you'll be small enough to fly under the radar. But the reality is small businesses are being targeted more and more by bad actors. They know that lean teams often lack the resources to prevent or respond to a breach. Compromised passwords are the number one way bad actors attack companies. So a password manager should be the first security purchase you make for your team. And in fact, that's exactly what I did. When I got the restaurant, I all of a sudden had to work with other people. We had to share credentials in some way and keep things secure. I went to 1Password. We got a group plan going. It's great. It's exactly the right tool for that job. And this can scale up to however complex your security needs may get. 1Password will stay with you every step of the way. And the earlier you start, the easier it is to build your business on a secure foundation. 1Password provides centralized management to make sure your company's logins are secure. Big company or small company, everything in between. 1Password is a simple turnkey solution, and it can be rolled out in just hours, whether you have dedicated IT staff or not. You know, the most effective security solutions need to be intuitive and user-friendly, so everyone at your company will actually use it instead of just doing, like, post-its and stuff. 1Password is great for that. I've had no problems deploying it to both nerds and non-nerds in the company. It's been amazing. OnePassword also has Enterprise Password Manager. This helps your company eliminate security headaches and improve security by identifying weak and compromised passwords and replacing them with strong, unique credentials. There is so much more to OnePassword. Check it out today. Take the first step to better security by securing your team's credentials. Find out more at onepassword.com slash ATP and start securing every login. Thanks to OnePassword for sponsoring our show. The Apple Studio Display 2 is rumored to have a 90 kilohertz refresh rate instead of 120 hertz. I just said kilohertz. A 90 hertz refresh rate instead of 120 hertz. My bad. The reading from Mac Rumors, in November 2024, an anonymous listener of the Relay FM Tech Podcast Upgrade claimed that Apple was developing a 90 hertz display technology that could be used for the next studio display, as well as future iPad Air and iMac models. Now, a Mac rumor's tipster has backed up that claim based on alleged information from an internal build of iOS 26 that was leaked online. Indeed, they believe the next studio display is likely to max out at 90 Hz rather than 120 Hz. The tipster believes that a 90 Hz refresh rate would make sense due to bandwidth considerations. Thunderbolt 5 can support 5K resolution at 120 Hz without any compression, but they think Apple likely wants to ensure that there will be plenty of remaining bandwidth for connecting other devices and peripherals to the new studio display. The rumor still warrants some skepticism. The internal iOS 26 build that Tipster cited is from early 2025. So Apple's plans may have changed since then. Not to agree with the Tipster's logic here. Like, yeah, you can reduce bandwidth by lowering the refresh rate. But if you only have one monitor connected, just use all the bandwidth. Like, you're the only monitor connected. I want 120 hertz. I really hope this is not true because, like, how many years have we waited for Apple to finally break the 60 hertz barrier on its desktop displays? it's just 120 is not like it's not rocket science it's been on it's been all their dinky little phones it's on uh the the max ipads it's it's table stakes like what like what are they doing like is there some kind of differentiation like okay well the studio displays for 1600 can only go to 90 hertz but if you want 120 hertz you have to buy the pro display xdr2 for seven thousand dollars. Don't give them ideas. Don't give them ideas. You can get, as we discussed, you can get like a PC gaming display that does like 400 hertz for, you know, $800, like half the price of these things. It's ridiculous. So I really hope this is not true. Not because 90 hertz is so bad, but it's like, 120 hertz is better. Macs already have 120 hertz display, the laptops, the good laptops. For the desktops, which we know are just never updated, to not get 120 hertz, like, okay, well, I guess I'll go back to sleep for another eight years and wait for them to finally get to 120 hertz. It's ridiculous. Please let this not be true. I was chit-chatting with Underscore. We did our monthly FaceTime earlier this week, and he was talking about his XCR and pointed out to me that that thing is like eight years old or something like that. I forget exactly what we concluded, but it is astonishingly old, given the fact that it seems to me like it was – oh, that's what it was. We realized that we had seen the launch at WWDC 2019 because we had gone across the street from the McHenry or whatever it was to that, like, concert venue or whatever. I forget exactly what it was called. But then they had, like, the pro display, like, walk-through museum sort of a situation where they showed you, like, the Mac Pro doing a billion different instruments. And, like, they had the Toy Story 4, like, carnival area being rendered on a Mac Pro against a pro display XDR and stuff like that. So, yeah, it's 2019, if I'm not mistaken. There's another rumor from MacRumors. It's Hartley Charlton at MacRumors writes, Apple is expected to use TSMC's base 2nm N2 process rather than the newer N2P variant for its upcoming A20 and M6 chips, according to the China Times. TSMC previously said that its base N2 process would enter mass production in 2026, followed by enhanced variants, including N2P and A16, in the second half of the year. Let's pause here for a second and just really applaud for the just massive namespace pollution and confusion. TSMC naming its next process A16. Oh, man. That won't be confusing at all. Not good. Especially since what are the Intel ones called? Don't they have names with A in them? I don't remember. No, theirs are called like 18A. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they have 18A, but this is A16, which is going to be used to make the A21 processor, but it follows N2P. Guys, guys, let's get together on this, please. They should name Sony headphones. Right. These are short, but that's the problem. Everyone wants to call their thing A and then a very short number, but, like, coordinate, please. Continuing from Hartley, N2P is positioned as a high-performance version of N2, while A16 is designed for high-power and high-complexity chips, particularly for AI applications, darn it, and data centers. On a roll. The performance difference between N2 and N2P is expected to be modest. N2P offers roughly a 5% performance gain at the same power level, but comes at a higher manufacturing cost, which helps explain why Apple is expected to remain on N2 for its A and M series chips this year. It's a little bit weird because the whole deal with Apple's last several rounds is that Apple would pay through the nose for the very most expensive process that no one else wanted to pay for, simply because they had to have the very best of the best for their phones. I forget the last time I did that. It was the 3 nanometer one where they – I have already forgotten the names. It was like the original N3 – no, N3B or something. I've forgotten. See past episodes of the show. But Apple paid for the one that nobody else wanted to use because the yields were just not good, so it was so expensive. But it's like, look, if you want to have these 3 nanometer chips ready for your phones, you've designed them around the idea these are going to come. You're just going to have to pay through the nose, and they bought up like all the capacity of that. And as soon as Apple was done with that, they just never used that process. Well, actually, I think they did for some of the later M series. But the point is it was expensive and Apple paid for it. And now this is a more frugal Apple saying, do we need the most expensive, fanciest one? Or can we just go with the cheaper one? It also may be because they have to make literally millions and millions of iPhones and they can't make millions and millions of them on N2P. So they have to go with the cheaper one. But it's either unfortunate timing or Apple being wisely frugal? Because honestly, I'm sure it'll be fine either way. Like it'll be a jump from the three nanometer node either way, and it'll leave the door open for them to use the better N2 and A whatever processes for their later chips. All right. So we mentioned at the beginning of our 30-minute, but don't worry, it's a short day today, pre-show, that we weren't going to be or that we didn't know of any M5 MacBook Pros or anything like that. And we wanted to focus specifically on some interesting rumors with regard to the M5 Pro, the chip, that there may not be an M5 Pro chip at all. So reading from Julie Clover at MacRumors, the iOS 26.3 release candidate includes references to a pair of unreleased chips that are in the M5 family, according to information found by Nicholas Alvarez. Chip 1 in the beta is T6051, T6051, H17C, which we believe to be the M5 Max. Chip 2 in the beta is 6052 H17D, which is assumed to be the M5 Ultra, but not mentioned in the beta is the T6050 H17S, or M5 Pro. It's not clear why we are only seeing signs of an M5 Max and M5 Ultra chip, but rumors suggest that the new MacBook Pro models with higher-end M5 chips are set to launch in the next few weeks. Now, Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac writes, A new report suggests that the M5 Pro and M5 Max might not be two distinct chips, but rather variants of the same one. So, with that in mind, 9to5Mac back in December of 2024, not this past December, but one prior, writes, Then finally, Vadim Yuryev, who is the host of the MaxTech YouTube channel, tweeted, just figured out why Apple's M5 Pro chip did not show up in the recent beta code leak. Apple is using the new 2.5D chip tech, allowing them to use a single M5 Max chip design for both the M5 Pro and M5 Max models. This saves Apple lots of money on SKUs and design. I don't know if Vadim has any inside info or if he's just spinning fantastical ideas, but I thought this was very interesting. First, they go rewind to the chip codenames. We talked about this on a past episode, but like these numbers have been very consistent. uh the h and the 17 and then the letters at the end uh i think that this mac rumor story has the list of code names and we linked to it at one point as well but if you go back through time you can i figure what the offset is but like the h17 is the m5 h16 is the m4 h15 is the m3 like all the way back and then the the letter suffixes have mostly been consistent the c's are the maxes the d's are the ultra but also i think that the ultra can sometimes be a g the s has always been the Pro, you know, as they say in stocks or whatever, past performance is not necessarily an indication of future things. Apple could change the codenames at any time. But whether or not there's going to be an M5 Pro, there were only two chips listed here. And there should be three because we expect there to be a Max or Pro and an Ultra. And not seeing, only seeing two chips and having the two existing ones look like they, for all the world, that they are the Max and the Ultra codes names, where's the Pro? So we talked about like the 2.5D chip stacking thing and separating the CPU and GPU and the potential to like, you know, finally divorce the CPU power from the GPU power to sort of mix and match in a way that hadn't been possible before. I still don't think that's likely just because Apple doesn't want to have a million variants. They're not going to they're not going to build to auto your CPU. They're just going to make a few variants that they think are appropriate for their machines. but maybe it means they're having second thoughts about the the pro chip where it lies in their product line and historically again i wish i'd written down the details but the pro chip has been weird in many generations where sometimes it's basically like a max was a little bit cut off and other times it's more like the base no suffix chip with a little bit thrown on and other times it's been this weird middle ground it's been all over the place yeah maybe apple doesn't know if the pro chip has a place in its life. Maybe, I mean, Apple would know. We wouldn't. Like, maybe most MacBook Pro buyers buy the Macs or they buy the base, and a lot of people don't buy the pro. So I find this really fascinating because of the new chip tech and how this might affect things. If, you know, Vadim's thing of saying, oh, it's the same chip or whatever, I think they would just call them by different names. Even if they mix and match a different CPU and GPU commando, that's basically an M5 Pro. Or it could just be that this build didn't have the code name in it because the other two leaked and there was an if-def that got missed somewhere. Like, who knows? But this is making me even more interested in what these chips are going to look like. If there really is no Pro, I personally would be fine with that because all I care about is, like, the high-end and low-end chips. But I wonder if, like, Mac mini owners and stuff would be like, hey, I kind of like the Pro because it was a nice happy medium between paying through the nose to the Macs or getting the base chip. What do you guys think? I have found, like, you know, as I've looked at different, you know, Macs over the, you know, since the Apple Silicon transition and as I've been making buying decisions, I have never found the Pro to be quite what I'm looking for, because it does end up costing a significant amount more than the base chip. But it doesn't have all of the high capacity support and all the highest performance of the Macs. And I have found that with the Pro, at least in the current lineup, like in the M4 lineup, which I know we're kind of split now, we have some of the M5 lineup, But in the M4 lineup, the base M4 got so good that I think it left very little reason for the Pro to exist. Because if you actually look at, like, performance per dollar, the base M4 is a really great value. And the Pro really is not. Like, it does not scale up that well to, you know, performance per dollar as you go up that list. And the Max serves the role of like, I need big resource support. I need all the ports, all the bandwidth, whatever that is. The Max serves that role. Big GPU. Yeah. But the Pro, it kind of sits in the middle of those. And you end up paying a lot more for only some of those benefits. And I don't think that's really a strong selling proposition with the current lineup. But as you mentioned, though, past generations of Pros before the M4 have been very different from each other. Like, the M1 Pro was very different from the M2 Pro, and, like, they've had different core counts and different balances of things. Yeah, the M1 Pro was basically an M1 Max with a little bit cut off, like, literally. It just went snip, snip, snip, snip, cut off some GPU cores. Hey, M1 Pro. It was so close to the max. Yeah, and then was it the M3 Pro that had the really weird proportion of P to E cores that was unlike everything else? Yeah, yeah. It had, like, more efficiency cores, and it was, like, this whole big custom design. Yeah, it seems like they're doing – it doesn't seem like making a custom design for the Pro is necessarily worth it. And I think by having the base chips, the regular M chips, get pushed up in performance so much – again, look at the M4 compared to the M4 Pro and M4 Max. The M4 really stands out as a really great bang for the buck compared to the other two. And also, I wonder if this might play in a little bit to their, you know, the rumored upcoming less expensive MacBook that is rumored to have an A-series phone chip as its CPU. I wonder if maybe the regular M chip, the M4, M5, those might be actually being elevated upwards in the product line, too, that maybe we're going to start seeing more very low-end products using the A-series chips from the phone, even in the Mac line. and then the M chip is actually more of a mid-range thing. And then you have the M max chip as the high end and then the M ultra for the one that they very occasionally make for the products they forgot about. They just renamed the plain old M6 chip to just be M6 Pro and there is no no suffix M6. I mean, who knows they might. From a marketing perspective, like why not? Because I agree with you. If the low-end laptop is successful with the phone chip in it, they're going to do more of that. And it makes sense. I think it's a good idea. I think that product is a good idea and I think that strategy is a good idea. I think the naming is a little bit weird with it being an A-series chip and confusing people, so they might need to work that out. But you can fix naming, right? So if they don't want to make the Pro anymore, just call the base M6 M6 Pro. Just do it. Well, I don't think that's necessarily neat. I mean, the reality is these M chips have gotten a reputation, well-deserved, for being really strong performers. So maybe the M chip doesn't need the same M naming line to cover the entire product line anymore. Aren't you glad they didn't do a BMW thing when they first laid out this line and just have like year after year, they would have, you know, the M3, the M5, the M7, and occasionally the M8. Like every year they would have that and we had to put year suffixes on them. Like I'm proud of them for sticking with a letter and a number and then each time they make a new line of chips increasing the number. Like good job, Apple. I know that it was hard to figure that out after a few decades, but they figured it out. But I do wonder if they're going to – they can't help self-sabotaging with the A-series chips and Macs, right, and the M-series chips and iPads, right? We had it – it was all clean. Everything was worked out. But now, what does the M stand for? MyPad? I mean, it's also possible that, you know, if the rumored, you know, less expensive MacBook using the phone class chip is true, it's also possible they might not call it the A17 or whatever it would be. They might call maybe they call it like The M0 Yeah Yeah or maybe it be like the M5 Express Who knows M5 Air There we go They would just call it the M5 Air and then that would be confusing with the M iPad Air and the MacBook Air. SE hasn't been used for chips either. I don't know. Oh, SE's good. The M5 SE. Or they didn't want to call the ultra-wideband chip the U2. They did it once or twice, but now they're back to not calling it that anymore. Yeah. Anyway, I think they have a lot of options here for naming. But regardless, I do think that the base M-series chip is no longer a low-end chip. I mean, it kind of never was performance-wise, but it's really a very solid mid-range chip by most measures. And so for them to elevate that, I think that's actually reasonable. Like a lot of these recent reviews I've been reading of the latest releases from Intel and AMD for their laptops and stuff, you know, Panther Lake or whatever thing, they come up with like, it's finally they got a good chip, it's made on a good process or whatever, and here are the benchmarks and they show all these graphs or whatever, and you're watching, I'm like, wow, Intel's really doing well. Until you realize every single one of the graphs is against the base M4. You're like, but you know, Apple makes other chips. Like other chips that are in laptops. Like it's not like, oh, it's not a fair fight. You can't put it up against an M5 Ultra or something. Like, no, just, you know, the other laptop chips. So the rest of the industry is so proud when they have a chip that performs better than Apple's base M4. They're so happy. It's like victory lap, party parades down the streets, and it's like you beat their lowest end chip by a little bit. Because the base M4 is awesome. That's what I have in my travel laptop, and it's amazing. Like, I have never really needed more grunt out of that for those needs. And that includes, oftentimes, using Xcode and making apps. I mean, you know, obviously, you know, we'll see with the thing that we're not talking about, you know, if that ends up ramping up the demand for local resources. But actually, if you do a lot of cloud-based things we're not talking about, which most of them are so far, that actually might reduce the need for local processing power. So, you know, we'll see how this all shakes out. But anyway, the M4 is awesome. And I haven't had any time to play with the M5, but it is probably awesome as well. No, no, the M5 is already as well. Solidly a middle class chip. It is not a it isn't a low end chip at all. Yeah. And I imagine the M6 once they get the process transition to the two nanometer is going to be even more impressive. So look forward to that for your OLED laptop sometime supposedly within this calendar year. If the rumors are to be believed. We are sponsored this episode by Gusto online payroll and benefits software that's built for small businesses. Personally, I had to dive into this world when I bought the restaurant. And all of a sudden we have employees and we have to deal with payroll. and it's a rough world out there. It's really hard, especially for small businesses. Gusto makes it easy for everyone. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use. You can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere with Gusto. They support everything you might need. Automatic payroll tax filing, of course. Simple direct deposits, of course. Support for health benefits, commuter benefits, workers' comp, 401k. You name it, Gusto makes it simple, and they have options to fit nearly any budget. You do unlimited payroll runs for just one monthly price. There's no hidden fees and no surprises. And you can save time with all sorts of automated tools built right in. Offer letters, onboarding materials, and so much more. You can even get direct access to certified HR experts. If you need any tough situations with HR you need some guidance through, they can support you through that as well. It's quick and simple to switch to Gusto. Just transfer your existing data to get up and running quickly. And you don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. It is the number one rated payroll software according to G2 last fall and trusted by over 400,000 small businesses so far. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash ATP and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months free of free payroll at gusto.com slash ATP. One more time, gusto.com slash ATP. Thanks to Gusto for sponsoring our show. Want to do some Ask ATP? We haven't done that in a while. Yeah, it's built up. We have a lot of it in here. Alan Scholl writes, The recent winter storm has me seriously thinking about whole house generators and batteries. If I remember correctly, Casey uses a gas generator, and Marco has installed rooftop solar recently, so what's best? Would it make sense to have a whole house battery backup without a solar installation? So let me talk about what I've got going on. For short outages, which, let me back up actually, it's very rare for us to lose power here. Very, very rare. It used to happen all the time, and then I think there were some overground power lines that were running through some trees, and the power company cut the trees back a lot, and now it's been very unusual for us to lose power. But if we were to lose power, if it was only for a few hours, especially if it's like a weather event, so I know that it's coming, then I'll take that tailgate battery that we use. So this is something that I got inspired to buy from Jason Snell. It's a, I don't know, like 15-pound battery pack that has a couple of AC outlets on it, a couple of USB-C outlets on it, et cetera. And that's enough to run the fridge. I've never tried it, but based on like power draw specifications, I expect I could run the fridge for probably the better part of a day, maybe even two on that thing. And I could also, you know, plug in a lamp or something like that. So for a short thing, if you only ever lose power for a little bit of time, I'd say a portable battery pack might just do the trick. And this thing is like $200 or $300, maybe $400 at the most right now. It's reasonably, I mean, it's a lot of money, but it's reasonably affordable. But then on top of that, we have a very physically large, physically heavy, pretty powerful gas generator that was, figuratively speaking, bequeathed to us from my parents. What had happened was they live in an area where they do lose power a lot. And so they had this something like 5,000 watt sustained 7,000 peak gasoline generator. It's a Honda inverter generator. So it produces like a near perfect sine wave, et cetera, et cetera. I would never have spent the like five grand that they spent on this thing 10 years ago when it was new. But if they're offering it to me for free, hell yeah. So that is in the garage and we have a generator interlock in the fuse box and so on and so forth. So I haven't ever tried this. And in fact, just this Monday when I went and drove the Taycan, I almost did a little experiment since I was the only one in the house. And I really want to try figuring out how much of the house I can run off that generator because I think I can do darn near everything in the house. And maybe, maybe even one of the two HVAC systems in the house if I turn on the natural gas heat. You know, we wouldn't run AC, but in the cold weather, I wonder if I force the furnace to natural gas because of the heat pump and the natural gas. I wonder if I might be able to run the furnace in emergency heat mode if we really got in a pinch. But worst case scenario, we could use a space heater or something like that. But that's my situation. To answer Alan's question, my personal opinion is if you can do rooftop solar with like a power wall or equivalent or something like that, that's probably the bestest answer because it it serves you the most time you know you can use that pretty much all year round um but that is incredibly expensive incredibly expensive if you lose power constantly then a generac like a whole home generac or equivalent i think is a really good idea but if you just lose power occasionally i would really figure out you know what is it you absolutely need to survive a fridge or two a couple of lights something like that and figure out if a small tailgate generator or portable tailgate-style battery like I have, would that be enough to sustain you for a day or two? Because doing a Generac, doing whole-home solar, even buying one of these large gasoline-powered generators is a lot. And in the case of the generator, I have to start it every few months. I have to check the oil. I have to make sure when I do start it, I run all the gas out of it, et cetera, et cetera. So it is a lot of work for something that I only ever use once every few years. Wow, that was a really good answer. Hey, go team. What Casey just said is very important. A generator is a lifestyle. My in-laws have a generator. Whenever we're visiting them, if we happen to be visiting, I believe it's Wednesday at noon. Once a week, it has to turn on and test itself. It makes a whole bunch of noise. You're talking about a whole home generator, like a Generac or something like that. Yes, exactly. It's a whole thing. It's a very physically large thing. It's a very loud thing if it's ever needed to be running and it needs to run itself to test it ever so often. As Casey said, it's a gas engine. You've got to maintain it like a gas engine. So it's a whole thing. Generators do have the advantage over solar and batteries that, first of all, if you happen to have a gas pipeline to your house, like from your town, if you have natural gas service, you can have that connected to that. and then you kind of have an infinite supply, you know, infrastructure asterisks and everything. But, like, you effectively have an infinite supply so you don't have to, like, go buy fuel and keep a fuel tank and, you know, go refill it. And actually, let me jump in really quickly. Something I didn't consider about the freestanding gasoline generator that I have. When we had this real bad snowstorm, I got a burr up my butt that we were going to lose power for 17 weeks. And so I filled something like I think we have, like, a five-gallon gas can and, like, a two- or three-gallon gas can. I feel both those bad boys because I'm like, I am going to be okay during the storm. Like, it'll be fine. I'm going to turn my garage into even more of a bomb. Right, exactly. Well, the thing of it is, though, in a normal summer season, we'll go through maybe like three or four gallons of gas. And I now have like eight gallons of gas sitting in my garage. So what am I going to do with the rest of it? I can stabilize it. I can run it through the generator for funsies or whatever. Like, now I have a different problem. I mean, can you pour it into Aaron's car? Well, that car never uses the gas engine. Put it in the golf. Well, that's true. But no, well, first of all, both our cars take premiums. Second of all, I'm too nerdy about... You didn't get premium for the generator? No. Well, you should have thought about reusing it. Even though your cars require premium, they'll run on regular, right? They feel like trash. They're knock sensors, though. They'll figure it out. Engine computers are smart. Anyway, and on top of that, I'm too much a nerd with regard to mileage tracking and things like that. So that's a non-answer. So you're not going to... All right, well, I guess you could just... Let it sit in your garage, which is a better choice than putting it in your car. Well, coincidentally, what I've decided is I told some friends of ours, some local friends of ours, that I was going to put the excess gas into the wife's Ford Explorer because they are good to their cars, but they don't care like I do. So anyway. Don't think you're filthy. You should have just put like a lemonade standout at the end of your driveway because it's free gas. Cars that drive by, you just put it in the net. Just put it a little. Here's a dollar. Here's a dollar. But anyways, I apologize for interrupting, Marco, and I'd love you to continue. But it's just another thing to think about with a freestanding generator. This is not what you're talking about with like a natural gas generac sort of situation. But for mine, I now have too much gasoline and have to do something with it. Yeah. So that's that's the generator lifestyle. It's it's involved. It's very it's very like imposing into your physical space and into the noise and to maintenance and fuel needs and everything. The advantage of generators over solar is, again, you tend to have like, you know, if you can get a natural gas pipeline, you can run it 24-7 and you won't run out. And also, you tend to be able to power larger amounts of wattage for less money. The main downside of solar panels with batteries is that if you – like you have to – what Casey was saying was important. You have to figure out what exactly you're trying to replace. What level of power? Are you trying to run your entire house? And does that include things like a water heater? And most importantly, does that include heating and air conditioning? If you're running your heat and air conditioning and they are electric or heat pump, you're going to need a lot of power for that. That's going to be way more power than your fridge, your outlets, your lights. You know, like if all you need is fridge outlets and lights, you can get you can get away with a much smaller setup. But if you're trying to power your thermal control of the house, your HVAC system, and if you live somewhere that has very hot or very cold weather and you want it to work enough for that, you need a lot of power to do that. And for that, if that is your setup, I haven't I haven't looked at prices recently. I'll get to that in a second. But that that might be too much power to have a reasonably affordable setup with batteries. If you have to run it from solar and you have to run it overnight and it's really cold that night and you have to make a lot of heat, that just might be too much power to do that with a reasonable number of batteries in your garage or whatever. So that being said, that might not be what you need. You might not need all of that. When I bought my system, it was 2019 when I ordered and bought my solar system. So my solar system at the beach is something like, I think, like 90 kilowatts. On a good day, it produces like 95 or 100 kilowatts of power. So whatever the water for the solar panels is, maybe it's that. So on a good summer, sunny day, I'm going to run 100 or 90 kilowatt production. Or kilowatt hour production, I think. And I have two Tesla Powerwall 2s before they were known to be a horrible company run by horrible people. So there's two Powerwall 2s, which I think are 11 kilowatts hours of storage each, something like that. But that was in 2019. And that cost a decent amount of money. Today, though, the cost of all of that stuff have gone way, way down since then. I don't know what they cost today because I haven't priced it out recently, but it's way cheaper. Now, you do run into limits with how much battery storage you are allowed to have based on local building codes, fire codes, electrical codes. So there are other limits to consider. And so I can't tell you what your limit is. It's different in different places. It's different depending on what kind of space the batteries are in. Are they inside or the outside? Are they in condition space? Are they in a garage? There's all these different rules and regulations of basically how much of a lithium-ion bomb you can have in your house because that's what energy storage is. It's a bomb of various types of gas in the same way. Anyway, so there's all these different limits of how much battery storage you can have. The solar panels themselves are really inexpensive for what you get now. And I can strongly recommend having solar power for lots of reasons. Climate is a really good, like, you know, climate change reduction is a great reason. Just general, like, energy renewability. It's a great thing to have solar panels on your house if you have a situation where that's reasonably possible. It's a great thing to do. Mine do not cover my entire electricity need, but that's because we use a lot of electricity, especially if we're running the hot tub heater. That uses a ton of power, but it offsets it all, and it's great. One of the great advantages of the battery system, though, for backup power in some kind of situation where you have a storm or you have a power outage, the great thing about that system is that as long as you don't need the entire power plus of all the batteries every day which you won't because you wouldn't size it that way you effectively then have infinite recharging because you can use the power from the batteries all night and all day your solar panels are topping them off so my setup at the beach is having just the two power walls is not enough to run our HVAC and hot water heater and everything, so we don't have those connected to it. We have them connected to a whole bunch of lights, outlets, fridge, ice maker, all my networking equipment, all the Wi-Fi gear, all that stuff, and a few critical appliances and stuff. We've never run out of power. We've had a few days-long power outages, and we use the power at night, and then by like 9 a.m. the batteries are back at 100% from just the solar input. And unlike generators, you never really have to think about the system. There's no moving parts. It produces no noise. They need no maintenance. I have never touched the system since it was installed in 2019. From a like reliability, simplicity, elegance perspective, solar plus batteries is awesome. It's way better than a generator. The only problem is, again, can you get enough battery capacity to power what you need to power overnight? That's the big challenge. But if you can get past that or if you can get away with powering not your entire house, maybe you don't need your entire AC system to be running at full blast all night long and then there somehow to be no sun all day. If you can get away with the budgeting of that, it's an amazing setup. and I strongly recommend it. I would have a shorter answer to this question, which is, does it make sense to have a whole house battery without a solar installation? No, it doesn't make sense. Because if you're looking at whole house battery backup, you're already spending a huge amount of money. Get the solar panels. Just get them. Like I know they'll be cheaper next year and cheaper the next year still, but they're pretty cheap now. Get the solar. A hundred percent. Like if you're even considering a, whatever you consider a quote unquote whole house battery backup, subject to the caveats that Marco just put in about what you'll actually be allowed to install. Yes, absolutely. Get the solar. I don't think it makes sense without it. Unless you have the ability to bury a giant hypersonic vacuum seal flywheel in your yard and use that for energy storage. Which also has problems. Which is less of a bomb than batteries or gasoline, but I bet you can't have it. Oh, no, it's just a kinetic bomb. No, because it's underground. So when it explodes, it just the dirt protects you. Yeah, okay. It spins sideways, not vertically. In any case, there's other issues. It goes out sideways, you see. It just hits the dirt. It's fine. Again, I haven't priced this out recently, But I would expect that the solar panels part of it is probably cheaper than the batteries part of it these days. And boy, what a better investment. For sure, a better investment. I mean, ideally, you know, if you can get both components, get both components. They work very well together. And it's wonderful. Yes, exactly. But, you know, because if you're just thinking about like what Casey was saying, like a battery that like can power some of your appliances that you can roll around or whatever, then I would say like, oh, the solar panels are going to be a lot of money. But if you're even considering anything that you call a whole house battery, get some solar panels. Absolutely. I would agree with that. And again, I think I said this earlier, but just to reiterate, if you are in a situation where you have lost power, you shouldn't likely think of this as how can I get my normal life back to me? What you should think about is what are the bare essentials to keep you and your family functioning, right? And generally speaking, I would say that includes HVAC. But in this scenario, I would say it doesn't. But that probably potentially includes hot water, depending on if it's electric or not, and certainly includes like a few lights, maybe a space heater or something, your refrigerators, things of that nature. Yeah. And also, and, you know, one other thing, too, like if you're deciding between solar and generators, keep in mind that all the rest of the time when you are not having this rare event of this, you know, having like a power cut shortage or storm or whatever, all the rest of the time, your solar panels are producing power that is saving you money and is saving the world. And meanwhile, your generator is sitting there doing nothing except losing value and slowly needing maintenance. So that does also probably sway the decision a little bit. Like solar panels provide constant value whether you need that value at that moment or not. They're always providing that value. I would say the infinite source of power that you have going through a natural gas line to your house is substantially less infinite than the light of the sun. Exactly. Even when it's cloudy and raining. Yeah, because even when it's cloudy and raining in January, I'm still making like 20 or 30 kilowatt hours a day. like there's a lot of power generation to be had by pointing things at the sun like when when the incremental cost of having them on your roof every day is nothing you can gain a lot of value over time it's wonderful so yeah definitely like if you can install solar on your house you should do it for lots of reasons and you know whether you need whether you need to you know power your entire life as casey was saying uh for you know indefinitely or not that that's up to you i would also just merely suggest like if if the context is like well we shouldn't get solar because we might someday need you know the heat in the winter on some awful outage and my family needs it to survive like well for the cost of that incremental gain of power you can buy a lot of hotel rooms yeah how often would that actually be necessary like it would you'll be fine but anyway yeah get solar. It's really good. All right. Kevin B writes, why are you feeling positive about John Ternus potentially taking over CEO of Apple? You all very much disapprove of what Tim Cook has been doing lately, and I don't disagree. By all accounts, John Ternus is Tim Cook's choice to replace him one day. If you disagree so strongly with Tim Cook's decisions, why are you OK with this one? I have nothing against John Ternus. It just seems like there's a disconnect between Tim Cook is making awful decisions and needs to go and Tim Cook's decision to select John Ternus to replace is good and exciting. I don't think that's that big of a disconnect. Like, just because Tim Cook has selected him doesn't mean the person he's selecting agrees with everything Tim Cook does and will do exactly what Tim Cook did. I mean, Steve Jobs picked Tim Cook and they were very different CEOs. So our expectation, our hope, is that John Ternus will be different than Tim Cook in the same way that Tim Cook was different than Steve Jobs. Now, he could be worse, could be better, could be worse, but, like, we're hopeful because the things we hear are good, you know, like, we want to be hopeful. But the real point is, I think we've always basically resigned ourselves to the fact that nothing about what we dislike about what Tim Cook is doing is ever going to change until he leaves. So he has to leave. So if you want to think of it this way, you can say, it's not so much that we're excited about John Ternus coming, it's we're excited about Tim Cook leaving. And we feel like anything's got to be like, it's the only chance we have for improvement. And I think it's a little bit of both because, again, we have very little info on John Turner. So that is we've said that before. Like we don't actually know he's been he's been in presentations for years. We see him on stage talking. But like he's more of a cipher. We don't have he doesn't have a track record that we know other than he was in charge of hardware and hardware is great. Right. But I'm I'm personally optimistic, mostly because a transition, a departure, a change in leadership is the best opportunity for things to potentially get better. And I'm currently choosing to believe that they won't get worse. We'll see. So we don't know and we can't know what kind of CEO John Ternus will be. Again, assuming he is the next CEO, that's a big disclaimer, but it does seem fairly likely. We don't know. But I think we are ready for change in so many ways from Tim Cook. I think Tim Cook has shown us everything he can do, positive and negative. He's shown us what he's really good at. He's shown us what he's not so good at. And I think Apple's in a bit of a tough spot right now. Like, I don't think Apple's going to have a very good year. I think Tim Cook has made a bunch of strategic decisions over time that are coming home to roost. The over-reliance on China is really bad. The cozying up to Trump is really bad. And by, you know, the recent Apple News bias thing, not really helping. Like, not really buying anything, just more, just giving in to the bully more and more. you know so you have those two problems you have the under investment in ai uh which is still sorry we were supposed to talk about that um but it's like that's a huge deal this i've been saying for a while now this is steve balmer missing mobile this is apple's version of that like tim cook blew ai instead making a car and a vr helmet and the car never shipped thank god and the vr helmet is, you know, limping and not it turns out not where the next big thing was and then totally blew the actual next big thing, which is AI. I think Apple really would benefit in this moment from a significant change in leadership. So I am very much looking forward to that happening for so many reasons. I mean, look, the regulatory stuff with the App Store control and anti-competitive. I mean, there's so much that Apple has been squeezing the wrong way or blowing the wrong way. Oh, God, this is going badly. There's a lot of things that the Tim Cook era is not good at handling or has squeezed every ounce of life out of that are really hurting the company's long-term prospects. And I think this is going to be a really bad year for them in a lot of ways. I think they have a lot of humble pie that they're going to be eating. And I think by the time Tim Cook actually goes, if it happens in the next year or two, I think a lot more people than me are going to be saying, yeah, it's time. This is a welcome change. So whether John Ternus will be a great successor, we don't know yet. But Steve Jobs, who was pretty good in this role, picked Tim Cook, who is pretty mixed in this role. Steve Jobs and Tim Cook are nothing alike. They're very different people. Steve Jobs did not have an amazing ability to pick successors for himself. But also, when you look at the pool of people that they have to choose from at that level, it's a pretty short list. When Steve Jobs realized he had to hand off the company, how many people was he going to choose from? Tim Cook was the obvious choice. we all knew it at the time even before we knew how bad Steve's condition was and how little time he had left we all we were all saying at the time of course it's going to be Tim Cook like that was very obvious and there weren't that many other clearly good options at that time well now Tim Cook looking for a successor like there's not that many good choices there's not many that many plausible realistic choices that would actually you know be good and aren't you know as old as Tim and who would want the job and who would be good at the job. So the fact that Tim is picking seemingly John Ternus doesn't necessarily say that there were 20 people on the list and Tim thought Ternus was going to be the most like him. It doesn't say that at all. I think the list is much smaller than that of practical options. And I don't think when people choose a successor, I don't think they are necessarily that good at finding someone just like them or that that would be what they would be looking for necessarily. Also, I think implicit in this question is an assertion or an assumption that we disagree with everything, every single thing that Tim Cook does. And I don't think that's true. We certainly lately have disagreed with a lot, but I wouldn't say that I at least disagree with literally everything that Tim Cook does. No, none of us do. It is possible. It is very possible for us to simultaneously say decision A is bad and decision B was great. So I don't think this is incongruous at all, personally. Carl Walther writes, On episode 675, John was talking about the confusion that would be caused if common menu items had inconsistent names. I'm a lifelong Windows user that came to Mac five years ago. Recently, I was working with an image in preview, and I wanted to rename the image to separate it from the original image. Instead of save as, duplicate is the default menu item, with save as available as an alt click. It is worth noting, however, that is also option. You can hit option and click as well. Why is duplicate the default Mac workflow? The workflow I'm used to is to use save as to create a new file, which is a copy of the old one, but with the new name keeping the same window I was working in, keeping inside the same window I was working in. John, what's going on here? The menu item is duplicate, not duplicate. I was wondering how long you'd let him do that. The option is alt. They're just the Windows user, and they think it's alt. I know it says alt on the key. It drives me nuts. Alt tab, which is command tab, not option tab. Anyway, actually, it should be the Windows key, because if you go by consistent placement, you should be remapping your Windows keyboard, which is one of the ones I use. So the Windows key added years later than it should have been when Microsoft finally got around to copying Apple in one more regard, and they still managed to screw it up. Yeah, there was just a weird gap there before in pieces of keyboards. Right. And so anyway, so this this change, like going from a world where you had save and save as in the file menu to the world where you have duplicate in that menu item and all these options, you know, all these key combinations that you can press to change those menu items to other things. this happened in 2012. I'll put a link in the show notes to my Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion review from 2012. That's when this was rolled out. And the idea behind it is hopefully still explained clearly in that article. It said, hey, iPhones and iPads and other things, people love those. And they have a different model for dealing with documents than the Mac does. And people seem to really like it. And if you're wondering what that model is, take out your phone, open the Notes app, and use it. How does that work? Is there a save menu in there anyway? Do you have to remember to save in notes? Are your changes unsaved and you can decide, never mind, I'm just going to close this note and not save those changes? No, that's not how the Notes app works. That's not how any apps on iOS or iPad have ever really worked. They've always been like, it's just a live thing. You don't have to worry about files or saving. And that's very in line with what people expect if it's what you're used to. And that was on the phone. And the bright idea around this era of 10.7 and 10.8 is like things people love about the phone and the iPad. We should bring them to the Mac. The problem is the Mac is not the phone or the iPad, but they did. They brought it They said we going to we going to have a new paradigm for a document model on the Mac And we going to have a bunch of new APIs and we going to have new conventions and we going to show you how it done by like here text edit and there no more save or save as option or whatever We're going to have documents that automatically save. We're going to automatically save versions in this janky SQLite database that's off to the side, and you'll be able to roll back versions. So don't worry. It's not like you're going to lose your changes. You can always go back from one version to the other, but you don't have to worry about saving anymore. And they pitched this real hard. They had WWDC sessions on it. They did it to their own apps to demonstrate, here's how it's done. Here's what we think the future is. Like, you know, just don't worry if you have unsaved documents. Just quit the app and relaunch it. Your documents will be back right where they were. Don't worry about saving. We're always saving. And don't worry about getting back past versions. We can always show you the past versions. And, you know, again, that was 2012. Here we are in 2026, and I can tell you, it did not stick. Mac users did not universally laud and adopt this new model. independent Mac developers that not universally adopted and say it's great and look never look back at that old crappy model and this is despite the fact that everybody still loves their phones and everybody still loves their iPads and there are Mac apps that work this way that people really like but it was not universally adopted and maybe especially as people are older than we all need to die but like wow you know like the the habits that were formed in the stone age of the PC which is that you open a document in your document-based application and you do stuff in it. And if you change your mind, you can just close that window and say, don't save these changes. And you know, you haven't modified the document on disk. The capabilities I just described are still there in the model Apple introduced. They're just presented differently. And my impression is that not just developers, not just old people, but the general public kind of rejected them for certain classes of applications on the Mac. For other classes of applications, they work. Notes on the Mac works just like it does on the phone. There's no saving, there's no documents, no reverting, and people love it, and it works fine. But for things like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word or all these other applications, they've been always, like, dabbling in that area. Well, we'll work that way because Apple says we want to work that way, but we do have some cranky users who don't want it to work that way, so maybe we'll give you options on what should the defaults be, and we're not going to use Apple's versions thing. Are you even familiar with this feature? It's so poorly adopted on the Mac. I'm always wondering if it's even still there. Do you know what I'm talking about, the versions thing? I know it's there. I've never successfully used it. Isn't it like a mini time machine presentation for just the document you're working on or something like that? Yeah. The problem with that feature has kind of been like all it is, you have auto save. You don't have to be saving. It'll always be saving in the background. You don't have to worry about it. And if you want to get back a change before, like you open a document, you make some change, you're like, oh, no, I changed my mind. I don't want any of this. I can't get back to the old version because those were all auto-saved, and I deleted a bunch of stuff, and I could hold down Command-Z for a long time, but maybe the undo buffer is gone because I opened and closed the document or something. I changed my mind. How can I get that back? The idea is that while the app is auto-saving, every old version of the document, like version control style, is saved somewhere, and you can just go back to earlier. This is not Time Machine. This is literally saving the diffs and chunks in this weird SQLite database. I think it's SQLite off to the side somewhere like this. This was and I believe still is built into Mac OS, and you would access it either through the menus or you could do a modifier click on the title of the thing in the title bar. But again, it never really caught on. The implementation was janky and not great, and the UI for presenting was inconsistent. It changed a lot, and just people never really latched onto it. It's like, look, there's two worlds. There's the iPhone world where you don't have to worry about any of this stuff, and lots of apps in the Mac do that these days, and there's the old world which is like pcs where you have file open save blah blah blah the only thing this change really did was teach a whole swath of the public the weird finger modifier combos to get save as back because that's what everybody wants they're like just google for how do i get save as back on the mac you'll find a million results like every like this is a widely shared tip since 2012 because people are like i just i used to know how computers worked and i just want that back and again maybe it's just the stubbornness and all these people just need to live out their lives and die, and then we'll enter the brave new world where everything auto saves. But I just feel like Apple's heart hasn't really been in it. They haven't advanced and continued pushing this, despite the fact that if you go to text edit today, I believe this is still the default of how it works. Yeah, I still get it in preview. That's where I see it the most. Yeah, preview drives me nuts with that. There's a bunch of other things that preview does that drive me off the wall, too. But yeah, now, text edit, you've got save, duplicate, rename, move to, revert. I believe you have the versioning thing still in the accessible somewhere i forget where that is hiding like just like you don't hear much about it like apple isn't like hammering on it like they were back in like 2012 2013 2014 of saying you need to adopt this this is the modern way forget about that all open save close documents out saving that's not it just we want all the apps the mac to work like uh they do on ios and it's just been like unevenly adopted and what has resulted in is people like carl seeing this and saying what's going on on the mac like is this how is this how everything is in the Mac or just some things and why are some things like this and why are they not? And why do I have to learn the modifier clicks to get save as back? I think it's actually like, it's just option. Yeah. But it changes duplicated, but then other options. It's just, it's, it's inconsistent in a way that it wasn't before because they weren't able to transition the Mac platform from the old model to the new one. So now we just have both of them, which might sound familiar. If you're have tracked the history of window management on the Mac, either. They're just saying they introduced a new system, but the old one doesn't go away, and now you have both, which in some ways is useful. But the problem is with every app that you use now on the Mac, if it's not doing what you expect, you'll be startled. Because, again, stickies and notes do what people expect, and they never have to think about it. But text edit maybe doesn't work the way you expect because you expect it to work the old way because it's just a simple text editor. But it doesn't. It works the new way. And the same thing with preview where you're like, is this saved? do I want to duplicate? Like, oh, I made a change, but I just saw the preview icon change on the desktop, but I didn't hit save. I guess preview doesn't work like I thought it did. I guess it just auto-saves. If I want the old version back, I guess I should have duplicated first. Is there a version feature in preview, and how do I access it? It's not a great situation. I understand what Apple is trying to do, but I think their transition essentially failed, and then they lost interest in it. yeah this this has bitten me constantly preview is by far the most common time i run into it oftentimes it'll be like i'm opening an image i want to resize it and save a smaller copy and so often yeah i open it up i resize it oh i just overwrote the original with a smaller version of itself thanks thanks so much and you didn't save but you're like surely nothing happens until i save nope that's not the way preview works it works like notes And I think the example of notes is a good one. The reason why we don't have save in notes, I think conceptually that is not at odds with wanting the old file save behavior in preview because notes, you're not operating on files. Notes is a kind of like, you know, solid data store. You are operating on a database inside the app. There are also some that's called shoebox apps. Like when you are when you are using notes, it does not work like open a file, edit the file, save the file because you're not operating on files. Whereas the reason why this new document model, new being 2012, is so confusing and has been since 2012 when they introduced it is because the entire history of PCs, when you are operating on files, works the old way. And when phones came around with phone apps that inspired like this new behavior, phone apps don't work on files, at least most of them, you know, and certainly now there's a few. But, you know, as we get into like, you know, the iPad being a power user thing. But for the most part, phone apps don't work on files. Phone apps work on databases and services. It is consistent that you can say you don't have to save in notes. Yeah, because notes, you're not dealing with files. But the workflow of people using PCs, Windows and Mac forever, has been when you are operating on a file, you can open that file, you can edit it, and it shows a little unsaved indicator somewhere. Maybe, you know, the dot on Mac. I don't know what the heck PCs do. It doesn't matter. And you can save the file. And if you try to close the file without saving, it'll ask you, do you want to save what you did? And you can save it or you can save as or you can discard it. And Apple said, we're going to change that. Now, the problem with changing that is that you're taking a model that everyone has already learned and not only throwing it away, but replacing it with a model that looks the same until you've destroyed data. It looks – and yeah, you can revert, and most people don't know that, or it's hard or it's clunky. We already had a model for this, and it's kind of like – and I'm sorry, John, you're going to hate this. It's kind of like the file extensions debate. I think you mean file name extensions. Yes, sorry. Where Mac file names don't natively need extensions, and the old Mac didn't even have them. And then, you know, Windows PCs use file extensions to indicate types of files and provide associations to whatever app should open it. Over time, like the pressure from the Windows world for Macs to work the same way as people know how to use them, and they have good interoperability with PC files, kind of required Macs just by kind of market pressure to adopt file name extensions. Or that's what the people who did it tell themselves so they can sleep at night. Wow. Gracious. And it's not the most graceful thing in the world. And, of course, Apple did their Apple way, which is, well, we're going to have file extensions, but we're going to hide them sometimes. And just to confuse the way things work, we're just going to have some file extensions that never show up, like bundles, app and stuff. And we're going to have some file extensions that show up only if you typed them in when you saved the file, but not if you did. And then we're going to prompt you to change it even when it's not there visibly. It's, again, like Apple tried to do something, you know, pretty and theoretically maybe a little bit uniform. And the real world complexity of it is kind of annoying. Well, the document model introduced in 2012 is an even larger version of that problem where they tried to do something that is different from the way PCs and previous Macs worked. And no one really wanted it. None of the rest of the world works that way, including the iPhone. It was one of the many features where the iPhone succeeds or the iPad succeeds, and Apple's like, we should unify the behavior between iOS and Macs. And that hardly ever has been a good idea and has hardly ever resulted in positive change. Sometimes it has, but overall, every time they've tried to unify the behavior by basically clobbering what was there on the Mac before with a copy of what's on iOS, us, it doesn't usually work out that well because they're different platforms. They work very differently. Their users have different expectations and different habits and different needs. Anyway, so this is one of those things where like we had a model that worked that everyone was familiar with and they tried to replace it. No one adopted it really except Apple's own built-in apps and even then only some of them. And so what we have now is this confusing mess and Apple is probably too proud to ever change it back in their apps to ever go back to this or to, as far as I know, there's still no system-wide option to change it back, is there? No, but they added so many APIs for this and so many systems, but I just feel like they lost interest in them, especially the versioning stuff. Well, I think the market just said, we don't care. We don't want that because users said, we don't want that. I mean, some apps do use it. That's the thing. They can't get rid of it now because some apps do actually use it and rely on it. They just painted themselves into a corner. It's not a great situation for anybody. I wish they had either successfully transitioned or not tried to do it, but they didn't, so we're kind of stuck. And you mentioned the apps not using documents. I don't actually know the answer to this question, but I'm curious to what people... If other people don't know the answer, think to yourself, have you ever even considered this and what you think the answer is? Does Final Cut Pro on the iPad autosave everything as you do it, or is there an explicit save function? I think it autosaves, but I don't know. It must, because on iPad iOS, you know, you got to be, you can be terminated at any time. Like you have to, like the whole, you know, iOS apps basically have to autosave for practical reasons. I mean, they could, they can, the thing is like, I'm basically adding what document model does it present? Yes, technically under the covers, they have to be autosaving, but they could be autosaving off to the side. And still like when you relaunch the app, it shows as having essentially quote unquote unsaved changes, even though it just reloaded it from disk. But like Final Cut Pro is an example because it is file-based. Like you are working on project file, even though the files are bundles or whatever. Like it is, it is totally file-based. Like it is no, it's not a shoebox app. There's not, I know there's a, there's probably some kind of library type structure, but the whole point with Final Cut is you're trading these project files around. You can transfer them, not losslessly, between the Mac version and the iPad version. Like it is the proiest of the pro app that has to deal with like media files and libraries of media files and project files and edit decision lists and all these other things. Right. And yet on the iPad, I also assume that it auto saves everything. so it's it's an example if that's true and i don't even know if it is like that's a difficult situation to be in because like the the rule of like well if you're a shoebox app then you you do this but if you're not a shoebox app first of all that distinction is makes sense to programmers but not so much to users because like how can i tell one way or the other but second it's like okay so final cut pro surely that works this way because it's not a shoebox like well when it's on the ipad it does but and here's another question i don't know the answer to on the mac does it autosave i I don't know that answer that either. But it's like the fact that we could just speculate and be like, I can see how that app could work one way or the other, and both would make sense from a certain perspective. That kind of confusion. That's what they introduced to the Mac platform, that confusion, which is any given app you're not sure. And this is the bad kind of confusion. I mentioned before when we talked about window, you know, Mark was going on about like he wants the app to close when you close the last open window. Well, that distinction I'm in favor of because I feel like most of the time it does what people expect. Close the last window on calculator, the app quits. Close the last window on dictionary, the app quits. Close the last window on Microsoft Word, the app doesn't quit. Like, even though that is a quote-unquote inconsistency, I think it's fairly straightforward to know what your app should do and let the developers pick that. But autosave versus not, it's incredibly fraught to the degree where I wonder if, you know, Apple making decisions about its highest end, most pro, most complicated product, even that the decision is not clear which way they should go. So this is kind of a failed. It's a failed sociological experiment and also a failed technical experiment. I'm not sure when it'll be resolved, but presumably I'll be dead by then. Yeah, probably never. I mean, also, in the case where you have the same app on iPadOS and Mac, whether they differ in their behavior in this way, I don't think is that important. Because I don't think there's that many people bouncing between Final Cut on iPad and Final Cut on a Mac. Because, as you mentioned, like, it's not even a safe transfer. But, like, I think most people probably use one or the other. I could be wrong. I don't have any data on this. But just kind of a gut feeling. I don't hear a lot of people using both actively back and forth. So I think it makes sense, again, like so many things about unifying the platforms. I think it makes sense for the app to do what is the native behavior on the platform it's running on. And that is actually different between iOS and macOS. Yeah, again, that makes me wonder what those two apps actually do. I don't necessarily think that they should be consistent with each other, but it's like it's kind of mind-boggling to think that, you know, the Mac version, for example, might auto-save like the iPad version, and it's done it for years, and we just don't know because we're not filing our Pro users. But, like, once you make a decision like this, you know, your users essentially get used to it, and you should just basically stick with that, I guess. But it's so, for new users, it's so, like, think of Preview, right? It's not like you don't know that's how Preview works, and yet it keeps catching you because you don't expect it to work that way. It's not like preview is a rarely used application that you touch once a year or something. It's still catching you by surprise when you crop. It's like there's something stubborn about the way things should work. Again, it's like if calculator didn't quit when you closed the little tiny calculator window. Even if you knew that and you've known it for years, every time you close that calculator window and then an hour later so the calculator was still open, you'd be like, oh, damn, I forgot about that again. This is not what you expect. And, yeah, it's a problem of their own making. It would have been much more consistent if they just left it alone or they forcibly transitioned everybody, but it didn't work out. To be clear, I have never used Final Cut Pro on the iPad, but on the Mac, as far as I know, every move you make, every step you take, it saves it immediately. There's no, like, file save or anything like that. Yeah, I wonder if that was true in Final Cut 7. Maybe that's just a cultural thing with video editors. Like, I'm sure people write in Intel. It's obviously not a research. Because that's not how Logic works. Yeah, well, they bought that from a different company. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week, 1Password, Zapier, and Gusto. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. There is more of the show to be had if you sign up as a member. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about how apparently everyone is stealing TV now. This is pretty fun. So we're going to talk about that in Overtime. Thanks, everybody. You can join us at atp.fm slash join to hear that. and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S That's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O A-R-M M-A-R-C-O R-M-E S-I-R-A-C U-S-A-C R-U-S-A It's accidental It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long Alright, so a week or so ago, maybe a little more, I don't know, sometime recently, the 2nd of February, I finally got around to putting a post up on my website about my status board, which we've talked about on and off over the years, over the last couple of years on this show. To recap, a few years ago, well, for a long time, I was using HomeBridge. There's nothing wrong with HomeBridge, but eventually I wanted to have a little more control over what was going on in the house. And so I became one of those people, a home assistant person. And so now that I'm a home assistant person, all I want to do is automate everything in my life. And a few months ago, we were talking on the show, maybe a year ago, about how I really wanted to have like a status board in the house, preferably somewhere downstairs where we spend most of our time, that tells me the state of a few like critical systems in the house. Did you always call it status board? I thought so. I'm wondering if you're calling it that now because of the recent panic status board thing that I was talking about. Yeah, maybe. I mean, it's not really a board, but anyway, continue. I just, my memory is making me think, was it always status board? Is this like a Berenstain Bears thing? So, but I'm not confident. It could be. I don't know. Anyway, go on. It's status, and it's on a board, kind of. Well, it's not really on a board, to your point. It's more of a series of status indicators. It's a very thin board. Right, yeah, yeah. It's status indicators. And so I had initially had the idea, and I remember talking about this on the show. The house was built in the late 90s. So in the kitchen at roughly eye level was a RJ11 jack, you know, a phone line jack. And it was way up high. And the idea was you would mount your kitchen phone way up high, as everyone did at the time, and plug it into that jack right there. And I've since pulled that faceplate off and kind of gotten rid of the jack. And so now it's just a blank faceplate. And my initial cut on this was, hey, I'm going to wire, like, I'm going to drill holes for like two or three LEDs. I don't know, why are those like a Raspberry Pi or an ESP32 or something like that? Now, I'm not sure how it was getting power to that ESP32, but we'll leave that aside. But I'll put a couple of LEDs on a blank, you know, wall plate and call it a day. And I told Erin this plan, and she told me in the most loving way possible over her dead body. And so I had to rethink. And we were talking about this on the show, and an incredibly kind listener, Chris R., wrote to me and said, hey, have you heard of these home seer switches? And that's H-O-M-E-S-E-E-R. And the company, as far as I can tell, is still around, but these particular switches are discontinued. And so that's a real bummer. But in the midst of all the recommendations for a particular InnoVeli switch, which I don't remember specifically which one it is, so I'm not going to link in the show notes, but everyone and their mother recommended these InnoVeli switches, which do a very similar thing to what I'm about to describe, but it doesn't work quite as well. And I'll try to come back and explain why. But the way this home seer switch works is there's seven LEDs on the left-hand side of a Decora-style switch, like a paddle-style switch. And by default, what happens is when it's a dimmer, and so as you hold down on the up button, let's say, each of the LEDs will start increasing over time as the light is getting brighter to indicate how dim or bright the light is. And they will all, you know, be white or whatever. However, you have the option of putting it in what they call status mode. And what that allows you to do is to control each of the seven LEDs individually. Additionally, each of the LEDs has like seven or so preset colors that you can use. So Chris R was kind enough to send me an extra one of these that he had. um it works via z wave which my understanding is and we talked about this a few weeks ago uh thread is kind of sort of z wave but over ipv6 whereas z wave is not over ipv6 um but nevertheless it's it it works via rf and so i needed to get like a little dongle for my home assistant installation like a physical usbc or usb a dongle b whatever i don't i can remember the other ones uh i had to get a usb dongle to hook up to the then synology now to a knock which we'll talk about in another show um in order to be able to talk z wave um and that was a little challenging but worked out just fine and it took a little back and forth for me to figure out how the heck to get this all wired up figuratively speaking literally speaking it was fairly straightforward uh but figuratively speaking to get it all wired up and home assistant so on and so forth it's a little bit clunky but i finally got to the point that i have my quote-unquote status board which is really more of a status panel or status lights. And I thought it was really fun to document that, which is what I put on my website, and we can talk more about it here. But the general gist of it is that there are seven LEDs, like I said, and going from bottom to top, what I have is if there's a red LED lit at the very bottom, the garage door is open. If it is extinguished, if it is not on, then the garage door is closed. Above that, there's a magenta LED that, if it's on, the shed door is open. Gentlemen, how do I know if the shed door is open? A Yolink contact sensor. Additionally, immediately above that, if there's a white LED that's lit, then the Volvo is actively charging. Then I have a blank space because I don't know what else I want to use for that particular spot. And then above that, this is now the one, two, three, four, fifth one up, the third one down. If there's a blue LED illuminated, then the mail is waiting, which, again, I know because of a Yolink contact sensor. Above that, if there is a green LED lit and solid, then there's some amount of laundry that needs attention, which I can dig into more if you want. And then if it's flashing, that means that the laundry is actively running. And then finally, at the very top, there's also a, figuratively speaking, blank spot because I don't know what to put there either. This is incredibly dorky, incredibly overkill, and largely useless. And I got to tell you, gentlemen, it makes me so freaking happy. I'm surprised you got clearance for a blinking LED when the laundry is running. Well, because she never pays attention to any of these LEDs. But it's blinking. I mean, I could turn that off. That's a choice I made. Also, my first question for this is, so you got this thing in here, and I encourage people to go to Casey's blog post to look at this to get an idea of what he's talking about here. has the rest of your family acclimated to these lights and they know what they mean or do they ignore them as just visual noise more of the latter i would say of the four of us i far and away pay the most attention which tracks uh the kids are at least somewhat aware i think particularly the red and blue which is garage door and male i don't think they pay that much attention to whether or not the car the car is charging which is white why do they care about the garage door I don't know, because if they want to run out and get the mail or if they want to run outside and play basketball or something like that, I think they're at least aware that the red means the garage door is open. I don't need to get your kids on the show. I feel like if they're going to run out through the garage, they're going to open the door to the garage from your house and see whether the door is open. Also true. They'll open it. I'm not sure they're consulting the LED before they make that journey. Perhaps not. But they are at least aware of red. They are aware of blue. I don't think they care about magenta, white, or green, which would be in order the shed door, the Volvo, and the laundry. I don't think Erin pays any attention to any of this whatsoever. I think she is lightly aware of what each of the colors means. I'm pretty sure. This would be a great quiz. You should do this. You should, like, not just do it casual-like. Just, like, it's not a big pressure thing. And just, like, see if you can casually figure out if, you know, quiz your family. What do the light colors mean? I should do that. And in fact, I should have done that before we recorded. Now I feel really dumb. I didn't think about it, but I should have. But yeah, again, this is very dumb. This is not something that I think most human beings would want in their house, particularly to John's point, a flashing light. Oh, and the red light also flashes when the garage door is actively going up or down. But anyways, I don't think any human would want this except me, but it makes me so incredibly happy. That's honestly, that's great. I feel like a actual status board, like a panic style status board would be, I mean, I think you would enjoy messing with that even more because then you'd have like a little animated garage door going up and you'd have graphics and and like you could do charts and stuff and all sorts of things. But obviously that would be, you know, a tremendous eyesore, no matter how good a job I do. I have to say that I kind of think this is an eyesore. I know it is a smaller eyesore, but it also has so much less information. Like everyone's so used to screens like, you know, all these smart thermostats that most of us have. They have screens that are much bigger than these tiny LEDs in them and people just accept them in their homes. and they have all sorts of weird graphics on them, and they change when you walk by because they have proximity sensors and all this stuff. So it's like, is it really that far? And to go to like an LCD that's the size of this entire panel that you could put some stuff on? I mean, but anyway, if it's working for you and it makes you happy and your family tolerates it, honestly, isn't that the best we can really hope for? Yes, all of that is very accurate. I don't know. So, I mean, it sounds like, John, you are not at all interested in replicating this, and honestly, it would be good. No, absolutely not. Marco, does this have any appeal to you whatsoever? No, fair enough. But but I recognize like I recognize the appeal for a lot of people to do stuff like this. I personally I it's it's not worth it enough for me. Like I like I have one of those terminals from the problematic guy, which we didn't know at the time either. And and it's it's fun for the family to see like weather and stuff downstairs. But like I will go a whole week forgetting to look at it because it's just like it becomes scenery because because it isn't reminding me in the corner of my screen. every day remind me this afternoon what does that mean i don't care like it's it's not one of those things it's it kind of becomes background and so if i have one of these indicators in my house anywhere i think the same thing would happen it would just become background to me i would i would stop seeing it and therefore it stops showing its function yeah i totally get that uh but it makes me very happy and there's a little bit more detail on the website on my website but it's very cool oh and then coming back to the inovelli switch there's a flavor of inovelli switch that has a bunch of LEDs that you can control, but there is a single diffuser that runs above all of the LEDs, so it's a lot more challenging to figure out what LED is lit and so on and so forth. And so that's one of the reasons why the InnoValley stuff doesn't really appeal to me. Also, at the time, I don't remember if they were doing any Z-Wave switches. I don't have Zigbee in the house, and if you don't know what that means, congrats, you're a normal human. But I don't have any Zigbee stuff in the house, and I only have this one Z-Wave device. But I didn't want to go and have to get another dongle to have a different communications protocol and blah, blah, blah. And so that's why I didn't go in a belly, even though people have very good things to say about it. And you can actually buy one, which is an improvement over this home seer thing. So what are you going to do?