Warning Stories
Oh, Marco.
Yeah.
I mean, well, I, when I first saw the bunnies, I was like, oh my God, that's amazing.
And then like, you know, a few posts later I saw the same thing with like raccoons.
I'm like, oh, oh.
When one of the bunnies did a flip and winked at you, you're like, wait a second.
It wasn't that ridiculous.
It was pretty ridiculous.
But I guess, and like, okay, you can kind of argue like, okay, that is, we're in this kind of hellscape of, you know, all this AI generated stuff being fed to us on social apps to keep us engaged.
Yeah.
But also, like, is it that different from them algorithmically feeding us stuff that humans made that, you know, we're going to breeze through and never see again and just, you know, tickling our fancy for a split second as we waste time?
It's a little bit different.
Is it?
Yeah.
yeah because because if you believe that it's real you know what i mean i suppose but like because because then like you get the sort of the the excuse me if everyone holds your ears because i know it'll be upset people it's the fox news effect where if you're fed a constant diet of things that are not true and accept them as true even if each one individually is harmless you essentially acclimate to the idea that uh you know you're you're filling your brains with untruths but following them under truths and so your whole worldview gets really distorted because you're like look
at all these things these are all things that happened and you're like actually no all 8 000 of those were bs you're like that can't be true well but like i wonder you know what are we comparing it to like how accurate was the pool of slop that was being fed to us before ai like if it was just you know once you finish the handful of posts from your friends and instagram and you know between all the thousand ads that you're seeing
You're mostly just seeing like, you know, memes and screenshots of funny things from Twitter or, you know, copies of TikTok videos, you know, whatever.
Like you're just seeing mostly low trust, low, you know, low nutritional value content anyway.
So now that if a bunch of that's going to be AI generated, like I don't actually think it's that much worse than it already was.
The specific kind of video you're talking about is the kind of like, look at this amazing thing that happened.
And the entertaining value comes from believing that it happened.
Because as soon as you realize that it didn't happen, it loses a lot of its value.
You're like, oh, now I'm not interested in seeing it.
You know what I mean?
So the value comes from, can you believe that this thing happened?
The closest analogy, I think, are the...
The videos, and this is kind of limited by how hard it is to be a good actor, but the videos with it are clearly staged, where they stage some kind of thing to try to make it like, can you believe this thing happened?
But the good thing about those is, again, people aren't very good actors, so it's usually very obvious that it's staged because...
it seems staged because they're bad actors but obviously the ai stuff sort of fixes that problem because you know the bunnies don't have to be good actors they just you know gotta be convincing on the camera anyway the bunnies are probably mostly harmless but like again being being fed a steady diet of stuff like that and not being interested like in not not being interested but like accepting the truth of those because the value of them comes from them being true and
sort of primes you to accept anything from that feed as true if the value of it comes from you thinking it's true so it's not great but you know we'll we will as as you just noted everyone knows about that stupid bunny video because it's a good example of people essentially building antibodies because now they've been burned now they feel they feel like they've been had they feel betrayed right and that feeling hopefully will stick with people to say i'm going to be a little bit more skeptical again not everybody but you know hopefully marco the next time he sees one of those
like the anaconda one that you're about to describe to us before we got derailed you're thinking is this real maybe you wouldn't have been thinking that before the bunny video yeah well and in a way like you know like what you're saying about so many videos in the past have been just staged you know can you believe this thing that happened and then like yeah it's like that you're all just acting or like like a like a man and a woman having a fake conflict over a thing that they think will be humorous but they're terrible actors
It's clear it was a setup.
Right.
Or like, you know, like you'll see like, you know, the screenshot of the message conversation that's outrageous.
Like that didn't, that wasn't a real conversation.
You know, like, but that, you know, back before AI, you would believe like, oh, maybe that happened.
That might be real.
But maybe, you know, now that we're in this AI world now, if everybody just believes that by default, if you believe the thing you're seeing is probably fake, that's probably both better and more accurate of how it has been than, you know, than believing most of it was real.
it's like the uh am i the a-hole reddit i just assume everything there is fiction but in that context it is a forum where people practice fiction writing and entertain each other with their fiction which i'm mostly okay with but like but that's you know that's that's sort of how you get you end that you enter this sort of like uh trust no one x files type environment and i'm sure lots of people read am i the a-hole and are entertained by it because they believe they're all true
But I read it and I'm entertained because I believe these are all this is a big set of skilled fiction writers trying to, you know, entertain the world with their fiction.
But I bet when it started, I mean, I don't know anything about Reddit really, but I bet when it started out, I bet that subreddit was probably mostly true stories.
But then they probably quickly ran out and realized, oh, this is fun.
Let's just keep going.
I don't think they run out.
Like, I'm sure there's true stories sprinkled in there.
It's just my, the way I take it is this is all fiction and that I'm able to be entertained by it without having to worry about it one way or the other.
But I think most people read it and assume it's all true, except for the one that they really can't believe.
These are all true, but this one I can't believe.
all right do you want to start the show do some follow-up that's what we do and that's what we do so i did the unthinkable i put ios 26 on my carry phone ah welcome and then promptly dropped it and the replacement had uh how did you know no not really no but then you can't restore your backup onto it anymore you have to upgrade your new whatever whatever phone you replace this phone with when you drop it you have to first don't just say more than one backup like don't can't you just use your older backup
Yeah, but then you're going to have a gap in time.
Who knows?
Whatever new game you installed or whatever in the meantime, you're going to lose stuff.
You can't do that.
You can never go backwards, John.
Only forwards.
The only way out is through.
I did this yesterday late morning, I believe it was.
It's only been a little over 24 hours that I've had iOS 26 on my phone.
No, I'm just kidding.
It's so weird.
I have a...
fairly visceral love-hate relationship with it so far.
I really like that there is some modicum of whimsy to it.
So like in messages, when you tap in the text field that you type into...
it kind of like flashes and like dances a little bit.
And I could see how somebody else would find that very frustrating, but I think it's kind of cute and neat.
And generally speaking, I think it looks pretty good.
And I think that again, the animations are fun.
I do think they've done an incredibly good job of modeling what glass looks like.
And so like when you pull down a control center notification center, rather notification center,
and you're watching the edge of Notification Center come down, that looks really cool.
I really dig it.
I really think at the surface level, a lot of this is very cool, and I enjoy it, and I like it.
With that said, holy God, sometimes the legibility is zero.
And I know this is old news, but now I'm experiencing it on my carry device.
Notification Center, in particular, is so bad.
It is so bad on Beta 7, and...
It's, if I turn off, or if I do reduce transparency, it basically looks like the iOS 18, which on the one side is good because it's readable.
On the other side, I don't like it because it feels old and boring and whatever.
But man, is that bad.
Additionally, Safari with the compact toolbar at the bottom, absolutely not.
I only have like...
I have like maybe eight tabs, eight to ten tabs on a general basis.
Meanwhile, Erin has like 450.
It drives me nuts.
But that's her phone.
That's what makes her happy.
But I only have like right now I have eight tabs, as it turns out.
And that's probably too many by my own admission.
But, you know, my point is it's not a ton.
But I do flip between them somewhat often.
And the compact tab bar where I turned it off already, but I think it's like something, the button on the left, the search slash URL field in the middle, and then basically everything bucket on the right.
And I hated it.
I tried to stick with it for the better part of a day and then realized, no, I can't, I can't, I can't do it.
I hate it.
I hate it.
I hate it.
But
But those are the only initial things that jump out at me that really, really struck me one way or the other.
Overall, I actually, despite my complaining just a moment ago, I actually do like it for the most part.
And again, I think it's whimsical.
I think it's fun.
I think it looks good as long as we're in relatively decent legibility zone, which is a zone that we dive in and out of with regularity.
But so far, tentative thumbs up from me.
And we'll see how it goes over the next few weeks.
Yeah, honestly, I think that's going to be a pretty common take.
I think those of us who care about things like user interface design are going to have a lot of complaints about some of the things about it that just don't work well as an interface, like legibility challenges, contrast challenges.
There's a lot about it that just doesn't work well.
Additional taps, things buried in, as you called it, the everything bucket menus, which I think is a great term.
Yeah.
Because that's kind of how Allendeye designs things is junk drawer design.
So there is a lot of that.
But also, it does look clean, fresh, and cool.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I think, as I said in previous episodes, I think most people are going to be fine with this.
I do think people are going to complain about slower performance, especially people on older phones.
But otherwise, I think for the most part, people are going to think it looks cool and new and fresh.
Yeah.
And, you know, those of us who are on the grumpier side of a lot of these little detailed problems, I think we're going to have to suck it up and realize that, like, we care a lot more about certain factors here than anyone else is going to care, including Apple's own designers.
And it does not feel great to be on that side of things.
But that is the reality of where we are.
Most people are going to think this is cool.
And Apple's not going to change their minds on almost any of it.
What you see now in Beta 7 is almost certainly what's going to ship with pretty much no changes or no meaningful changes.
And this is the new design.
This is it.
So we can, you know, bury our heads in the sand and move to the woods or we can just go with it.
And, you know, we'll keep critiquing as we need to.
But this is it.
This is the design.
And only we will care about these things.
Everyone else will not.
Yeah.
Also, I should bring up, I have been talking specifically about my phone for the last few minutes, but I put the beta on my iPad and Vision Pro pretty much immediately.
I've used my Vision Pro like thrice since then, but I did put it on my iPad pretty much immediately.
There are definitely times that the new windowing system gets in the way, and as an example, if I do something on the title bar, like pull down to get to notification center from the top of the screen, sometimes it takes that as, oh, I want to take this window from full screen to a window, if that makes any sense, rather than, oh, I'm trying to reach a notification center.
There are things like that where it gets in the way that I find very frustrating, but...
Overall, I cannot say enough good things about iPadOS 26, obviously on the iPad.
It's incredibly, incredibly good.
Is saying iPadOS 26 on the iPad, is that like saying 4.30 a.m.
in the morning?
I hate that so much.
I hate like 4.30 a.m.
in the morning.
Oh, really?
You don't say.
But anyways, the point is that it's incredible on the iPad, and I think overall I do like it on the phone.
John, remind me, what is your beta situation for non-Macs?
I'm still avoiding iOS and iPadOS.
I'm avoiding iOS just because...
i don't know like my phone i don't i don't want it to be janked up but all of the betas uh and i'm avoiding ipad because i i'm not ready to say goodbye to slide over i'm sure i'll find a random alternative but it is it is part of my television ipad television watching workflow to have a bunch of stuff and slide over and i know there are other ways to get around it like to do similar things so i guess i'll just figure that out but i'm figuring i'm just gonna
because normally i would have upgraded my ipad by now usually that's usually my sacrificial machine but yeah i'm in tahoe all day doing dev so i'm i'm getting a full dose of tahoe and um yeah i'm sure i'll have more to say about both these things when they're actually released because i will i will upgrade when they're all released maybe i'll still hold off my ipad i don't know but anyway i'll you know we'll see
all right good deal uh i have to i i'm really torn because on the one side i want to take a victory lap but on the other side and i will be taking that victory lap but the other side is i will i would like to concede and congratulate you for admitting your own wrongdoing and doing so publicly by putting this in the show there's no victory for you to lap here oh there absolutely is i don't know why you have the wrong view of this entirely but go ahead
Oh, okay.
Well, this is going to be an adventure for all of us, especially me.
So I found in the show notes, which I did not put there, quote, myriad of, quote, is okay.
So this was Ask ATP last week.
Daniel Liu had talked about liquid glass and touch interfaces, which included the phrase that Daniel wrote, quote, the myriad problems with legibility, quote.
And then I read that verbally as, quote, the myriad of problems with legibility.
And John jumped down my throat for it.
I issued a mild correction, but okay, jump down my throat.
Go ahead.
All right.
Agree to disagree, maybe?
No, anyway, so one way or another, then Jason Eccles writes, Myriad of is perfectly fine.
And then someone, I presume John, found Miriam Webster's grammar and usage blog, which reads...
Pretty aggressively, that myriad of is just fine.
And reading the quote that I presume John polled, somewhere along the way, someone made the ruling that myriad is most properly an adjective, but we are all here to tell you that that is simply not true.
One will occasionally find use of guys professional and otherwise specifying that myriad should not be followed by an of, which is another way of saying it's just an adjective.
Myriad is a noun, and if anyone tells you otherwise, feel free to print this article and shove it in their very wrong hands.
Maybe I misunderstood, but I'm reading that as myriad of is just fine.
right so here's here's here's uh how you're misreading this first of all um my correction of you is that you didn't read what daniel wrote and the reason i was very true which that so that's you you need to be corrected there but why should you need to be right because there are lots of people like me out there who will say hey you shouldn't say myriad of you should say myriad and i wanted to spare daniel from the corrections of other people saying hey we're
When Daniel wrote into the Ask ATP question, he shouldn't have written myriad of it.
But he didn't.
He wrote the myriad problem.
So I wanted to give Daniel full credit and help him to avoid that correction.
So it's not that you're particular.
It's just that you're altruistic.
But then, yes.
I did correct you.
And I said, I listened back to it.
And I, as usual, I have qualifiers to say, I believe you're not supposed to say myriad, myriad, myriad of myriad is correct or whatever.
So yes, that correction does apply to me.
It's one of many of those things.
Like, so as, as the Merriam Webster's usage blog says,
Some style guides say that you shouldn't do it.
And it's one of those grammar rules that you learn if you're of a certain age.
But the language changes.
And, you know, just like people would be correcting, you know, you have to use whom here.
You can never use who.
And it's like too late, man.
Like that stuff has changed.
So I stand corrected that myriad of is perfectly fine in modern usage, even if some style guides say that you shouldn't do it.
But most importantly, Daniel did not do it.
So he was avoiding the issue entirely by doing the one that pens think is correct.
It's pedance, isn't it, John?
It's pedance.
I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
Anyway, so I congratulate you, John, for admitting your wrongdoing publicly by way of my mouth.
Well, the reason I put this in here is because this will hopefully save us from being corrected if any of us say myriad of it in the future because now it's fine.
And I'm one of those people who had always heard that you shouldn't do the of, so I learned something too.
So I'm sharing it with everybody.
This is the nature of follow-up.
This is the value of follow-up.
This is TIL personified.
All right.
Then related to the above, Brian Guffey writes, with regard to Daniel's question about liquid glasses, decreased information density and touch interfaces, Brian writes, Marco and John keep saying that all the design changes that folks read as, quote, setting things up for touch Macs are just accidental good luck.
How then would they read the size classes era where developers were encouraged to adopt a flexible design, which most folks credit as, quote, looking forward to when iPads were introduced?
So actually, size classes were introduced with iPads for the distinction between iPad apps and iPhone apps.
What Brian is most likely referring to here is auto layout, which was introduced, I believe, for the Mac a year prior, but it was introduced for iOS 6 in 2012.
So it was announced in June 2012, and then the fall of 2012 was the release of the iPhone 5.
This was the first iPhone that had a new screen size besides all the iPhones that preceded it.
And it was the same width, but it was like one extra table row basically in height.
So, auto layout is the reference here.
And the idea was, you know, that June, before we knew about the iPhone 5, they were like, hey, you should really use this auto layout system.
Not assuming anything about anything, but use auto layout and you can...
You can define how your layout should respond to whatever size it gets.
And, you know, they were very, they were, you know, not subtle that you should really probably have a dynamic layout.
And here's a new system to make that easier.
You know, and then four or three months later, then there was iPhone 5.
Yeah, so the difference between these two things here is that with them saying we have a new system that allows your content to adapt to containers and you should really adopt it.
It's strongly hinting that like this adopting different size containers like why we do that all the screens are the same size like we kind of get the hint.
But with the less information density in liquid glass, first of all, I don't think Apple has even ever said that liquid glass has lower information density or larger targets or anything.
And second, they certainly haven't said, and by the way, when you're designing your UIs, make sure you make your targets on macOS a little bit bigger.
Maybe you maybe make them a little bit taller, maybe make them a little bit wider, right?
Dropping those kinds of hints of saying like, we suggest you do this, not giving a reason, you know, you should have auto layout, uh,
it will allow your UI to adapt to different sizes where it might find itself, right?
But they didn't say any of that.
Like they're not pitching it, right?
And it's just two different situations, right?
One is where they knew that they were creating a UI that they wanted developers to adopt because they knew they were about to release a phone that was a different size.
I know that sounds like a big deal because it's like, well, so what?
It was a centimeter taller, big deal.
But every iPhone app before that had been like pixel perfect, exact grid to the size of the iPhone screen.
So it was a thing that developers needed to get on board with.
But I haven't,
I haven't seen anything from Apple saying, yeah, on macOS, you should make things bigger.
You just should.
It's a good idea.
And here's a system for making things bigger.
It's true that Apple's interface takes up more space in various places as low information density.
But in some cases, as Marco pointed out, the actual touch target, quote unquote, touch targets may be smaller because they wasted all the extra space on margins.
Yeah, they really... I even found, like... I think this is going to be an interesting problem as we see as apps adopt iOS 26.
When you make an iOS 26 toolbar button, just, you know, those round, glassy buttons with the icon in the middle, if you, in SwiftUI, if you put anything in that button that is not a label element, if you try to make your own button with, say, an image, you just put an image in there, the touch target for the button...
is not the whole button anymore like the round shape of the button if you touch the edge of the round shape it will expand in response to your touch and then you let go and it just decreases right back down it does not it does not like fire the button so it looks like you're tapping the button it responds that you're tapping the button but the actual touch target of the of the item in the button is smaller than the circle and
If you use the SwiftUI label component, it does some magic where it takes up the entire circle.
But anything else, even if you give it a rectangle or whatever, it doesn't take the whole circle.
There's so many problems with... There's going to be so many little, subtle frustrations like this that we're going to see in apps over the next few years until they fix that, if they can or will.
There's no button shape modifier or something that you can stick on to the... There is, but it will not take up the bounds of the circle.
That's...
yeah cool there are a lot of problems with liquid glass in from the software stack hopefully they sort some of the stuff out what's also fun is that if you put some if you define say if you put like you know the dot frame specifier on the contents of a round button and you give it a square the button becomes not a perfect circle anymore it becomes oblong
That's fun.
It's super fun.
I feel like we are designing for iOS 2.0 again, but as it was called then, iPhone OS 2.0, the SDK was actually a little bit more firm.
then like there's there's so much about designing with liquid glass you saw my uh the controls moving when you mouse over them yeah most of my tahoe battles have been with uh the uh the settings screen and hyperspace which is just a bunch it's just a form with a bunch of toggles all using the modern interfaces and that i can't get the thing to not have scroll bars because the size of it keeps changing i have condition obviously i have conditionals for mac os 26 or later like runtime checks is this mac os 26 or later or is it before so obviously i have that
i also have is this intel or is this arm why would the layout change in intel and arm i don't know i'm just telling you it does so i have think think of the conditionals in the code it'll just it's and i keep hoping they're going to fix it and every new beta is just weirder in a different way i still need to file a bunch of stuff but yeah like controls moving on mouse over and that movement changing the height of your thing causing a scroll bar to appear or disappear it's madness
That sounds super fun.
Yeah, I have been very, very busy and I've been kicking the can on my call sheet, you know, update, rewrite, whatever you want to call it, reskin for iOS 26.
And man, it's definitely a roller coaster so far.
I'm only a couple of days in, but I'll...
start something and realize, oh, this looks like trash.
I hate every bit of it.
Then I'll try a different direction.
Oh, this looks good.
Oh, I'm cruising.
This looks great.
Oh, no, I hate this again.
It's very one step forward, 10 steps back, two steps forward, 13 steps back.
That's a lot me.
It's not exclusively Apple, but it's going to be a rough ride.
I would say that
I would not expect that many apps will be 100% ready to rock on Liquid Glass when iOS 26 drops.
I would expect it's going to be much more of a trickle-out.
And I certainly hope so for selfish reasons, but that's what I expect will be the case.
Yeah, definitely.
Those of you out there, we have a lot of opinionated app users in our audience.
And I would urge you, please...
give the developers of ios apps a lot of leeway and a lot of forgiveness and a lot of a lot of time uh as we adopt liquid glass because it's not a small job uh even even to just like like what i'm what i decided to do with overcast is like i'm not radically changing the interface i'm just updating it to you know use the native toolbars and stuff you know new design for the mini player like you know it's just stuff to make it fit in a
But it's still going to look effectively the same.
Like, basically, you know, in broad strokes, it is not a complete redesign.
But even just that, even just adopting little things, like, for instance, when you have a menu that has, like, say, a delete item in the menu, and you tap that, and before it deletes, it confirms, are you sure you want to delete?
Those confirmations used to be on the iPhone the sheet that comes up from the bottom or maybe like an alert dialogue in the middle.
Now it's like an iPad.
Now those pop out of a source view.
So ideally they pop out of maybe the button or the menu that spawned this whole process in the first place.
But if you have an iPhone app, you've never had to deal with that.
So now you have to go and like move these around and make sure they're popping out of the correct view.
You have to go through every confirmation and every alert in your entire app and every way you could possibly reach confirmation or an alert.
You have to go through all of them.
to make sure it's popping out from the right place now.
There's so many of those types of things where you think it's as simple as, oh, I'll just replace my custom button with the system button.
And it's like, okay, yes, but then you have all these behaviors you have to consider.
And then if you want to maintain compatibility with iOS 18 and earlier...
you probably have to do everything twice because not only are you like, okay, now I'm going to use the system X instead of my custom X. Well, you're going to probably have to keep your custom X for iOS 18 or figure out how to make the system one work acceptably on iOS 18 when it doesn't have the 26 behaviors.
So it's a lot of work, even doing what seems to the user like a pretty light adoption of the new design.
It's still a ton of work and a ton of QA, a ton of testing, a ton of little subtle bugs.
So be gentle with your App Store Star reviews this fall to everybody's apps.
You know, we're all doing the best we can.
It's going to be a lot.
It's not going to be great on day one.
You're going to have apps that are not ready on day one and maybe aren't even ready this calendar year.
You're going to have apps that are ready but are limited interpretations of the design or that have weird edge case bugs because...
Apple is shipping a beta as a final version.
What they are going to achieve quality-wise for iOS 26 is beta quality at best.
26.0 is going to be a little rough.
It's going to have animation bugs.
It's going to have little behavioral things.
This entire design is a beta.
And all of our apps using it will basically also be betas.
And that's kind of, you know, Apple has kind of brought us here to this point that we don't really have much of a choice in the matter.
So please, you know, be gentle and be tolerant of your friendly neighborhood app developers and, you know, give them some slack this fall.
It's kind of a rough time for us.
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all right john you apparently have your own victory lap to take what's going on with your home pod my home pod is back uh had one original home pod from back in the day and then marco gave me two of his also original home pods the very first generation they were all in various states of disrepair and dying some of them totally dead i was like okay now that none of them work because they got to this they got to the point where none of them i couldn't use any of them for any purpose
some of them turned on but i couldn't use them to do things i couldn't get signed in it couldn't connect to my iCloud thing i couldn't do it in my home automations i could ask what time it was and maybe the weather but that's about it but one of them just totally didn't turn on so i was looking for someone who i know people repair home pods i found somebody online uh nixfix.com n-i-c-s-f-i-x.com uh that he repairs home pods um
and i i figured i'll send him the dead one the one that like you plug into the wallet nothing happens it doesn't light up doesn't make any noise it's just dead dead dead which is the thing that happens to uh first gen home pods for a fairly explicable reason because some component burns out or something anyway um and it's real easy you go to the website uh you know sign up to do it he'll send you a box a packing box for the thing uh and then and i return like a shipping label so i got the box wrapped up the home pod and the
uh and arrives uh at nick he streams his repairs live on youtube and we will put a timestamp link in the show notes to his stream where he fixed my home pod my repair starts at one hour and 54 minutes and 11 seconds in this video he spends a long time repairing a lot of home pods he's so fast like he repairs them very quickly
Let me jump in right there.
So I will concede that I was watching this at 2X, but I watch a lot of things at 2X, and you get a pretty solid vibe as to how quickly or how slowly something's happening.
Holy freaking crap, this dude was flying doing this repair.
It is clear he has disassembled and reassembled thousands of HomePods.
It is...
incredible he does like he does dozens in this video just in this that's just a per day like it's the backlog of home pods is incredible like and and the other fun thing if you watch it at 1x is to see exactly how painful it is to open a first gen home because he's he knows how to do it he's like this is the best case scenario an expert doing it has done this so many times and it still looks incredibly painful like are you breaking it is that how you're supposed to do it is that really the only way and it's like yep and
um anyway so uh his workstation is extremely dingy and scary looking considering that his dozens of home pods are going through it per day and there's like you know burn marks and solder drips everywhere but you know he gets the job done um and the care with which he uh you know uh desoders and replaces surface mount components is maybe not up to the sort of micro electronic precision that you see from like some of the other youtubers but it's all about turnaround you know you just got to go go go bottom line is he
replaced a bunch of components that he knew would be, he doesn't even need to diagnose this.
He knows, okay, this, I know what the problem with this one is.
Take these out, take these out.
He also replaced some other stuff of like the, the woofer cone that always fails.
He replaced that with a better one.
He just, and, and the other thing he has like in a checkbox in the form is like, do you want me to update your OS?
I'm like, yes, please do that.
Because one of the problems with my other home pods is I can't get them to do an OS update.
So he did everything.
He replaced a bunch of parts, including ones that weren't.
They probably still worked, but they were probably going to eventually fail.
He just replaced those two and sent it back to me.
And it works now.
So it was like 80 something dollars.
And I basically paid like the maximum amount, which is I'll pay for you to send me a shipping box, you know, because you could pay less if you want to.
ship it yourself and yada yada but i don't want to deal with any of that the whole point is i will give you 80 something dollars you take care of this for me and he did so my home pod is back i'm debating sending the other two or just waiting to see if this one ever dies because i only really need one of them but yeah uh the repair economy is real uh even if apple doesn't want it to be 80 something bucks to get a first gen home pod back to working order
That is really incredible.
And about how long did it take from the time that you said I would like it done to the time you unboxed the repaired HomePod?
I didn't time it all that well because, first of all, he had a little bit of backlog.
And second, when he was ready to repair it, I was about to leave on vacation.
So I said, oh, don't even bother.
Like, you can just push mine to the back of the queue because I don't want him.
Because he repairs, as you saw, he repairs one HomePod in like...
three and a half minutes right so he's not like he's going to take all day to do whatever and it's like if you repair it and ship it back to me no one is home to get it so you can just wait until x date when i come home from my vacation and then send it back then and so there was some artificial delay for me being away but uh yeah it was basically like uh how long did it take me to get to the front of his extremely long repair queue uh but once i got there it's like done ship back the same day like it's you know it's very straightforward so i i would i would recommend this or any other service that's like this
Um, because look, I sent him a dead piece of electronics that would otherwise just go to like the electronics recycling center.
And I got back a working HomePod.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
Yeah.
And like John said, you know, you can watch the repair of John's actual HomePod.
And whether or not you're interested in general in these sorts of things, I think there's something fun and fascinating to watch when you see someone that has done this so many times and knows exactly what to do.
I will concur with you that
I was not in love with the haphazard nature by which he dropped those, like, I think it was either three or six little rectangle bits.
I don't know what specifically they were.
But he basically, like, put a bunch of wet solder down, threw them on, and then walked away.
And I was like, what?
No.
You need to wait.
Make sure it hardens.
And nope, nope, none of that.
I feel like he knows what he's doing.
And also, by the way, I think this was actually Marco's HomePod.
not mine oh it was marco i talked about before that i couldn't tell i couldn't tell which one was mine anymore so they got mixed up but the easy way to tell is marco had chucked his two in a box haphazardly and sent them to me so his are more scuffed up than mine mine is pristine like most of my of course it's it was taken it was carefully taken out of its original box and placed in one place in my house and never moved until right so i'm pretty sure he actually repaired one of marco's home pods but anyway most likely my home pod now
Very cool.
Again, not required viewing by any stretch, but I do strongly recommend you watch starting at one hour, 54 minutes and 11 seconds.
It's very, very cool.
All right.
So you had your victory lap.
Now, unfortunately, we're going to have to turn that smile upside down.
Tell me about your latest AppleCare one woes.
You know, when I put this item in here, it was just going to be a little bit of follow up on something that I said last week, but it just escalated since then.
So the little bit of follow up from last week is I was saying that they had pulled off my wife's phone.
I said, you know, because people have been asking questions like, why is your wife's phone on there?
That's clearly not your device.
You're not signed into it or whatever.
I'm like, Apple recommended that I add it.
But then they threatened to remove it.
And I said, well, I tried one thing, which is I'll sign into the App Store on her phone with my Apple ID, which I did.
And that seemed to solve the problem.
But not for long, because eventually they just they just yanked her phone off the plan.
And I'm like, fair enough.
Like, I don't I don't think it should ever have been on the plan.
And yes, it is a problem that they promoted the plan to me by saying, here, you should use these devices.
Yeah.
And I just I just took their word for it.
Silly me.
But clearly my wife's phone shouldn't be on the plan because the whole deal with the plan is it has to be devices that are all on a single Apple ID or Apple account.
And her phone's not on mine.
So and the store login thing maybe warned it off for a little bit, but not for long.
So I'm like, all right, I'm I'm resigned to that.
Her phone should never have been on.
That's fine.
But of course, after I was resigned and they removed the phone, immediately I got a red dot on my phone under the AppleCare and warranty thing in settings, like a little red badge saying, hey, you should add this phone to AppleCareOne.
Of course.
Like, get your stuff together, Apple.
Like, I can tell you that you should not be recommending that I add this thing.
Like, I've never been signed into that.
Anyway, so that would have been my follow-up.
But when her phone was removed from Apple Care One, I had to, hers was one of the original three devices.
You see, three devices for $19.99 a month or whatever.
So fine, hers gets kicked out because it never should have been on there.
But I needed to replace it.
Otherwise, I'm paying the full three device costs per month for two devices.
And that doesn't save me any money.
So I replaced it with the Mac Studio.
So it's my phone, my iPad, and the Mac Studio.
Which, yes, the Mac Studio is technically my wife's computer.
But I bought it on my Apple ID.
I have an account on it.
So does everyone in my family.
And as I said in the past, when I complained about this, I'm logged into that computer with my Apple ID on my account 24-7.
That computer is set not even to go to sleep.
It is on 24-7 online.
I'm logged into it 24-7, and recently, I'm actively using it every single day by sitting in front of it and using the mouse, because that's essentially my Sequoia test machine while my Mac Pro is in Tahoe when I'm doing, like, dev work on my stuff, which is happening, you know, every single day.
Anyway, after recording a podcast, it, like...
10 46 PM.
The other day, I get an email from Apple that says, Hey, we're about to yank your Mac studio off Apple care one, which I had gotten before.
And I'm just like, I was just at the end of my rope.
I'm like, stop threatening me for moving my Mac from the thing.
Because the stupid email is like a new account assigned into your Mac studio to avoid losing Apple care.
But like,
And what are you talking about?
Did I receive this email when I was logged into that Mac studio with my account?
Yes, I absolutely did.
Like all the other times that this email has come and I was so angry about it.
And I threw a big tantrum about it.
You did.
It was incredible.
It was just, it was like late at night.
Like, I feel like it's like, like that's the type of email that could like get lost in the shuffle.
Cause like if it comes in late at night and the next day's email, when I wake up in the morning, there's a new batch of the next day's email.
I don't see that one or whatever.
Like,
Like, here's the thing.
Warranty plans are the type of thing you don't have to be vigilant about, like at any at any time, a 24 hour timer should start could start without your knowledge.
And you have to do some nonsensical BS within that 24 hour window.
Otherwise, they'll take away your warranty.
And many people said, sounds like AppleCare one sucks.
Why don't you just cancel the whole plan?
Well, the problem with AppleCare one is when you sign up for it, they cancel all the warranties of the devices you put on it.
And AppleCare one can be applied to any device that's four years older or less.
But regular AppleCare plans, I believe you still can't take like a three year old device and say, oh, by the way, I don't have AppleCare on this, but now I want to add it.
Now, there may be a grace period like I may actually figure this out.
and try it and say fine cancel apple care one can i get can i go back to getting plain old apple care for devices that are you know two or three years old or can i only re-add apple care one to them right but you know my my complaint about this is like
This this Mac Studio is compliant with all of their rules.
I actually went to their website and looked up their terms and conditions PDF, like not a little like footnote on the web page.
But let's see.
Let's see the legalese on this.
Right.
It's not that much different than the footnote.
So here's what it says.
We'll link to the the AppleCare one terms and conditions.
You have to pick your state if you're in the United States.
So I pick Massachusetts because I guess it varies by state.
But directly from the Massachusetts PDF of the terms and conditions, it says these are some of the relevant passages.
All your covered equipment must remain signed in and associated with that Apple account during the plan term.
I'm doing that.
It's signed in with my account, with the one that purchased the plan.
And then later it says, if you sign out of your Apple account connected with this plan on a covered device, except for AirPods, Beats, and Studio Display, and sign in with a different Apple account on that covered device, you will have 24 hours to sign back into your Apple account on that covered device to avoid looting coverage, blah, blah, blah.
So here's my new theory.
My new theory is whoever made this plan doesn't know that you can be signed into a Mac in multiple accounts.
Definitely.
Which boggles my mind because that's not a new feature of Mac OS.
It's a thing that... Right?
And, like, the feature is so broken because...
All four members of my family are currently signed into the Mac Studio.
All four of us, right?
We're always all signed in.
It's kind of like the communal computer for, like, doing stuff because we do things on behalf of our children.
My wife is always signed into it.
I'm always signed into it, right?
But, you know, so...
I don't know how they couldn't understand this, but that's my new theory.
I will eventually call Apple support and dedicate an entire day to essentially saying I don't I do have a problem.
I don't expect you to solve it.
I just want you to convey like pass up the chain.
Max can have more than one person signed in.
And so that was yesterday.
That was like last night when I ranted about this.
I'm like, at the end of my rope, a warranty is exactly the type of thing that should be like secure and you don't have to worry about.
You should just pay and it should be ready to go.
It shouldn't be something you have to be ever vigilant about.
Right.
And their thing is just broken.
It just doesn't work right.
And then today, just before the show, I got the same freaking email again.
And people are asking, like, will they yank it off your plan?
Yes, they absolutely will.
I've tested this.
If you don't do anything, they will yank it off and give you a little refund and then tell you to put it back on, which I have done.
Right.
So they will yank it off.
And how do I fix it so they don't?
What I do is I just go to my account that's already like I unlock the computer and see before me my account that has logged into my Apple ID and is always there and always on.
And I log out and back in.
that's how i fix that's how i fix like i'm already logged in i log out and i like back in and then it fixes it and then like the the little orange text that says this is advice about it disappears from my phone like at least they don't they never tell you this by the way there's never some email that says yes you've satisfied it don't worry your 24 hour timer has stopped the only way i can tell is if i go to the warranty section on my phone and look for the little orange text underneath it so yeah like and and i think the thing that triggered the email tonight
was uh the what is it the let me look it up uh the sequoia 15.6.1 update which had security fixes i updated the mac studio from 15.6 to 15.6.1 uh and when i updated it everybody logged out because the machine had to restart and when it booted back up i signed into my account first intentionally and
did that help no a couple hours later email that says a new apple account assigned into your mac studio to avoid losing apple care one coverage you must sign into the mac studio which i was already signed into it's just it's it's killing me so this this this thing is so badly implemented all right so it's badly conceived because as i said confining apple care one to a single apple account is dumb but whatever but it doesn't even do that correctly and
And I guess I mean, I've been warning people off saying don't do this because it's more headache than it's worth.
Maybe if you don't have a Mac or you don't sign into your Mac with more than one account or anything like that.
But like, boy, how terribly botched of this.
So I'm I got to figure out what to do.
I should probably cancel the thing and then just like complain on support until they restore my old support things or whatever.
But it's a mess.
I'm very upset about it.
And AppleCare one is the worst Apple thing that I have paid for in a long time.
And you've owned Mac Pros.
They're great.
They're great.
I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
I shouldn't poke the bear.
I'm sorry, John.
I'm kind of glad my Mac Pro has been spared from this drama because it's too old.
That's very true.
Now, I don't take joy in your frustration.
However, seeing you lose your shit on Mastodon was incredible.
I don't know.
I don't know what pushed me away.
It's just the fact that it's a warranty.
It's supposed to be like so boring.
It's like insurance.
And why is insurance constantly threatening to take away your insurance unless you do something dumb that you shouldn't have to do?
This is the worst idea ever.
Who came up with this?
Like like what?
Only time insurance companies are constantly trying to boot you off is if you're like a higher risk, like Casey's keep shattering his phone or something like that.
Right.
You get into an accident, your car insurance drops you.
But this is like you get car insurance.
You never drive your car like you don't get any accidents.
You make never make any claims.
And at any point, like on a daily basis, they send you a threatening letter that says, hey, if you don't, you know, switch your windshield wipers once, you'll lose insurance on your car in 24 hours.
Like, why?
Don't you want my money?
I'm trying to pay you monthly.
I feel your pain.
However, it was really something to see you go this ballistic on something.
Exactly.
I'm so mad.
I think it was because it was at the end of a podcast.
It's like, oh, it's night.
I finished a podcast.
It's late at night.
I'm ready to go to bed.
Oh, but before you go to bed, here's a threat from Apple that you got to deal with.
And again, I got the same threat the next night.
So I think this is just going to be every day.
Maybe every day.
Oh, yeah.
Maybe it's fast user switching.
Because if I'm logged in and my wife sits down and the computer is locked, she just hits escape and then clicks on her account.
She's already logged in, but she's basically just switching to her account.
We're all logged in all the time.
When she switches to her account, does that trigger it?
I'm just going to get this threat every day.
I can't leave the Mac Studio.
I have to stay here every day and log out of my account and back in to satisfy this stupid thing.
I don't think anybody is at Apple who knows that Mac multi-user support exists anymore.
And, you know, it's one of those problems like the people who, you know, work on Apple features.
And this is the kind of thing like this is not, you know, you're talking about adding, you know, a kind of a brand new kind of obscure kind of fancy warranty plan to a Mac.
So this is already kind of like off the beaten path a little bit.
This is not like the next version of iOS, which itself has problems.
I don't know if AppleCare for Macs is off the beaten path, but go on.
This isn't going to get like the maximum amount of QA in the company.
They're too busy with the redesign they shouldn't have shipped this year.
What you're talking about is a problem that none of those people who actually work on this would really face because...
Apple programmers and Apple managers and stuff don't have scarcity as a factor in their Macs.
They don't know a world where people might share a Mac.
The same way that Apple's software tends not to deal very well with small amounts of disk space.
Because Apple people can afford or have access to larger disks than what many people buy.
So that's not a problem they run into very much.
So it doesn't get as much testing.
It doesn't get as much attention.
Multi-user support on the Mac is something that Apple could really make a lot better if they wanted to.
When you do multi-user Macs, you run into a lot of problems.
A lot of little bugs in both Apple's stuff and in other people's apps.
Because no one who makes apps for the Mac really does a good job of testing it.
I don't think this is the case.
We've been running multi-users on all of our Macs for the entire existence of Mac OS X, and it's been fine.
It sounds really fine.
The two things that I've had was when you have hundreds of windows open, it gets slow, and Apple fixed that bug as I reported it, and Apple care won.
Those are the two things that we've had.
well it's it sounds like it's pretty much not super fine right now but i said there's one of the two things it was it was the slow windows and apple care one but otherwise like there is no app that i've seen that misbehaves because we have like the multi-user system is on mac os is real multi-user system based on the real unix multi-user system and it works fine it always has okay sounds great anyway so when you are off the beaten path
you are more at risk for things like this, like more at risk for bugs and problems and everything.
Multi-user support on the Mac has now reached that point where you are now out of the mainstream, you are off the beaten path, you are going to have periodic problems like this.
And this is not a good answer, but I think this is the answer, which is Apple launched a system like this that did not consider multi-user Macs at all because they don't think that much about it.
Yeah, I'll try to give the feedback when I talk to them on support.
Like, I don't think there'll be anything they can do to help me.
I just have to endure this or cancel the plan or whatever.
But I want to say, like, is there some way we can convey to the people who created this plan that the two things?
One, that the plan is dumb as conceived.
But two, the plan as conceived is implemented incorrectly.
And I think they will probably be able to fix this with updates, but I don't think it's going to be top priority, like especially heading into a fall season.
I don't know if this is one of those things that's ever going to get fixed.
You know what I mean?
Like for the reasons that you stated, like it just seems like one of those things that'll be like this.
The problem you are describing affects so few people.
Nobody cares.
So I don't and I'm just again, I'm just guessing at the at the what the problem is based on like what I know of people talking to me on Mastodon who are and aren't having the problem and my experimental evidence.
I'm still just guessing.
But like, all I can tell them is like, here, here's what the plan says it's supposed to do and it's not doing it.
And I'm not entirely sure why I have some ideas.
But like, you know, just go fix it.
I will work with anyone in Apple who wants to debug this with me and figure out what the problem is like, whatever.
Well, we can work through it together.
But it's I'm not expecting this to be fixed in the next five years.
I'm guessing it gets fixed in one year.
I'm guessing like with next fall's OS's, it'll be fixed.
But I think you will have a year to wait.
All right.
Well, we'll see.
Anyway, I will look into, hey, if I cancel these plans, can I get warranty stuff back on these devices?
Because they're all so old, right?
And maybe there's a grace period as soon as you cancel AppleCare, you can start a new one or something like that.
So I'll figure it out.
It's definitely going to be a phone call with support for a while for that one, I bet.
I know.
Like, just imagine trying to explain this.
It's just, I'm tired even thinking about it.
Well, Godspeed, John, because that is not going to be fun.
Not at all.
And again, and I do think it's, you know, to kind of generalize the lessons here, I think this is one of the situations where, like, this is kind of a warning sign of, like, or a warning, what are those warning stories called?
My brain is melted.
Cautionary tale.
There you go.
Yeah.
I didn't know where you were going with that.
I also apparently have a melted brain.
Okay, so it's a warning story.
When you are off the beaten path, again, problems like this can arise.
And over time, things that maybe could have worked at one time or worked okay start to work worse as they get further into the...
the lesser used options or configurations.
So one example is like, if you relocate your home directory on the Mac, like you can do that.
You can even, I think you can be even put on an external drive.
This is not a good idea.
And a lot of things break if you do, but you can't.
Or you can start playing SimLink tricks and stuff like that.
Or like, hey, if you want Dropbox to sync some other folder, you can play a SimLink trick.
It kind of works, or it might work briefly, but you're kind of signing up for bugs and problems.
now multi-user mac configurations are now that class of risk i don't know again we're going to push back pretty hard against using multiple user support in mac os versus changing where your home directory is with siblings those are two very one is a hundred percent supported used by millions of people every day and the other one is a thing that might work if you figure out how to hack it
I take your point, Marco, but I think John's right that this is a false equivalence.
But it's certainly, as we've said many times in this program, I think there's something to the theory that if this is something Apple people do, then it will work.
See, for the classic example of, oh, Maps has always been great in Silicon Valley.
What are you talking about?
It's always been great.
whereas Maps on the East Coast was not great for a long time.
And I think this is another example, or I think this very well could be another example, where who at Apple doesn't have a Mac per person in their lives, much less their households?
And one of you said this earlier.
It's not a concern that they have, and thus it's not something that they tested.
I mean, this is still a piss-poor experience for you, John, and I feel awful for you.
But ultimately, I think this very well could be a lack of dogfooding.
Yeah, I mean, it is a less commonly used feature than the other case, which is not to do this.
But it's just so supported and has been for so long.
And there's really no excuse for this.
And really, the other pushback I have on this whole feature is what I want to tell the people, like talking about product sense and product design.
Don't design a warranty system called, you know, AppleCare One that is confined to a single Apple account.
Like, it doesn't make any sense except for as, like, they've decided they couldn't afford... It's right there in the name, John.
It only supports Macs with one user account on them.
They couldn't afford to do it because, like, if families were allowed to, they would lose too much money.
But, again, that's one of the reasons, even though I'm...
sometimes an early adopter sometimes not one of the reasons i jumped on board with this is that the come on was very compelling which is like hey save 18 a month i'm like yes please like it was going to save me money uh and technically it still is saving me some amount of money although no longer 18 dollars um although it might be close because the mac studio is a pretty expensive computer putting expensive uh hardware on apple care one saves you more money than putting cheap hardware on and putting really cheap hardware loses you money but
Anyway, it's just an ill-conceived thing.
It's a poorly conceived product.
This is the wrong product offering that, by the way, also doesn't work.
But even if it did work, it would still be the wrong design choice for this.
They should adjust it so they still make money but allow it to be used across families.
That's the no-brainer thing.
And it should never, like, save yourself and mark Apple.
Don't have any mechanism whatsoever to try to figure out if a device should be yanked off.
Just don't do it.
You don't have that for regular Apple care.
It's tied to the serial number.
As long as someone pays the bills, that serial number is covered.
That's all you should care about, Apple.
All right, let's do some topics.
And there's some breaking news from, I think it was last week, that the blood oxygen sensor for Apple Watches sold in the U.S.
recently is sort of back.
So reading from Apple's newsroom post, Apple will introduce a redesigned blood oxygen feature for some Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users through an iPhone and Apple Watch software update coming what was later today, which was August 14th.
This update was enabled by a recent US Customs ruling.
So jumping to Gruber's reaction, what this workaround does is process and display the blood oxygen sensor data on your watch's paired iPhone rather than on the watch itself.
That apparently is what the new US Customs ruling holds does not violate Massimo's patent.
No processing of the sensor data on the watch and no display of the results on the watch.
Then reading from Victoria's Song of the Verge, this redesign only covers Apple Watches sold after January 17, 2024, once the ITC import ban took full effect.
A dozen impact models sold before that date or watches sold outside the U.S., all of which still have the original blood oxygen feature.
You can tell if you have a covered model by checking if the serial number ends with a LW slash A. To get the redesign feature, people with the Series 9, 10, and Ultra 2 watches will have to update their devices to watchOS 11.6.1 and their iPhones to iOS 18.6.1.
Coming back to Gruber, after the iOS 18.6.1 and watchOS 11.6.1 software updates, the iPhone and Apple Watch need to download an over-the-air asset to enable the redesigned blood oxygen feature.
This apparently may take up to 24 hours.
Until the asset download happens, the blood oxygen app on your Apple Watch will say, the blood oxygen app is no longer available.
To jumpstart the download, users can open the Health app on their phone and the ECG app on their Apple Watch.
Just opening the ECG app is enough to trigger the asset download needed by the Blood Oxygen app.
What a weird way this has gone.
Like, we've been talking about this patent fight, and then we said, like, well, it looks like they can't get around it.
Apple should just settle.
But...
uh somehow quote oh they're they've been giving this out of like well if you do this thing in this way technically it won't violate the patents and i think the patents expire in like 2028 or something so now it just seems like apple's gonna wait it out because
The way of doing it, like, okay, well, you can do stuff on your watch, but you can't look at the results except on your phone.
And the phone is technically the thing doing the analyzing.
I mean, that's the reason number a million why patents are dumb.
Like, it's all an unfortunate situation.
But it's an unfortunate situation that Apple has been...
very typically uh very typical of them stubborn about by saying we're just we're just gonna not not remove the feature like what we will we you think we won't remove a feature from the apple watch for people in the u.s we'll do it but we're not paying you any money mossimos we hate you so much and so now they found a way around it possibly because of their bribery of our terrible government who knows uh either way
I guess it's better for people who bought the watch and hadn't had the feature.
Now they have the feature in a not-so-great version.
And by 2028, this will all be behind us.
But this is a strange ending to a long-running saga with Apple and their watches.
Yeah, Apple is very cheap and very patient.
So I am not surprised to see this kind of thing.
And very stubborn.
Oh, God, yes.
Yeah, so...
yeah i mean it's it's an interesting fix or workaround i guess yeah i mean honestly if apple had never gotten this fix and just had not been able to the future i think they still would have waited it out like it seems like that just at this point they were resigned like we're just we're gonna wait till 2028 and the fact that they got this out however they got it is like oh bonus actually we can give it back to our customers but even if they didn't they had shown that like we're just never gonna pay you we're never gonna settle like we're just gonna wait
Yeah, it's weird, but I mean, I guess at least Apple got what they wanted.
I feel bad for the Massimo people, assuming that there's more to this, like Gruber's post at one point basically all but said that he thinks they're patent trolls.
And I don't know one way or the other, but I feel bad for them if they're more than patent trolls, but if they are patent trolls, then screw them.
Well, I mean, like I disagree with the entire concept of patents, as we discussed in the past.
But but Apple has to operate within the system which has patents.
And so that's the choice before that Massimo is not entitled to the money from Apple to license this patent.
If Apple doesn't want to license it, they sued.
They won.
Massimo's reward is Apple's not allowed to do this in the US.
You won.
And what did Massimo do with that?
Did they take advantage of it by deploying their own products that they made money from?
Like, that's not Apple's problem to do, right?
So, like, I think it's terrible, but it is the system that we have.
And so this is one way that can turn out where there's no licensing.
There's no, like, it's just one party waits out the other.
Yeah.
Yeah, sometimes people sometimes companies just don't get along.
And I don't I don't think like whether or not Massimo is a patent troll, they certainly didn't reap any massive reward from winning this case against Apple.
I think I saw some report about how much money Massimo has spent on this lawsuit.
And it's like hundreds of millions of dollars.
I do wonder if that was the correct choice for them.
There's another terrible thing about our system that even if you have a patent in our stupid system and it's valid and you successfully deploy it against a big company like Apple, doing so will cost you hundreds of million dollars and you may get nothing out of it anyway except for the satisfaction of defeating Apple in court.
I will say, too, I don't think they're a patent troll at all.
The idea of a patent troll is not a company that sues over patent infringement.
Patent trolls do that, but not all companies that do that are patent trolls.
A patent troll is a company that doesn't actually really make anything, that basically buys up patents for the sole purpose of suing, and usually it's historically the way that term's been used –
It's like really obvious, usually software patents because software patents are even more dysfunctional than other kinds of patents, which is really impressive because I think like John, I think the entire patent system is incredibly dysfunctional.
And it is my opinion that no patents should exist.
Yes, I'm also even including prescription drug patents.
I don't think any patent should exist because I think the net harm they do to the world is much greater than the net benefit they bring to the world.
And the entire patent system is based upon a fallacy that ignores things like principles of simultaneous invention.
Or it's kind of based on this fantasy that we have these individual inventors in a garage somewhere.
And that's not really the truth at all for almost any patents.
But anyway, Massimo's a product company.
They're really big in healthcare.
They have a lot of presence in healthcare stuff.
And so this was not a patent troll.
This was a legitimate patent lawsuit.
And I think if the patent system is deemed to need to exist, this was probably a valid case to bring.
Apple was bullying them around and saying, no, we're just not going to pay you.
And Apple is ultimately going to come out ahead because it doesn't, you know, Apple had more leverage.
You know, they...
They didn't need this feature on the Apple Watch.
And now they found a workaround that will probably hold until the patent expires.
But this is not a victory of Apple over a patent troll.
This is Apple bullying another company because they didn't want to pay.
If you look at Apple's behavior here, it's awful.
Apple is definitely the bad guy in this story.
No question.
All it took was one gold trinket and a little bit of glass.
I don't know of the details of the case because, as you noted, Margot, a lot of these things, Apple may feel that they didn't even know Massimo existed and they just happened to come up with a similar idea because it's obvious, like so many patents are.
And the fact they lost the case, they may feel essentially justified in saying, we didn't take an idea that should have been licensed.
you know they just beat us to the punch with patenting it because apple patents everything as well but i don't know enough of the details to know that but yeah i think people call it think it's a patent troll because even though massimo does make things they don't make like a direct apple watch competitor and sort of the simplified view is like well if apple watch can't have this feature then where is your apple watch equivalent of this feature and that's just not massimo's business and their business is lower volume and again the amount of money they've spent on this case is like like it doesn't seem like they like the victory for them is basically a
legal a legal concept but like it hasn't been uh a boon to their business because they spent all this money on the case it hasn't increased the sales of the things that they have they just have this feeling of righteousness i guess that they want a case but you know in the end like so much things in our legal system if you're if the person you're suing has more money than you and is never going to do the thing you want which is to license your patent with a bunch of that money then what did you what did you gain right like
You stopped this feature from shipping an Apple Watch as you won the case for a time anyway, but you didn't get any additional revenue from licensing the patent, and you spent a huge amount of money for a company that size to win the case.
All right, so there is a rumor, first posted at Macworld, that apparently there might be a M5 MacBook Pro with cellular being tested.
So Felipe Esposito at Macworld writes, Internal Apple code seen by Macworld now reveals that the company has indeed been testing an unreleased MacBook Pro model with an M5 Pro chip and Apple's first 5G modem.
The code, which also revealed the existence of a new Mac Pro with the M4 Ultra chip, which nobody cares about, right, John?
Now confirms that the company is at least experimenting with the idea of a MacBook with cellular connectivity.
This Mac laptop found in the code is powered by the M5 Pro chip, codenamed T6050, which indicates the upcoming generation of MacBook Pro.
The same code suggests that this could be the first Mac ever to include a Centauri chip, which is the codename for Apple's 5G modem, also known as the C1, which was introduced earlier this year with the iPhone 16e.
oh my gracious please make this so i can give you all of my money all right so let's just set expectations accordingly i don't know if this kind of indication is a sign that apple is you know preparing this as a launchable product or that this is just like something that they had to build in software support so that they could start engineering testing to have cellular support in a macbook at all earlier rumors from i believe about six months ago
had suggested that they weren't going to consider cellular until the second generation cellular modem and the, I believe, the OLED redesign of the MacBook Pro, which I don't think is slated for another year and a half or two.
That's the M6 is the OLED one.
Correct.
So I don't think this necessarily contradicts that.
So this could just be like they made this configuration supportable by the software so that they could test it internally.
So that's kind of like I'm trying to get my hopes up too much because I've wanted this for so long.
But
Either way, it is very promising that this seems to be something they are starting to work on.
There is a lot more smoke behind this fire than I think we had originally seen.
So that's great.
i cannot wait for this and even though i just bought this m4 14x macbook pro i would gladly replace it with another one if it had cellular because it is just such a difference like in in terms of practicality usefulness although that being said
The timing of this is fantastic.
Ever since I updated to the Tahoe betas on that laptop, it's a lot better at automatically connecting to tethering than it ever has been.
Oh, interesting.
For the last few weeks, I've noticed I don't need to go to the menu and select my phone anymore, and it doesn't prompt me anymore.
It just connects to my phone when it can't find Wi-Fi, which is pretty awesome.
Now...
My phone is still draining its battery the whole time and heating up like crazy.
And, you know, like it's I would still rather it be built into the MacBook.
But they made tethering.
It's at least it's working now.
Like somebody pointed out months ago when we last talked about this, there was like there was that setting somewhere in network settings of like automatically connected tethering.
And I remember I tried it and it just didn't work.
Like it just kept prompting me anyway.
And it just never actually worked.
And I talked about it on the show.
but in Tahoe, it seems to be working.
And so maybe this is like a HDMI CEC unicorn kind of thing.
Like maybe I'm just like lucky and knock on all the wood I can find.
Like hopefully this stays this way because it is a lot nicer.
And again, it's not the same as having a built-in, but it gives you a glimpse of what it is like to have it built in because it is closer to that than it not auto-connecting.
And it's glorious.
So I hope that it continues to work well on my existing laptop until they make one with it built in.
But when they do make one with it built in, it will be better.
So that's what I was about to ask.
If you could guarantee, you know, if I could wave a magic wand and I could guarantee that tethering would connect every single time without fail, do you think you would still want a MacBook Pro with a cellular chip in it?
It makes it a lot less urgent.
Another thing I've noticed, back again six months ago, whenever it was we talked about this last, one thing I complained about on the show was that if, say, you were on a train and it went through a tunnel, you lose your signal.
If the tethered phone lost its cell connection and was offline,
previously, it would cancel the tethering session on the Mac, and it would never reconnect automatically.
So you would go through your tunnel, phone would drop the connection, the Mac would drop the connection to the phone, and then it wouldn't tell you this, and it wouldn't reconnect.
So five minutes later, you'd be back out in the world, your phone would have a connection, but your Mac would still be disconnected from the phone.
That seems to have also been fixed.
When the phone loses the cell connection to the network, it no longer drops the tethering session with the Mac.
So they've done something, they've changed something, and they've made it a lot less crappy.
Maybe they've been in there doing a lot of code related to cellular on macOS.
Yeah, maybe.
I will say tethering in the Tahoe beta has worked better for me than it ever has.
So it does actually remove some of that urgent, oh, gotta have it, you know, nature of my desire for MacBooks with tethering, however, or with cellular rather.
However, again, like once I can buy one with it built in, I'm going to there.
That's not a question.
It's just, it's just a matter of, you know, between now and then, which is probably at least six months to a year away, at least possibly longer.
It's less painful now.
that's awesome i'm happy to hear that some uh meta commentary on this felipe esposito or felipe esposito at macworld he's had a bunch of stories that are they read kind of like mac rumor stories where there's like you know apple code seen by macworld like macworld didn't used to sort of be on the rumors beat occasionally maybe they would report on something to someone else but this is a sort of direct reporting from macworld about rumor stuff so
i keep seeing that name with a lot of this stuff i don't know if mac world is branching out into the rumors world because that get that stuff gets a lot of traffic but just keep an eye on that um and on the mac pro thing like this is these are old existing rumors like this is not any new news like look you gotta introduce the machine apple like we could just sit here i'm waiting all year for to see what they're gonna do with the mac pro the rumor is essentially like there's no ultra fusion on the m4 so if there's an emperor ultra it's not two of any other m4 six chip sucked
together it's its own chip yeah yeah like what like this rumors have been around for ages and ages but they need to ship a thing so i'm like i'm not really i'm just waiting like i need to see what they will actually release not more rumors and part numbers about this is the exact right part number that should be for an m4 ultra but of course apple has directly said that the m4 is never meant to have ultra fusion and yeah like so
I'm just waiting.
I hope you're waiting.
Put out a new Mac Pro and we'll see what it's like.
So I'm not getting too worked up about it, but I'm glad it looks like we're getting closer to cellular Macs.
I would definitely choose that over tethering, even if tethering worked perfectly every time.
Yeah.
All right.
The A19 Pro chip could be coming to a studio display too.
Reading now from Mac rumors.
Yesterday, signs of the second generation studio display with the codename J427 were spotted in Apple code.
Now it has emerged that the device will contain the as yet unreleased A19 Pro chip.
Rumors suggest that the next generation studio display will come out in early 2026 when we're also expecting new Macs.
Little is known about the new studio display, but it could feature mini LED backlighting for improved brightness, contrast, and color.
If it didn't, I would be disappointed because it would just be the same as the current one.
But this is a hilarious rumor because the rumor for the low-cost Apple laptop that we talked about all those shows ago is that it would have an A18 Pro.
So the monitor would have a more powerful SoC than the low-cost laptop that you connect to.
Now, granted, the monitor presumably wouldn't have a 512 gig SSD in it and it doesn't have all the ports or whatever.
I get it.
It's not quite the same thing.
But the current studio display has, what, an A13 in it or something?
And we always thought that was weird.
But it's like...
Well, Apple's got a bunch of those chips laying around.
Might as well use it.
And then that thing was buggy and had all sorts of problems.
So, but maybe they work that out.
But that's what a world we live in where the monitor, which got, I hope that, I mean, the rumors like, Oh, it might be mini led.
Like,
if it's not why even bother like if it's like if you don't improve like they're always so cautious it might actually be better than the current one oh you think after six years or whatever it's been there would it would be better than the one every place i would hope so there's like a million things they could do to make it better uh but anyway having an a19 from like can you offload stuff that like maybe that'll mean it'll be like a smart monitor where like the samsung ones like with no mac attached to it it can still do stuff like like
With the addition of an SSD, how is that not like an iMac?
No, you're not wrong.
A19 Pro in it.
You're just like, can I just stick some storage here with a Thunderbolt?
I know it's quite the same because, again, of all the security and the boot up process.
Like, I get it.
But it's just...
What a world that we live in.
And obviously this would probably be way more expensive than a low cost laptop.
So it's not, although the screen would be substantially larger as well, but this is just one of the most absurd situations I've ever heard.
And it's, you know, because we, we talk so much about the Apple Silicon chips, but as we occasionally note, when we talk about these things, they are pretty much never the most expensive component in any of these systems.
Mac pro possibly accepted depending on what Apple does.
Yeah.
like the screen is the most expensive component i imagine in the uh the studio display the screen is often one of the most expensive components and these socs as amazing as they are they're fairly small and they're not they're not that expensive in the grand scheme of things like retail price if they were selling like the mac pro chip maybe it would be thousands and thousands of dollars but like to manufacture it you can kind of know like how much does this cost it's like well
uh here's what tsmc's cost for its highest uh you know for their highest process the whatever whatever process apple is using here's how much it costs per like you know area of the die and here's how much their weird assembly thing is where they fuse the parts together and put the ram on it or whatever like you can calculate it like what the cost is plus tsmc's margin and it doesn't come out to be more expensive than the screen in many cases um but it's so central to the device like it makes it what it is it's how fast it can do the stuff you want it to do it determines the capabilities
And yeah, we've got this monitor with a more powerful SoC than Apple's low-cost laptop.
Again, both rumored, but I'm watching for that.
It's bananas.
I don't know.
I'm curious to see what they do with monitor story because obviously y'all's XDRs are positively ancient.
I mean, what was that, like 2020 or something like that?
2019.
Was it 2019?
I have a 2019 Mac Pro that I bought with the XDR when it was new.
That's why I can't put AppleCare 1 on them because they're all too old.
But I'll tell you what, the XDR...
It is incredibly solid.
I know.
I know.
Again, everyone's problems they have with studio displays up front.
I haven't heard about them recently.
I assume maybe they fixed it.
They got most of the stuff worked out, but it is still weird that you have to do basically a software update on your monitor.
I mean, I guess there's firmware updates for the XDR too, but it's just like, yeah, it's a different world where you're running a full Apple OS versus whatever weird firmware that the XDR is running.
yeah like the xdr is great i mean it is a little long in the tooth and like there are certain parts of it that i would love to see updated obviously like number one screen well yeah like number one would be like you know maybe um get rid of those dim edges on the outside and maybe more dimming zones and yeah uh maybe 120 hertz like i think those would be like my top three um but those are the ones you got them yeah but like the and of course you know can it not be five thousand dollars plus a sanford and a thousand like nope sorry yeah
now you're asking too much yeah like it's it is a great monitor in all other respects and for it being six years old and still being amazing and still having almost no peer like we talked a little bit about like there's some recent ones just coming out now from other companies that that you know match the resolution and some of the specs but but not apple's design sense obviously because no no
and certainly not matching apple's hardware but yeah it is it is unique in that way and you pay for it but but like being a thing that has a pretty okay screen in it even all things considered and with you know an exquisitely designed horrendously expensive apple matching case yeah like it is a very good product like there's it doesn't leave me wanting much um and in fact selfishly i kind of
i'm kind of waiting you know i'm like well i kind of want to get my my six thousand dollars worth out of this i don't want it to be replaced too soon yeah to be clear if and when i buy a new computer i'm not buying the monitor i'm using this computer until i use this monitor until it dies because i'm i'm perfectly satisfied with it it does everything i needed to do its flaws accepted i'm i would love uh you know to not have the vignetting around the edge to have 120 hertz and to have more dimming zones and yada yada but like
I don't need any of that to do what I'm doing.
So I'm using this computer until it dies from the vertical red line that has been haunting underscore.
Yep.
Now, I don't know if there were to be a Studio Display 2.
Because I have no self-control, I'd probably get one.
But if you recall, my setup right now is a LG 5K on my left, LG 5K on my right, and a Studio Display dead center.
And the difference between the two, or the three, I guess I should say, you would think that it would be minor, but oh no, even on Visa mounts where that awful stand from the studio display is irrelevant, the display quality is very, very, very different.
It's quite a bit different.
And so...
I would love a studio display too, I think, but depending on how hilariously expensive it is, I may or may not end up getting one.
I feel like they should be able to match close to the current price of the studio display because that A19 is not going to add that much to the price.
Maybe it would be inflation adjusted similar to what it is because...
You can get a mini LED backlit 120 hertz screen for enough money to fit comfortably within the ridiculous margins of the studio display.
So I hope the price doesn't get inflated by too much.
Maybe let's just say just the Apple standard.
Oh, it costs $100 more than it used to.
And I think you would still end up buying one.
And I think you'd be happy with it.
Why aren't they going OLED yet?
Is it not ready at those sizes?
I mean, it's been a while, right?
There are rumors of that sometimes, but the OLED burn-in issue is still a thing.
I'm looking at them from my PlayStation 5.
You can get a 27-inch 4K QD OLED or tandem OLED gaming monitor that has high refresh.
They're great, right?
But burn-in is still a thing.
and especially for like desktop things with lots of windows on it like uh what is it uh monitors on box has been doing like a year-long test on like a i think it's an alienware qd oled 27 inch 4k thing using windows on it just like a regular computer it's got a little bit of burning you can detect it uh it's not a problem with mini led so i wonder if apple is
uh a little shy about that i mean obviously they're going to go oled with the with the macbook pros in the m6 generation so maybe that'll be the test bed but um i don't think there are any 32 inch 6k oleds from anybody anywhere ever uh but for 4k and i'm not sure about 5k but right now you can get 4k and 1440 uh oleds that are amazing um
Apple tends not to be an early adopter in display tech.
So I think we're going to have to wait for the current refresh and then wait another seven years or whatever the normal Apple time is.
And by then, hopefully the issues will have been worked out because...
Again, our phones are all OLED.
It's like, why is burning not a problem on our phones?
I think we've talked about this before.
It's just like the screens aren't on as much.
The power is lower.
The brightness is lower for less time.
But for desktops that are just showing static stuff for a long period of time and are on a lot, it's an issue.
In fact, one of the clever features that Asus recently added is essentially a proximity sensor to their monitor.
So when you get up and walk away, it turns the monitor off.
And it's just a hardware thing that has nothing to do with the OS.
It's just a monitor hardware feature.
That's to save burn in.
It's a smart feature.
And yeah, Apple would probably have to look into something like that if they ever went OLED on their big monitors with current tech.
All right.
And then we need to talk about gaming on the Mac, which, believe it or not, is a thing.
And apparently, if you're gaming on your MacBook Pro, your game is probably rendering blurry.
John, do you want me to read this?
Do you want to talk about this?
How do you want to proceed?
You can go through it.
All right.
So from Colin Cornaby, they write,
This worked well for decades on Macs with regular displays, but modern Apple laptops have a notch at the top of the display.
The full screen area your game runs in is not the same resolution as the screen.
Most games do not account for this problem.
They output frames size for the entire screen instead of the region they can draw to.
This output is height compressed and blurry.
The problem is that the resolutions returned from the CGDisplayCopyAllDisplayModes function are mixed in a single list with no built-in way to filter.
Worse yet, most games default to the first resolution on the list.
That happens to be the resolution of the entire display instead of the area under the notch.
Out of the box, most games draw using this squished down output.
I've submitted the issue described in this post as a blah, blah, blah feedback number, which will be in the show notes.
The issue has been open since September of 2023, which means it's a wee little baby feedback.
It's barely alive at this point.
Yeah.
So just to clarify what they're talking about here is like the game thinks it's going to draw on the whole screen, like basically drawing behind the notch, like the whole resolution of the screen.
But then when it actually does display it,
it displays in the region below the notch because you don't want your notch interfering with things.
So they're taking the full screen's worth of pixels and just squishing it down a tiny little bit to get under the notch, which is terrible.
It's not non-native or whatever, but you would hope that the game spends the time rendering the pixels
at a certain resolution that it would display it at that resolution instead like squishing it, making things look, I mean, it'll make things look wrong and blurrier and just, it's, it's bad.
This reminds me of when I think I had a rant about this.
I'm one of my older technical blogs or something like Mac games would, um, you'd launch a Mac game, a Mac iOS 10 game back in the day.
Uh, and it would go full screen, uh,
But it wouldn't use the macOS APIs for essentially locking the screen.
Like there's an API that said, hey, I'm a game.
I'm about to go full screen.
Give me exclusive control over the screen and then change to whatever res the game is going to be running at and then play the game.
And then when you quit, unlock it.
And the reason you'd want to do that, the reason it was important to me, you'll be shocked to learn, is that if a game didn't do that, it would say, I'm going full screen and my settings are set to, you know, 1024 by 768.
So please go full screen, 1024 by 768.
And every other...
Mac app that you had running when you launched that game would get a notification that says, hey, FYI, the screen resolution just changed to 1024 by 768.
And macOS itself would say, oh, all you other apps, you just changed to 1024 by 768.
And they would gather all the windows so they fit on screen in 1024 by 768.
So when you quit the game and it turned back to like whatever your, you know, Apple cinema display resolution was, all your windows have been moved and squished into a 1024.
And it drove me bonkers because Apple had an API said, Hey, game developers, before you go full screen, call this API.
So we won't tell the whole rest of the system that the resolution has changed because we trust that you're going to change it back before you quit.
Like there'll be, there'll be none the wiser, right?
You're going full screen.
You've blacked out the whole screen.
You've locked the screen.
Yeah.
don't tell all the other apps that you've squished, you know what I mean?
And they made a specific API for this.
And this is one of the frustrations with Mac gaming is that to properly port a game to the Mac or write a game on the Mac, you have to actually understand the platform enough to get basic stuff, right?
Like how do I display full screen in a game on Mac OS?
And the right way to do it was back then to lock the screen so you don't destroy the placement of everybody's windows.
even if you're not like a picky window person like me people notice when suddenly all their windows that used to be arrayed across their screen are squishing to a little central like imagine if you went to 640 by 480 in the game to get higher frame rates and all your windows are now squishing to 640 by 480 this is just like that where it's like apple's doing all the stuff about the game porting toolkit and look at all these triple a games that are coming to the mac and we're getting all these game developers and these games can't be bothered even with apple's presumably direct support
to make sure they're correctly drawing their, you know, correctly sizing and drawing their display to account for the notch.
Again, the notch is not a new thing.
All these games have basically come out on the Mac in the post-notch era.
And so does Apple not care enough to say, hey, we looked at your game and it looks like...
It looks like you're squishing your output to fit under the notch because you're picking the wrong resolution from this thing.
And in this case, it seems like Apple doesn't even have an API that says, or I guess they do.
You can still find essentially the safe area inside or whatever, but it's just so disappointing with all this press and all this technology about gaming on the Mac.
They can't be bothered.
No one, no one in this situation can be bothered to make sure something basic about the games is correct, which is that they are drawing into the size and area that they think they should be drawing into on Apple's most popular Macs.
very disappointing i i i like this post from colin because this is an issue i had never heard of because again i don't have a laptop with a notch that i game on or a laptop with a notch at all and i don't like laptop so this doesn't affect me but like every time they show gaming on the mac it's like look at it and you can run on your laptop if you don't mind uh shoddily constructed games that don't correctly render by default
oh and there was a list of affected games fyi so shadow of the tomb raider was used as an example which is a very game that was poured to the mac ages ago maybe this predates it but uh um colin says riven defaults to a squash resolution stray the game where you cool game where you play a cat defaults to 17 28 by 11 17 which is not 16 by 10 in a squash control ultimate edition uh colin says control gets around the issue by just making up its own resolutions there are a few 16 by 10 resolutions on the list but none of them are the actual native resolution of the mac of colin's macbook pro
No Man's Sky defaults to squash non 1610 resolution.
The resolution pickers lists both safe area and non safe area resolution.
So, you know, a lot of these cases just like what it defaults to and you can, you know, change the settings to make it not squish.
So it's not like a permanent thing, but it's embarrassing when it's the default.
And then honorable mention for World of Warcraft, which has actually been a pretty good Mac OS citizen for its entire life.
World of Warcraft at first looks wrong, but World of Warcraft is an older game used in legacy core graphics display services, full screen API.
That API actually allows World of Warcraft to draw into the notch.
So in this case, the 34 or 56 by 22, 34 resolution is correct.
So if your game is super old, it has no idea the notches there uses the old things, but at least it doesn't draw squished.
We are sponsored this week by HelloFresh.
Let me tell you, here at the List House, not only is everything upside down because of home renovations, but school started, and so everything is doubly upside down.
Does that make it right side up?
Who knows?
But one way or another, what I do know is that at the end of the day, Aaron and I do not want to have to think about what's for dinner, how are we making it, where do the ingredients come from, etc.
So we love having something like HelloFresh because HelloFresh makes it easy to fit quick home cooked meals into your schedule every week by curating delicious recipes right to your door.
And they have not only these full recipes, but over 100 seasonal snacks, sides and treats.
A couple of weeks back, they sent us a box and we've already cooked all this up and all of it was very tasty.
Let me tell you what they got.
They sent us sweet chili turkey lettuce wraps, which were very tasty.
And since they're lettuce wraps, I liked that there wasn't a whole ton of carbs in there.
That was really great.
Chicken sausage rigatoni, hand to heart.
This was freaking delicious.
And I'm still dreaming about it a couple of weeks later.
And finally, pork chops and cranberry shallot sauce with garlicky roasted potatoes and green beans.
Let me tell you, if there's anything you need to know about Casey, it's that Casey loves garlicky roasted potatoes.
I love them.
And I'm also talking in the third person.
I don't know why.
That's okay.
Okay.
Here's the thing.
Every HelloFresh meal uses high quality ingredients, including seasonal fresh produce, proteins that travel from the farm to your doorstep and are simple with easy to follow recipe cards or simple heat them and eat them options.
You can choose from 60 recipes every week, including prep and bake and ready-made meals.
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to add on to breakfast, lunch, and more.
They're delivered right to your doorstep and are so flexible that you can pause and skip whenever you need.
So make your summer and early fall enjoyable and delicious by signing up for HelloFresh at hellofresh.com slash ATP10FM and get 10 free meals with a free item for life.
That's hellofresh.com slash ATP10FM for 10 free meals and a free item in every box.
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All right, let's do some Ask ATP, and let's start with Aaron Bushnell, who writes, with Apple working on new LLM, AI, and voice technologies, do you think the name Siri will continue to be used, or do you think it will be retired and they'll use a new name after years of Siri disappointment?
This is a really great question, because as soon as I read it, I was like, oh, yeah, they should get rid of Siri if it's actually good now.
But I don't think that's what they would do, but I think it would be a very wise choice to do it.
Let's start with Marco.
What do you think?
I think they won't, you know, but if they did, I think they would call it just ask Apple because that's kind of their direction.
Oh, I hate that, but you're probably right.
And we would sue them, right?
Yeah.
Because we invented the entire concept of ask something and didn't steal it from another podcast.
yeah exactly um yeah so i i think if they did if today's apple you know like with moderate with you know this group of you know marketing and decision making people i think they would just say ask like hey apple what's the answer to this question whatever like i think that would be their their answer which i kind of hate but that that is probably what they would do um but that being said i don't think they're going to change it because to change it away from siri like number one apple would have to think siri is unrecoverable and i don't think
Anyone high up at Apple actually realizes how bad Siri is and how bad the Siri reputation is.
Certainly many of the non-high up people know very well.
But I think the people at and near the very top have convinced themselves that Siri is awesome.
And I don't think they have the self-reflection to really see how bad it is.
Also...
apple you know we said earlier they're a very patient company apple loves recycling names and using them for a long time we have magsafe like that's one we you know like we have a lot of like once apple comes up with a term and they market it they tend to return to it whenever possible so even if siri is damaged now i can see them you know possibly even oh hold on my phone just woke up thanks thanks for that um
even if it is considered damage now like i can see them you know just kind of downplaying it for like a year or two and then going right back to it again um or or never leaving it in the first place because apple loves the names they invest in you know and and they they continue to use them as much as they possibly can so even so again i don't think they're leaving the name siri but if they did leave the name siri they would just say apple because they would want it to stand for apple intelligence and so it would just be you know
Hey, Apple, what's the weather tomorrow?
That's what it would be.
I agree with you both in that that's what they would do, and I hate it.
But do you think they would do Hey, Apple even considering that Hey, Google has long been a thing?
Well, it used to be OK, Google.
No, that's true.
You're right.
So when all of these wake phrases started, they needed to have certain audio characteristics to make them more easily distinguished from other words and other sounds.
And, you know, and the hardware and the software back, you know, back with Alexa and the first Google Home things like the hardware and software were much simpler and much more primitive.
So they like certain words and rhythms and sounds and frequencies would work better than others and would be more easily distinguishable from background, like, you know, from false wake ups, basically from from like other sounds and other words as technology has gotten better and more advanced.
Now, I think they have a lot more flexibility in what those words can be.
You wouldn't know it from how my phone just woke up.
But over time, we do have better options available to us.
And that's why they dropped the hay requirement recently.
Although, I'll tell you, if you turn the hay requirement back on, it reduces the frequency of miss wake-ups.
Yeah, that's why I never turned it off.
Yeah.
But anyway, I don't think they care that Google was OK Google.
And then I believe now they're Hey Google.
I don't think they care.
You can do both.
Yeah.
I don't think Apple would avoid using the word, you know, Hey Apple or just Apple.
Like, I don't think they would avoid that for that reason.
yeah i don't think they will because the earlier discussion about apple stubbornness like just because they're just damn it we're gonna make siri good at some point surely right um there i thought we had this in fall for next week but apparently we don't but there is actually a story about um maybe i just didn't pull out of my stuff so maybe i'll spoil it here but like
There was a story this week about rumors of a visual redesign for the new Siri because they burned their pretty, pretty cool current visual redesign for the Siri that wasn't any better.
Right.
And so they're thinking of having to do a new one.
And that's that's I feel like how they're going to like there may be like a rebrand.
even if they say like Siri two or Siri, now it's good.
Or like new Siri or next gen Siri or whatever.
Like, but I feel like Siri is going to be in there.
I think they should do like, you know, the whole, uh, I don't know, like, uh, bell Atlantic, Verizon, AT&T, like the airlines that changed the name, uh,
the the reputational uh associations of syria are so bad with just regular people justifiably bad that they should get rid of syria and pick a new one if and only if they have an actual good voice well that's the thing right so clear like they did the visual design which i think i think the new one is cool and they wasted it
yep like they just so like if that is true if they come out with a new visual design and the people who design the current cool one they're like oh man like we we made this cool thing you just didn't give us a thing to associate it with so yeah i don't think they will change it but i think they totally should and i'm secretly hope that they do
rolly c writes does john have an update on the accessibility feature vehicle motion cues have have you tried it so to recap i think this was ios 18 maybe even 17 but recently uh there was a thing you could opt into where and i think it would try to do it automatically but you could also put it in control center where there would be a series of dots predominantly along the side of the screen if i recall correctly and
as the car that you're in or the boat or what have you moves around, those dots would move in a commensurate way, which allegedly will help keep your inner ear and eyes in sync.
I presume that this didn't work for you, John, because you have more severe motion sickness than pretty much anyone I know.
But tell me, what has happened?
I've never tried it.
Oh, come on!
Well, okay.
In John's defense, it was announced, you know, like Apple does those big accessibility feature previews in the spring, but those features often are like months away from shipping.
And so when it was announced, we talked about it, but I don't think it shipped for like at least three or four months after that.
And so I think we all just forgot about it.
I didn't forget about it.
That's not why I didn't try it.
Like, look, I've been I've been this motion.
I've known that I've been this motion since fifth grade.
There's a lot of things early on.
I tried all the various things that you can try.
Granted, they were different back then, but like.
what i've learned is i've learned what works for me and what doesn't work for me and those dots like my motion sickness was to just laugh at those dots because they are insufficient to properly sync up my inner ear and my eyes i would here's the thing i would never attempt it because the punishment for finding out that they don't work is so terrible when i have a known solution which is do the things i currently do like you know make sure you're looking out the front of the car or stare at the horizon or whatever i
have known things that I know will work for me I would never risk like let me see if I can ruin my entire day and puke my brains out to see if these dots work so I don't have anything against the dots I'm sure they work for a lot of people I just don't expect them to work for me and I don't need them to work for me
currently don't need them to work for me because i have other things that i can do to accommodate this the most important being like don't put yourself in situations where you're getting emotions like now if someone said you have to be on a boat i'm gonna puke my brands out anyway so of course i'd try the dots then because hell i'll try anything right you know what i mean but like
I'm just not going to go on a boat that rocks like that.
You know what I mean?
So, yeah, I haven't tried them.
I know it's disappointing to some people.
What I have done is heavily promoted these dots to my children because my children insist on being on their phones or iPads in the back of the car and then complain that they get motion sick.
I'm like...
i know you're on your phone of course like you have some of my genes i this is not a surprise to me i'm like they won't get off their phones right so i'm like try the dots and they're like ah the dots or whatever i'm like at least like it's it's like me on the boat like you're gonna like apparently you can't stop looking at your phone while we're sitting in the car and you always complain that you get motion sick the same thing with reading they'll read a book i'm like don't try to read you're my kids don't try to read a book in the back of the car it's not gonna work out well for you like oh i feel so sick so
yeah i know i know you've they're not as bad as me like they're not as bad they don't have the problems that i have but like all child things like i've been trying to tell them to use the dots because i think they're they're at the level maybe maybe the dots would help them the dots are a good idea they're they're sound there's a rationale that makes sense and i'm sure they do work for some people but i'm just probably never going to try them unless if you see me trying them you know everything else has fallen apart and i'm i'm completely desperate
All right.
Well, homework assignment.
Have Tina drive you around because I want to know if this works.
I've been meaning to ask myself.
Come on.
All right.
So I'll do that if you drink some Ipecac.
All right.
I think that's not exactly apples to apples.
It is because the failure scenario is the same.
Where's your sense of adventure?
Ellie writes,
click anywhere 99% of the time I am doing a, uh, doing my thumb on the bottom of the trackpad click.
And that will probably never stop happening because I'm an old, uh, Marco, you occasionally use laptops.
So what do you do?
Sometimes I will do the old style, like where the button used to be.
Sometimes I'll do that.
Usually I'll just click the finger I'm using to move around, which is almost always my index finger.
Fair enough.
John, I know you hate trackpads and avoid them at all costs.
Do you have any thoughts on this?
I avoid them, but they still exist and I have to use them, especially when I'm fixing my kids' laptops and stuff.
My laptop is another one of my Tahoe test machines.
So I have an Intel Tahoe machine, an ARM Tahoe machine.
Anyway, so I do have to use trackpads.
I hate trackpads.
You're not my friend.
But when I read this question, I thought about it for a little bit.
I'm like, oh, we'll put that in next to whatever.
But then the next time I was using the laptop, I started to pay attention to what I do because I was like, what do I do?
Because I started using trackpads when they had the physical button at the bottom part of the thing, right?
so i'm like that must be what i do right but no it seems like most of the time i do the clicking anywhere with my with my pointer finger and once i realized that that's what i was doing i don't know when that transition happened but like i'm you know some at some point after they introduced the you know the trackpads where you can click anywhere i started doing it because it is convenient but once i realized that i was doing that a lot i said i shouldn't be doing that because one of the things i hate most is when i'm doing that and i'm like doing a drag and i like
get to the limits of the trackpad because the tracking isn't quite what i expected it to be or whatever and then it's like i gotta like do this little maneuver to like continue the drag without releasing it but give myself more room you don't have to do that if you do it the old way and the thumb is holding down the quote-unquote button while the other finger goes swipe swipe swipe swipe to move over so i've consciously been trying to change how i use the trackpad to not run into these
more problematic scenarios and obviously again i'm not a great obviously i'm not a very good trackpad user like it's one of the reasons i don't like it it doesn't it doesn't fit with my it doesn't fit with the way i use computers and i've never really gotten particularly good at it but uh paying more attention to how i'm using it and using different techniques i've even gone so far as occasionally to the old person thing
where i use my other hand to be the holding down the quote-unquote button and then use that hand to do like dragging things or whatever i still feel so constrained by trackpads and i hated i'm a mouser for life right but uh but yeah um apparently i use the click anywhere thing and i shouldn't
All right.
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Thank you so much, everybody, for listening.
We'll talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, 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-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-
Accidental.
Accidental.
Tech podcast.
So long.
Did we ever promote the vacation special?
We did not.
That occurred to me like an hour ago and it was way too late.
I was about to jump in, but I'm like, maybe we did.
Maybe we did.
Nope.
Sure didn't.
We're still on the regular show.
We can still save this.
No, this is the after show.
This is the after show.
What I'm saying, but it's not overtime yet.
Yes.
We can save this.
Maybe we'll just save it.
Let's just save it for next week.
No, we're committed now.
At this point, we got to do it.
You got to get better in increments.
We're getting incrementally better.
Right.
So we should have done this in the pre-show, but we didn't.
But we have a new member special, ATP Insider Vacations, where we talk about our vacations, what we want out of them, what kind of vacations we like, how do we handle them, what are our roles when going on vacations, what's a trip, what's a vacation, et cetera, et cetera.
I don't know.
John, anything to add?
Yeah, how we think about vacations, the role they have in our lives, because there are surprising variants from the sort of stereotypical view, especially the stereotypical American as promoted in the media view of what a vacation is supposed to be versus...
how people actually engage with vacations in their lives so that's that's the topic we tackle tackled in our typical uh fashion if you want to hear about us and our vacations and our weird uh ideas and attitudes about vacations there's a member special for you that we forgot to promote at the top of the show us weird we don't do anything weird us forgot to promote a member special that that never happens i don't know why this is gonna become a sickness with us it never used to and then like the last three it's been it's been a problem
Yeah, it's just, I don't know what's happening.
Maybe they just become so routine.
Anyway, members, you get member specials every month, like clockwork, but we just can't remember to promote them.
Yeah, it's bad.
But hey, you know what?
You should check it out.
And I mean, whether or not the Vacations member special is interesting to you, I would like to plus one, if you will, Marco's typical outro where, you know, even if this one isn't interesting, at this point, we have amassed a pretty solid library of specials and whatnot.
And
Over 30.
Yeah, there you go.
So if you are interested at all, join at least for a month, preferably for longer, and check them out.
And you can listen to them and enjoy them.
The tier lists seem to be the crowd favorites, but we have heard many pieces of extremely lovely and good feedback about pretty much everyone we've done.
So definitely do check that out.
And if you're not a member, ATP.fm slash join.
yeah they're all different like there are ones about tech topics there are ones about like this one's mostly about like kind of family things there are funny ones there are goofy ones there's there are ones where we watch movies like it's it's all over the map but like each one is you know different so if you say like i don't want to hear you talk about your lives or your vacations i want to hear you about talk about software development there's a member special for that and there'll probably be more so yeah check them out