On the Shelf With the Pickles
Casey:
Marco you can obviously do whatever you want to do but if I if you will permit me to punt to John if I can do the punting to John for the pre-show when you're ready please yeah all right let's go live hi everybody we're live oh is it me all right I didn't know if you had a preamble sorry I didn't know if there was I know they they say hike when they like you know snap the ball is there is there an equivalent command for punting over hold I don't know all right let me start over and get us going oh
Casey:
A long time ago, when Marco and John and I first started talking about doing a podcast together, and I think we've told this story, but not in a long time, one of the things that Marco and John and I all said to each other was, look, we're not going to stop being friends on account of any of this.
Casey:
And at the time, that was hilarious because it was us talking about cars, and that didn't amount to all that much in the grand scheme of things until you get to ATP.
Casey:
I stand by that.
Casey:
I think you two stand by it.
Casey:
I think we've done a great job of it.
Casey:
Except...
Casey:
Now, everything is the show.
Casey:
And so, in our internal show notes, we have a section for the pre-show.
Casey:
And sometimes there'll be stuff there.
Casey:
A lot of times Marco will just make something up, or sometimes the two of us will.
Casey:
But for the last 48 hours, I've had to stare at pre-show colon, John made an important purchase.
Casey:
And I don't know what it is.
Casey:
And I'm dying.
Casey:
And this is why maybe this whole... Maybe we should shut it all down.
Casey:
Because I don't want to have to wait to know what your important purchase was, John.
Casey:
But finally, the time has come.
Casey:
Fill me in, please.
John:
I spent so long trying to decide whether I should put anything there.
John:
Because a lot of time, I just don't.
John:
I don't want to surprise you with it.
John:
But I did want to reserve the slot.
John:
But I didn't want to make it seem that big of a deal.
John:
I didn't want to overhype it.
Casey:
Important purchase!
Casey:
That sounds like a big deal.
John:
Well, I know, but it's not like...
John:
If I had like, uh, if I'd written like on your school paper, see me, like see me after class or like we need to talk or something terrible like that.
John:
So I wanted to tamp it down to be like, this is not, this is a pre-show.
John:
It's not a big thing.
Marco:
Issue with your performance.
John:
I did want to reserve the spot in the pre-show.
John:
So no, it's nothing that exciting.
John:
Um,
Marco:
John, everything we purchase can be exciting if we talk about it in the right way or if we care enough about it.
John:
Yeah, I think this one is significant in stupid ways.
John:
So picture it.
John:
June 11th, 2011, San Francisco.
John:
You got anything, Casey?
Marco:
Your toaster.
Casey:
Yeah, actually, that's true.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
I got it immediately.
Casey:
I was going to say WWDC, and I thought that that was keynote day of WWDC of that year.
Casey:
And that was the first time that I had met you in person.
Casey:
And we kind of sort of knew each other at that point, but not well.
Casey:
But I don't know if I would have jumped all the way to toasters.
Casey:
Well done, Marco.
John:
I'm shocked that Marco had that in a nanosecond.
John:
I thought for sure you'd be like, huh, I don't know.
John:
Is that backwards?
John:
Anyway, yeah.
John:
Just tell us to take a look in the show in the chat room.
John:
Take a look at that image.
John:
You may remember this.
Casey:
Yes, I do.
Casey:
I might have even taken that photo.
Casey:
I was certainly there for it, and I think I took it.
Marco:
Yeah, I think you probably did take that photo.
Casey:
Anyways, but yes, I do remember.
Marco:
It's advertising iOS 5 in the background.
Casey:
And iCloud.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Right.
John:
So, fast forward 14 years, June 11th, 2025.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I put in an order on Amazon.com for a new toaster.
Marco:
This is an important purchase.
Marco:
Whoa.
Marco:
Now, is it the same toaster?
Casey:
Did you buy a backup of the toaster?
John:
The real question is, why?
John:
Why did I put it in order?
John:
And I didn't plan this.
John:
I looked at the dates.
John:
I looked on the Amazon order history.
John:
It was exactly 14 years to the day.
John:
That's 2011 to 2025, June 11th, both times.
John:
I put in order for a toaster.
Marco:
What's your guess, Casey?
Marco:
My guess is either the first one finally died and he put in an order for the exact same one again because nothing better has been made since to his standards.
Marco:
Or he is buying a toaster for somewhere that one of his kids will be living like for college.
Casey:
Do you need me at all for the show?
Casey:
Because I was absolutely going to say both of those things.
Marco:
He probably would buy the replacement toaster, definitely the same one, because nothing else is as good for his standards.
Marco:
He'd probably buy the same toaster for himself and then give the kid the old one.
John:
Yeah, I would buy that.
John:
That's good that you are both on the same page here.
John:
Oh, here's what happened.
John:
The toaster that I've had for 14 years has served us well.
John:
But in recent months, it started doing a thing where it would work almost all the time.
John:
But once in a blue moon, you would press the button to begin whatever toast thing that you're doing.
John:
And the screen would change from blue to orange like it always does.
John:
And the timer would start counting down like it always does.
John:
But the heating elements would not get hot, which is an important function.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
For a toaster.
John:
And you'd be like, huh, like I put this bread in here and I pressed the button and it changed color and counted down.
John:
And I came back and the bread was stone cold.
John:
And then a person will come up to it and said, what do you mean?
John:
And press the button and then it will work.
John:
But you can't have that.
John:
It's got to work all the time.
John:
So unfortunately, that toaster had to be retired.
John:
It's interesting that you mentioned potential kid things.
John:
It's like, what did you do with your retired toaster?
John:
Did you chuck it?
John:
Did you bring it to the single stream recycling center along with the air conditioner that also died this year and the dehumidifier that also died this year?
John:
No, because it works like 92% of the time.
Yeah.
John:
is that packed up and put it in the attic in case a kid wants it when they go okay what kid is gonna want a toaster that works most of the time it's a good toaster it still works great almost all the time nothing is wrong with it except for the times when you press the button and nothing happens
Marco:
Okay, I cannot think of very many appliances that I could tolerate that kind of failure in.
Marco:
Like, I would rather go to Target and get a toaster oven for $30 that works 100% of the time.
John:
Oh, have you tried a $30 Target toaster lately?
John:
Because I have.
John:
Because we bought a toaster for my son for his, like, apartment-style accommodations in his junior year, and it's terrible.
John:
Like, I wouldn't... Yeah, so maybe it turns on all the time, but it is terrible all the time.
Yeah.
John:
is being terrible all the time better doesn't do a good job of any of making your food hot and toasting it it's all uneven and it's just it's like it's unsatisfying to use it doesn't do its job well like it's bad so this this toaster even if it only works one out of every you know 90 times or whatever still way better than that so anyway it may eventually end up getting chucked but for now it is a mostly functional toaster
Marco:
So, what did you replace it with?
John:
I mean, the same toaster.
John:
Yeah, okay.
John:
There it is.
John:
There it is.
John:
Luckily, they still sell this toaster.
John:
I've tried a lot of toasters since, and I haven't found... The only one that I think bests it in some ways is the Panasonic Flash Express whatever thing, which is just so much faster than this toaster.
John:
But it is smaller, oddly proportioned, and I don't like the UI.
John:
And so I need something that's... The size of this one is perfect for my kitchen because it basically is...
John:
As big as will fit, there is a much bigger one, which I literally can't fit.
John:
And honestly, my friend has the other one.
John:
So I'm very familiar with it.
John:
I don't think I would like that bigger one because it's just too big.
John:
So this is the size for me.
John:
And by the way, my parents have the smaller one.
John:
So I have some experience with that when I'm over their place.
John:
So the Breville 650 XL, they still sell it.
John:
I just got another one, the same toaster.
John:
But I wanted to salute this toaster that you gave me generously as a gift in 2011 that I did not ask for.
John:
You got me this toaster, which we later learned through extensive, in case you have to link to your page, extensive reviewing of other contemporary toasters that you basically stumbled upon by going into the rich person's store, the best toaster that was available at the time you bought it.
John:
Where did you get it?
John:
Like Bloomingdale's or something?
Casey:
No, it was Nordstrom, I think.
John:
nordstrom there you go you went into the rich person's store paid way too much money for a very fancy toaster and then paid even more money to have it shipped back to my house which is very nice of you and i had it for 14 years so that's a good run for an appliance it's an amazing run it technically isn't entirely dead that's amazing and by the way i think it was merlin who paid for it to have it shipped back to you but yeah right but now here's a review of the new toaster because although it is the same model number oh no they've changed some stuff oh no
John:
All for the good.
John:
So first of all, the toaster that I had, the place where I put it, the plug for the toaster is basically directly behind it, dead center.
John:
And because my house is ancient and weird, it is directly behind a dead center and very low in the wall.
John:
and the the plug like the you know thing the thing that goes into the wall on the toaster that you guys got me is like breville's patented thing have you seen it where like the end of the plug has a hole in it where you could put your finger through the hole to yank it out have you seen that yep right
John:
That's really bad when the plug for your toaster is directly behind the toaster because that thing sticks out really far.
John:
Like so much so that if I plugged in my toaster and then tried to slide my toaster towards the wall, it will hit the cord and you can't have the hot back of the toaster touching the cord.
Marco:
Have you ever tried one of those like right angle adapters that has like a six inch cord on it that just like has like a flat right angle plug that goes on the wall and then just ends in like a three prong plug six inches later down a short cord?
John:
Yep, so I have a whole bunch of those.
John:
Back in 2011, when I got this toaster, I knew this wouldn't work, so I took about one of those right-angle things, and I connected the toaster to it.
John:
But now I have some extra cord to get rid of.
John:
So the right-angle thing is flat.
John:
It's in the wall.
John:
The toaster cord goes down and to the right.
John:
The thing in the wall, the flat thing, goes down and to the right.
John:
I just connect them all.
John:
But where do I put this loop of cord?
John:
I have very little counter space here.
John:
Zip ties.
John:
Right next to the toaster is our...
John:
stove top slash oven and so i was going to chuck the cord behind our stove top slash oven i don't know what you call that we just call it an oven here but on the top of it is a range with burners and then underneath it is an oven with a door that opens that thing i put the cord behind there and it was a you know i don't know maybe like two feet of cord or whatever because again it was the toaster's right next to that and
John:
But if I'm going to put some electrical cord behind a thing that gets really hot, I'm going to try to protect it.
John:
So 14 years ago, I wrapped that cord in a whole bunch of aluminum foil and various other things to sort of make a giant sort of heat sink muffler heat shield thing around the cord that was behind there.
John:
to get it out i realized i had to pull the oven out i must have pulled it pulled it out to put it in there and so i was wondering after 14 years did that thing finally melt through and that's the problem with my toaster or something didn't seem like it because the lights were all turning on everything but anyway i pulled out the oven did some cleaning it's pretty gross back there um pulled out the cords unwrapped all the aluminum foil looked as good as new like the day i got it so
John:
aluminum foil or tin foil as you would call it if you're my age amazing as a heat shield totally protected the cords they were perfectly good the new toaster has a flat right angle plug good job breville they realized that that patented thing that they're so proud of it sucks for a toaster so i didn't have to use the adapter
John:
for the new one and it was only a tiny little bit of cord that I tucked behind the oven and I wrapped it in some aluminum foil so that's great the next thing is there are little offset pegs on the back of the toaster they're trying to stop the hot back of the toaster from burning your wall yeah so you have to put it like at least an inch away from the wall
John:
Yeah, like the little standout peg.
John:
So first of all, my house being terrible and old, the essentially the backsplash or whatever you would call it on the countertop does not go up as high as the pegs.
John:
So the pegs basically are above it.
John:
And so if you if on my old toaster, if you were to push it against the wall, setting aside the plug, you got the right angle plug in there.
John:
It's all flesh and everything.
John:
If you were to push the toaster up against the wall, the pegs would go over the backslash.
John:
touch the wall and then the the hot back of the toaster is like a millimeters from the wall which is bad so i had like standoffs on there like i basically i was using like um the things you put on the bottom of uh chair legs to keep them from scuffing your floor right those things i had them i was extending the standoff so it actually stayed far away from my wall new toaster longer standoffs
John:
Number two in Breville's Comp.
John:
Great.
John:
And then the final thing, I can't tell if this is an improvement or just the fact that my old toaster was 14 years old.
John:
The screen is way brighter.
John:
Maybe it's LED and the other one was like the cold cathode things because it was so old.
John:
I don't know, but the screen is so bright.
John:
I'm actually hoping it fades a little bit.
John:
This is incredibly bright.
John:
It's, again, blue when you turn it on and orange when it's going.
John:
Otherwise, toaster works amazingly.
John:
Best toaster ever, Breville 650XL.
John:
Salute to the 14-year-old one that you guys got me.
John:
But now I've moved on to another toaster, which is the same toaster, but better.
John:
Pour one out, John.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I'm curious.
Marco:
I mean, I'm pretty sure this will be a predictable answer, but I'm curious why you didn't consider other things that are now more popular than they were 14 years ago.
Marco:
We now have all sorts of smart ovens.
Marco:
We have combination steam ovens.
Marco:
Obviously, everything says it's an air fryer now.
Marco:
There's different...
Marco:
brands that have you know taken on like you know ninja is really well liked among rich people um there's the anova precision oven which i've been lusting after but it sadly is like one inch too deep to fit on my countertop um you know there's all sorts of like smart and more functional countertop ovens now did you look at any of those or consider any of those
John:
i mean i'm aware of all of those and i've seen them as they've been introduced and flown by but like first of all space considerations exclude a lot of bigger fancier things even something as simple as like the there is a breville one that has like convection or whatever those that doesn't fit or smaller models that have like room for a convection fan convection is honestly the only feature that i would even remotely be interested in but the space available it's just not going to happen any of the smart things that are like we look at your food with the camera and figure out nope nope no thanks
John:
absolutely not can you imagine any of those lasting 14 years yeah 14 years forget it like it just this thing does what i need it to do it has adjustable temperature and time and you press a button and it gets hot and it evenly heats and it gets hot pretty quickly and it is durable and all the places the parts on it
John:
that could potentially get gross or easy to replace.
John:
I did replace the wire tray once in 14 years to tell you how sturdy this is.
John:
Still have all the original trays.
John:
It's a workhorse.
John:
And this is a situation where I can get it again.
John:
They still make it.
John:
In fact, they make a better version.
John:
So I'm not interested in any of the fancier stuff
John:
I don't have room for like convection.
John:
And even then I would be at a problem because I feel like those convection ones are much more interested in being ovens.
John:
And honestly, most of the time I'm using my toaster for toast type things like toasting bread or toasting bagels or even like reading pizza, which is not on the toast setting, but still.
John:
And then occasionally we use it as a small oven, but it mostly serves as a toaster that can also serve as a small oven.
John:
Or when I'm toasting like for Thanksgiving, I can toast like six slices of bread at the same time for stuffing, which saves a lot of time.
John:
So no, nothing else out there interests me.
John:
This one does the job.
John:
If someday I get a better different kitchen that's larger, I'll probably still go with this just because I would probably get a convection like regular oven because my regular oven doesn't have convection.
John:
I would get a convection regular oven and stick with this for the toasting stuff.
Casey:
Just to get ahead of all the feedback, half of which has probably already been sent, we all agree that slot toasters are very, very interesting in their own right, but pretty much useless in our personal opinion.
Marco:
I don't agree to that first half at all.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
You think they're completely useless in every way.
John:
I mean, they're really not good for reading pizza, I'll tell you that.
Marco:
No, they're terrible for that.
Marco:
I think there are very few things that they are better at than toaster ovens, and there are a lot of things they are worse at.
John:
I actually agree with you.
John:
Yeah, I mean, the only slot toaster that would have any interest in me is if I was constantly making breakfast for huge numbers of people, I'd get one of those ones that has like 12 slots because you can make a lot of toast.
John:
At that point, just get one of those roller toasters.
John:
No, like those are faster, the ones where you can cook a huge amount of toast very quickly because the slot toasters are faster.
John:
The heating elements are closer to the bread.
John:
They're just plain faster.
John:
And if I had to make a lot of toast fast all the time,
John:
A giant slot toaster without a huge number of slots is the way to go.
John:
But any other situation, I'm not interested.
Casey:
Yeah, I was trying to provide a little bit of an olive branch because the people who are fans of slot toasters, while being wrong, they are extremely dedicated to their wrongness.
Casey:
And I was trying to be nice about it, but since we're all in agreement, yeah, slot toasters are silly.
John:
Well, I mean, it's part of the problem is we've been saying, oh, you got a new toaster.
John:
John's toaster.
John:
Toaster this, toaster that.
John:
And everyone is hearing this.
John:
And in their head, they're picturing the flying toasters from the After Dark screen series.
John:
They're picturing slot toasters.
John:
Every time I say toaster, what I meant was toaster oven.
John:
That's what I grew up with.
John:
That's what I have.
John:
That's what I want.
Marco:
If you could find a slot toaster that was flying, though, that would be a pretty good feature.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Hard to get the toast, though, because it jumps from one toaster to the other, you know?
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Beyond a friend checking daily, we'd put your advice into action and install the detectors around the house.
Casey:
We left yesterday.
Casey:
This evening, I got a notification that one had tripped.
Casey:
A neighbor with a key was able to drop by and discover that the water line to the fridge for the ice maker that we never use, please, John, focus, had burst and was pouring water on the kitchen floor and down to the basement.
Casey:
Our friend had last checked our house at 4.45 PM.
Casey:
We got the leak notice at 8 PM.
Casey:
If not for your advice, the fridge would have been pouring water into the house for close to 24 hours.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
leak detectors if you've got an old new england house and you unwisely got a water feature on your refrigerator leak detectors they're cheap they're so cheap they're so cheap they're like 15 20 bucks each i think for the lower ones we i've sprinkled them all around our house and i i am not looking forward to the time that they eventually get set off but i am it gives me incredible peace of mind to know that they're there
John:
One of mine tripped recently, by the way.
John:
One of my in-wall ones is underneath my bathtub trying to detect leaks from the wall.
John:
It tripped.
John:
I'm like, oh my God, the wall's leaking again.
John:
I opened it up.
John:
I looked inside and there was like one tiny drop of water that had fallen on the thing.
John:
And I still don't know where that water came from.
John:
So I'm like, all right, well, I'm going to keep an eye on this.
John:
I'm going to wipe off the thing of water, put it back, wait, but it never came back.
John:
So I know they work.
Yeah.
Casey:
How do you have it in wall?
Casey:
I'm not trying to be snarky.
Casey:
I'm genuinely.
John:
There's like a, well, if you had an old New England home, you'd know very often there's like a panel.
John:
There's like an access panel.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
There's like a panel on the wall that you can unscrew and remove to get access to the plumbing that you otherwise wouldn't have access to.
John:
And it's all like raised edge panel and painted and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And yeah, it's the way I get into the walls that are underneath and behind my tub to see if it's leaking.
John:
gotcha i mean that's it's a good thing it's working yeah yeah seriously you always want to have a test you know to see if it's working i've got them i recently bought a couple extra ones for like the basement near the the lines that go to the washing machine too not so
John:
Keeping an eye on things.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And then speaking of saving lives, we talked last episode.
Casey:
Why did we talk about this?
Casey:
About trip insurance, travel insurance?
Casey:
What was the reason for that?
Marco:
You were telling me about Allianz Theater.
Casey:
Oh, yes.
Casey:
That's what it was.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Allianz, Allianz, whatever it's called.
Casey:
So Jason Poole writes, I never expected my profession to be applicable to ATP feedback, yet here we are.
Casey:
Quick aside, that is like one of my favorite, we've heard that same statement made many times over the course of the show.
Casey:
One of my favorite things to read, it really is.
Casey:
Anyways, Jason writes, as a travel advisor, I talk about travel insurance every day.
Casey:
Travel insurance has two components, pre-trip cancellation, which is what everyone thinks insurance is, and during the trip emergency coverage.
Casey:
Nearly all United States-based health insurance policies do not work outside of the country.
Casey:
And this is where travel insurance is critical.
Casey:
Allianz is my preferred company, and the policy I sell serves as a primary source of payment to hospitals outside the country.
Casey:
I rarely purchase travel insurance for domestic trips, but I never leave the country without travel insurance.
Casey:
I could write a small book about my clients that have declined travel insurance and have been in tough situations outside America.
Casey:
More positively, I could write a book about Allianz saving the day for clients that have purchased it.
Casey:
Additionally,
Casey:
I'd also like to note that Allianz and presumably other companies sell yearly all trips insurance if you go to them directly.
Casey:
This can price out to be a better deal than purchasing individual trip insurance each time if you're taking multiple trips a year.
Casey:
For example, I have yearly coverage for my entire family, and if any of us goes anywhere, we have coverage.
Casey:
For our plan, it works out to $150 a year a person, and it is a set it and forget it option where I don't have to wonder about whether a certain trip is covered or not.
Casey:
Allianz plans also include a travel concierge, which can help with dinner reservations in a foreign city and so forth, by which I mean the concierge can assist with trip planning, not just with insurance related issues.
Casey:
Of course, some credit cards offer something similar, but not everybody knows that they don't have to personally fire up a translation app and make calls at weird hours because of time differences to restaurants in Greece or France to make a reservation.
Casey:
A concierge can do that for you.
Casey:
Maybe this is old news to everyone else, but I didn't know most of this, so I thought it was worth sharing.
Marco:
I didn't know most of it.
Marco:
I do, though, think it's probably not as much of a, like, you should always do this, as they say.
Marco:
But it certainly seems like when traveling internationally and therefore health insurance or health coverage becomes more of a thing, that's obviously a bigger factor to consider.
Marco:
But I still am not convinced about its value for most people most of the time.
John:
I like the people responding on Mastodon.
John:
They're like, oh, they were saying the same thing, basically.
John:
Oh, you should definitely get it if you travel overseas from the U.S.
John:
because your U.S.
John:
insurance won't work here and the health insurance in our country, we have universal coverage, but it's not for you because you're from America, so we'd have to charge you.
John:
And then they would show us the amount that they would charge and we would just laugh at it.
John:
For three days in the hospital, we'll charge you $5,000.
John:
You're like, ha, ha, ha.
John:
We can't even look at us for 30 seconds for $5,000 in this country.
John:
So paying out of pocket for coverage overseas.
John:
No, you don't want to do it.
John:
You want insurance to cover it, but you can't scare us with health care costs.
John:
Out of pocket health care costs in France or whatever.
John:
You've got that tooth looked at in a dentist, that'll be 50 bucks.
Casey:
Ooh.
Ha, ha.
John:
oh yeah yeah all right john do you want to tell me about this next item please sure uh abby drissman writes in says uh about a window widget size in tahoe uh he says in episode 644 you quoted my toot about how window control size on mac os 26 is gated on the sdk linked against you thought that the size might be connected to toolbar visibility it is not as i said if you link to an sdk less than 26 you get compatibility size window controls and if you link to the mac os 26 sdk
John:
You get window controls with the new size.
John:
This is the sole determining factor.
John:
So there you have it.
John:
Big window controls.
John:
No matter whether the toolbar is visible or not, toolbar controls the corner radius and maybe also the position of those things because they got to have concentricity.
John:
But the size is always big with 26, which honestly I think is a reasonable thing to do.
John:
Like the window widgets have changed size a little bit over the course of macOS all these many years.
John:
Making them a little bit bigger, or maybe it's because I have a huge screen now and I'm getting old, but yeah, they can stand to be a little bit bigger.
John:
So I kind of like the new size in Tahoe.
John:
So any app that links against the new SDK, which that whole concept, I know if you're not a developer and you're like, what are they talking about?
John:
Does that mean when I get Tahoe, they'll all be bigger?
John:
Like it's not a thing that you...
John:
would otherwise have to know or care about.
John:
But if you're wondering when you get Tahoe, some apps have the big window windows and some apps don't.
John:
It's basically the ones that do were built using the API set that comes with the new OS.
John:
And the ones that have the old one are built with a different API set from an earlier OS.
John:
So there you have it.
Casey:
Apple intelligence is now allowed when booting from an external drive in Tahoe Beta 2.
Casey:
And John Val writes, unlike on Sequoia, which required a hack to activate Apple intelligence while booting from an external drive, on Tahoe that hack is no longer needed.
John:
I didn't even know about that hack, and I would have liked to know about that hack, but it's good that it's no longer necessary.
John:
Whatever the deal was with the whole, like, Apple intelligence can only be on the internal drive, I'm glad to see that go.
Casey:
Ian writes, you've been complaining about the new liquid glass tab bar on iOS because it can obscure the content.
Casey:
I've been playing around with it and I'm finding that when I scroll to the bottom of a view, the content scrolls above the tab bar, even on websites.
Casey:
It seems to me like they were well aware of this potential folly when designing.
Casey:
And so they do some view magic to make sure you don't end up with content stuck under the bar when you scroll to the bottom.
Casey:
Am I missing something?
John:
See, I'm still not able to figure out whether I should make a blog post about this because it does kind of require visual aid, but I'll try expressing again why this whole design drives me up a wall.
John:
What we're talking about is the little lozenge that floats over the top of your content.
John:
at the bottom of the screen people don't even like that i call it lozenge because technically large and it's like a hexagon but anyway um capsule round ended rectangle toolbar thing floating at the bottom of the screen which means there is a margin on the left on the right and on the bottom where you can see the stuff that's behind it and i was complaining about things getting stuck behind there and things being obscured by it and he is saying well i've been trying these various apps and what happens instead is they let you scroll the content so it goes up uh so it's above that thing and
John:
When you have the content, so it's scrolled above that, now you have the problem of what do I show in the empty region that is below the end of the content?
John:
Say the webpage, the very bottom of the webpage, there's a word.
John:
You scroll, that word is up above the little floating toolbar.
John:
Great, I can read the word.
John:
But the toolbar is still floating.
John:
What is it floating over?
John:
Should they draw the checkered pattern there from back in early versions of iOS or early versions of iPhone OS?
John:
That would have been amazing.
John:
Scrolling couldn't keep up.
John:
It would show the gray and white checkerboard pattern.
John:
Should they detect the main color of the body of the page and extend it down there?
John:
What if it's a photo that you've scrolled up and they want to let you scroll it so the photo is visible and the photo ends before the toolbar begins?
John:
Do they say, let's say, reflect and blur the photo like they do with the sidebar thing?
John:
These are all problems of their own making.
John:
Because if you're not going to show the content behind there, but always scroll it up above there, what then is the function of leaving that space around the
John:
edges because you can't see anything there of consequence when you're scrolling through the content and when you get to the end of it if they're pushing that content above the toolbar hey how about just make the toolbar cover the bottom of the screen at that point which is the design we had before which is so much more straightforward and doesn't have any of these problems of apple's own creation that is what i find so frustrating about this control that it serves no purpose it introduces problems that they must solve for no reason for no benefit anyway i don't like it
Casey:
Good talk.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Tim writes, do you think that Apple includes ducks, so to speak, in their beta releases to make the tech press feel like they've achieved some victories so that they don't make as big of a deal about the things that didn't change?
Casey:
the left-aligned image on the macOS dialog boxes comes to mind as a candidate.
Casey:
And so a duck we can define, or this started on, what is it, Jeff Atwood, right?
Casey:
His blog.
Casey:
And this is a feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product.
Casey:
And John also pointed out, see also the Architect's Lions, which is by a friend of the show, Anthony Johnson, or a story retold by a friend of the show, Anthony Johnson, which we will also link to in the show notes.
John:
Yeah, the idea is put something in there so the people in charge have something to focus on and you know you're going to let, it's something that they're going to say, what's that doing there?
John:
I want to get rid of that.
John:
And you fight them on and fight them on and eventually let them have their way.
John:
And the whole time you're fighting about that, they're not paying attention to anything else.
John:
The thing about the duck slash Architect's Lions theory for Apple's OSS is they don't need to do that.
John:
They don't care what we think.
John:
We have no we're not their manager.
John:
They have no reason to put dumb things in the OS to allow the community to notice them get angry about them and fix them because they don't they don't care that we're that stuff.
John:
like they honestly don't like they'll accept our feedback that that works but they're they're not intentionally releasing things that they know will get negative feedback to make us feel like we're affecting things that's not how they work they would never do that because they not because they're so good and kind but because they we're not their man they have no reason to there's no motivation for them to do that we're not their boss they
John:
what we do and say uh is doesn't need to be corralled in that way um and interestingly i meant to mention this one of the shows after wdc if you watch a lot of the wd sessions and especially when um i know you were in some of these casey the uh i forget what they were called the like the group uh live what were those things called but the labs where it's a bunch of people and like at the webex call oh oh yeah the group labs group labs yeah so those were live where there was yes yes yes yes
John:
Some number of WWDC attendees slash developers, they're all at home on our computers going to a WebEx.
John:
And then in the WebEx, hosting the WebEx, were like, you know, five or six Apple engineers and managers or whoever, whatever the topic happened to be.
John:
And the audience gets to submit questions through text in like the WebEx, like submit your questions thing.
John:
And then there's no other like speaking or, you know, you don't see any of the audience.
John:
You just see the Apple people.
John:
Anyway, during those things, very often there would be questions that would ask some question about like a glass or whatever.
John:
And all of the people in all the sessions would say.
John:
They'd, you know, say whatever I have to say.
John:
I would look at the last night and say, if you have any feedback about this, please submit your feedback to whatever.
John:
You know, they'd tell you, we're interested in hearing what you think.
John:
What do you think about this?
John:
What are the areas where it can be improved?
John:
They were basically soliciting feedback about the UI.
John:
And they're all so disciplined.
John:
But my little radar was up the whole time going, which one of these people...
John:
is desperately hoping that you send feedback because they also hate the thing that you're just about.
John:
Right.
John:
And they're so disciplined about like, you know, here's how it is.
John:
And here's the, here's what we're doing.
John:
A rarely have any feedback about it.
John:
And like, I have a feeling a lot of the people in a lot of, a lot of the Apple employees and a lot of those sessions were carefully, kindly, and gently suggesting to you that if, that if you have feedback about the new UI, they'd love to hear it because they're like, please, please send them this feedback because they're,
John:
believe me there are people at apple that have all the same complaints that you hear in the community or whatever so that's another reason i think there's no reason to put out ducks because there's plenty of people apple employees who are expressing this feedback inside apple because you keep you know never never let anyone outside the family know what you're thinking that's a reference casey um
John:
But they did solicit feedback in all these sessions.
John:
And so if there's something about this UI that you don't like, please send it to Apple.
John:
I'm sure Apple employees would say the same thing, whether they are desperate for you to send that feedback so it counts more than their internal opinion, or whether they're just saying that because that's what they're supposed to say.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Adrian Mester writes, with regard to SD cards, you said on PCs you can just yank out a memory card.
Casey:
That's not true.
Casey:
You should still eject it first.
Casey:
By PC, I assume you meant Windows, but it's the same on Linux.
Casey:
And Adrian provided a link to the Windows knowledge base, if you will, to talk about this.
John:
I don't find it surprising that these features exist.
John:
I do wonder how many people use them in Windows.
Casey:
Yep, that's fair.
Casey:
I mean, I know when I was a Windows user, I pretty much always just yanked whatever out pretty much immediately, which I know is not the right answer, but I don't believe I ever got burned by it.
Casey:
So that's pretty much what I always did.
John:
I mean, the new versions of Windows might complain about it.
John:
That's what maybe make people do it.
John:
They do.
John:
If you yank it out and it throws a dialogue in your face, I haven't actually tried it.
Marco:
They do complain about it, but I think everyone still just does it anyway.
Marco:
if it throws up a dialogue don't you think that would make people like no the the experience of using every computing device ever these days is being constantly nagged by the system for stuff that you just have to say okay okay cancel cancel dismiss whatever like that's even even apple stuff like this is just this is the reality that most how most people see computers is a series of interruptions to their work that they just have to quote cancel out of so if some box comes up that says you go to eject first like okay whatever and they just click okay they don't even
John:
it i can't run windows 11 on my mac unfortunately because it doesn't it's not compliant with the trusted compute whatever thing uh but i can run i do run windows 10 so next time i'm in windows 10 i'll try to see what it does
Casey:
All right, John, it's not everyone else, or it's not all of us that are right and you that is wrong.
Casey:
Really, you are right and everyone else in the world is wrong.
Casey:
But it's okay because you have an answer now.
John:
So I got an iPhone 16 Pro when it launched.
John:
It was the introduction of the camera control.
John:
Lots of people, case manufacturers just put a big hole in the case for the camera control.
John:
So I got my preferred open bottom leather case.
John:
for my iPhone, and it has a giant hole where the camera control is, and I didn't like it.
John:
And I said, boy, I hope some of these third-party case manufacturers produce cases that are like the one I have, but that have the pass-through button that Apple had on lots of its launch cases, which is like another button that
John:
that presses the actual camera control button below it so that you won't have a giant hole in your case.
John:
What you instead will have is a camera control on your iPhone case that works and feels just like the camera control that's under your iPhone case.
John:
Just like the volume buttons and the power buttons where there's a button that hits the button that's underneath.
John:
Here we are a year later, and they finally did it.
John:
A little while ago, Ryan London did a case that had a camera control button on it that I believe had an open bottom, but it had a metal ring on the back around the camera mesa, and I like that.
John:
But finally, Bullstrap came out with essentially the same case that I had, because the previous one was a Bullstrap case.
John:
The only difference is, instead of a giant hole for the camera control, it has a little pass-through button thingy.
John:
And I found this out because I got an ad on Instagram that said, we messed up with a broken heart emoji.
John:
The text says, for months, you asked, where's the button?
John:
Or I would buy this if it had a camera control button.
John:
And for months, we gave you a cutout.
John:
Yeah, we know.
John:
But now we finally got it right.
John:
A year later, a year later.
John:
They've introduced the case with a button on it.
John:
For me, better late than the other because I keep my phones for two years.
John:
So halfway through the life of this phone, I swapped out the bull strap case for another bull strap case with the camera control and immediately realized how often I accidentally hit the camera control button now that it has surfaced on the edge of the case.
John:
I mostly got over it, and now it is way better in all ways, but I was shocked to learn.
John:
Boy, I guess I put my finger in that hole a lot when I pick up my phone, and now that there's a button there, I can't press it as much.
John:
But yeah, it's way better.
John:
Last year, I also changed cases a year into my phone simply because I had bought multiples, and I just swapped an old case for a new case because the old one was a little beat up.
John:
But anyway, I've got a brand Sprinkin' new Bullstrap case.
John:
It is leather.
John:
It is black.
John:
It has an open bottom, and it has a pass-through camera control button.
John:
Only took a year.
John:
Our long national nightmare is over.
John:
And it's an incredibly expensive case, and I don't care.
Marco:
It looks really nice.
Marco:
And I've had this case before, before this generation of phone.
Marco:
If you want a leather case on your phone, this is the best option I have found.
Casey:
$100 is not cheap, but it looks very nice.
John:
And it is, I believe, if you care about these specific things that I care about, I believe this is the only...
Casey:
leather black open bottom no metal ring around the camera mesa camera control button case sold anywhere well i'm happy you found it finally for follow-up ads in youtube igor coleman writes why not just use ublock origin you all if you also add sponsor block you get a much better experience than paid youtube
Casey:
And additionally, Michael Brown writes, just use the Vinegar app on iOS and macOS, which not only gets rid of YouTube ads, but also gives you the system video player instead of the YouTube one.
Casey:
I can't speak to Ublock Origin.
Casey:
I can speak to Vinegar.
Casey:
I have bounced in and out of Vinegar over the last couple of years.
Casey:
I feel like when it works, it works incredibly well, and I really, really like it.
Casey:
But then oftentimes I have weird little hiccups with it, especially if you increase the playback speed.
Casey:
And I don't know, I have had weird problems with it from time to time.
Casey:
And the way I solve this problem, which I forgot to bring to the show, is that a week or two ago...
Casey:
I finally signed up for YouTube premium light or whatever it is we talked about where it's like eight bucks a month for ad for YouTube in most cases.
Casey:
And I got to tell you, my life has dramatically improved on account of this.
Casey:
And you were both right to needle me and tell me I'm an idiot for not having done this sooner.
Casey:
What's annoying though, is that nobody else in the family has noticed.
Casey:
Now, Aaron doesn't typically watch YouTube, but Declan loves a couple of like Minecraft YouTubers.
Casey:
And I'm a little annoyed that he hasn't commented on the fact that he hasn't seen an ad in
Casey:
a while it's too late his brain has already been poisoned by ads you waited too long i mean people don't really notice the absence of ads nearly as much as they notice the addition of ads that's very true um but yeah i've we we got a lot of feedback about you block origin i can't maybe one of you can i can't speak to it one way or the other i think vinegar is worth giving a shot it is not a bad app by any means it's very good it just like i said especially on mac os i've had problems from time to time that maybe maybe i'm holding it wrong i don't know but
Casey:
We'll put a link to both in the show notes.
Casey:
You should check at least Vinegar Out and potentially uBlock.
John:
Setting aside the convenience versus like futziness of trying to block ads with a program versus just paying the fee to get the ads.
John:
If you can afford it, paying is always much more convenient.
John:
But especially in the case with YouTube where I feel like part of the –
John:
solution that casey's going for and that definitely i was going for is let's get it so my whole family doesn't see ads on youtube and in that situation trying to use some kind of ad blocking thing is the worst idea ever because that means on everybody's device every every device that every person in your family uses you now have to carefully maintain configure uh all these different things to make sure they work right and by the way when those ad blocking things mess up in some way or cause some other site not to work now you're on the hook to fix that
John:
And once they find out that it's the weird ad blocking thing that blocks ads on YouTube is making it so they can't use their favorite website or whatever, they're going to ask you to uninstall it.
John:
Just pay for the thing.
John:
Like if you can afford it, just pay for YouTube without ads.
John:
It is so cheap in the grand scheme of things to not be bombarded by those ads.
John:
And once you do that, as long as everybody is signed in to their accounts for their Google accounts for YouTube, and unlike many other sites, YouTube will keep you signed in essentially forever.
John:
Like you won't have to constantly be signing them in.
John:
Then you're done.
John:
It doesn't matter what devices they get.
John:
It doesn't matter if they're on
John:
Their computer on their iPad or on their phone or whatever.
John:
So much better than trying to maintain a fragile fleet of ad blockers.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's very telling that both of these commenters included the word just in their suggestion.
Marco:
Why not just use UBlock Oregon?
Marco:
Just use the Vinegar app.
Marco:
And ad blockers are never a just.
Marco:
There's always more complexity than that.
Marco:
They're always going to mess up certain things, and then you have to troubleshoot, oh, turn the ad blocker off, reload, see if it fixes the thing you're blocking.
Marco:
I mean, obviously, in the case of trying to block specific behavior on a specific site, YouTube in this case,
Marco:
The surface area for it messing up pages is much narrower, obviously, so you have a lot less of that drama to deal with, but you still don't have zero, and it's a cat and mouse game.
Marco:
YouTube keeps trying to block all these different things, then these things develop new...
Marco:
heuristics and new strategies to unblock themselves and get working again.
Marco:
And then YouTube blocks it again.
Marco:
There's a lot of situations in which it is worth people saving the eight bucks a month to do this.
Marco:
But if you have the eight bucks a month, just spend it on this and you can move on with your life and not spend so much time playing this cat and mouse game.
John:
And by the way, I don't like the system video player versus the YouTube one because the YouTube one has features that the system video player does not.
John:
I like the little graph that shows you the lump where most people watched, that type of thing.
John:
If you're watching a how-to video to find out the good part where they actually show you what they're supposed to be doing, that's not... You can correct me if you're wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's not visible if you use the system player.
John:
Similarly, I'm not even sure if chapters are visible if you use the system player.
John:
um and i you know the keyboard controls might be different as well so anyway for youtube's player it's not made with flash anymore you know um i prefer it because it has more features and whenever youtube adds a feature they add it to their player so my personal preference is not to actually switch it to the system video player which is separate from ad blocking you can do that without blocking ads i believe
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Casey:
Marco, please feel free in the edit to insert taps right here because apparently Tahoe has finally dropped FireWire support.
Casey:
John, what even is FireWire anyway?
John:
This is kind of like dropping x86 support.
John:
So FireWire is an old interconnect standard that was used for...
John:
digital video personal digital video cameras that used to record a digital video on tiny little tapes at home uh and it was also on max not just for video but also for peripherals um like hard drives uh it was expensive it was fancy it had lots of important features to reliably carry things like audio that are latency sensitive while making sure that things arrive on time um
John:
It didn't require the host computer to do as much sort of traffic control and computation.
John:
So if your computer was slower or your computer bogged down, Firewire would keep chugging along because it wasn't dependent on your computer to shuffle the bits like USB was.
John:
That made it more expensive because USB could be cheaper because it made your computer do a lot of stuff.
John:
Um...
John:
And, uh, I guess the reason most people even know this exists is if they got one of the early iPods, which if you didn't have a digital video camera, uh, maybe the first time you ever saw a FireWire port, uh, the original iPod came with a FireWire port that ended pretty quickly once they started putting like 30 pin connectors on them or whatever.
John:
Uh, but anyway, uh, it came in, uh, 400, what's that?
John:
megabits per second megabits firewire 400 and 800 transfer speeds um you can listen to our member special about connectors to learn about the firewire 400 connector versus the 800 connector but the bottom line is the 800 connector was terrible mostly um and eventually it faded away and usb remained and went through several iterations and got faster
John:
and thunderbolt basically replaced firewire as the big expensive really fast bus uh but macs have still had support for it so if you found a way to get an adapter somehow to plug in firewire to your modern computer or you were able to run a semi-modern os on a computer that had a firewire part you could still plug something in like a firewire hard drive or even an ipod i would imagine and mac os would recognize it and still do all the old stuff but apparently they are ripping out that software from mac os which
John:
kind of like the x86 support it's like well was that hurting anybody it's like oh we don't have to keep maintaining that and making sure it works and making it part of our potentially non-existent qa process can't we just remove that code nobody has firewall protocols anyway and if they do they can choose an old mac with an old version of the os so it seems like i mean this may change we'll put a link to the mac rumor story that links to a reddit post
John:
that has some qualifiers like well maybe you know apple hasn't said one way or the other maybe a later release of tahoe will have firewire back but it just seems like they've removed that code so they don't have to maintain it anymore and it's gone and you'll have to remember that for like when for people like in the retro computing world like oh yeah um this mac can run tahoe but if you want to do any firewire stuff you have to you know put an older version of nos on or whatever so
John:
Yeah, poor one out for Firewire.
John:
It was weird.
John:
It was expensive.
John:
Most people didn't have it, but it did an important job for when it existed.
Marco:
Yeah, I have heard.
Marco:
I don't know how true this is.
Marco:
I guess maybe listeners can write in and tell us.
Marco:
I have heard that a surprising number of audio interfaces in production studios...
Marco:
still are Firewire, and people have just been daisy-chaining Thunderbolt adapters to them over the years to keep them working with modern Macs.
Marco:
If that is still the case, I can imagine this being a pretty big deal to them, because what that would basically mean is you have to buy a new audio board or whatever is outputting Firewire.
Marco:
So that could be a significant deal to those people, but I don't know how many of those there still are.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And again, FireWire was ideal for that because it was really good about delivering data on time all the time without hiccups or glitches, which is really important for audio and like a studio environment.
John:
So that's part of the reason you still see those things around because they were big and expensive.
John:
And if they're still doing the job, why should you ever need to replace them?
John:
And the answer is, well, if you upgrade all your Macs in the studio to Tahoe and they can't talk to it anymore, it's time to upgrade or downgrade your computers.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Apple has done another thing where they put up some marketing material and then almost immediately say, just kidding.
Casey:
And in this case, they put together a PowerPoint and keynote, I think one of the Google present or whatever it's called, I forget what it's called, presentation about convincing your parents to get you a Mac.
Casey:
And they also put together like a 10-minute video of a guy, a comedian, who was on some movie that everyone loved recently.
Casey:
What was that movie?
John:
Is that from Saturday Night Live?
John:
It's Martin Hearly or something?
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
Casey:
Anyways, they put up this video.
Casey:
It was like 10 minutes long.
Casey:
He's going through this presentation and teaching the kids how to give the presentation.
Casey:
And I...
Casey:
didn't care for it.
Casey:
Like, I didn't think it was a problem, but I just didn't think it was clever or funny.
Casey:
And I think they were trying for both and they pulled the video.
Casey:
I think the presentation is still available, but they pulled the video after like 24, 48 hours, something like that.
Casey:
Um, Oh, here we go.
Casey:
Let me just read from the show notes one day after publishing it.
Casey:
Apple has taken down its parent presentation video on YouTube.
Casey:
Apple has also moved the parent presentation slides to the bottom of its college students page, effectively bearing it.
Casey:
Just one day earlier, the presentation was prominently featured at the top of the page.
Casey:
In the YouTube video, comedian Martin Harlehy showed a group of high school students how to effectively use the parent presentation.
John:
yeah so this is there's two stories here one is it seems like apple's been pulling a lot of ads lately i think some uh other people talked about this counted up four of them there was like the crush ad where they smushed all those musical instruments and a hydraulic press thing that was ill considered and they kind of pulled that there's the bella ramsey siri ad thing that never shipped and they pulled that there's the parent ad and there's a fourth one that i cannot remember uh
John:
Oh, it was like a vacation ad where like a family was like flying to Thailand and it was like super racist.
John:
So they pulled that one.
John:
So I think it's within the past 12 months or so, they have, you know, distributed and then pulled four different ads for four different reasons.
John:
So there is the question of like, what's going on over there with advertising?
John:
Maybe they should have...
John:
people with more taste to take a look at the ads before they go out into the world ideally more taste to look at the ads before they decide to pay all this money to make them but you know they do a lot of advertising and i don't you know it's it is potentially a thing uh the the case where you there's some cracks in their uh their system where people with taste are not in the right place to make these decisions unfortunately but you know it's not the end of the world they make the right decision you know a day later uh as opposed to just leaving it up right
John:
The second story is, and the reason I put this in here, I like the idea of them trying to convince people to buy Macs.
John:
I know that sounds so dumb.
John:
Like, aren't they always trying to convince people to buy Macs?
John:
Don't they advertise Macs all the time?
John:
Isn't that part of their business?
John:
But time was when the whole company was focused on trying to get people who don't use Macs to try a Mac because they're a better kind of personal computer.
John:
And that is not the focus of the company anymore.
John:
Obviously, there's other products that are so much more important, make so much more money.
John:
And it seemed like they basically gave up on, yeah, we also sell Macs and the people who like them like them, but we don't need to actually try to expand a Mac market share.
John:
Like they always had these statistics like, you know,
John:
Oh, 50% of the people buy a Mac.
John:
It's their first Mac.
John:
And they would say that, but it's like, does that because of any advertising you're doing?
John:
Like they, they didn't, they became uninterested in trying to convince the world that Macs are a better PC, that Macs are better than windows, that you should buy a Mac instead of a PC.
John:
It's like, ah, people, people who want one will buy one and it's fancy.
John:
And if people can't afford one, they'll get one.
John:
We don't have to do much advertising.
Um,
John:
This ad seemed like it was from another era, seemed like it was from an era when kids would go off to college and maybe the kid would say, maybe I should try one of those Apple computers.
John:
And the parents would say, you can't use an Apple computer.
John:
It's not compatible with the world.
John:
You have to use Windows.
John:
That's not the world we live in today.
John:
Go look in a college classroom and count up how many Macs you see versus how many non Macs you see.
John:
It is so lopsided.
John:
Macs are everywhere in higher education, and yet this ad is out there saying, you know, it's a bad ad.
John:
I agree with you, Casey.
John:
It didn't do the job.
John:
It's not funny.
John:
It was ill-considered in a thousand different ways.
John:
But the concept of Apple trying to convince college students to get a Mac because a Mac is better for their purposes than a Windows PC is just blowing my hair back.
John:
I'm like, what?
John:
wow remember that remember when apple had this confidence in its computers remember when we would have i mean i still have confidence the computers that you if you're gonna get a laptop for school you should get a mac like but like i just i just don't see ads like this anymore so it's a shame that them actually doing this it's a sort of throwback head-on macs are better than pcs and you should buy one because they're good ad turned out to be such a stinker uh and even like the apple parent presentation like it's like it doesn't
John:
it doesn't reflect the reality of parents or kids or anything but i i like i like the idea like i mean i mentioned this in one of my posts that i was writing about how like the apple seems to have given up on trying to gain market share from android and just like the deciding that it is what it is and we'll just sell for iphones to iphone people and android can still have 70 of the worldwide market share right
John:
Why should Windows still have as much market share as it does?
John:
Apple's hardware is amazing, and it's OS for all our complaints.
John:
I like it better than Windows.
John:
And at the very least, it's probably a wash for most people who don't care about computers.
John:
But this should be an easy thing to convince people to buy, especially once you've got things like the M4 MacBook Air for under $1,000, barely.
John:
That comes in 60 gigs of RAM that is perfect for any college student, right?
John:
It is expensive.
John:
It's more expensive than a $400 PC.
John:
Like, I get that.
John:
But within the realm of people who are buying $1,000 laptops for college, Apple should be able to win a lot of those sales by doing good ads.
John:
And I know they have ads on TV and sports and backup catalogs or whatever, but there are always so much like modern Apple ads, which is like,
John:
apple we're wonderful buy our stuff and not just like coming out punching and saying windows sucks max are great look at all like for crying out loud this ad had like a blue screen of death thing and it's like all right all right come on like what what century is this but anyway uh i find it delightful that apple still seems to have a little bit fight in it about mac versus pc and i find it depressing that they're not able to make a good head about it anymore
Casey:
yeah what are you gonna do but i mean i agree with you at least they're trying to be aggressive that that's kind of fun all right uh we had some late breaking news as we record this on monday the 30th of june apple ways using anthropic or open ai to power siri this is from bloomberg apple's considering using artificial intelligence technology from anthropic pbc or open ai to power a new version of siri sidelining its own in-house models
Casey:
Apple has talked with both companies about using their large language models for Siri, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Casey:
In its discussions with both Anthropic and OpenAI, the iPhone maker requested a custom version of Claude and ChatGPT that could run on Apple's private cloud compute servers.
Casey:
Apple's investigation into third-party models is at an early stage, and the company hasn't made a final decision on using them.
Casey:
A competing project internally dubbed LLM Siri that uses in-house models remains an active development.
Casey:
The project to evaluate external models was started by Siri chief Mike Rockwell and software engineering head Craig Federighi.
Casey:
They were given oversight of Siri after the duties were removed from the command of John, Gene, and Andrea, the company's AI chief.
Casey:
After multiple rounds of testing, Rockwell and other executives concluded that Anthropics technology is the most promising for Siri's needs.
Casey:
That led Adrian Perica, the company's vice president of corporate development, to start discussions with Anthropics about using Claude.
Casey:
Apple's models are developed by a roughly 100-person team run by Ru Ming Pang, an Apple distinguished engineer who joined from Google in 2021 to lead this work.
Casey:
The proposed shift has weighed on the team, which has some of the AI industry's most in-demand talents.
Casey:
Some members have signaled internally that they are unhappy that the company is considering technology from a third party, creating the perception that they are to blame, at least partially, for the company's AI shortcomings.
Casey:
They've said that they could leave for multi-million dollar packages being floated by Meta Platforms Inc.
Casey:
and OpenAI.
Casey:
Apple this month also nearly lost the team behind MLX, its key open source system for developing machine learning models on the latest Apple chips.
Casey:
After the engineers threatened to leave, Apple made counter offers to retain them, and they're staying for now.
John:
Tune into overtime for more on this particular issue about poaching people.
John:
But this fits with what we had been hearing and rumors from German about what's going on now that there is new leadership for the whole Siri thing, which is no more not invented here syndrome, willing to look outside the company going so far as to say, hey, we've got a team working on that LM Siri thing.
John:
Shouldn't we also shouldn't we also talk to the people who already have chat bot type models and see if their technology might be farther ahead than our technology is?
John:
And I kind of feel for the whatever 100 person team working on this stuff, because like from the reports that we've heard, it is entirely plausible to believe that those teams were not adequately resourced to make products that are competitive with with Claude and ChatGPT.
John:
I mean, it's totally reasonable to think of because we know how much money like OpenAI is spent on ChatGPT.
John:
And Claude has been around for a long time and has been out there in the world and they've been iterating on it.
John:
And this is Apple trying to do their version 1.0 of anything remotely close to that.
John:
And they've been flailing.
John:
So that team...
John:
maybe hasn't been resourced to do a good enough job, but certainly they probably started later than their competitors.
John:
And so I think it is the right thing to do for Rockwell and Federighi to say, we shouldn't just assume we're going to use our internal thing.
John:
Let's at least look at the external things.
John:
It does really highlight the not great position they're in because regardless of whether having a particular LM is a competitive advantage or
John:
It's the type of thing that every big player in the tech space has felt the need to have.
John:
Facebook's got their own model.
John:
Microsoft has basically got open AI by having that big investment.
John:
Google's got their own models.
John:
Apple.
John:
in theory has their own models, but nothing like Gemini, nothing like Claude, nothing like, uh, nothing even like the llama stuff, nothing like chat GPT.
John:
So they're behind.
John:
And if they come out and say, well, it turns out the most expedient thing we could do to make Siri not suck in the fastest time possible was to license Claude or something, you know, all right, well, that's what you had to do.
John:
But now you are beholden to another company for a key technology, uh,
John:
which, to the extent that you believe that the Cook Doctrine is a reasonable thing to do, does fly in the face of it, owning and controlling the primary technologies behind your most important products, blah, blah, even if there's no moat, even if LLMs are commodity,
John:
If you don't have one of those commodities but instead have to buy it from some other vendor, other vendor that may compete with you once they come out with an egg that sweeps the world or something, that's not a good position to be in.
John:
So I'm not saying they shouldn't do this.
John:
I think this is good news.
John:
I think hearing this makes me optimistic they're doing what they need to do to make Siri not bad anymore.
John:
And if that means paying someone to use their model because it's better than our model, then by all means they should do it.
John:
But I also hope they retain their own team because I think in the long term it is important for Apple to have its own model.
John:
Not because every company needs to have its own model, but because A, Apple has the money to do that.
John:
And B, like any other thing that Apple does, them being able to make exactly the thing that they need is part of their competitive advantage.
John:
I don't think their model is going to be better than their competitors in some significant way.
John:
I think it'll just be could be competitive and in the ballpark if they put enough money and time into it and eventually catch up with their competitors, in which case they could swap it out.
John:
Like so if they go with like Claude or something, they shouldn't can this team.
John:
I hope they can retain them because they should still be working to say, hey, your goal is now to replace Claude.
John:
Get something as good as is better than Claude so we can end this contract and have our own internal thing.
John:
Kind of like how we used the processes from other companies until we eventually could make some of our own that were better, and it took a really long time.
John:
So that's my take on this article.
John:
I think I'm actually optimistic about it, but it does really highlight the corner that Apple has painted itself into.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is, it is possible for more than one thing to be true.
Casey:
It's possible for the internal team to have not delivered.
Casey:
And it's also possible that it wasn't the internal team's fault.
Casey:
But in the end of the day, Siri sucks.
Casey:
Like, everyone agrees that Siri sucks.
Casey:
How many different times over the last 10 years, 15 years, whatever it's been, have we seen jokes on national television about how bad Siri sucks?
Casey:
Like, it sucks.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And no matter whose fault it is, they've got to fix it.
Casey:
Just because they might be doing this soon doesn't mean they're doing it forever.
Casey:
There is no reason they couldn't use like Claude or whatever for the next couple of years, two, three, four, five years, and then eventually swoop in and have their own internal thing that maybe would be even better.
Casey:
So yeah, I agree 100%.
Casey:
I am all in for this.
John:
Well, that is tricky though.
John:
Like, oh, we're going to do our own thing.
John:
You have to retain the team.
John:
They can't all leave.
John:
And it's going to be super demotivating for that team that's worked since 2021 on Apple's own internal models, probably being frustrated the whole time by like the Siri team and they're not being funded or whatever their issues are internally.
John:
Like I wouldn't actually blame the team that was developing the models.
John:
I don't think that's where the problem was.
John:
But the fact is they work for years on this.
John:
And then what happens is Apple just goes and use Claude instead.
John:
They're going to be so demotivated.
John:
So it's going to be a difficult challenge
John:
to convince them to stay at Apple and continue their work, right?
John:
Because it's just – it's demoralizing, right?
John:
Even if Apple wants to keep them, they could go and get much more money elsewhere.
John:
Again, see this week's overtime.
John:
So I feel for – but that's the situation that Apple is in.
John:
It's difficult.
John:
And I do like the fact that Apple is –
John:
going to apparently according to this german rumor wants to run these models on private cloud compute because i think that is apple's one of apple's key competitive advantages is the privacy angle that they have a way to run server-side models in a privacy preserving way which their competitors don't seem to care about because it's not part of their
John:
It's not part of the value proposition, right?
John:
They're just like, oh, send us your stuff for Facebook, whatever, like open AI, yeah, send it all over, it's fine.
John:
Apple's whole thing is we can't even look at the stuff that you are, you know, conversing with the models and that's the way they like it and that's part of their whole deal.
John:
And so having a third party model, but saying, OK, we'll license this from you, but we're not going to send like what they're doing now, I believe, is when we use ChatGPT through Siri, it's going to open AI servers.
John:
And yeah, Apple has this thing about, well, we do it in a more privacy preserving way.
John:
We anonymize you and bounce off a proxy or whatever.
John:
But I don't think and someone can correct me.
John:
Who knows if you're listening?
John:
If I'm wrong about this, I don't think when you send a query to ChatGPT through Siri today that ChatGPT is running on private cloud compute.
John:
No, it's absolutely not.
John:
This story is that they're trying to do that.
John:
And so bring it on, man.
John:
Bring on ChatGPT.
John:
I'm not saying you just replace Siri with those.
John:
No, there's still work to do.
John:
Siri is not just a chatbot, as JAWS will tell us a million times.
John:
very much like a chatbot but not just a chatbot so it's still like they need an llm engine that can do good things for them that they can build on top of and this would just be a piece of what would be the new siri which is which allows them to swap it out because you're never like there's certainly no branding and you don't it's not even like you're talking to claude or chat you're talking to siri which does all the siri things only now it just does them competently and faster and better hopefully like that's the dream
Marco:
Yeah, I think this is all good news.
Marco:
It plays into the narrative that we heard about over the rumor mill over the last few months that basically that Apple's high ups are taking the poor state of Siri and their AI efforts seriously.
Marco:
And they're making big changes in order to turn this ship around.
Marco:
And, you know, it started out like obviously like the restructuring of the, you know, Gianandrea going over to Rockwell, like, you know, the staff restructuring.
Marco:
We heard reports of Federighi, you know, issuing directives now of like, you know, look, if somebody else does a better job of it, use it.
Marco:
We've seen now from what they did at WVDC, from what they're releasing, that they have more integration than ever within these new OSs and products with third-party LLM and AI providers.
Marco:
So this is good.
Marco:
This is showing us that the not-invented-here syndrome is finally being a little bit turned down for AI stuff.
Marco:
And
Marco:
It needs to be because the obvious reality to everyone in the entire market is that these companies are dramatically outpacing Apple in this area.
Marco:
And so Apple, look, they fumbled the ball really badly early on in AI stuff.
Marco:
Their next option is spend a bunch of money and buy some stuff from some people like that or buy the people completely by the company or have a big partnership with the company with some huge investment so that you have rights to stuff the way Microsoft did with OpenAI.
John:
Oh, on the financial front, I saw earlier today on the news that Apple is doing this on this story that's in Bloomberg, German or whatever.
John:
Apple stock price went up the equivalent of two anthropics.
Marco:
yeah which should show you like and it was only it was like three percent like as a percentage like that's not like it isn't like the double or anything but like that should show you even all like the stock market i mean we know how incredibly fickle that is and how yeah i'm not saying this means anything it's just funny it is funny and but it's also like the stock market upon news that apple might be spending a whole bunch of money soon uh jumped in value for apple like
Marco:
That's significant because that shows you the confidence that the investing world has in Apple doing its own AI stuff is very low.
Marco:
And once the news came that Apple is going to be probably doing even more with a third-party company for AI stuff, the value of Apple in their minds jumped.
Marco:
That tells you a lot about what they think about Siri and Apple intelligence.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
And again, if Apple's worried about the price, their stock price just went up enough to essentially fund probably a purchase of Anthropocos.
John:
I'm assuming they're willing to sell.
John:
You don't know what these things would actually sell for because people have Zuckerberg disease, which one of the stories about Zuckerberg that I forget if it was in the original Social Network, and if not, it will surely be in the now-planned sequel.
John:
But his whole deal is, you know, he started Facebook, and at various times, other companies wanted to buy Facebook because they could see it was being successful.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And he turned down what was at the time big offers that would have made him very wealthy, you know, millions and millions of dollars.
John:
He turned it down.
John:
And why did he turn it down?
John:
Because he said, I don't want to be somebody who starts a company and then becomes a multimillionaire by selling it.
John:
I want to become Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
John:
Like, don't sell the company.
John:
Stay with the company.
John:
You are the company.
John:
The company is defined by you.
John:
That's why he still has control of Facebook.
John:
and I feel like a lot of these old, these AI companies fancy themselves, the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve jobs or Bill Gates setting aside, Steve jobs got kicked out of the company and came back anyway.
John:
Um, that they're, they're already wealthy and they're like, you know, you know, what's cool.
John:
It was cool than a million dollars.
John:
You know, what's cooler than a billion dollars, a trillion dollars, uh, or like, actually it's not even the money.
John:
It's just like the power, like to be, uh,
John:
To have this company, this like world-conquering force, be a personification of you and be under your sole control is so much more attractive than any of the money.
John:
So when you say, oh, Apple's stock price went up the price of two Anthropics, like twice Anthropics market cap, that doesn't necessarily mean that the people behind Anthropics would be willing to sell it for their current market cap according to the stock market or their private valuation or whatever.
John:
If those people decide, no, I'm never selling because I'm the next Mark Zuckerberg, God forbid.
Marco:
Yeah, but you know what?
Marco:
The reality is, like, there's multiple companies that Apple could partner with or buy that would be substantially better than what they are doing internally right now.
John:
I mean, if they're willing to do the deal.
John:
So I saw some article saying, like, let's go through all the companies and see who would entertain an offer of Apple.
John:
It's like, OpenAI know because of the Microsoft entanglement, Google know.
John:
uh llama no because because it's facebook they could steal llamas open source things or not steal but take llamas open way to things or whatever um the the one in china not a great idea um uh and then you get anthropic and i forget what their reason was that anthropic probably wouldn't maybe they have amazon ties like it's like uh everyone's already it's like the dance and everyone's already all coupled up and apple's just like on the wall and there's no one to dance with
Marco:
Yeah, Apple walked in two hours late.
Marco:
Oh, there's a dance.
John:
Yeah, everyone's got a partner already, huh?
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, and I think one of the biggest problems here that got them to this point and will hinder them going forward is...
Marco:
Certainly, one of the things that got them here is that, as mentioned many times in the past, I think Apple fundamentally underestimated the value and importance of this kind of technology.
Marco:
And then the biggest thing is they under-invested in it early on.
Marco:
And one of the root causes of that, besides Tim Cook being a terrible product person and not seeing the value in anything, is Apple is really cheap.
Marco:
And they're cheap in a lot of ways.
Marco:
One of the ways they are cheap is they didn't want to give their teams GPUs and stuff to start developing these things.
Marco:
Another way they're cheap is they just don't pay good salaries necessarily in a lot of areas, in a lot of competitive markets.
Marco:
Their attitude, from what I've gathered from people, has always kind of been, it's an honor to work for us.
Marco:
You should be so happy to work for us that you don't need necessarily the highest salary you could get in the market.
Marco:
And certainly with the AI story, we're going to talk about this in overtime, about there's a lot of high value going on in the AI market because...
Marco:
There's a lot of hype, a lot of values being created, a lot of potential value is being seen.
Marco:
And so to really be a big player in AI, you have to spend a bunch of money somehow, whether you are developing your own stuff, you know, spending a whole bunch of money on various computing resources and GPUs to get that done, or spending and or
Marco:
you know hiring a huge team of very talented very in-demand people right now or buying one of these companies that has or you know very heavily partnering with one of these companies that has all of those things already it's all going to take a lot of money and apple's cheap even though they have all the money like apple it isn't that they can't afford it they have everything
Marco:
all the money to do whatever they want, but they are really, really stingy with it.
Marco:
And I don't know if they are going to value this stuff enough yet.
Marco:
I mean, over the past few years, the problem is they haven't.
Marco:
So we don't know.
Marco:
How much has their mind changed on this?
Marco:
How much are they going to value this?
Marco:
Are they going to value it enough to pay what it takes to actually get competitive?
John:
From the time G. Andrea came, though, the story was that the reason there was resentment in his group is because he came and hired a bunch of people and they all of a sudden immediately start getting paid more than everybody else.
John:
Which you can imagine bringing resentment to the rest of the employees who are like, we work on the products that pay the bills around here, but we don't get the money that these new people in the AI group do.
John:
And that is probably just a reflection of the market.
John:
But it is also like it is a culture clash with the established culture at Apple, which is
John:
pay vaguely competitive but not like super high salaries but when it came time to staff the ai people they're paying them super high salaries because you got it if you want to hire any of these people you have to um and but now you have a problem in the company because you've got one part of the company this new shiny part that's getting paid more than you and you've been working there for 10 years and you're making the iphone and you're like what the heck and so that's you know it's
John:
It's very difficult to pull that off.
John:
You really have to say, okay, well, we're not going to do what we've historically done, which is pay competitive salaries, but most of it is made up with the fact that our stock price keeps going up so we can pay you a little bit less.
John:
If all of a sudden you need to hire people who are in high demand and pay them more money,
John:
if you don't do that for the rest of your company it makes people sad and and even then i'm not even sure they were paying the people in their ai group as much as the other companies are and certainly not as much as the new things again we'll talk about in overtime so yeah they've they've got themselves in a difficult situation and they're they're under investment in this whether it's under investment or they didn't have enough time or they didn't have enough people or like
John:
Maybe it's not even the LLMs, but it's entirely on the Siri team.
John:
Maybe they have models that could potentially have been used and were competitive when they were ready, but Siri wasn't ready to integrate them, and now they've fallen behind.
John:
It's hard to tell what kind of mess they have over there, but it's clear that they have a mess, and we can see the results.
John:
They just don't have anything.
John:
Siri's not competitive.
John:
Siri was bad before LLMs arrived.
John:
That's the worst part about it.
John:
Before LLMs even existed, Siri was terrible.
John:
They were starting at a deficit, and they just have not caught up.
John:
Um, and yeah, so I, I hope they, I hope they figure out a way to retain their existing team and to hire more of them.
John:
And they're probably going to have to continue paying higher salaries.
John:
And I don't know what you do with the rest of the people.
John:
Like they could get themselves into a situation where they are kind of already there and have been in the past where, um,
John:
The people who have the skills that Apple needs are not actually that common.
John:
It used to be you had to find people who knew objective C, which wasn't that many people.
John:
And then the iPhone came out and it made a lot more of those people.
John:
But still, especially if Apple's weird about working remotely, like many more people can make a website with react than can make an app with Swift.
John:
forget and let alone a mac app with swift or something like that so it's kind of getting in the situation not that apple is filled with cobalt engineers or something but like at the skills need because native apps are a bit of a native native apps on apple's platforms are a bit of a niche thing like at least android has like basically cotton which is basically java right java skills are way more common than swift at this point certainly they were more common than objective c so i kind of feel like
John:
Most of the people who are really good at the skills Apple needs for its bread and butter platforms are underpaid simply based on how rare they are in the market.
John:
As evidenced by our, you know, perennial complaint that it seems like there's nobody left at Apple who knows how to make a good Mac app.
John:
I guess they've all retired.
John:
Yeah, so highly in demand skills.
John:
AI people or anybody knows about how to make a decent app on an Apple platform.
Casey:
Hmm.
Casey:
It's a tough nut to crack, and I don't know what the right answer is, but I agree with both of you that the fact that they're willing to change the modus operandi from everything being trash and that's just the way it is, I'm really excited about that.
Casey:
And so I really am hopeful that we get to see the results of these efforts sometime before we all die.
Hmm.
Casey:
We are sponsored this week by Quince.
Casey:
So it's going to come as no great surprise to anyone listening to this that I am not the world's most fashionable human.
Casey:
And in particular, my summer wardrobe is basically entirely ATP t-shirts and some sort of shorts.
Casey:
I am happy to report I've graduated from cargo shorts, but nevertheless, it's ATP shirts and shorts.
Casey:
And one of the things I love about podcast sponsors like Quince is that it exposes you and me to new stuff.
Casey:
And even though many of you may have already heard the good word about linen pants, let me tell you, it wasn't until Quince that I had the opportunity to try linen pants and try I have because Quince sent me a pair of their 100% European linen pants and they are so nice.
Casey:
I hate wearing pants in the summertime because it is so stuffy and restrictive.
Casey:
One of the things I love about these linen pants is that they feel light and airy, but even more, they don't look like you're just bumming around on the beach.
Casey:
They look like you're ready to go out for a night on the town to the degree that I would ever do that sort of thing.
Casey:
They have a nice button at the top.
Casey:
They have a zipper fly.
Casey:
There is a drawstring, but it's on the inside.
Casey:
So it looks nice and crisp from the outside.
Casey:
And the best part is that everything with Quince tends to be about half the cost of similar brands.
Casey:
Additionally, they work directly with top artisans and they cut out the middlemen.
Casey:
So Quince gives you luxury pieces without the markups.
Casey:
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Casey:
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Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Francois Olivier LeBlanc writes, I was planning on purchasing a MacBook Pro, but I got some unexpected bills recently, so I had to put it off.
Casey:
I was going to wait for the M5 models, but I just realized that these come with macOS Tahoe.
Casey:
I think Tahoe is ugly, and I strongly disagree with its design principles.
Casey:
My main iPhone will be on iOS 18 for a very long time as well.
Casey:
Should I stretch my wallet and buy an M4-based MacBook Pro now so I can stay on Sequoia for as long as possible?
Casey:
But before we answer this...
Casey:
I get what Francois is saying, Francois Olivier is saying, and there was somebody that wrote us via email that had a pretty much identical question.
Casey:
Let me just say, don't throw out iOS 26.
Casey:
Don't throw out Tahoe yet.
Casey:
Like, yeah, it's a little bit rough now, but I really think it's not going to be as bad as pretty much everyone says it's going to be.
Casey:
I really think it'll be okay.
Casey:
That being said, if it were me, and I guess because I'm more optimistic, I would say just get the M5 when it's available and just be happy with that.
Casey:
And don't worry about Tahoe so much.
Casey:
But I'm guessing I'm the most optimistic of the three of us in this regard.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
Marco, do you have any thoughts on this?
Marco:
Whenever Apple does something that radically changes things about their OSs, a lot of people say, I'm going to hold on to the old version either for a long time or for as long as I can or for forever.
Marco:
I mean, it's hardware, too.
Marco:
I mean, look at how long I held on to that 2015 MacBook Pro before the butterfly keyboard and the touch bar.
Marco:
We do this, and there are times when you can do it, and it's fine.
Marco:
But the moment you say, I'm going to not update to the latest version, I'm going to not buy new products that come with the latest version, and I'm going to stand here as long as possible.
Marco:
The moment you start that, you start feeling resistance from all sides in various ways.
Marco:
Obviously, this takes the form in hardware of like, well, if you need to buy new hardware, you have to buy something old somehow.
Marco:
That's one problem.
Marco:
And then, of course, in software, the world moves on.
Marco:
So you are saying, I'm going to stand right here.
Marco:
I'm standing still.
Marco:
But the whole world is not.
Marco:
The whole world is running past you.
Marco:
And one of the aspects about the redesigns, like any other major system redesign, is it triggers a lot of redesigns and rewrites of software, of application software, and it becomes really difficult to support old OSs and the new OS with the same app.
Marco:
So many apps raise their deployment minimum, their minimum OS target, to the new version because it makes it a lot easier.
Marco:
Now, I don't expect that to happen on day one.
Marco:
There will be some apps, mostly indie apps, on day one that will be iOS 26 slash Tahoe only.
Marco:
You can get away for a while without most of your apps switching to that.
Marco:
But I bet within a year, almost everything will require the new OSs.
Marco:
So again, you can keep the old versions of those apps going, but you'll stop getting updates.
Marco:
So, you know, you're going to see all this friction fighting against you to do this.
Marco:
So you can do it.
Marco:
You can do it for a while.
Marco:
Eventually, there's going to be some compelling new feature of something that will require you to update.
Marco:
And at that point, it's like, well, was was that fight worth it?
Marco:
Maybe for a little while.
Marco:
Maybe give them a chance to iron out all the 1.0 bugs.
Marco:
But it's probably... I bet you're not going to want to keep this strategy going for more than a year.
Marco:
And so you might as well...
Marco:
If new updates to the M5 models might be compelling for you, I'd say just suck it up and just do it.
Marco:
You also don't know, are future iPhones going to be compelling for you?
Marco:
The MacBook Pro, we've heard it's rumored sometime in the next two years, I believe, to probably go to an OLED screen.
John:
Yeah, it's not the next one, but the one after that.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like the M6 generation, right?
Marco:
Yeah, I think so.
Marco:
That's what the rumors were for.
Marco:
So you're probably not going to get that by waiting for the M5.
Marco:
But at some point, you're going to be forced to make this transition.
Marco:
So don't expect to hold on to it for too long.
Marco:
And it's probably going to be harder than you think within about a year because all those apps are going to start requiring it just to make the redesigns at all tackleable.
John:
Yeah, so this question is slightly different than the similar sounding question, which is, hey, I have a computer.
John:
Should I buy a new one or should I just keep using my old one?
John:
If you have an old one that's still serving your needs, like if you have an M4 or you have an M3 and you're like, oh, should I use this for another year?
John:
Sure, you keep using it.
John:
But if the question is, I'm going to buy a new computer, should I buy M4?
John:
an M4-based one now?
John:
Should I buy the last one that can run pre-Tahoe?
John:
Should I, especially if you're in a situation where you're like, I can't afford to do it, I have to wait a little bit, but should I stretch just, and should I buy one now so I'll have something that doesn't have to run Tahoe so that I can plan on using that for years and years and avoiding Tahoe?
John:
That doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
John:
My advice is to save your money, buy the M5 when it comes out.
John:
If you have something you can use now until the M5 comes out, because that seems like you do,
John:
you may use a little bit longer when the m5 comes out wait six months like you can wait for the the bumps to be ironed out but like there's no holding back the tide if you don't like tahoe and never will change platforms because like yeah this is what mac os is going to be for a while like if you didn't like mac os 10 you're like i'm going to stay with classic mac os like well you're not a mac customer anymore because guess what the mac moved to mac os 10 and you can use classic for a
John:
that's not what the mac is anymore and if you don't like what the mac is you should be on a different platform so i think uh it's why you know if you don't have the money for an m4 right now wait save your money buy an m5 if you can wait for an m6 buy an m6 but like and like i said my personal experience with tahoe is despite my complaints about the ui actually using it day to day is not shocking
John:
Like, it's fine.
John:
Like, you will be fine.
John:
It's not like, oh, I can't use this.
John:
It's just totally unusable.
John:
Like, there's things that annoy me that I feel like are regressions from a UI perspective, but you get used to just plain sitting in front of the OS and using it pretty fast.
John:
It still works like a Mac.
John:
It's not that radically different.
John:
Yes, things look different and things are too light and high contrast or whatever, but like...
Casey:
it's it's fine so my advice is get that m5 i think you'll be happy with it and if not get an m5 and a half or an m6 uh what is the email question we got which i don't have in front of me might have been the same person no i don't think it was asked also has something about downgrading so could you buy an m5 that comes to tahoe and then put on an older version of the os and to the best i recall that's not possible right
John:
everything's possible with hacks but i don't think that's a supported configuration for apple which is uh why i would not recommend if that's your plan if you need to run pre-tahoe don't get a machine that doesn't support pre-tahoe because yeah if you can get it to work fine but like you're just you're just asking for trouble like if you're that desperate for something and you have to buy something and you can't afford to buy something about buy a new m4 now or later on buy a used m4 like it's much better to do that than to try to force an older os on hardware that doesn't support it
Marco:
Yeah, because whenever when Apple releases new hardware, that hardware is only supported by the OS that was current when it shipped and then all OS is forward.
Marco:
So right now, the M4 MacBook Air, say, that's the current M4.
Marco:
That's the current MacBook Air.
Marco:
Right now we have Sequoia.
Marco:
This fall when Tahoe ships, they will still probably be selling that same M4 MacBook Air.
Marco:
If you buy one and it comes with Tahoe, you can probably easily downgrade it to Sequoia because that exact hardware shipped with Sequoia at some point.
Marco:
But then later on in the fall, if an M5 series of MacBooks comes out and that comes out after Tahoe, then Sequoia will never be updated to get hardware support for that hardware.
Marco:
So you won't be able to downgrade it in any way.
Casey:
I have a Mac Mini M1 with 16 gigs of RAM, which I primarily use for Xcode.
Casey:
My only niggle is how long it takes to spin up new simulators.
Casey:
Will that be noticeably faster with an M4 with 16 gigs of RAM?
Casey:
I don't know, to be honest with you, but I don't imagine it'll be that much faster.
Marco:
Will it?
Marco:
I mean, the M4... So keep in mind, as you go from M1 to M4, a lot of other things have also changed about these chips.
Marco:
You have various throughput improvements.
Marco:
I'm sure the memory has more bandwidth.
Marco:
I'm sure the SSD is probably faster.
Marco:
There's other things about it that have changed.
Marco:
And then, of course, M1 to M4...
Marco:
As awesome as the M1 was, that was, what, five years ago now?
Marco:
And they've made a lot of very big progress since then.
Marco:
The M4 is really fast.
Marco:
The M1 was amazing for its time, but, you know, it is like four or five years old now.
Marco:
The M4 is very, very fast.
Marco:
It is substantially faster than the M1.
Marco:
So I would say...
Marco:
If you're going from M1 16 gig to M4 16 gig, you will probably notice generally faster performance with almost everything that is a taxing operation on the computer.
Marco:
Now, I would also suggest, though, if you're using this for Xcode, that 16 gigs is starting to look a little skimpy these days.
Marco:
So if you can at all afford, if you're going to replace it,
Marco:
And if you can at all afford more RAM than that, I would suggest get more RAM than that.
Marco:
If you've been living with 16 and you're doing Xcode, I'd say at least go to 32 if you can.
Marco:
That would be a great setup.
Marco:
An M4 family chip, whichever one it is, with 32 gigs of RAM can last you a very long time, I think, in today's software.
John:
john i don't have experience doing simulators that's why i asked a question for you to youtube i agree that like the thing the place where you'd probably notice it for like starting up a simulator is probably going to be ssd speed that i don't actually know what the bottleneck is for simulator startups and i think you could get by with 16 gigs of ram like it depends on so like simulators are simulating phones right it's kind of like phone backups we used to do our like local backups and finder to our phones but then like phones would come with like a terabyte and it's like i don't want to do a local backup of a terabyte and
John:
phone on my Mac and eat all that disk space right simulators are simulating iPhones which used to come with a piddling amount of RAM but now like they're I mean they're iPhones with 8 gigs of RAM there's iPads with 16 gigs of RAM and so yeah if you're simulating a high RAM device and it is faithfully simulating the amount of RAM that device really has that's going to eat up some of your max RAM so maybe that makes a difference but I felt like if you're doing iPhone dev and you have a 16 gig Mac and the only thing you're running is Xcode I thought you'd be okay but
John:
You two know better than I do about using simulators.
John:
So yeah, if you think three gigs will help, it will probably help.
John:
And now this just says M4.
John:
It doesn't say like M4 Pro, M4 Max, or M4 Family.
John:
It just says plain M4.
John:
And you know, it's a mini, right?
John:
So I don't know.
John:
I feel like if you have an M1 machine,
John:
it's reasonable to upgrade now anyway if you if your m1 is feeling a little pokey like you're wondering if you get a thing like you waited a good amount of time you you got good mileage out of that m1 it lasted you reasonably because it's not like you're just using it for casual web browsing you keep using that m1 for casual web browsing for ages right but you're doing dev work in it and you got a lot of years out of it and the new mac mini is cheap especially in the base config so
John:
I would say upgrade.
John:
And I think you will notice the problem with any kind of thing like this of noticing is you'll notice the day you get it and then you get used to it the next day.
John:
That's just, that's just computers, right?
John:
You know, we get used to how fast it is.
John:
I guess you leave the old one around.
John:
So after a month, you can go back to the old one and try building your app and going, Oh yeah, I remember this.
Marco:
i did just by the way i just went to the configurator to see like okay so a mac mini base model is 600 which for the computer that it is it's 16 gigs 256 256 yeah 256 sucks but 16 gigs m4 uh 600 that's honestly a really good deal if you want 32 gigs the price jumps by 400 more dollars no longer a good deal
Marco:
so a lot less of a good deal it's still in you know that you're at a thousand dollars for that which again like when compared to apple's other desktops like that's a pretty good deal but wow to almost double the price of the mac mini you look for a refurb you know save some money
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
David Levine asks, how do you recommend choosing a new UPS?
Casey:
How do I know how much, what is VA?
Casey:
Volt?
Marco:
Volt amps?
Marco:
I do not understand VA.
Marco:
I only ever see it in UPSs.
Marco:
Like, I don't quite understand this measure.
Marco:
And all I know is that AC power is really weird.
Marco:
And so there's all sorts of little complexities to it that like you think, you know, DC is much simpler.
Marco:
It's like, oh, yeah, you got volts, you got amps, watts.
Marco:
All of that makes so much sense with DC.
Marco:
AC is so insanely complicated.
Marco:
What phase are you pulling the load on?
Marco:
And is your motor pulling it this way or that way?
Marco:
Is it a motor or a light?
Marco:
Like there's it's so complicated.
Casey:
Yeah, it's nuts.
Casey:
I did computer engineering in college.
Casey:
Is that what you did, John?
Casey:
Isn't that right?
John:
I did computer engineering.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So for me, it was basically EE and CS combined.
Casey:
And let me tell you, the EE side, I did not do well at at all.
Casey:
But anyways, so how do you choose a UPS?
Casey:
I don't know, man.
Casey:
Add up how many watts I think you're going to use and how long you think you want that to last and put your thumb in the wind.
Casey:
I'm sure there's a better answer than that.
Casey:
John and I have each put our respective UPSs in the show notes.
Casey:
They're basically the same model.
Casey:
John's just has a little bit more power than me.
Casey:
I probably could stand for more.
Casey:
They're both cyber power tower style UPSs, which actually Marco might have been the first of the three of us to have one of these.
Casey:
I don't recall.
Marco:
I've had these for years.
Marco:
And in fact, the rack mount version, I have three of them at the restaurant.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
I will say that mine, after only like three-ish years, the internal batteries did go on them.
Casey:
However, it was astonishingly easy and relatively inexpensive to replace them.
Casey:
They looked very similar to motorcycle batteries.
Casey:
I'm sure they're not actually the same, but looked very similar to that.
Marco:
I bet they're surprisingly similar.
Casey:
Well, yeah, fair.
Casey:
But I ordered a couple of new batteries from Amazon, put them in myself.
Casey:
And other than the slack on a couple of the cables being very, very taut, there was not enough slack in a couple of spots.
Casey:
It was actually very easy to do.
Casey:
But in terms of how to choose, I don't know.
Casey:
Do either of you have a recommendation in this regard?
John:
Well, we get this question every few years, and the answer is always the unsatisfying, like you said, add up all the power in the devices you have and see how much you need.
John:
Every UPS seller will have something on their website that purports to do this for you, but those tools are motivated.
John:
Their interests are not aligned with yours, let's say, because...
John:
They'll let you enter a bunch of information, and they'll tell you what UPS you should buy from them if every one of your devices is pulling the maximum power it's allowed to fall at the same time, which honestly, like, that's the conservative answer.
John:
But that will cost you a lot of money, which, again, is in their interest because they sell UPSs, right?
John:
For years, I bought – because I remember when I first got my, like, I guess Power Mac G5, maybe even when I got my G3 –
John:
I did the calculations on the various websites, got a number that said I should buy this UPS that was more than I could afford.
John:
And I said, okay, well, how about I just get a much smaller one?
John:
And for just years and years, I had a series of UPSs that, yes, I would replace the batteries when they died.
John:
And it was like 30 bucks to replace the battery when it was real cheap.
John:
Anyway,
John:
So when the power went out, I had about two minutes and 30 seconds to shut down my computer.
John:
And they have a thing that most of the good ones have a thing where you can connect your Mac through USB to the UPS.
John:
So your Mac will detect...
John:
when it's on ups power and shut itself down and even that was a race so even if you're not there to shut it down the mac will shut itself down based on knowing that it's on ups if you can figure this is built into mac os you don't even need to use third-party software although they used to come with it back in the day but mac os itself knows what a ups is and i think
John:
think built into mac os is a thing that will shut itself down with x amount of time remaining on the thing or whatever what i'm saying is you can get away with a ups that is massively undersized for your uses if you have let's say a dual power mac g5 that could potentially use a huge amount of power with like an nvidia graphics card in it and you buy a dinky ups that could barely handle an imac it will protect you when the power goes out as long as you shut down within two to five minutes right and sometimes that's enough especially if the power like flickers
John:
or whatever, or you just want time to save your stuff and shut down.
John:
And in my experience, having experienced many blackouts and many flickers or whatever, I have never lost anything or had any problem due to having a massively undersized UPS.
John:
That said, once I got fancier computers and could afford a UPS that was closer to being sized correctly,
John:
Uh, that's better.
John:
You should do that if you can.
John:
Um, uh, the reason I linked to the cyber power one in the show notes is I had a series of APC UPSs and other brands, uh, that were more of like the horizontal kind.
John:
That's like a big giant flat thing that Marco rests his feet on or whatever.
John:
Um, or maybe you rest your feet on the tower ones too.
Um,
Marco:
No, the tower ones aren't.
Marco:
They're too top-heavy.
Marco:
They tip over.
Marco:
You've got to reach your feet on a subwoofer or an old big-style UPS.
John:
Or your feet can reach the ground.
John:
That's another option.
John:
No, that's terrible.
John:
Anyway, and those were fine, but when I got my 2019 Mac Pro, the place where I was putting it was on a little skinny table that is the proportions of a tower computer, and a tower...
John:
uh uh ups fit perfectly under a tower computer on a tower shaped table the danger that i have with all these ups is is it going to make noise it doesn't have a fan in it and a lot of the fancier ones that that uh support a lot of power do in fact have fans in them and you're always like reading the comments reading the help say okay it's got a fan but does the fan run all the time or only when it's on battery power because when it's on battery power i don't care if the fan runs
John:
And I can tell you that the model that I'm going to link in the show notes, I'm assuming Casey will say the same of his, does not make any noise in normal operation.
John:
When it switches to battery power, yes, it has a fan that turns on.
John:
But at that point, I don't care because I'm just shutting down my computer.
John:
So my main criteria is, is it reliable?
John:
Can it keep my computer alive when the power is out long enough for me to save my work and shut down?
John:
And does it not make any noise?
John:
And this, I have two of these cyber power ones.
John:
I think I have one of the ones that Casey's going to like, and I have one of the newer ones.
John:
They're both sitting in this room with me.
John:
They're silent.
John:
They do their job.
John:
That's all I can ask for them.
John:
And when their batteries die, I will pay and replace the batteries with a new one.
Casey:
Yep, so I have the CyberPower CP1350 PFC LCD, and John apparently has the CP1500 PFC LCD.
Marco:
Yeah, and I have a whole bunch of these all over the place.
Marco:
They're all good.
Marco:
The one thing, we actually, back in episode 569, I mentioned that there was, I have Tesla Powerwall batteries installed.
Marco:
as a solar backup battery at the beach i had a ups plugged into one of the outlets that is backed up by the solar panels or by the batteries and i had said like for some reason like when it goes on solar power like if there's a if there's a blackout from the utility company and it switches over to the batteries providing the power to those outlets then the ups that i had put into that the you know the standard cyber power ups would think it was like a blackout even though there is power going to the outlet and it would cut off
Marco:
the supply and it would use its battery until it died and then everything would just die i was thinking i was like double backing things up but i wasn't so and there was some issue with like the way that like powerwall batteries when supplying power supply a different frequency of ac it's like 62 and a half to 65 hertz instead of 60 hertz for the ac um you know switching rate but
Marco:
And that throws off UPSs.
Marco:
They think, oh, this is invalid.
Marco:
This is bad power.
Marco:
I better switch to my internal power supply.
Marco:
And so you have to use certain UPSs that do it.
Marco:
And there's a brand called Eaton, E-A-T-O-N, that makes UPSs that cost about the same as everybody else's, maybe a little bit more, that are compatible with Tesla Powerwall batteries.
Marco:
So if for some reason you have Powerwalls as backup power for your house and you also want to use a UPS on those outlets for extra protection for some reason, then consider the Eaton brand.
Marco:
My solution was I just disconnected the UPS and just plugged directly into the wall and let the Tesla batteries do their jobs.
Marco:
And this was before Elon Musk, et cetera.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I think we're all good here.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Factor, 1Password, and Quince.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
Marco:
We're going to kind of continue what we talked about earlier about the AI stuff by talking about our developers.
Marco:
Is any developer worth these like big multi-million, even $100 million pay packages that AI developers are allegedly being offered or taking right now in the open marketplace?
Marco:
We're going to talk about that in overtime this week.
Marco:
You can join us, listen, atv.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-
Marco:
I now love one each of Casey and John's previously talked about MVP technologies.
John:
We don't have MVPs.
John:
MVP is a thing that you do for your restaurant.
John:
When did we ever do MVPs?
Marco:
I am curious, but fascinated and excited.
Marco:
Okay, so these are two things that you guys have talked about in the past that I have recently come to need that I have really appreciated.
Marco:
I will start with Casey's.
Marco:
I have recently come to finally install and use and really appreciate Tailscale.
Casey:
Ah, yes, indeed.
Casey:
One of us.
Marco:
One of us.
Marco:
So and they have been a sponsor.
Marco:
I don't know if they're sponsoring again, but they have been a sponsor.
Marco:
So to disclose that, but I had never really had a need for it before.
Marco:
But so what tail scale does, as you've heard Casey talk about in sponsor reads is basically it's like a like a network network.
Marco:
routing software.
Marco:
Let me take a stab at this.
Casey:
So when you hear about Tailscale, and I didn't know I was going to talk about this tonight, but hand to God, I love Tailscale so much that whether or not they've ever sponsored, which they have, I would talk it up anyways, because I really do love it that much.
Casey:
But anyways, when you hear Tailscale, you think VPN.
Casey:
And it works with VPN, the same kind of technology that runs VPNs,
Casey:
But that's not the way you should think of it.
Casey:
The way you should think of Tailscale is, what if all of my devices could talk to each other irrespective of how they're actually connected to the internet?
Casey:
So what if I had a server at Linode and I had my laptop here at my house and I wanted them to be able to talk to each other as though they're on the same local network?
Casey:
That's kind of what Tailscale does.
Casey:
So all of your devices that are on your Tailnet, which is what they call your account, if you will, your network of devices, all of the devices on your Tailnet can pretty much always talk to each other, irrespective of how they're connected to the internet and irrespective of where they are geographically.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so where this became useful for me is I have my Mac mini doing basically like file server type work in my garage over on Long Island.
Marco:
I'm now at the beach for the summer.
Marco:
I want to be able to access that Mac mini.
Marco:
And I want to be able to do screen sharing and stuff like that and access the network volumes.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
How do I do that easily?
Marco:
Well, Tailscale lets me do that.
Marco:
I installed it on both, and now I can access it.
Marco:
And I installed it on my iPad for some testing things.
Marco:
When I was on Long Island, I wanted access to the network at the restaurant.
Marco:
So at the restaurant, there's an iMac that we use in the office.
Marco:
So I installed an exit node there as well as the regular... So the exit node is basically like a VPN host.
Marco:
You can basically say, sir, whatever device I'm using right now, tunnel all the traffic so it comes out of that device over there.
Marco:
And so you're basically creating your own VPN.
Marco:
So now I have exit nodes at both houses and the restaurant.
Marco:
So anywhere I am in the world, I can...
Marco:
basically treat it like a vpn i can i can say go you know connect to my my long island uh you know home mac mini and route all traffic through that and then you know i don't have to use somebody else's vpn or something but also you know you can like i can screen share right now to the mac mini back at home and it just works like it like you you know the tail scale menu like it copies uh the ip address you need to use and i just go into you know the finder i hit command k you know vnc colon slash paste the ip address
Marco:
and boom i'm in my mac mini from anywhere that's really cool and like this is the kind of thing that like you you there have been ways to do this over time with like all right port forward things or dynamic dns and like all these different things that were a pain in the butt and fragile and this takes all of that pain into pain in the buttery and fragility out of the situation and it's like oh here's here is an ip address that you can use from your local device to connect to this thing over there and it will behave as though it's local that's fantastic
Casey:
It really is incredible.
Casey:
If you have devices that are not geographically next to each other pretty much ever, tail scale really is incredible.
Casey:
And to build on what Marco said, the way it works is it kind of sort of layers another network on top of all of the network that your device is currently on.
Casey:
And so like Marco said, you get a, I think, what is it called?
Casey:
A carrier grade network address translation?
Casey:
You get a 100.xyz IP address for each of your devices.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
While your device may have the 192.168.1.whatever IP address, TailScale adds to that another IP address that that device will answer to.
Casey:
That's something like 100.75.whatever.
Casey:
And so if you use that 100.IP address to access your other devices, that tells your device and tells TailScale, oh, I'm going to go through TailScale to get to this other thing.
Casey:
And then like Marco said, you can use exit nodes, which is what they consider like a way of egressing onto the internet.
Casey:
So you can be in London, but have an exit node in Long Island and you're effectively getting on the internet from Long Island.
Casey:
They also have the idea of subnet routers, which is to say, what if I want to access a non tail scale device on my in-home network?
Casey:
Well, I can set up one of my in-home tail scale devices to allow me to tunnel through that onto my local network and
Casey:
You can do some really crazy stuff where my parents, for example, they have a 192.168.1.x network.
Casey:
And I want to occasionally be able to get on their network to do some maintenance things for them.
Casey:
And I don't want to do the standard subnet router thing where it just says, okay, anything that is 192.168.1.x, that's going to be served at Casey's parents' house.
Casey:
I don't want that because that's not necessarily the case.
Casey:
And you can actually use IPv6 to get around this.
Casey:
I have a blog post about it.
Casey:
I'll link in the show notes.
Casey:
It's kind of complicated to talk about, so I'm not going to spend any more time on it now.
Casey:
But my point is just that you can use this really cockamamie IPv6 address to get into this other network via IPv4.
Casey:
Like the stuff that Tailscale does is bananas.
Casey:
It's really, really worth your time looking into it.
Casey:
You probably already did after my incredible sponsor reads back in the day.
Casey:
But seriously, give it a shot.
Marco:
yeah so very happy with tail scale thank you for that casey um and next john's mvp well at the restaurant i needed some ways to monitor the temperatures in the walk-in fridges oh here we go yo link so it just by coincidence we happen to have this yo link follow-up this episode the cheapest thing you bought for your restaurant by far
Marco:
So I have – so we have three walk-in coolers, a freezer and two fridges.
Marco:
As a restaurant, it's very important to know the temperatures of those because for food safety basically, you need to keep things within a certain range so that your food doesn't spoil, your frozen stuff doesn't thaw, your cold – your refrigerated stuff doesn't freeze.
Marco:
Like there's all sorts of –
Marco:
Bad things that happen to food and drinks if they are in the wrong temperature zone.
Marco:
And for a restaurant, for health code compliance, you have to keep things in certain ranges, and it's very important.
Marco:
Okay, so you can go to my preferred brand, ThermoWorks, for high-quality thermometers and stuff.
Marco:
And ThermoWorks will sell you a Wi-Fi app-enabled temperature logging kit for a walk-in.
Marco:
It has a couple of sensors and
Marco:
It has a module that connects to your network, and you can then view the historical data.
Marco:
It's $400 for one fridge.
Marco:
And if you have three fridges, it's $400 for each fridge.
Marco:
Yolink gives me that for about $35 per fridge.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
The only weird thing about putting the Yolink thing in the fridge was – I was like, how do I attach this to the fridge wall or where do I place this in the fridge?
Marco:
It is basically like a three by three inch by one inch rectangular solid-ish.
Marco:
How do I attach this to the wall?
Marco:
Nobody has made brackets to stick them on the wall.
Marco:
They don't come with one.
Marco:
And I could just use my trusty VHB tape, which I mentioned in the past.
Marco:
I could just use that to stick it to the fridge wall.
Marco:
But on the back of the Yolink sensor is a battery door and a few holes that are probably to let some of the air in to measure the temperature.
Marco:
So you can't really, I don't want to like stick it to the wall and then the battery, you can't like take it off easily every probably, you know, six months or a year to replace those batteries.
Marco:
So what I did was I actually, you know, we have an old 3D printer that mostly Adam and Tiff play with.
Marco:
I'm like, finally, I have a use for this thing.
Marco:
I custom 3D printed my own bracket.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
That has a flat back so I could use the VHB tape on that.
Marco:
I made little cutouts for all of the air holes on the sensor.
Marco:
And it perfectly, it looks like a bench in a Catholic church.
Marco:
Like, you know, that kind of like shape, you know, like a straight edge, like, you know, back, little arms and little front lips so that it rests in there.
Marco:
But it's mostly open on all sides.
Marco:
And I stuck those to the wall of the fridge with VHB tape.
Marco:
They've been there now for three months.
Marco:
They are working perfectly.
Marco:
The kitchen staff loves them.
Marco:
And now I have a complete history.
Marco:
of all the temperature variations of the fridges and i can see i can get notified every single time that something goes out of range and i can see oh is it out of range right now because they just like loaded the freezer and so it went up by you know by a couple degrees for a few minutes okay or i can see oh wait a minute
Marco:
On a regular day, it goes up, down, up, down, up, down like this.
Marco:
As the compressor kicks on, kicks off, kicks on, kicks off, you can see the cycle that it stays within.
Marco:
And then I noticed a couple days ago, or about last week, I noticed, huh, it stopped that pattern, and now it's like two degrees higher, and it looks like it's having trouble keeping up.
Marco:
So I called the fridge repair guy, and it turns out, oh, there was some frost somewhere.
Marco:
There shouldn't have been frost, and it couldn't work the way it was supposed to work.
Marco:
But we caught that because of Yoling, because of these sensors.
Marco:
If it was any other situation where we just relied on people noticing, hey, the fridge is warm, it would have taken a lot more of a temperature delta before people noticed.
Marco:
I noticed it within two degrees.
Marco:
So it was still within the safe range, but I could tell something's wrong or something's different and get it fixed before it becomes a bigger problem.
Marco:
So it's actually keeping our food safer.
Marco:
And it's keeping our butts better covered in a lot of those ways.
Marco:
Like, this is incredible.
Marco:
And these are – they're so cheap.
Marco:
So I am now – I just a few days ago bought myself a second Yolink hub, this time for my house.
Marco:
And I'm going to put some of the temperature sensors here and various things.
Marco:
I got one to float in the hot tub.
Yeah.
Marco:
They have one of those cone-shaped things that you can float in the hot tub and monitors.
Marco:
I noticed they have smoke alarms now, which that I would very much like.
Marco:
If we're not here, I want to know that the smoke alarm is going off.
Marco:
I have tried other solutions to this problem, and they are not very good.
Marco:
And so this – let's see if this works.
Marco:
But they have the whole family of stuff.
Marco:
As we mentioned earlier, they have water leak sensors.
Marco:
They have door open sensors.
Marco:
They have all sorts of custom things.
Marco:
You can custom wire stuff to a relay to do things.
Marco:
And what I have found with their service is like – I mean, yeah, the app is –
Marco:
what you would expect the app to be but it works and it's reliable and those notifications come in immediately every time they're very reliable it's kind of low drama it just tells you when you need to know stuff that's it
Marco:
So given given how inexpensive their stuff is and how low needs it is in terms of like you don't need to hardwire everything like I have for temperature monitoring in my house.
Marco:
What I previously used is these little Eve.
Marco:
I think they're called Eve rooms, Eve room sensors.
Marco:
They're like a hundred bucks each or something.
Marco:
And they are powered.
Marco:
You have to, like, you have to power them by micro USB with some kind of charger pretty often or just leave them plugged in all the time.
Marco:
And so I have one of those, like, there's, like, a room in the basement that the water main runs through.
Marco:
And so in the winter, you want to make sure it doesn't freeze.
Marco:
So there's, like, you know, small heater things in there.
Marco:
And I have one of these monitors to make sure, like, if it ever gets below, you know, 40 degrees, alert me, you know.
Marco:
And I've been doing that through, you know, with Eve's sensors and through HomeKit.
Marco:
And it's just, it's very complicated.
Marco:
It's kind of unreliable.
Marco:
And it's pretty expensive.
Marco:
And then, you know, you go to Yolink and it's, you know, costs almost nothing.
Marco:
It's like, it's a third as much per sensor.
Marco:
And they have, you know, infinite battery life.
Marco:
They don't need HomeKit complexity.
Marco:
They don't need hubs or anything.
Marco:
And yeah, they have a fairly ugly app to manage them.
Marco:
But like, at this point, who cares?
Marco:
Everything else about them is better and cheaper.
Marco:
So I'm into it.
Casey:
Yeah, they do need a hub.
Casey:
They need one hub per location that you have them.
Marco:
The hub's also like $40.
Casey:
Yeah, it's really not that expensive.
Casey:
The other thing I'm waiting for inevitably is for you to decide, you know what I'd like to do is have more control over exactly when this triggers and how it triggers and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Or maybe it should send an email to certain people when such and such happens.
Casey:
So what I'm saying is...
Casey:
the next time you bring up one of these that's inspired by John or me, it's going to be home assistant because Yolink has a really solid, I don't think it's first party.
Casey:
I think somebody else wrote a really good Yolink integration for home assistant.
Casey:
And then you can do all sorts of crazy crap.
Casey:
Like, Oh, if it's been higher than such and such a temperature for such and such a time, and it's not whatever time of day when we know that they're always opening the fridge and leaving it open for 10 minutes, you can get just utterly bananas with this stuff.
Casey:
But the,
Casey:
That being said, I'm genuinely very glad that you found them and like them as much as John and I do.
Casey:
So that is, like you said, 100% John.
Casey:
So thank you, John.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And again, the low drama.
Marco:
What am I going to put in a walk-in fridge?
Marco:
There's no outlets in there.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
And it's a metal box.
Marco:
It doesn't do Wi-Fi very well from there.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
There's not many options that you can do with wireless transmitting technology that will work well inside of a metal box.
Marco:
But these work great.
Marco:
They work totally fine.
Marco:
Each one of them reports into the base station on a regular basis.
Marco:
I've never had one drop out or miss one.
Marco:
I installed them all in March or April.
Marco:
Their batteries are still totally fine here almost in July.
Marco:
Like, it's great.
Marco:
I'm very, very happy.
Marco:
And when you compare it to, you know, the stuff in the kind of, you know, consumer HomeKit ecosystem that connects directly to Wi-Fi or even Thread, it's night and day difference in range and battery life.
John:
Yeah, Wi-Fi is the wrong tool for that job, as I think we discussed in the past.
John:
Although I think you overcomplicated it with these little church pews on the wall.
John:
My Yolink and my fridge and freezer, I just chuck them in there.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
I just chuck them in the fridge like they're any other thing that's in the fridge.
John:
Like I'm not treating them special in any way.
John:
They're just on the shelf with the pickles or like somewhere in the fridge.
John:
I don't even know where it is in the freezer.
John:
I just chuck the thing in the freezer, and I have one in the downstairs.
John:
They're not fragile.
John:
You can just put them in there.
John:
I mean, I guess if you want to be really careful, like, oh, don't put it in the hottest or the coldest part in your fridge, but they're like $17 each.
John:
Buy two.
John:
Put them in two places in the fridge.
John:
They're so cheap.
Marco:
i actually did that so like you know our our refrigerator repair guy when i when i first uh complained that like that the fridge was running a couple degrees warm and something must have been wrong he looked at where i put it next to the door on the inside and was like well you shouldn't put this here so i said okay so i grabbed a second one because i bought a couple extras i have like a five pack like i grabbed it i just grabbed another one i didn't
Marco:
three minutes it was set up paired you know i put it in the back bottom corner of the fridge like as far from the door and down low so it should be as cold as possible and then like you know a few hours later i'm like look here's the data it makes almost no difference whatsoever it was like a one degree difference like it's it there is obviously no difference but he thought there would be and i was able to show with data nope look disproven and in two seconds like it's it's a great it's a great system i i strongly recommend it