You’re the Oreo Cookie
Marco:
it really is a miracle that we did not kill each other during the recording of the last member special and that we are here recording a new episode of our normal podcast i think this is the closest we've ever come to killing each other can you think of it a different time i don't know why you thought it was so uh so contentious i thought it was very calm and uh reasonable right up until the very end but still you gotta count the whole you gotta count the whole rest of the episode which was very long where everything went fine
John:
I'm not sure I agree entirely.
John:
I think this is kind of one of those things where you meet somebody else's family.
John:
When someone from a family that doesn't argue with each other all the time meets someone from a family that does, it can be quite shocking.
John:
And I still think, despite the fact that you two have known me for over a decade now, you don't quite understand how...
John:
I operate normally, and every time there's any contentious words, you're like, oh, no, the world is ending.
John:
And I'm like, this is just another day.
John:
It really depends on how you were raised.
John:
i'm sure i have been more upset with you john probably with regard to something car related and your ridiculous probably on every other past no it was never well maybe actually i think this one reached new levels for sure really i thought i really feel like the ipod one i mean marco definitely seemed more aggrieved than the ipod one
John:
because i think we were farther apart on those i don't want to spoil anything about it but i think we're actually pretty close together on this one but you you two just we're united in disagreement about one level in the tier list single level i i really honestly think that we need to change the rules of the tier list as a result of this episode that's how that's how bad the the voting process was i
John:
think i think it worked out remember the connectors episode where we like couldn't get anything up to the top right i think the connectors was more problematic but like you know we do what we do we got to work within the system i feel like i still feel like we did a good job in the end in the end justice was done
Casey:
Well, I don't know if I'd go that far.
Casey:
It was funny, though.
Casey:
So after we recorded, it was either yesterday afternoon or perhaps this morning, I was thinking about how maybe we should change the rules.
Casey:
And very briefly, the rules for the tier lists are all three of us have to reach an agreement if something is going to be S tier.
Casey:
And remember, it's S is the best, then ABCDF.
Casey:
And for something to go from A to S, the rule has been we absolutely all three of us must agree.
Casey:
And this has caused some amount of problems in the past.
Casey:
I think I do mostly concur.
John:
I think it's caused some amount of success because I think it really does.
John:
In fact, what I was thinking is if we did change it, we should change it so F also requires all three of us to agree.
Casey:
I don't think that's wise.
John:
And then we just work in the middle part.
John:
Because you get to those extremes, then you really need everyone to agree.
Casey:
i mean i i understand the logic there i don't know if i agree and it increases the value of s and you know the d value of f i guess but i was thinking yesterday or today that all of a sudden all of connected's absolutely preposterous rules suddenly they're starting to make ever so slightly more sense you can't just you can't just end up chasing your tail and changing the rules all the time when you don't like how things go you know
John:
It's true, but nevertheless, at the same time... I mean, if that was the case, I would have been arguing to change the rules after the iPhone episode, but I wasn't.
John:
I accepted.
John:
That's just the way it turned out.
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
But yes, so we should probably specify what the heck we're talking about.
Casey:
So yeah, we said it was another tier list members episode, but we were ranking storage medium, or storage media, if you will.
Casey:
Storage media, yes.
Casey:
Yeah, and we were ranking all sorts of storage media.
Casey:
So I had been the...
Casey:
inventor of the topic the creator of the topic but all i all i said was hey we should do storage media and then john took it and ran with it you listed a bunch of ones too i like i looked at your list when i came up with the things um but john ran with it in a way that i did not expect but i have no problems with i thought you ran with it in a very reasonable way some people uh based on feedback were not as uh were not in agreement that you chose the right selections i thought your selections were great i mean that's always
John:
the case i mean like i as i explained in in the episode i intentionally like i you can't do all them because there's too many we we focused heavily on a subset and we ignored lots of other ones and you know you can't like the thing was two and a half hours long like we can't put any more in there right and so which ones would you have us drop and i guess everyone would say i'm not going to ruin it but there's i'm sure everyone would say you should have dropped all that stuff in the middle but that was a fruitful area where people on the show had strong opinions so i thought it was important that we kept it
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
I think you made the right choices.
Casey:
But there was a moment at which Marco and I were in devout, just complete agreement about one of the items.
Casey:
And John was not having it.
Casey:
And I don't know that I've ever been closer to quitting the show than I was at that moment.
John:
Hey, you should take the consolation prize of the thing that you were rooting for.
John:
It's just one level different than what you wanted.
John:
It's so close.
Casey:
But it's not where it was supposed to be.
John:
It's in a good tier.
John:
It's in a happy home.
John:
It's an injustice.
Casey:
It's in an injustice.
Casey:
It really is.
Casey:
But anyway, so, hey, John.
John:
There was an injustice, but it wasn't that one.
John:
Oh, stop it.
John:
If you wanted to listen to this.
John:
Listen to the episode to find out.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
If you wanted to listen to this just absolutely out of control tier list, how would you do that, John?
John:
You go to atp.fm slash join and you become a member and then members get access to all of our member specials, both the current one and all the past member specials of which there are like 25, 26 at this point.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And a lot of them are tier lists because I do find that based on feedback...
Casey:
They seem to be the most popular, but also they seem to just really be a laser focused way to get us to bicker with each other, which is nice as an occasional thing.
Casey:
Obviously, we don't want to make that everything, but it is quite funny.
Casey:
And I feel like we have never been closer to the energy of the good top gear.
Casey:
Well, people will take issue with that.
Casey:
But you know what I mean?
Casey:
The good top gear than when we do the tier list.
John:
The last tier list we did was in June.
John:
So it's been many months.
John:
Oh, wasn't that long?
John:
Okay.
John:
I thought it was more recent than that.
John:
By the way, if you want to just see all the specials, even if you're not a member, you can just go to atp.fm slash specials, and that just lists all the specials.
John:
Obviously, you won't be able to see much about them except for the title if you're not a member.
John:
But you'll see where they are, and they all have prefixes.
John:
So if you just look for ATP tier list colon something, you'll see all of our tier lists.
Casey:
Yeah, we should put like a count on there because we've amassed enough that we should be proud of it.
Casey:
I'll have to talk to our web developer about that at some point.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we should do some follow up.
Casey:
And Marco, hopefully you have some follow up with regard to sleep apps, maybe?
Marco:
Not really.
Marco:
So everyone keeps recommending the same handful of them.
Marco:
And I assure you, I have seen them all.
Marco:
I have including, yes, yours.
Marco:
The one you were just saying, yes, that one.
Marco:
The one you're yelling at your podcast app, yep, that one.
Marco:
I even saw the Aura Ring, which I've never even thought about a smart ring before.
Marco:
But actually, the Aura Ring's app seems to do exactly what I want.
Marco:
I just don't really want to buy an Aura Ring.
Marco:
So nothing against them.
Marco:
I just don't want a whole other device just for that.
Marco:
I think what's more likely to happen is I'm going to stop sleep tracking because I'm just going to eventually find that I'm not getting enough actionable data out of it.
Marco:
Or at least actionable info and through the very limited interface of the health app.
Marco:
So I think I'm, you know, I don't love this pursuit enough to make this app myself.
Marco:
And none of the apps that I've seen out there do what I want in the way I want.
Marco:
Yes, even that one.
Marco:
Yep, you're yelling right now.
Marco:
Yep, that one.
John:
The one you're writing to me in the email.
John:
I think a lot of people kept sending you the suggestion for Autosleep because your complaint that you voiced in the show was that they make you make accounts and they track you and they do all sorts of stuff and everybody wanted to tell you that Autosleep has no tracking, no account, no in-app purchase, custom tags with history and filtering.
John:
And so your complaint about that one is just despite the fact that it doesn't do all those bad things that you were complaining about.
John:
Still, it doesn't work the way you want it.
Marco:
It also like the way it uses the emoji and not really like customing.
Marco:
It's it's a whole I looked at that one.
Marco:
I tried it and yeah, it wasn't doing what I want.
John:
All right.
John:
I just that's the only reason I put that in there because people will not stop recommending auto sleep because they say it fulfills all your requirements.
John:
And it's clear that there's more requirements than just not being annoying.
Yeah.
Casey:
You've seen a million apps, and you've rocked them all.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do you have any information about leatherbacks for your iPhone, perchance?
Marco:
See, there I have better news.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So I now have, right here on my desk, I have all of them.
Marco:
The Nomad Goods leatherback, Atom Studios, A-T-O-M Studios leatherback, the Sudi one that I described last time in both leather, and then I also have the Sudi silicone one.
Marco:
The Atom one I only used for like half a day because it's incredibly thick.
Marco:
So actually I took out some calipers and I measured all of these.
Marco:
For reference, like the bull strap regular leather case that wraps it on the whole phone.
Marco:
is 2.6 millimeters the atom cactus leatherback is 3.7 millimeters so it's like almost it's like you know one and a half times as thick as like a common leather case of the phone so does that come close to leveling out the camera mesa or no
Marco:
It comes close, but it still doesn't.
Marco:
It still has these little ridges that push up that make little rings around the lenses.
Marco:
But it makes the phone feel very thick in hand.
Marco:
It almost feels like you're holding two phones stacked.
Marco:
I know it's not quite mathematically that, but it feels very big.
Marco:
So I couldn't last very long with the Atom, so I ruled that one out.
Marco:
So really, for me, the only two that I like are the Sudi leather and the Nomad Goods leather.
Marco:
The Sudi one looks way nicer.
Marco:
The Nomad one works better.
Marco:
Tell me more.
Marco:
So if you're going for looks, the Sudi one wins hands down.
Marco:
The texture of the leather is nice.
Marco:
The way that it has like a little black cover around the camera mesa, that looks nicer.
Marco:
The edges form like a nice slope up.
Marco:
That looks nicer.
Marco:
The Nomad one, even though this is Horween leather, which is a nice leather maker here in the U.S.,
Marco:
Even though it's hormone leather, it just looks very flat.
Marco:
The Nomad one looks cheap, even though it is actually a nicer grade of leather, I think.
Marco:
But it kind of looks very cheap and flat.
Marco:
It doesn't do anything special with the camera.
Marco:
It has the hard plastic ridge around the camera.
Marco:
So the Sudi one...
Marco:
The edges slope down into like a plastic gasket around the edge, which does look very clean.
Marco:
And it feels nice in the hand, except that it really doesn't provide any grip around the sides.
Marco:
The Nomad one goes all the way to the side and then ends abruptly in like a flat side, almost extending the shape of the iPhone's flat sides.
Marco:
And because it goes all the way to the edge, you feel the sides of that leather with your hand as you grip the phone.
Marco:
And if you like lean the phone, if you like stand up the phone and like lean it back, if you're for instance like propping the phone up on a windowsill, the bottom of the leather will touch the surface.
Marco:
Whereas that's not true of the Sudi because the edges are like, you know, kind of ramped up gradually with a little bezel.
Marco:
So the Nomad one, despite not looking very fancy, actually works the best.
Marco:
It's also substantially thinner.
Marco:
It doesn't matter that much, but the Nomad leatherback is only 2.2 millimeters.
Marco:
And the Sudi vegan leather one is 2.6, which is the same as that bull strap leather case.
Marco:
So the Sudi one is about the same thickness as a regular iPhone case, a common iPhone case.
Marco:
The Nomad one goes from 2.6 to 2.2.
Marco:
So it's noticeably thinner.
Marco:
So the Nomad one overall, even though I don't think it looks nearly as cool as the Sudi, it's the one I've been spending the most time with because it's the one that works the best.
John:
I think the Nomad one looks better too, but I know that the marketing photos on case websites are not always representative.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, and keep in mind also, the Sudi is a fake leather.
Marco:
The Nomad's a real leather.
Marco:
So the Nomad one will probably age better in the sense that it'll probably develop a nice patina with certain leather wear patterns.
Marco:
It got tackier.
Marco:
Yeah, it immediately got tackier within a day of just having all my hand oils all over it.
Marco:
So it is getting nice and tacky.
Marco:
But even the way that wear will happen on this...
Marco:
Natural or, you know, real cow leather tends to wear nicer, you know, in terms of like little scratches that get kind of like re-oiled in, you know, certain like, you know, wrinkly patterns that develop with leather, as we all know.
Marco:
So the Nomad one, while it looks bad now, I think it will age very gracefully.
Marco:
Whereas the Sudi one looks great from day one.
Marco:
I don't know how it will age, but it doesn't matter because the Nomad one works so much better.
Marco:
And what about HDR photos?
Marco:
Oh, this is some important follow-up.
Marco:
So we discussed a few months ago, I was trying to figure out how the heck do we get HDR photos in Apple's Photos app taken by big cameras?
Marco:
How do you get your big camera to be an HDR photo in the Apple Photos app?
Marco:
And we went through a couple apps that would kind of set the right metadata fields, and it was kind of hacky and tricky.
Marco:
It kind of worked.
Marco:
It didn't work great, but it kind of worked.
Marco:
um well i tried again this past weekend i loaded you know a photo i just taken i loaded it into lightroom and modern and this is like a lightroom classic this is like the old style lightroom before the whole sync service thing before you get to this did you do anything special when you took the picture can you explain the picture taking process was that just like there's no hdr features or support in your camera like explain that part to me
Marco:
I was using pictures from the Fuji GFX100S, which does not have any kind of built-in HDR functionality.
Marco:
It was just a RAW file.
Marco:
I shot RAW.
Marco:
Just a RAW file.
Marco:
And so the way I expose pictures, almost always now, like if I'm going to be shooting RAW and I intend to edit them,
Marco:
I do what I believe photographers call exposed to the right.
Marco:
So the idea here is you usually will underexpose the photo in the auto exposure control on the camera by at least one EV.
Marco:
If there's going to be a sun or a moon or a bright light source in the shot or near the shot, it will darken everything else so that the light source doesn't blow out the sensor and become all white.
Marco:
So if there's some sunlight somewhere, you don't want that to be all white.
Marco:
Modern sensors on big cameras are very sensitive compared to old ones.
Marco:
And so what you can do if you're shooting raw is in post-processing, you can bring up the level of detail from the dark areas.
Marco:
It's called shadow detail.
Marco:
And you can usually bring that up a lot in editing without amping up the highlights too much and blowing out and making everything just white on the highlight side.
Marco:
So what you do is you underexpose when shooting RAW so that the highlights don't blow out the sensor in the brightest parts because you can't recover from blown out white in editing.
Marco:
You can't say, all right, bring down that white and put back the nice fine cloud texture that was up there.
Marco:
You can get a little bit of that back, but not much.
Marco:
So whereas you can bring up shadow detail in editing pretty far these days with good modern sensors.
John:
then it'll be full of noise but lightroom has amazing denoising another one final question about capture do you remember what color space you're using were you just using srgb what do you have your camera set to i don't know offhand i whatever the i think i i'm pretty sure i use srgb yeah the reason i'm asking is because you're about to go into hdr stuff and i always wonder is there something i could be doing on my camera to help out the hdr and one of the things i do is i always like i have limited choices on my cameras but one of the choices i have is whether on srgb
John:
or adobe rgb adobe rgb i believe is close to the p3 color space but not quite the same but anyway it's a bigger it's a bigger triangle on that big rgb space than srgb and so i always want to give the biggest triangle to give myself the highest chance of hdr but anyway gone
Marco:
That's interesting.
Marco:
I actually have never experimented with that.
Marco:
So I probably am just shooting sRGB because I think that's usually default.
Marco:
Anyway, I had the raw file in Lightroom.
Marco:
Modern Lightroom Classic has, over in the exposure area, it has an HDR thing you can toggle.
Marco:
And what that does basically is expand the exposure range in the interface to give you this big section above where it was before.
Marco:
And so I was able to edit the picture in HDR in Lightroom.
Marco:
Looked great.
Marco:
I'm so happy with that.
Marco:
And then I thought, well, okay, how can I get this picture into Apple Photos and keep the HDR?
Marco:
Well, first I tried the regular old, you know, JPEG 80% quality.
Marco:
Keep as much as you can.
Marco:
There's even somewhere in there, I think there's even an option to say keep HDR in a JPEG.
Marco:
And I tried that and it didn't import with HDR into Photos app.
Marco:
But then I tried JPEG XL, our new friend.
Marco:
And when I export Lightroom HDR in JPEG XL and import that into Apple Photos on the newest macOS Sequoia, it works.
Marco:
It keeps the HDR.
Marco:
And now I have real HDR photos shot with my big camera in Apple Photos showing the HDR perfectly.
John:
Nice.
John:
What is the JPEG XL?
John:
Does JPEG XL support so many things?
John:
Are you exporting a raw with JPEG XL, lossy or lossless compression, or are you exporting a essentially not raw JPEG?
John:
This is something I'm not clear about about JPEG XL because I haven't actually used it directly, but the spec says...
John:
um that it can be i mean apple's apple in ios 18 it's used for raws and the choices are you have is lossy compressed raw or losslessly compressed raw but of course it also does like plain old compressed jpegs with variable quality so do you know which one of you one of those things you exported from lightroom
Marco:
I'm using just like the fancier version of JPEG compression in Excel.
Marco:
So I set them both to quality 80.
Marco:
And so it is lossy, but it's just, you know, it's similar to JPEG.
Marco:
However, I will say quality 80 on a JPEG, like the regular JPEG export versus the JXL export.
Marco:
The JXL one is less than half the size.
Marco:
It went from 23 megs to 11 megs.
John:
And they show up as JPEGs, essentially, in Apple Photos.
John:
They don't have the RAW tag anymore, just to ensure you're not doing a lossy RAW or something?
John:
No, it just says... Here, I'll pull one up here.
John:
I mean, they don't use a tag for non-JPEG, but they put the little gray RAW tag or whatever.
Marco:
It has the .jxl file name in the info panel, but then in the little overlay in the middle of it, it has a little JPEG badge and does not have a RAW badge anywhere on it.
Marco:
So it's treating it like a fancy JPEG.
John:
sounds interesting i'm going to try this although i have like zero experience with lightroom but i'll figure it out yeah i'll send you one it's massive it'll slow down your computer because you have an intel oh what are you gonna send me i can i have picture i have plenty of pictures that i can i have plenty of raws that i can just chuck in there just to find this uh magic hdr control somewhere in lightroom classic
Marco:
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Casey:
Alright, an anonymous Apple genius writes in, All Macs, since at least the Intel days, are capable of running without a battery connected.
Casey:
It's actually used as a common troubleshooting practice in the Genius Bar.
Casey:
Often swollen batteries, such as what Marco experienced, will cause issues like unexpected shutdowns or slow performance, and can even cause the Mac not to boot in certain cases.
Casey:
While not very frequent, we tend to see expanded batteries or spicy pillows, most commonly when the customer has left their Mac connected to power for most of its life, similar to Marco's situation with his gaming PC.
Casey:
P.S.
Casey:
I know I said every Mac since the Intel days, but the one exception is the 12-inch MacBook.
Casey:
It is a very strangely built machine and a complete nightmare for us technicians to work on.
Casey:
If you disconnect the battery and then plug in anything higher than a 5-watt adapter to let it trickle charge, you will fry the logic board.
Casey:
Most technicians avoid it like the plague.
Marco:
Okay, honest question.
Marco:
How many 12-inch MacBooks could there still be in use?
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
Like, because that keyboard was so short-lived, like, and the repairs were so expensive, and they're all out of warranty now.
John:
Well, you just connect an external keyboard, you know, because there's plenty of ports for you to connect an external keyboard.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Use Bluetooth keyboard, I suppose.
Casey:
Why do you do this to me?
Casey:
Why do you do this to me?
Casey:
Well, that's right.
Casey:
Did you see, by the way, this is an aside, did you see XKCD yesterday?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
uh yes the ravioli shaped things and the entire world has sent this to me that was recent i thought that was like for years ago one that just reminded people no that was an interesting coincidence clearly randall munro listens to the show that's the only reasonable conclusion we can come to something like that uh
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Apple TV Plus is now available as an add-on to Prime Video, which is somewhat unexpected.
Casey:
So you can be in Amazon's Prime Video client or what have you, and you can subscribe to Apple TV Plus as another channel in there for the same money you would otherwise pay Apple.
John:
Unless you have Apple One, in which case you're probably paying less for it if you count all the other services.
John:
So this streaming stuff is so complicated.
John:
Last time there was another bundle, it's like, oh, hey, look, there's a bundle of three services that I pay for separately.
John:
Will that save me money?
John:
And I had to go through this complex gymnastics to figure out, no, it will not save me money.
John:
So thanks a lot, bundles.
John:
You're not quite working for it.
John:
And this is yet another bundle that will not save you money, despite the fact that I do, in fact, have Apple TV Plus and also Prime Video.
John:
But because I've Apple TV Plus through a bundle already...
Marco:
anyway it's fine so you think apple is uh getting 100 of that money i don't know i doubt it but i don't know we have to wait for the court case to find out yeah right exactly no i mean and this this makes total sense like you know for apple is trying to get tv plus out there into the world get more people watching it apparently you know it's not super well watched which is a shame because there's a lot of good stuff there
Marco:
So they were trying to get it out everywhere.
Marco:
And when you're in that kind of business of like a content service, it is in your best interest usually to make that service available everywhere.
Marco:
That's why they have Apple Music for Android, right?
Marco:
Isn't that a thing that exists now?
Marco:
I believe so.
Marco:
That's why Apple TV Plus clients are built into smart TVs now.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So they want TV plus everywhere.
Marco:
And the reality is this, you know, even though even if they make less money from the Amazon deal and they would sell it directly through some other means, it is worth it for them to have that everywhere.
Marco:
The same reason why it's worth us having our apps on the iPhone.
Marco:
Like, you know, so if Apple has to give Amazon 30 percent or whatever, like, yeah, that's that's reasonable.
Marco:
And for them, it's probably worth it.
Marco:
And that's that's why they do it.
John:
Did you see the rankings recently?
John:
Like, I don't know if it was speculative or like based on real numbers of like the viewership or the number of subscribers to the various streaming services.
John:
I was kind of surprised at how well Apple was doing and how poorly Peacock was doing Peacock Plus or whatever.
John:
But Apple, you know, obviously Apple isn't at the top, but it was, you know, it's solidly mid-pack.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
With regard to, and this is tangentially related to Apple TV+, with regard to Major League Soccer, one of us, might have been John, had said, hey, okay, well, there you go.
Casey:
All right, Shaggy.
Casey:
Somebody had said, hey, they should make a Drive to Survive-style thing for Major League Soccer.
Casey:
And Devin Dundee writes in to say, Apple has commissioned Box2Box Films, the production company behind Drive to Survive, to document this season of MLS and create an, quote, eight-part panoramic documentary event, quote, for Apple TV+.
Casey:
Apple and Box2Box previously worked together on a pro-surfing series called Make or Break.
Casey:
I had no idea this was a thing.
John:
I wonder if that's all the, you know, like the 3D cameras that people were reporting thinking it's for some Vision Pro thing.
John:
I wonder if that's all part of this documentary.
John:
And I also don't know what the heck a panoramic documentary event is.
John:
Is that Apple Vision Pro?
John:
We'll find out, I guess.
John:
Nobody knows.
Casey:
And then additionally, a lot of people wrote in with regard to Lionel Messi.
Casey:
I think I have that pronunciation right this time.
Casey:
And MLS being not very popular, which we had talked about last week.
Casey:
And the consensus that I gleaned from the feedback we got, there were a lot of individual perspectives.
Casey:
But the one thing that seemed a pretty solid agreement is that, hey, Major League Soccer here in the States, just not the same level of play as over in Europe.
Casey:
It's just not as good.
John:
Which we said on the show.
John:
Like we said that, you know, he's a good player, but now he's over here and all his good playing buddies are back over there.
John:
So he's not playing with them.
John:
He's playing with us.
Casey:
Yeah, it's a JV.
Casey:
I mean, the perspective that people who wrote us had was that it's the JV squad here.
Casey:
I'm not sure that's true or not.
Casey:
I mean, obviously, these are incredible athletes and are way more athletic than I will ever be in my wildest dreams.
Casey:
But compared to what's going on in Europe, that seems to be the perception whether or not it's reality.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
We have feedback with regard to the maritime report that you were talking about from a friend of the show, John.
John:
Yep.
John:
Anthony Johnson wrote in to say that the maritime report I was thinking of that me and Merlin have talked about in Rectiffs is called the shipping forecast.
John:
Anthony says it's a national institution broadcast every night on Radio 4.
John:
There's even a dedicated BBC site that promotes it as a sleep aid.
John:
We'll put a link to that in the show notes.
John:
Drift to sleep.
John:
And so many people were offended by my suggestion that, you know, that's the type of thing that could be taken over by AI because it's a very sort of
John:
affected kind of voice reading just basic information about weather and so on and you know it's such a beloved institution they couldn't believe it could even suggesting that it be taken over by a machine is offensive and I said maybe it already has been you would never know laughter
Casey:
And then Scott Zero, I hope that's your real name.
Casey:
That's a great surname.
Casey:
Scott Zero wrote in with regard to disabling and enabling audio modes on AirPods 4 with ANC.
Casey:
So Scott writes, you can change which ANC modes are in rotation by going to settings, your AirPods, and then selecting one of the press and hold AirPods menu items for the left or right AirPod.
Casey:
Uh, and you can, you see a thing that's, you know, tells you whether noise control or series, what, what that, you know, press and hold will do.
Casey:
Uh, and then you can choose their check marks for the different noise control things off transparency, adaptive and noise cancellation.
John:
This is the UI that I could not find, uh, before I give it a
John:
marco suggested it and then i and then i looked for it and then i had follow up and i said i look for it i couldn't find it i guess it's not there maybe it's just a pro only feature no it was there it was just cleverly hidden uh i mean one uh these controls being split up in all sorts of weird places is not great but two it continues to frustrate me that you can't even get to these controls unless you have the airpods like essentially connected to your phone and in your ears at the time
John:
um and the other thing is like so this is under like you have to look at the press and hold thing and then for the left and right air pods and there are separate sub menus for the left air pod and the right air pod because i assume there's your specific instructions down there but the noise control selections whatever you do on the left is mirrored on the right because i i kind of wish there was the opposite uh that you could do them separately because then you could have the left ear like every every mode would be one click and hold away you know what i mean you'd have two on the left ear
John:
and two on the right ear so no matter what mode you're in you'd always be one tap away i guess you could be two taps away but anyway uh doesn't matter there it's a bad ui for multiple reasons and one of them is if you go into the left ear and change some stuff when you go into the right ear well look those changes you made in the left ear are mirrored there but only for the noise control section anyway this is all moot because since all the promotion of the adaptive mode i have now as we stated last time it is now a mode that's in my rotation so i have them all turned on
John:
including including oh yeah including by the way this is my uh my fall update for my airpods my airpods 4 with noise cancelling uh one of the reasons i have all four in my rotation is because i discovered a use for off
John:
Other than trying to save battery when I'm in bed at night at the end of the day.
John:
I don't know how my thing's charged, right?
John:
Turns out that if you go out to walk the dog and it's kind of chilly and you put a hat on, the hat rubs against the microphones that are used for noise canceling and makes a terrible...
John:
You know, like it amplifies the noise.
John:
You get used to it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So transparency, well, transparency, adaptive, and noise canceling are a no-go when wearing a hat.
John:
So off has found a very important role in my life now.
John:
I'm very happy for that.
Casey:
uh gpx exports so uh we were talking about hey how you can you geotag photos taken with like a big camera um and you know what could you do about that uh ryan michalovsky writes uh pedometer plus plus written by dear friend of the show david smith uh that app is my go-to for recording gps tracks for photography i export its gpx and use the mac os app huda geo h-o-u-d-a-h-g-e-o for tagging
Casey:
To export GPX from Pedometer++, go to workouts, select a quote-unquote workout, then swipe all the way to the bottom to export as GPX.
John:
And I never would have found that I had to actually ask, like, where the heck in Pedometer++ is GPX export?
John:
You've got to go to workouts.
John:
Even if you don't think you're doing a workout, that walk counts as a workout.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We have a little bit more information about global keyboard shortcuts, John.
John:
Yep, this is from Michael Burke.
John:
He says, the issue with global keyboard shortcuts requiring a modifier other than option shift only seems to apply to apps using Carbon's register event hotkey API, which doesn't require the user to grant any special permissions in order to work.
John:
There is another method that can be used to track global key presses, which is part of the NSN.
John:
nsevent framework nsevent.add global monitor for events which i've used by the way but it requires the user to grant the app accessibility permissions even though the carbon api has been deprecated it's stuck around since there's no true modern api that doesn't make you show a dialogue and a lot of popular popular packages for global keyboard shortcuts are based on it um
John:
It makes me wonder if anything that's part of accessibility, I believe, is essentially not allowed on the Mac App Store, which Moom 4 isn't on the Mac App Store.
John:
But I think things are on the Mac App Store that do do the register event hotkey.
John:
This is not exactly an instance of an issue that has come up a lot recently, but it's kind of related.
John:
The issues that come up, which is come up a lot in the context of screen sharing APIs, but there's other things in macOS like this as well, where Apple will deprecate some old API, usually some carbon thing, but even just some older whatever, some old API, right?
John:
They'll deprecate it and say, you should use the new API.
John:
And the problem often is, guess what?
John:
The new API doesn't do everything the old API does.
John:
can do and if your app required like that one thing that the old api did that the new one doesn't do you literally can't use the new api so you're like so well so what is my app dead now like the old api works but it's quote-unquote deprecated so you're just like now on a timer like okay how long until this api is gone is removed
John:
you know, puts up scary warnings and there's no modern replacement.
John:
That's very frustrating.
John:
In this case, it seems like there is a modern replacement, but it requires, I mean, require accessibility permission seems extreme.
John:
Like you just want your screenshotting apps to be able to bind to command shift two to take a screenshot like a tech sniper or something.
John:
Guess what?
John:
You have to ask for accessibility.
John:
Hey, you can't be in the app Mac app store because you can't ask for accessibility permission there.
John:
B, you have to ask for accessibility permission, which is massively powerful.
John:
And you're like, I just want people to be able to command shift two to take a screenshot.
John:
I have to ask for... And then C, you have to guide them.
John:
Go to system preferences.
John:
Go to security and privacy.
John:
Scroll down to accessibility.
John:
Scroll to find my app.
John:
No, there's no way to search or filter.
John:
Like...
John:
This is a bad situation on the Mac.
John:
The way they're handling security and deprecations in macOS is really coming to a head here.
John:
It's fine to deprecate old APIs and replace new ones.
John:
It's fine to increase security, but there's these sort of complete...
John:
sort of cul-de-sacs of badness where it's like, hey, you got rid of, you deprecated the API that I was using, you didn't make a replacement, and you're slowly making everyone's life miserable.
John:
Like, I can't be in the Mac App Store, my users are getting more and more dialogues, they're blaming me, there's nothing I can do about it, and the supposed replacement either doesn't exist, or it exists but I have to ask for accessibility permission.
John:
There really needs to be some sort of, like, counsel related to macOS and say...
John:
look, before you deprecate an API, let's make sure the modern equivalent does what people want.
John:
And before you require people who used to be able to do something with no permission to ask for the biggest permission there is in the entire operating system, maybe consider whether that's the best thing to do.
John:
Frustrating.
John:
Very frustrating.
John:
I mean, I myself have filed a bunch of feedbacks for...
John:
modern apis that either do things that used to be possible with old apis or were simply never possible but seem like reasonable things to do and i'm like i just want this one little corner it should like you can give it a special permission but make the permissions more granular the option shouldn't be you can't do this at all or you must ask for a complete access to everything on their system there needs to be lots of middle ground there
Casey:
Alright, let's talk about passkeys.
Casey:
There are a bunch of benefits to passkeys, which we didn't enumerate last episode as a result of an Ask ATP, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
So, John, do you want to take us through this?
John:
Yeah, I felt like passkeys got short-stripped because we had a very specific question about passkeys and migrating to them, and we never really said why the hell would anyone...
John:
ever like why were you were asking us have you used passkeys what are you using them for blah blah but we didn't say why would anybody use passkeys what the hell's the point like why why would anyone ever be motivated to go through any kind of process that we were describing uh and we're not going to go into the technical details of passkeys but just sort of the the the f's and b's as they say the features and benefits so one of the biggest and first ones is unlike with passwords um
John:
No private info is ever sent to a website.
John:
So if you log into a website or an app or anything else with a username and password, your username and password are sent to, in some form or another, to the service or they're sent to the app.
John:
You're giving your private information to code that you did not write.
John:
You're giving your private information to the application, to the web page, to whatever, right?
John:
And then presumably does something safe with it and checks it if it's right or whatever, you know.
John:
It doesn't even have to transmit it.
John:
It could do all the hashing locally or encrypt it locally, but whatever.
John:
You are handing over your private information.
John:
That doesn't happen with pass keys.
John:
They're more like SSH keys where the private thing is never given to another piece of code.
John:
You are given a thing, which then you sign with your private thing, and then you chuck the other thing back.
John:
So you're only ever sending public information to another entity.
John:
And related to that is you, the user, don't make the choice of what to send where.
John:
With passwords, you make the choice, even if the choice is like right clicking and picking autofill or like allowing autocomplete or whatever, like you are choosing to enter your username and password somewhere in a web page, in an app, wherever it is.
John:
You choose to put it there.
John:
And when human choice is added to that equation, you are vulnerable to phishing.
John:
Because if someone could put something in front of you that you think is a place where you should put the password for service X, and you put the password for service X there, but it was a phishing attack, and really that's an enemy website, you've just given, you've transmitted your private information to this bad party.
John:
Passkeys don't work like that because passkeys never ask you to send to decide when you should send your passkey to a thing.
John:
You cannot send the passkey for Apple dot com to someplace that is not Apple dot com.
John:
Right.
John:
That's not a choice you have to make.
John:
That's not part of the flow.
John:
Again, if it's a security problem and there's some way that they can trick.
John:
ios or mac os to send it passkey to an incorrect place that would be a security problem but it's not your fault because you didn't you didn't make that choice phishing relies on essentially social engineering can i trick the user into thinking this is the place to do this and it happens to everybody i recently saw a thread i'm asked on where someone said i literally do cyber security for a living and at the end of one day i was really tired and
John:
And I entered a bunch of my private information into form that I thought was legitimate because it looked just like my, you know, intranet, whatever page.
John:
And I totally got phished.
John:
It can happen to literally anybody.
John:
There is no amount of vigilance and care and expertise that can prevent you from falling victims of phishing.
John:
That's why we want to take the human out of the equation.
John:
Passkey says you don't ever have to make that decision.
John:
We cryptographically determine if this is the place we should send this.
John:
It will never get sent accidentally to the wrong place.
John:
right and then finally um we're talking about transferring and like uh what happens if my phone goes in the ocean or whatever and we we'll get to import export in a second which was which i mentioned as sort of a thing that had not yet been solved but just to make it clear most of the platforms including apples that deal with passkeys at all have some form of end-to-end encrypted cloud sync so it's not like the passkey only exists
John:
on your phone or only exists on your mac or whatever it's integrated into icloud keychain once you get a passkey if you have icloud keychain enabled it's everywhere on all your apple stuff so if you create a passkey and then drop your phone on the ocean a day later you did not lose your ability to log into your stuff that thing is synced through icloud keychain it's available as long as you still have access to your apple id
John:
that's been there from day one cross-platform sharing like hey but what if i i'm that's fine if you're if you have apple devices but what if i have a windows pc what if i have an android phone how does that work that is a little bit more difficult although apple does have icloud keychain sharing thing and browser extensions for windows but like it's not a great cross-platform solution depending on what your platform is if you're using linux i don't think apple has any great integration there
John:
There's I think there's some way to get they're not like passwords where you can just copy and paste them from one place to the other.
John:
So there needs to be some kind of integration, which leads us to and I mentioned import export.
John:
What if you don't want to use iCloud keychain because it's so Apple centric or Apple slash Windows centric?
John:
You wonder if you want something that's you know, you want to use a different system to deal with your past keys.
John:
And I said that it's not like 1Password or whatever.
John:
You can just export a CSV or something.
John:
That's because that just puts all your passwords in plain text.
John:
They wanted to come up with something that's more secure.
John:
And lo and behold, the FIDO Alliance, which is the group that is responsible for passkeys that all the big companies are members of, including Apple,
John:
recently announced a new specification for doing import export in a secure way we'll put a link in the show notes to the 95 max story about it um reading from that article it says the new specification aims to promote user choice by offering a way to import and export pass keys the draft of the new specification establishes the credential exchange protocol or cxp and credential exchange format or cxf format for transferring not only pass keys but other types of credentials as well
John:
The new formats are encrypted, which ensures that credentials remain secure during the process.
John:
1Password, which worked with the FIDO Alliance on the new specification, has already committed to supporting the new passkey import and export formats as soon as they become available.
John:
Other companies such as Dashlane, Bitwarden, NordPass, and Google also worked on the draft of the new specification.
John:
Okay.
John:
Okay.
John:
But yeah, this import export format against a draft format, people are commenting on it.
John:
But once this becomes available, it will essentially make your collection of pass keys and other stuff portable so that if you ever decide I don't want to be in the Apple ecosystem anymore, you can securely transfer your pass keys from one place.
John:
system to another people still complaining about this because they're like i just want it to be exported into a file that i can deal with but this is sort of like you need like uh two things involved here icloud keychain and something else that understands this and so you're never you're never just dumping a bunch of files dumping all this info to a file that you can just save and store away somewhere it's always like the receiving end has to initiate the thing and the sending end has to agree and there's a handshake and it securely transfers from one to the other there's no sort of middle way to do it and
John:
To the point where the people who are responsible for this spec are saying, if somebody makes a client that allows you to dump out the info and doesn't have it immediately imported into something but allows it to just sort of sit in a file on disk, they may disallow that from being part of the system because they don't think that's something you should be allowed to do.
John:
And this has people up in arms because they're like, I want a plain text file on my disk that no one controls that has my stuff in it.
John:
Or I want to be able to print something out on a piece of paper and put it in a safe.
John:
And if I can't do that, the standard sucks.
John:
Everyone has different requirements for it.
John:
for what makes them feel comfortable about security uh but i think for most people who absolutely do not care about any of the things i just described uh pass keys will someday be a superior alternative to passwords we're just not quite there yet because they're still kind of fidgety and weird and every website does it a little bit differently but hopefully we'll get there someday
Casey:
Do you want to tell me about AI moats and open AIs?
Casey:
Is this 01 or 01?
Casey:
I always get it wrong.
John:
It's 01.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Yeah, it's a lower... They make it lowercase to try to not confuse it with zero, but their naming is terrible.
John:
This was from an overtime on, I think, last episode.
John:
We were discussing if open AI has any kind of quote-unquote moat.
John:
Like, do they have any secret sauce that other people can't copy?
John:
Or are LLMs a commodity?
John:
And 01 is their new model that...
John:
supposedly does uh fancier reasoning to try to arrive at better answers and it can partially explain its reasoning uh in the over time we were discussing open ai's uh stern position on people trying to discover how all one works by doing prompt injection and like you're not allowed to look inside the box it's our super trade secret if anyone else knew they'd be able to you know compete with us but we have the special sauce anyway um
John:
I'm sure completely coincidentally Apple AI's researchers recently published a academic paper about things like OpenAI's 01 reading from the Decoder, which is not the Decoder podcast at The Verge, it's a different website, the-decoder.com.
John:
A new study by Apple researchers, including renowned AI scientist Sammy Bengio, calls into question the logical capabilities of today's large language models, even OpenAI's new reasoning model 01.
John:
I will put a link in the show notes to the paper.
John:
There's a thread on X from one of the from the team leader of the people who wrote the paper.
John:
He says, overall, we found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models, including open source models like Lama, Phi, Gamma, Mistral, and the leading closed source models like the recent OpenAI GPT-40 and O1 series.
John:
Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching.
John:
So fragile, in fact, that changing names can alter results by up to 10%.
John:
This is from the, quoting from the paper, the performance of all models declines when only the numerical values in the question are altered.
John:
Like they're asking in math problems, like word math problems.
John:
And if you like change the name of the kids in the word problem, it gets the answers wrong, right?
John:
Change, sometimes changing the numbers, right?
John:
Changing it from like one to five or whatever, it will get the answer right with one and wrong with five or whatever.
John:
uh back to the thread on x we can scale uh data parameters and compute or use better training data for 5.4 llama 4 and gpt5 but we believe this will result in better pattern matchers not necessarily better reasoners uh and there's more on the same paper from gary marcus we'll link to his blog post in the show notes as well uh i think anybody who knows anything about how the work would have said oh of course it's not doing reasoning it's just you know it's
John:
Speaking of spicy, Marco loves the memes with spicy.
John:
Spicy autocomplete is one of the things people call LLMs, that it's much more like compressing data and searching it, compressing textual data or whatever and searching it than it is like any kind of reasoning thing.
John:
That's how they work on the inside.
John:
But you can't just assume because that's how, you know, well, everyone knows that LMs don't think.
John:
Look at how they work on the inside.
John:
That's not thinking, right?
John:
In scientific endeavors, even if it's something that you think, quote-unquote, everybody knows, okay, then prove it.
John:
And how do you prove it?
John:
Devise a way to test for the thing that you think may or may not be true.
John:
Run the test and publish a scientific paper about it.
John:
That's how this works.
John:
And even for things that are like...
John:
boring like you know making a paper about something that oh everybody knows that it's common sense well common sense is not proof you have to actually test the idea you need something you need an ideal that is falsifiable and then you need to test it and then people can argue did they test what they think they were testing
John:
Can I do a better paper?
John:
This is the scientific process.
John:
I love seeing this because it is something that people talk, that I've certainly talked about is like, oh, well, everyone knows that.
John:
They're not really thinking.
John:
They don't have any kind of reasoning or whatever.
John:
But you can't just make that assumption.
John:
You have to actually test it.
John:
And you have to actually come up with a way that you think correctly tests for the thing you think you're testing for.
John:
And I'm sure there will be follow-up papers to say, well, actually, this paper didn't quite get at the heart of what the problem is or whatever.
John:
So you can look at it.
John:
It's very readable if you just look at the examples and look at the things that they...
John:
They did like, you know, giving it word problems and saying, OK, but if I change the boy's name from Billy to Timmy, now it gets it wrong.
John:
That is probably a good sign that it is not logically reasoning about this math problem, but is instead, you know, spicy autocomplete.
John:
And because it is just pattern matching and doesn't understand the significance of any of these different things, changing the name is like, well, different pattern match.
John:
And I got the wrong answer because these things have no idea what math is.
John:
And that's just not the way they work internally.
John:
The other danger about this, by the way, is they're like, that's not how it works in my brain when I do the problem.
John:
Therefore, this thing is not thinking.
John:
And that's always dangerous because even though we think we know how our brains work, we are often very, very wrong.
John:
And we don't actually understand.
John:
We don't actually understand everything about how our brains work either.
John:
So it's the example I always give is like...
John:
a it doesn't really matter how our brains work uh airplanes don't work like birds but they still fly really well right and b we don't always know how our brains work so you can't just make assumptions like that by saying well i know lms don't think because they work nothing like how i think my brain works when i think of this problem i don't do anything like that what the lm is doing as far as i know therefore lms don't think you gotta test it so a plus to apple people
John:
to doing what i think most people would consider a boring and pointless paper but you need you know you need to do these things you need someone to actually test the things that everyone just assumes are true to try to show that they are or aren't so kudos to apple for uh uh confirming something that i already believed wow or try or trying to again more papers will follow i'm sure
John:
Oh, and related to this, there's a so that series I always link to whenever we talk about LLMs is the three blue, one brown.
John:
They're called courses.
John:
I keep looking for playlists, but they're called courses somehow on their YouTube channel.
John:
There is a course on neural networks and chapters like five, six and seven are about LLMs.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to I think what is the most recent video in that series called How LLMs Might Store Facts.
John:
that tries to explore like given how we know how lms work see previous videos with just a bunch of numbers and matrices how do they essentially how does the information in them stored i think the example they give is like michael jordan plays blank how does it come up with basketball right where where is that information stored in this giant matrices of number how does that even work which is an interesting question because we're like well i know how it's stored in my mind i just know that he plays basketball everybody knows that it's so easy but
John:
Now I just look at these giant arrays of numbers.
John:
Where the hell is that information in these numbers?
John:
This video tries to explain it.
John:
And also it's, as you note from the title, how they might store facts.
John:
It's actually kind of difficult to tell because we're not particularly good at reasoning about giant piles of numbers.
John:
So take a look at that if you're interested.
Casey:
It was a very interesting video as all of them are.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, for follow-up, a Google breakup may be on the table, says the Department of Justice lawyers.
Casey:
Reading from The Verge, now that Judge Amit Mehta has found Google is a monopolist, lawyers for the Department of Justice have begun proposing solutions to correct the company's illegal behavior and restore competition to the market for search engines.
Casey:
In a new 32-page filing, they said they are considering both, quote, behavioral and structural remedies, quote.
Casey:
That covers everything from applying a consent decree to keep an eye on the company's behavior to forcing it to sell off parts of its business, such as Chrome, Android, or Google Play.
Casey:
Then Google has a response, which we will also link in the show notes, which is exactly what you would expect it to be.
John:
Is Google in favor of that?
John:
Do they want to be broken up?
Casey:
They do not, John.
John:
I know you're surprised.
John:
Their response is like, here's how the world will end if you make us split off Chrome, Android, or Google Play.
John:
It'll be bad for business.
John:
It'll be bad for you.
John:
Everyone will break out in a rash.
John:
Dogs will howl.
John:
It's so hard for me to tell because these things take so long to wind through the system or whatever.
John:
Structural remedies were in play for the Microsoft DOJ case as well.
John:
uh and that ended up not happening and got partially overturned on appeal or whatever uh i don't know how this is going to go down the environment in the u.s and i guess worldwide the environment for these big tech companies
John:
is currently pretty negative you know the view of how much power they have and what they're doing with it is pretty negative right now and so they are they're facing cases and laws and regulation in many cases they are losing and the people who are on the other side of it are making noises about like we might break you up we might say chrome has to be a separate company or android has to be separate or whatever and
John:
It's hard to even think about what that world will be like because we're so used to the status quo.
John:
Everybody is, right?
John:
It's just like, how could that ever happen?
John:
What would happen if you did that?
John:
And Google will gladly tell you all the bad things that would happen.
John:
But it's kind of like the flip side is all the good things that would happen that we've been denied for so long because we just accept the status quo and we don't even think about what we're missing out on and the competition that we're missing out on.
John:
But it is notoriously difficult to...
John:
to do anything effective or good after you win the trust case right you can look at all the ones that have happened there's lots of good things that have happened lots of also terrible things and lots of backsliding and finding us back at the same place again so i don't know how this is going to turn out but uh it's interesting to see uh the rumblings revolving around google here it'll be amazing if like google gets broken up and apple gets to stay together i'm sure they would love that
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Casey:
Breaking news as of yesterday, I believe it was, there is a new iPad mini.
Casey:
It has an A17 Pro.
Casey:
It used to be an A15.
Casey:
It has a five core GPU instead of six.
John:
Let's pause right here on this.
John:
This is the name of this new iPad mini.
John:
The previous one, I believe, was iPad mini, like fifth generation or sixth generation in parentheses, like with the Apple naming thing.
John:
I believe the name of this one is iPad Mini parentheses A17 Pro.
John:
So they went fifth generation.
John:
What?
John:
Sixth generation A17 Pro.
John:
Go look at the comparator.
John:
Go look at the like apple.com slash iPad slash compare.
John:
It's called the iPad Mini parentheses A17 Pro.
John:
So first of all, that's weird.
John:
But second of all,
John:
it's the a17 pro that is weird as a reminder this is the chip they put in the iphone 15 pro and 15 pro max that was made on tsmc's n3b process which was super expensive and only apple was paying for it and they you know immediately wanted to stop and move everything to n3e and were like they're never going to use that a17 pro chip in a phone again the pro chips never go anywhere they put them in the 15 pro because they had to
John:
And the Pro Max, but like, we're not going to see it next year in the iPhone 16.
John:
And lo and behold, the iPhone 16 has processors that use TSMC's N3E process, which is newer and cheaper than the N3B process.
John:
We're never going to see that A17 Pro again.
John:
Guess what?
Yeah.
John:
It looks like they had a lot of leftover A17 Pros where one of the GPU cores didn't work because the A17 Pros in last year's phones had six GPU cores and these A17 Pros in the iPad Mini have five.
John:
So maybe they just saved every single A17 Pro where one of the GPU cores didn't work and they saved them all up for what?
Marco:
the ipad mini this so that's this this was the biggest shock of this like for me because i'm obviously you know we're nerds about this kind of stuff like i i was convinced i said on this show of course that first three animated process was dead of course they were abandoning those chips
Marco:
I said on this show like two or three weeks ago that we would see the A18 non-pro chip being used all across the Apple lineup in kind of lower-end, less expensive products that nevertheless needed Apple intelligence compatibility.
Marco:
Never did I think that the iPhone 15 Pro processor...
John:
would live on in the ipad mini yeah of all things in the ipad mini like that i am i am blown away you know i gotta hand it to apple they can still surprise me i mean and it makes sense when you think about like what do they do with the rejects i can think of something because if you throw them away like because i believe in on both the iphone 15 pro and the iphone 15 pro max they all had six working gpu cores so anyone that came out with one non-working gpu core what are they gonna do throw it in the garbage
John:
no save it for the ipad mini put it in a box for a year i don't know if that's enough like it was that sufficient to to work with the ipad mini and did they have to manufacture a bunch of new ones and a bunch of ipad minis actually have six working gpu cores but they just disable one of them or something like i don't know how that works but like this has got to be a cost like a shrewd cost saving measure because there's nothing about the ipad mini as we'll see when we get to the
John:
that is like this is such an important product apple really needs to give it the pro processor from last no they absolutely don't like this just has to be a cost-saving measure based on like you know binned uh chips that they would otherwise throw away that's that's that's all i can think of that's the leading theory for this it makes some sense but it does make it's total it's a total tim cook move like how can we economically make use of what would otherwise be a waste product but uh
John:
It's really weird.
John:
The iPad mini is weird and not not a well-loved product, not frequently updated.
John:
And as we'll see in a second, not really that well updated this time around either.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So continuing along, there is Apple intelligence, which implies that there's eight gigs of RAM, but we don't know that.
John:
But Apple's not saying.
John:
As usual.
John:
Exactly.
John:
But they did list Apple Intelligence as a feature.
John:
I guess Apple Intelligence is now code for portable devices with 8 gigs of RAM or more.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
It sure seems that way.
Casey:
Let's see.
Casey:
There's 10 gigabit per second USB-C, which is up from 5.
Casey:
There's Wi-Fi 6E, up from just plain 6.
Casey:
The cellular is now eSIM only.
Casey:
It supports the Apple Pencil Pro and the Apple Pencil USB-C.
Casey:
It used to be the second-gen Apple Pencil.
Casey:
and also the Apple Pencil USB-C.
Casey:
We have a storage bump from 64 to 128 as your base with 256 and 512 available.
Casey:
The 12 megapixel wide back camera supports HDR 4 for natural-looking photos with increased dynamic range, says one of the websites.
Casey:
And we don't know if that's better or worse.
John:
That's a quote from Apple.
John:
Support smart HDR 4 for natural-looking photos with increased dynamic range.
John:
increased over what i like for the life of me i was like is there a new camera on this or not because that thing that they wrote is that just a software thing and by the way all the features you read it's like hey you know all the stuff the iphone 15 pro had because it's part of the soc well now the ipad mini has it too because it's part of the stupid soc but like the camera i'm like hey did they replace the camera they wrote this is for apple's copy the sentence they wrote about the camera on this new thing and it has the word increased increased
John:
and it says smart hdr4 but i think that's all compute stuff so it's not clear to me whether the camera on the eye the ipad mini parentheses a17 pro is a different camera than the ipad mini parentheses sixth generation who knows uh but it also it does have a new true tone flash that's camera related so that's good they put new right in there so the flash thing maybe that is new yep there's new blue and purple colors that join starlight and space gray if you have really good vision did you look at the blue and purple colors
Marco:
this is like you know kind of like you know the the you know you walk by a can of paint and kind of smelled it and kept walking like it's that kind of color like there's not a lot of the color in the color it's the type of thing it's like like the gold where if you see one in isolation you have no idea what color it is like i need all the other ipad minis here so i can tell what color this one is
Casey:
I need a deck of iPad mini cards.
Casey:
It comes with a braided USB cable.
Casey:
There's no charger in the EU.
Casey:
You can pre-order it right now, and it'll deliver on the 23rd, which is, what, a week from today, actually.
Casey:
That's a weird time.
Casey:
Usually it's Friday, but it's this coming Wednesday.
Marco:
Nothing about the iPad Mini is ever normal.
Marco:
Not even the ship day.
Casey:
You know, I used to be such an iPad Mini mega fan years and years and years and years ago.
Casey:
And I haven't had one, golly, since maybe the first or second Retina one.
Casey:
It's been a long, long time.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with it.
Casey:
It is a very neat device.
Casey:
And I've understood the new ones in particular, like even before this one, to be really great.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I just don't have a place for that in my life, I don't think.
Marco:
I think that what killed the iPad Mini for me was text input.
Marco:
Once the iPad started having really good first-party keyboards that stuck right on them and were available for them, that to me radically improved the utility of iPads in general for me.
Marco:
And then when I briefly tried an iPad Mini last year as an e-reader and quickly found I was very frustrated by the lack of good keyboard options for it.
Marco:
So for me, for my purposes, the keyboard is what did it.
Marco:
But a lot of people do use them.
Marco:
I think the challenge the iPad Mini has always had is in trying to figure out whether it should be a higher-end device or not.
Marco:
Certain pros and enthusiasts use it and just wish for more pro features, which I think is interesting that it got the Apple Pencil Pro support.
Marco:
That is interesting here.
Marco:
But with that exception, it seems like nothing else here is particularly pro in terms of iPad nomenclature.
Marco:
So it still is kind of, you know, basically a smaller, slightly worse iPad Air in many ways.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
I mean, but even then, they didn't even give it to CPU.
Marco:
Again, it's weird.
Marco:
It's always been a weird balance.
Marco:
Usually it is more low end than people like.
Marco:
It is usually more expensive than people want it to be.
Marco:
And as a result, I think it has a hard time figuring out what exactly it's for.
John:
Yeah, we're going to talk about this in overtime of like figuring out product mixes, spoilers for overtime.
John:
But that's kind of the situation with the mini is like,
John:
there's just one it's the mini there's not like a mini and a mini pro uh there's just one small one so what do you do with the one small one the small one can be cheaper because the screen is smaller and the screen is expensive but you don't want to make it too cheap so is it going to be like the air is it going to be like the pro something in between most people who are mini fans are disappointed with this update because although we listed we essentially listed everything that has changed about this device it's not much it's basically the previous like everything about it physically is the same
John:
same size same shape the cases all work on it before they added two new colors um it's not radically different it doesn't have face id it doesn't get any new features other than the new pencil connection thing right which you know granted does give you like the hover and everything so
John:
that is kind of a pro level upgrade to it but it doesn't have an m chip in it like it's just it's not a huge update it's more like an internal spec bump with a couple of external uh things like the pencil added to it but just the fans want more or more significant so much so that they're like oh this is just a temporary holding pattern one they just introduced this one because they needed to update it but but you know pretty soon there'll be the real ipad mini update don't hold your breath
John:
like this this is not a well-loved product that gets lots of updates this is the ipad mini update for a little while i feel like especially since this one runs apple intelligence it's kind of important for apple to get more of its products to be you can buy this and run the feature that we think is going to be super important if we ever release it um so that's what the satisfied uh the a17 pro is a weird choice for it but it is kind of like in the well you're not going to get an m chip
John:
Because they're expensive and they're bigger and hotter and take more battery life.
John:
And your battery is smaller because you're a mini.
John:
And so you're going to get, uh, whatever we have left over from the 15s, uh, and you're going to like it and it'll be fine.
John:
Right.
John:
But it's just, yeah, this is not all of Apple's products get the same attention.
John:
And then mini has, uh,
John:
historically not gotten a lot of apple's love but this is better than the one that it replaced and it does you know i think the if you really want like a small sketching thing and you wanted to have the new pencil and a better cpu this one does it for you and hey you can you know watch it summarize your notifications and erase people from pictures with it too soon eventually
John:
But maybe by the time you download this, end of October is the rumor.
Marco:
I still am getting a decent amount of utility out of the notification summaries.
Marco:
I'm actually really enjoying it.
Marco:
Are you on the beta?
John:
Is that why?
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
The rumor is like the 28th or basically the end of October, 18.1 is supposed to come out.
John:
So we'll all be living it soon.
Marco:
And ultimately, I think this shows the fact that Apple updated the iPad mini.
Marco:
That tells you, wow, they're really trying to bring everything up to Apple Intelligence-capable specs.
Marco:
Except for the HomePods.
Marco:
Well, yeah, that's never going to happen.
Marco:
You know the things you talk to all the time?
Marco:
Those ones?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
They remain a product in the lineup.
Marco:
But yeah, I think anything that can reasonably have Apple Intelligence compatibility is going to get upgrades.
Marco:
So I'm expecting...
Marco:
Well, I don't think we've really seen how it gets into TV OS yet, but I bet Apple TV with an A17 Pro or A18 something is probably not that far off.
John:
Does the Apple TV already have 8 gigs of RAM?
John:
I forget what the RAM is in the Apple TV these days.
John:
I have no idea.
John:
I mean, they possibly could ship 8 gigs of RAM easily in the Apple TV, I feel like.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't think it's that big of a problem.
Marco:
But we're going to see probably the low-end iPads getting an update sometime soon, I would expect.
Marco:
The rumors are that's getting pushed off.
Marco:
I don't know why, but that was the last rumor.
Marco:
I mean, to me, the biggest question is how the heck they're going to do it with the watch and the HomePod.
Marco:
I guess the HomePod is, especially if they make another big one, the HomePod is a large, expensive enough product that you could probably find a way to get one of these chips in there cost-wise.
Marco:
the watch it just doesn't like that kind of hardware just doesn't fit in the watch yet the home pod has the watch cpu now doesn't it i believe so that i don't i don't know if we ever got that confirmed but that was the rumor that it used a watch cpu or watch watch caliber let's say like performance wise and by the way the apple the latest apple tv apparently has four gigs of ram
Marco:
There you go.
Marco:
But yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of updates to products that usually kind of fly under the radar.
Marco:
We're going to see a lot of updates to them to just bring them up to minimum spec to run Apple Intelligence.
Marco:
And that's overall, I think it's a very good thing.
Marco:
I think we're going to see a nice refresh throughout the whole lineup.
Casey:
All right, so Marco, I know that you've definitely done your homework on this.
Casey:
There is a new, about 15, 17 minutes, something like that, a short film that Apple has released exclusively on the Vision Pro.
Casey:
What did you think of Submerged, Marco?
Marco:
I didn't do my homework.
Casey:
All right, I'm going to have to see you after class.
Marco:
No, I mean, look, I've decided rather than continue to insult Division Pro as a platform, I'm going to enjoy it to the degree that I have time and to the degree that it's worth prioritizing in my life.
Marco:
And right now, I'm doing a lot right now in my life, and so it's just not earning its time.
Marco:
I'm not sitting around alone thinking, what should I do tonight?
Marco:
Ever like that that never happens like I'm doing work I'm doing family stuff I'm like there's always something I'm doing so this is this is not a product in my lineup right now but it from from what I hear it sounds interesting for you know what's what's going on with this with this with this movie.
Casey:
yeah so this is uh shoot i already forgot the director's name um but he he did uh some recent western movie i think oh this is already going on to a great start but hey that's all right um basically this is a 15-ish minute film about a world war ii submarine um which you know something bad happens i don't know can i suppose should i spoil this i don't even know what's appropriate it's a submarine movie of course something bad happens well right let me guess it fills with water the uh the director is edward berger
Casey:
thank you, who I think had just won an Oscar or something like that for one of his films.
John:
I think it's an app where you can look that up.
Casey:
Yeah, there is, but I'm not looking at it right now.
Casey:
Nice plug, though.
Casey:
I appreciate that.
Casey:
Anyways, so this is... It is unlike...
Casey:
It is unlike pretty much anything I've ever seen.
Casey:
So a lot of the Vision Pro stuff so far has either been CGI dinosaurs or let's tell a three to seven minute story about something or maybe 10 minutes tops.
Casey:
And it was more documentary style than it was anything else.
Casey:
So as an example, I don't think we've talked about it on the show, but they came out like a month ago with a four or five minute sizzle reel on the most recent Super Bowl for American football.
Casey:
It's incredible.
Casey:
As someone who enjoys American football, this was an absolutely phenomenal like four or five minutes sizzle reel, but again, like a documentary.
Casey:
And to my knowledge and my recollection as I sit here now slightly sick with a cold, I don't recall any other like scripted thing that has happened on the Vision Pro and certainly not anything that they've described as a scripted short film, which is how they described submerged.
Casey:
And this is a 17-minute short film that is obviously scripted.
Casey:
It's acted.
Casey:
And it is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly cool.
Casey:
And I think one of the things that I find most amusing about it is...
Casey:
trying to understand the language of the film and how do they leverage this medium to still accomplish the same thing that any filmmaker generally needs to do.
Casey:
So, for example, how do they point your attention at something?
Casey:
And one of the ways they do this...
Casey:
is with incredibly shallow depth of field, you know, perhaps an incredible close-up of somebody's face with, you know, a very, very shallow depth of field.
Casey:
So even if you try to look around, there's nothing else to really see.
Casey:
It's all blurry.
Casey:
And sorry, I don't know if I actually said it clearly, but this is immersive.
Casey:
So you get 180 degrees, you can look around and tilt your head.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
Even though in some cases, the depth of field is as you would expect.
Casey:
And as such, the extras that you really can't focus on in a traditional movie, you can turn your head and you can go see what that extra is doing.
Casey:
You can turn your head and go see what the other extra
Casey:
doing and you know that's the whole idea and i'm doing fully work on purpose which is going to drive marco nuts when he edits but um but but nevertheless but the point is that you know even the extras have to be acting always in a way that i think is not typical for an extra because they couldn't they they might not be the extra they might be the star just because i turned my head that way
Casey:
Similarly, all of the audio in all of the lighting, it kind of has to be on set because unless it's behind the camera, you need to be able to, you're going to be able to see it because you can look around.
Casey:
You can look down, you can look up.
Casey:
Not a lot, but you can look down, you can look up, and you can look 180 degrees side to side.
Casey:
And so all the lighting and all the sound pickup kind of has to be there.
Casey:
And in fact, in one of the scenes, I'm not going to spoil the story as much, but in one of the scenes, you're sitting, there's two people sitting around a table having a snack, basically.
Casey:
And you end up zoomed in on the star of the film.
Casey:
And the other person is behind you based on the way the set is, right?
Casey:
Because you're basically, the camera's kind of floating above the table, if you will.
Casey:
And you can hear dude man eating behind you, right?
Casey:
Because that's the way surround sound works.
Casey:
And so that, you know, they could obviously have the pickup behind the camera.
Casey:
But for anything that's happening in front of the camera, you don't want to be able to see a microphone.
Casey:
And you don't want to be able to see the lights and whatnot.
Casey:
It's incredibly, incredibly weird in a good way.
Casey:
And it feels like you're there.
Casey:
Not that you're participating in it necessarily, but in a lot of ways, it feels more real than anything I've ever done before.
Casey:
A couple of examples of this.
Casey:
they do move the camera from time to time.
Casey:
They don't have the same problem that that MLS thing did where there's just constant cuts, constant, constant, constant cuts.
Casey:
There are cuts, but they're much better, much fewer and far between, not unlike the football one I was talking about a minute ago, the NFL one.
Casey:
But there's, there's occasions where they move the camera and once or twice, they kind of like just take what would effectively be a couple of steps forward.
Casey:
Although clearly the camera's on like rails or whatever.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
But there's a couple of times they're moving the camera quite a ways, like a solid 15, 20 feet.
Casey:
What is that?
Casey:
Like three meters or something like that?
Casey:
No, more than that.
Casey:
Anyway, four or five meters.
Casey:
And it feels slightly off-putting.
Casey:
Like, John, you would absolutely hate this because your body is telling you you just moved, but yet...
Casey:
or I guess your eyes are telling you, you just moved, but your body is saying, no, I'm still sitting here and it's John's out.
John:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
It's, it's not off putting to the, to the point that it, that it was bad, but it was weird.
John:
That's one of the areas where this, where it starts to diverge from like, cause lots of people have made this comparison and it's,
John:
It's somewhat apt, but not quite for everything you just said of like watching a play, because when you're in the audience of a play, you could choose to look somewhere that's not where the action's happening.
John:
And plays also do things to guide your attention, like put the spotlight on these two people.
John:
But hey, what if you want to look over there?
John:
Well, unless they have it in complete darkness, which is one of the things they do, you might be able to look at other people who are in a scene instead of just the two people who are talking.
John:
And people can have different seats in the audience and they might have different perspectives.
John:
So you got it.
John:
You can have visible microphones and visible people holding up props.
John:
serviceable lights and all the other stuff but even a play even if you're in the very front row isn't full 180 because you're not literally on the stage but obviously with inversive video i was thinking when you were talking about two people eating the snack like you can make artistic choices like guess what casey you're the oreo cookie in the middle of the table
John:
your head, your disembodied head is literally sitting in the middle of the table and you can look to the guy to your left and the guy to your right.
John:
That would be a weird choice, but you can do that.
John:
You can't do that with the play where your seat suddenly is in the middle of the actors, right?
John:
So there's lots of choices you can make, but they're faced with the same challenges as a play of like, hey, we don't know where people are going to be quote unquote sitting in the audience or looking in the audience.
John:
I guess they can place the camera where they want, but they don't know where you're going to look.
John:
So they have to dress it
John:
more like a play than like a movie where if you ever see a movie being made whatever the camera is seeing is reasonable anything that's a foot off of the camera it's like you know a guy from craft services is eating a snack like whatever like this it could be anything you can see the whole set you can see all the light rigs you can see the tape on the floor you can see everything and
John:
honestly these days you can put a lot of stuff in the camera too and just make someone erase it after the fact which is i'm sure what they did with submerged but yeah it's an interesting challenge and part of that challenge is like okay but when you're watching a play you don't suddenly get up and move 20 feet forward like they don't do that in a play they can't do that in a play you're in your seat but with immersive video they just take that whatever weird camera rig and they walk down the hallway with it and as you noted casey you're not walking down the hallway you're sitting on a couch
John:
right but the camera is moving down the hallway and you may think well what's the big deal i see that all the time in movies i'm watching a movie the camera goes in the hallway i don't feel sick well you're not wearing a headset that wraps the image around your entire field of view and that i feel like does make a big difference yeah it really really does and another moment that was just incredibly striking to me is okay slight spoiler water enters the submarine i know oh my god surprised i never would have predicted this who made this never would have guessed it
John:
They should make it so water doesn't come in.
Casey:
Yeah, they should work on that.
Casey:
But water enters the submarine, and at some points, the camera gets a little bit submerged.
John:
And I watched it.
John:
Leonardo DiCaprio gif.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
Casey:
And so I watched it the first time, and I didn't notice this.
Casey:
And I rewatched it this morning just to have it fresh in my mind for today.
Casey:
And I noticed in myself that as the camera was about to go underwater, I kind of took a breath.
Casey:
Like not a...
Casey:
kind of breath, but like a, you know, it was just subconscious that I felt like I was about to be underwater, so I should breathe in a little bit.
John:
That's version two where water actually falls out of the mask and goes into your mouth.
John:
You water barred yourself.
John:
Cheesy peasy.
Casey:
But that's just indicative of either how gullible I am or...
Casey:
how incredibly immersive it is.
Casey:
And the story, like, I'm a sucker for submarine movies, for sure.
Casey:
And the story, there's not a lot you can do in 15 minutes-ish.
Casey:
And it was good for a 15-minute story.
Casey:
But I think, like, I was listening to Upgrade, and Jason and Mike, I think, were more impressed by the story than I was.
Casey:
But in terms of an exemplar, you know, an example of what media and film could be
Casey:
Oh, it's so cool.
Casey:
And I've hung around Todd Vaziri enough that, like I was saying earlier, the vocabulary of it is, I think, very fascinating.
Casey:
And how do you accomplish directing attention?
Casey:
How do you accomplish keeping the visuals clean so you don't have craft services hanging out just barely off screen?
Casey:
How do you accomplish all that?
Casey:
It was incredibly, incredibly cool.
Casey:
And the story wasn't that moving to me, but the experience was really moving.
Casey:
And I have no idea if Apple is letting people watch this at an Apple store.
Casey:
I would presume not.
Casey:
But if you have a friend with a Vision Pro, which said differently, if you have a friend with more money than cents, then you should definitely watch it.
Casey:
It is very, very neat.
Casey:
And even if you don't have a Vision Pro, there's a five-minute-ish making of, which I think is on YouTube.
Casey:
I'm not 100% sure of that.
Casey:
I will try to remember to put it in the show notes, but I might forget.
Casey:
But there's a five-minute making up.
Casey:
Certainly, it's on Apple TV+, and that is not immersive.
Casey:
That is just a straight-up regular old video.
Casey:
And that was incredibly cool, too, to see how they did it.
Casey:
And this is...
Casey:
This is what I want Apple to do.
Casey:
I want them to, I presume, write a blank check to say, go do some cool shit.
Casey:
And that's what this is.
Casey:
They just went and did some cool stuff.
Casey:
And they apparently built a gigantic submarine set.
Casey:
I'm probably exaggerating, but I thought they said that they built half of a submarine or something like that.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And it does look like the making of is on YouTube, so we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
But it is incredibly, incredibly cool and really unlike anything else.
Casey:
And again, I think I started to make this point.
Casey:
I got it myself sidetracked.
Casey:
But all the other stuff that I've seen, even though I've really liked it, the sports stuff, the nature stuff, like the elephants and the rhinos and whatnot, the
Casey:
the flying around Hawaii.
Casey:
All of those documentaries were incredibly cool and in some ways moving in their own way.
Casey:
But this is so wild to me because this is 100% synthetic in the sense that it is constructed.
Casey:
It's scripted.
Casey:
And I think so much cool stuff could be done with this.
Casey:
And I hope so very much that Apple continues to pull this thread and continues to do this.
Casey:
Because this is the kind of stuff that, to me, and maybe a MetaQuest could do this.
Casey:
I don't have any experience with those.
Casey:
But to me, the only device I have...
Casey:
that can experience something like this is the Vision Pro.
Casey:
And it's these moments that make the otherwise occasionally silly, otherwise stupidly overpriced Vision Pro just seem so very worth it.
Casey:
And so, Marco, even if you don't watch the whole 17 minutes, after you find the Vision Pro and then charge the Vision Pro and then start the Vision Pro and do software updates on the Vision Pro...
Casey:
After you do all those things, as much as I'm snarking, I really do mean it.
Casey:
It is worth giving it a few minutes of your time because it is really, really cool.
Marco:
Honestly, this sounds great, and I do want to watch it sometime soon because the Vision Pro desperately is starving for good content.
Marco:
This is good.
Marco:
This is it.
Marco:
So, you know, the more of this, the better that, you know, we've we're going from nearly zero.
Marco:
So every single additional bit of good content helps.
Marco:
So, yeah, please more of this.
Casey:
And they're learning, right?
Casey:
Because like that MLS thing, granted, that was a documentary, but the MLS thing, it was the one that was, you know, the quick cuts all the time and it was terrible.
Casey:
Then the NFL thing was way better.
Casey:
All these documentaries are getting really, really, really good.
Casey:
And this is, again, like another step above.
Casey:
It's just so cool.
John:
Another tech angle on this is related to something that we talked about at length before and shortly after the Apple Vision Pro was released.
John:
Casey was talking about one of the ways that they were drawing your attention in this narrative fiction thing in the Apple Vision Pro with immersive video is based on depth of field.
John:
What's in focus, what's out of focus to make you look at the thing that's in focus.
John:
That's a thing you can't do.
John:
as easily or really at all with the stage play because with stage play there's someone standing close to you someone standing far away if you choose to look at the person standing far away you will refocus your eyes and they will be in focus because you control your own eyes and you can look wherever you want but the apple vision pro and most other headsets
John:
have a fixed focal distance so you can't casey can't look away from the main character look at the background refocus his eyes and suddenly it becomes in focus that's not how it works that they they chose it is it is essentially a video that he is looking at they chose the depth of field when they recorded the video and even though they're playing it back in a fancy way there's no way for him to focus on that and that's interesting when it comes to narrative because
John:
I think a lot of directors, especially anyone who has worked in traditional video, would say, that's a feature.
John:
I need to be able to control what's in focus and what's not in focus.
John:
That's one of the tools in my tool chest to making video content.
John:
And if you take that away from me,
John:
how am I supposed to do anything?
John:
And then they'd have to talk to playwrights and play directors and say, okay, well, how do you do this in a play?
John:
In a play, the audience can focus wherever they want.
John:
There are different techniques they'd use to direct your attention because they can't really control your focal distance.
John:
But if they did that in a movie, you'd be like, this movie looks like a play.
John:
Why are there spotlights on people?
John:
Why are they suddenly in the dark when they're not talking anymore?
John:
The person gets sad, their head goes down, and now I can't see them anymore because they're in dark?
John:
That's not how the real world works.
John:
This is weird.
John:
Is this a play or is this a movie?
John:
obviously we don't technically have the ability to make affordable high fidelity headsets or ar glasses that allow you to change your focal distance we talked about uh that uh meta was doing a bunch of they have like two or three different prototypes of how to do that with motors and with other clever things that allow you to change where you're viewing your focal distance we also talked about the thing that i can't remember the acronym for which is like
John:
Not being able.
John:
What was that thing called?
John:
Like, you know, you guys know what I'm talking about, right?
John:
But the thing where because you can't refocus your eyes, it can cause discomfort.
John:
Oh, yes.
Marco:
Convergence.
John:
Conflict.
John:
Yeah, there's some acronym.
John:
V-A-C.
John:
Yeah, there's some acronym we talked about, which is a thing.
John:
When you're inside these headsets, you feel like you should be able to look over there and refocus your eyes.
John:
And when it doesn't happen, it can cause eye strain or discomfort or all sorts of other stuff.
John:
And there's an acronym for it that we talked about in the past, right?
John:
this is this is interesting we're in an interesting time here where we currently don't have the technology to do that but if we did have the technology to do it would we want to do it or would we disable that for example when watching an immersive movie like it's so it's such an interesting time for this type of media that we should just try all the things right just in the same way that when movies were first made they were very much like we just put on a play and stuck a camera in front of it and eventually you
John:
The filmmaker has said, you know what, we can do different things in movies than you can do in plays and let's do them.
John:
And we're at that point again or close to being at that point again with headsets because there's stuff you can do in a headset that you can't do in a quote unquote regular movie.
John:
And if we can get to the point where we can also support variable focal distances, well, that's yet another step.
John:
So very exciting stuff.
John:
I'm glad to see them experiment with this.
John:
And then finally, with AR glasses, that's another interesting place where it's like, well, with like AR glasses, you can change your focal distance when you're looking at the real world because they're just glasses and you're looking through them to the actual room.
John:
Right.
John:
But you could put everything that is projected in a single plane.
John:
And so you do have to refocus your eyes on the floating window in front of you that's always two feet away.
John:
And then when you want to look at the thing that's 20 feet away, you have to refocus, right?
John:
So we already kind of have that variable focal distance by cheating by saying the real world is all the focal distances.
John:
And then the stuff we project is fixed focal distance.
John:
So I do feel like we're taking baby steps towards...
John:
essentially more like the live theater experience of you can focus on anything you want but yeah i would love to see this this video you mentioned them having a blank check or wishing they could have a blank check at 17 minutes i don't think this check was very blank but you know it's better than nothing
Casey:
A couple other very quick things.
Casey:
The first time I watched it, I watched it with my AirPods Pro 2.
Casey:
This is not the ones with the instant audio or whatever it is, the lossless audio.
Casey:
You know what I'm thinking of, the one with the USB-C case.
Casey:
My case is still a lightning case.
Casey:
It sounded incredible, as you would expect.
Casey:
However, this morning, I just watched it with the audio pods, whatever you call it, on the straps of the Vision Pro.
Casey:
Still sounded phenomenal.
Casey:
Those things are stunningly good.
Casey:
Now, granted, if I was watching like a, you know, two-hour movie, I would probably feel over time that, okay, maybe this isn't as bassy as I would want or something like that.
Casey:
But for just quick stuff like that, I cannot overstate how good the audio pods are.
Casey:
It's really quite surprising.
Casey:
And then also very quickly, in that five-minute Making Up video, I wanted to call out, and I think I did this on Mastodon, but I wanted to call out here.
Casey:
I'm curious if anyone who's listening happens to know—I've seen a lot of conjecture, but I'd be curious if anyone knows—that whenever they show people watching back what they had just filmed on the Vision Pro, which they do a lot in this Making Up video—
Casey:
Every Vision Pro I saw, which maybe I missed one, but every Vision Pro I saw had the developer strap.
Casey:
But none of the developer straps were plugged into anything at the time.
Casey:
So were they actually using the developer strap the whole time and they were just not showing it for the purposes of this making of?
Casey:
Was it just that Apple happened to hand them developer strap equipped Vision Pros?
Casey:
I'm really curious what that was used for.
Casey:
So if you know, I don't need conjecture.
Casey:
I've heard all the theories.
Casey:
But if you know, you can tell me.
Casey:
I'm not going to tell anyone.
John:
i've got a conjecture what have you heard my conjecture i don't know i don't think i've heard it from you but i probably have heard that same conjecture somewhere else it makes me think that like uh you know there are things you might want to do with the vision pro on a movie set in terms of connecting it to other devices that aren't supported by the vanilla vision pro and they're like oh well we'll we'll hack in support for that but you have to use the developer strap to do so connecting it to monitors connecting it to video things all stuff like that that's my guess
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, and I've heard similar guesses before.
Casey:
And just the most common one would be like file transfer, you know, like, could you get file transfer onto this thing faster that way?
Casey:
And I don't have a good answer.
John:
And by the way, the thing that we were trying to think of, VAC, vergence accommodation conflict for the probably fifth time we will put that in the show notes.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Maxell Amador writes, your recent member special episode about photo workflows inspired me to take a look at my own photo editing pipeline.
Casey:
Hopefully you use the three of us as cautionary tales.
Casey:
I shoot with my own iPhone 16 Pro camera and a Canon Rebel SL3 and sometimes an old film, Canon AE1.
Casey:
I'd like to get good at actually editing my photos.
Casey:
Me too.
Casey:
Especially the ones I take on the Canon.
Casey:
The problem is, I don't know where to start.
Casey:
Me too.
Casey:
Searching for, quote, how to edit photos on YouTube was overwhelming, and most of the videos talk about Lightroom.
Casey:
In general, should I be editing every photo I take, even the heaths with the iPhone?
Casey:
Like casual photos of my friends?
Casey:
Should I shoot JPEG in RAW on the Canon or even the iPhone?
Casey:
Should I try something like Pixelmator Pro or stick with Apple Photos Editor?
Casey:
Should I avoid RAW completely since I'm such a noob?
Casey:
How does one get good at this?
Casey:
I missed the auto-enhance feature on Apple Photos and generally... Excuse me, I messed with the auto-enhance feature on Apple Photos and generally like the results...
Casey:
But that is a big no-no with photographers as it can overexpose or make some weird edits based on machine learning, maybe?
Casey:
Question mark?
Casey:
I do generally enjoy photography as a hobby, but it seems daunting to me.
Casey:
I appreciate any tips for a very, very basic start to taking photos and editing them.
Casey:
This was genuinely written by somebody named Maxell Amador, but it could have been damn near word for word written by me.
Casey:
So, gentlemen, I don't care which one of you it is.
Casey:
Maybe we'll start with Marco, but tell me, what do I do?
Casey:
What does Maxell do?
Casey:
What do we do?
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So Maxwell says, in general, should I be editing every photo I take?
Marco:
No, definitely not.
Marco:
You will never take photos again if that's the restriction you're putting on yourself.
Marco:
So number one, like I think you have to ask yourself, like, you know, what what are you trying to get out of it?
Marco:
Are you trying to be a professional photographer?
Marco:
Are you trying to become a person with a large following on something like Instagram?
Marco:
If the answer to both of those is no, then what you're trying to do is just make your photos nicer for yourself and your family and whoever else you're sharing them with, maybe.
Marco:
But that's...
Marco:
That dramatically lowers the bar and removes a lot of the stress angle from a lot of it.
Marco:
Because if you're just editing photos mostly for yourself, not for public sharing, which, by the way, that's what I do.
Marco:
I hardly ever share photos anymore on public social networks.
Marco:
But I, all the time, will take photos.
Marco:
And I'll either enjoy them as myself.
Marco:
Part of the one thing I decided to do recently...
Marco:
I've talked about how part of the reason I have big cameras is just to shoot pretty landscapes that I see.
Marco:
And what do I do with those landscapes?
Marco:
Not much.
Marco:
I usually just make them my desktop wallpaper.
Marco:
Like that's it.
Marco:
Like it's my desktop wallpaper.
Marco:
And I recently decided, you know, I like having photo printers and we have all these blank walls in our new house.
Marco:
Why don't I fix this problem?
Marco:
Why don't I get a couple of frames and put my own landscape pictures in them and hang them in my office?
Marco:
Nice and easy.
Marco:
And so now I have another goal.
Marco:
I'm going to pick out a few pictures to hang in my office.
Marco:
Now, this takes editing.
Marco:
But the editing that I will do to those pictures is literally just like, what will make this look good as a printed picture to my own eyes?
Marco:
And what will make this make me happy to look at?
Marco:
That's very different from how should I make this photo perfectly edited so that people will like me on TickTube or whatever.
Marco:
If you're going for public honors and praise that way, that's a very different thing from just make this the way you like it.
Marco:
So I'm going to focus the rest of this on making it the way you like it because, frankly...
Marco:
I don't have the skills to do the public praise side of it.
Marco:
That's not at all anything I know anything about.
Marco:
So first of all, should you be editing every photo?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
You shouldn't even be keeping every photo you take.
Marco:
You should take – so I once heard that the secret to good photography is large amounts of bad photography.
Marco:
And the idea is you take a bunch of shots because some of them are going to work.
Marco:
Some of them aren't.
Marco:
If you're going to start searching how to improve your photos, editing is kind of down the list from other things like composition and lighting.
Marco:
Those matter a lot more.
Marco:
But we're talking about editing in this question.
Marco:
I get that.
Marco:
This is a song about Alice.
Marco:
So should you shoot JPEG plus RAW?
Marco:
It depends.
Marco:
Should you be using Lightroom or Apple Photos?
Marco:
It depends.
Marco:
When you're dealing with the very early days of editing, most of the edits you're going to want to do are fairly subtle changes to what the camera or the iPhone will be doing automatically.
Marco:
You don't want to get into like really ridiculous stuff when you're getting at the gate.
Marco:
You want to do subtle changes and you want to just play with some sliders and see kind of what is going to be pleasing to you.
Marco:
Where I would suggest you start is exposure and white balance.
Marco:
Now, exposure includes multiple things.
Marco:
That isn't just the main minus one, plus one kind of control.
Marco:
It's also things like highlights, shadows, and contrast.
Marco:
I kind of lumped that all in with exposure.
Marco:
I know it's probably wrong, but I don't care.
Marco:
What you want to do, you know, start out, the very first edit you should do is get the white balance right.
Marco:
Now, iPhone photos usually will do this for you pretty well.
Marco:
You normally won't have to adjust much.
Marco:
If you are shooting with an external camera and you're shooting indoors, you will almost certainly have orange pictures.
Marco:
The cameras have gotten better over time.
Marco:
Yeah, or blue, depending on if you have the wrong setting.
Marco:
But if you shoot with auto white balance indoors on a camera, your pictures will probably end up orange and you should probably adjust the white balance somewhat.
Marco:
And that's what you're looking for is subtlety, subtle tweaks.
Marco:
The advantage of shooting RAW is that a lot of these tweaks become lossless.
Marco:
And so you can then later on when you realize that you're terrible at editing now and everything you did now is garish, you can go back and re-edit your favorites and kind of tone it down a little and use your new skill.
John:
I wouldn't call that the main advantage of RAW is because if you use Apple Photos, all your edits are reversible.
John:
You don't have to worry about messing things up in that way.
Marco:
raw a lot gives you more uh latitude for the things you can change but uh but if you use if you're using apple photos which it sounds like max l is uh don't worry about your edits edit fearlessly you can always revert to original good point yeah fair enough um so anyway yeah raw basically gives you a lot of headway but i i think so max l asked should i avoid raw completely since i'm such a noob
Marco:
I think maybe yes.
Marco:
I think maybe avoid RAW at first simply because RAW files are, you know, by definition, less processed.
Marco:
So they start out in a much worse state usually and need a lot more in editing to look good.
Marco:
Also, they are huge and they are cumbersome and they are more slow to edit.
Marco:
They take up more resources.
Marco:
And so what that might do is discourage you from editing or shooting.
Marco:
And that's the last thing you want.
Marco:
So, what I do... I mean, this is... Let's see.
Marco:
Maxwell, you say you have the Canon Rebel SL3 and the iPhone 16 Pro.
Marco:
I don't know anything about these.
Marco:
Does that have a dual card slot by any chance?
Marco:
Can you do my trick?
Marco:
But anyway, my trick is JPEG on one card, RAW on the other, and mostly never even use the RAWs and just import the JPEGs.
Marco:
You can do the same thing on one card, just a little bit more work.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
I strongly suggest just deal with the JPEGs at first.
Marco:
And it'll make everything faster and lighter weight and smaller and lower impact.
Marco:
And that's what you want as you're getting into this because you're going to make a lot of bad choices.
Marco:
And the last thing you want in the learning process is to slow down your iteration and the cycle and you don't want to discourage yourself.
Marco:
So basically, you get good at it by...
Marco:
learning what each of the controls do in the editor.
Marco:
So the best thing I can say is just kind of start sliding some around and look at what they do with the picture and you can see.
Marco:
So like when you move the highlights up and down, you can see, oh, it blows out the sky versus trying to unblow it out.
Marco:
You move the shadows up and down, oh, all the dark areas get lighter and you can see more details, but it raises the noise floor.
Marco:
You can play with the exposure, you can play with the contrast, see what looks ridiculous, see what looks more calm.
Marco:
kind of just play with it and and i i would say like just try to yeah try to learn what each of those sliders does by experimenting with it and then however you think you might want to edit a picture dial it back a little bit afterwards like yeah go nuts with the contrast make it look really cool and then dial it back to like half of what you did and that that's probably better so anyway all right john where am i wrong
John:
Well, so yeah, let me, I mostly agree with the things you said, especially that you shouldn't be editing every photo.
John:
Like that's madness.
John:
What you should be doing is going through every photo and chucking the terrible ones and finding the ones that you really think are good.
John:
And the ones that you really think are good, edit those.
John:
My last time I checked, I'm about at 10%.
John:
of the photos I take, I edit.
John:
And that's after throwing away the terrible ones, so it's obviously less than 10%, right?
John:
So I throw away the terrible ones.
John:
What's left out of those?
John:
One in 10, I essentially fave, and that is one that I will edit.
John:
In terms of raw, I mostly agree with Marco, except I will say you should...
John:
have some raws somewhere if you have a dual card thing and you can put the raws on one card and mostly ignore them great but if you have a single card every once in a while take a raw once just to give you a feel for what does raw give me the other things don't it would be ideal if you could take both jpeg and raw and do what i do which is just deal with the jpegs except for for the for the 10 that are your favorites pull the raws for those because that will teach you when you're doing any kind of editing oh i can't get this photo to look right which i'll talk about in a second
John:
When you face that situation, you might say, let me look at the raw.
John:
And if you use a good app, you're like, huh, I couldn't get this JPEG to look decent.
John:
But this raw, I can get it to look good.
John:
And it will teach you the advantages of raw, right?
John:
So I would say, don't ignore raw, but absolutely do not shoot everything in raw.
John:
Don't import everything.
John:
You'll be overwhelmed with data.
John:
It's just a waste of time that makes your camera slower, right?
John:
But don't totally ignore it.
John:
So every once in a while, get a raw just to start to get a feel for it.
John:
I'm only a little bit farther on my photo editing journey than Maxell, so I can't tell you how to go all the way to be super-duper expert.
John:
And by the way, super-duper experts who are, as Marco says, trying to become famous for their photography, they also don't edit every photo.
John:
Nobody edits every photo.
John:
Everyone takes a lot of photos.
John:
Only some of them are going to be good.
John:
What I would say to focus on first with the editing is...
John:
The simple things like when you look at this picture, is there some part of it that you wish you could see that you can't?
John:
Is there something that you wish you could see that's like either completely black or too dark?
John:
Can you fix that with editing?
John:
Is there something in the picture that you wish you could see that's too bright or completely white?
John:
And can you fix that?
John:
If you have overexposed something, you won't be able to fix that.
John:
And you might be able to check in the raw if you can, but like that's undesirable.
John:
But if the sky is the thing that's overexposed and it's completely white and you don't care about that because the person's face is correctly exposed, like just those two things of like, is there something in this picture that I wish I could see that I can't?
John:
Does this photo look bad because, oh, I can't see that person's face.
John:
The dog looks like a silhouette and I didn't mean it to.
John:
The sky doesn't look the way I remember it.
John:
Figure out which controls lets you essentially recover from the edges when you captured this photo It you know what we say about blowing out the highlights That's when something is completely white and you can't get anything back from it.
John:
You're like I wish I could see that White tells me nothing.
John:
It's 100% white I see nothing but there was actually something there like there was texture to that clouds It wasn't 100% white or this thing is too dark and I can't see the person's face They just look like they're silhouetted, but when I was there I could see their face Can I fix that right?
John:
that's where i would start with photos and i guess that includes white balance too because that's when you get into like do these colors look weird to you does this picture look weird that's something you can tell uh better sometimes when you're looking at all your thumbnails like in the thumbnail view we got this giant grid of thumbnails
John:
especially if you have a bunch of outdoor pictures than a bunch of indoor ones, then you really see the yellowness of the indoor ones because lots of our indoor lights have a color temperature that is warmer than the sun.
John:
And a lot of people like that, which is why we keep doing it on purpose.
John:
I certainly do.
John:
But if you see the thumbnails together, you'd be like, oh, all these pictures look like someone peed on them.
John:
They're all yellow because they're indoor.
John:
Maybe when you're looking at them in isolation, you might not notice.
John:
And maybe you even want to keep them that way, but be aware that's a thing, right?
John:
So those are the places I would start.
John:
What's too bright?
John:
What's too dark?
John:
What looks like someone peed on it?
John:
That's a good starting point.
John:
The other thing that I will add to this discussion is part of the process of finding, you know, the 10% or whatever pictures that you like and trying to edit them is
John:
is that you'll you'll look at them and you're like oh this look such a great picture or whatever and you'll try to do some edit to get it to look the way you want and that process of editing will teach you how to take better pictures because you'll be like oh this picture this picture will be so good but i cut off this person's head or there's some obnoxious person in the background that i can't ai erase that ruined this picture for me if only i had taken from a different angle or i
John:
I didn't realize that the entire background where someone's garbage can is would be in focus in this picture.
John:
And it would be such a good picture if that stupid garbage can wasn't in focus.
John:
Right.
John:
The act of editing, the act of trying to rescue these pictures like this is almost a good picture.
John:
What can I do to fix it?
John:
Can I crop this?
John:
I wish I'd taken I wish I'd step back two feet because I'm missing something here.
John:
It looks like a light bulb coming out of this person's head.
John:
The process of editing.
John:
will teach you what to do next time to capture a better picture and i know you're asking about editing and margot touched on this as well but in the end editing it's too late you can only do so much with editing you want to capture good pictures that is this most important skill of photography is
John:
knowing when and where to point your camera that is the most important skill and i know you're asking about editing but the process of editing the process of trying to take a picture that you think is almost good and make it better and realizing what you can't do in editing even with ai you can't get you can't reframe it you can't point in a different direction you can't decide to use the flash or not use the flash every time you encounter that in editing you
John:
that will teach you the next time you're out there with your camera what you want to do differently so that that i feel like for me is one of the most important parts of editing is not the process of taking a picture trying to make it better it's the process of learning what you did wrong when you were capturing the photo that you will avoid next time so the next time when you go to editing your job will be so much easier you won't have to crop as much you won't have to lose as much resolution the lighting will be better you won't
John:
accidentally put the garbage can in the background and focus the light pole won't be coming out of the person's head that i think is one of the most important uh benefits of doing editing and it might it feels disheartening because you're like i'm doing all this editing and all i'm learning is that i can't make these pictures good it's nothing that my editing skills aren't good enough and honestly even if you get it to a pro sometimes you're like there's no rescuing this one it was framed poorly it wasn't exposed correctly you cannot make this a good picture
John:
That seems disheartening, but that is the process that will teach you to make a better capture next time.
Casey:
Those are great answers.
Casey:
Thank you, gentlemen.
Casey:
Additionally, we have Scott Schuchart, who writes, I'm trying to compress three large-ish files, about 20 to 60 gigabytes each.
Casey:
using the Finder, and they're taking forever.
Casey:
According to Activity Monitor, Archive Service, which I assume is a compressor, is running six threads, but only using between 95% and 140% CPU.
Casey:
This is in a MacBook Pro M2 Pro with 10 cores.
Casey:
Nothing else significant is happening, and it's plugged in with no fan noise.
Casey:
Why can't it spin up at least three performance cores to get this done faster?
Casey:
What are these chips for?
John:
i think it's an interesting question because a lot of the times in people's regular computing lives especially if they're using phones there's this question that i always uh ask make people think about is there anything you do with your computer that makes you wait and a lot of people will say honestly no like unless i'm waiting for an animation to complete like i don't do anything like my computer where i'm like come on come on this is taking too long because
John:
the magic of modern technology is a lot of times now people will say waiting they used to say waiting for a web page to load or like a cellular is bad waiting for something to load like lots of network related stuff but like if you really want to get down to it like is there anything you're waiting for the cpu for uh gamers would say yeah i'm waiting for it to draw the next frame faster because i'm getting 20 frames per second on this thing and i really wish i could get 60 or whatever like there there are answers to this question it's not like we're like we have infinite performance and this is another interesting one
John:
This is a thing I think a lot of people who use just, you know, Macs and PCs find themselves doing, which is like, I asked my computer to do a thing.
John:
And because of the size of the data involved, like trying to, you know, do something with a 20 or 60 gig file, I'm waiting for it to be done.
John:
And I'm like, why?
John:
You know, I see a progress bar.
John:
I have to wait several minutes.
John:
Sometimes it's, you know, network related, but sometimes even just on the local thing, you're like, is this, what's the bottleneck here?
John:
Is it, as we would say in the business, IO bound?
John:
Am I waiting for things to be read off of disk or written to disk?
John:
Is it CPU bound?
John:
And Scott is asking, my computer seems like it's doing nothing.
John:
It's chill.
John:
Like the fans aren't running.
John:
It's not using all of its resources.
John:
And yet here I am looking at a progress bar.
John:
Here I am waiting.
John:
I'm waiting for my computer.
John:
And I don't understand why, because it seems like it's got more resources that could be putting towards this.
John:
um if you are a computer science major or ever studied this at all you'll uh inevitably run into amdahl's law which is we'll put a link to the wikipedia page um it's often used in the context of parallel computing which is what they used to call it back in the day when you had more than one processor although now everything does um to predict the theoretical speed up when i'm reading for the wikipedia page here when using multiple processors for example if a program needs 20 hours to complete you can tell how long ago this was written if a program needs 20 hours to complete using a single thread it
John:
and a one-hour portion of the program cannot be parallelized, then only the remaining 19 hours of execution can be parallelized.
John:
Therefore, regardless of how many threads are devoted to a parallelized execution of this program, the minimum execution time is always more than one hour.
John:
So it's basically saying there are some things that you can do in parallel and some things that can't.
John:
And even if you make the things that can be done in parallel happen instantaneously, which you're not going to, but if you can make them be done instantaneously because you deploy 7 million processors and there's no overhead to distributing the work to them, which also doesn't happen, you're never going to get it faster than the time it takes for those serial portions.
John:
Sometimes running a particular compression algorithm has parts of it that are parallelizable and parts of it that are not.
John:
And you're never going to make it run faster than the parts that are not.
John:
They are the long pole.
John:
They are the thing that you can't shrink.
John:
No matter how many more threads you throw at it, there are certain portions of it that you can't work on at the same time.
John:
Now, this particular task, compressing this, is this compression algorithm parallelizable?
John:
Yes.
John:
If so, is the thing that is running it in a parallel not devoting enough threads to it?
John:
This can happen, especially on macOS.
John:
There's lots of things, and I've complained about this before, where it's like, there's a task, and there's a portion of it that are parallelizable, but it is intentionally run by the program or the OS.
John:
in a way that it uses fewer resources.
John:
It's run at low priority.
John:
It's run at a low number of threads so that it doesn't make your computer feel unresponsive.
John:
But sometimes this is the only thing you want your computer to do and you want it to do it right now.
John:
I talk about like, you know, the photos.
John:
Please recognize faces now.
John:
Please analyze my photos now.
John:
It's literally the only thing I want you to do.
John:
I'm going to walk away, use all my resources to do it.
John:
And macOS and Apple's apps in particular are terrible at that.
John:
I'm going to guess in this case, the main problem is the like right click finder thing that compresses files has a cap on how many threads it will ever use and therefore is never gonna go faster than that.
John:
Now, it may also be the case that this algorithm is not parallelizable sufficiently, so more threads wouldn't help.
John:
I don't know specifically, but these are the potential scenarios.
John:
One of them is just like,
John:
theoretical like if you pick an algorithm you can't break into like 75 chunks you can only break it into like four chunks right there's it's you know there's not parallelizable past that because there's interdepend data interdependencies between the tasks and they need to communicate and synchronize with each other and there's serial portions then you're stuck but specifically in apple platforms apple is good slash bad about making choices for you that ensure that the system remains responsive under all circumstances by limiting the amount of parallel work that can be done
John:
And you would like more options, like, for example, past sponsor Backblaze that I use on my computer to back it up.
John:
It actually has a pop-up menu in the little, like, settings that says, hey, when Backblaze is running and backing up your stuff, how many threads do you want it to use?
John:
And the default is pretty low because you don't, like, as we say in the ad reads, you don't even know Backblaze is running half the time.
John:
The default is, like, just do your work.
John:
It'll back up your stuff behind the scenes or whatever.
John:
It's using a small number of threads to not disturb you, right?
John:
The way I personally run Backblaze on one of my computers is because I have a million backups running all day, every day anyway.
John:
I make Backblaze run only at 3 a.m.
John:
and I give it like 99, like whatever the maximum number of threads is.
John:
Obviously, there's a point of diminishing returns.
John:
You shouldn't give it way more threads than you have CPU cores.
John:
But I have a lot of CPU cores.
John:
I give it a huge number of cores.
John:
So it wakes up at 3 a.m., runs my Backblaze thing, and it runs it using every resource on the system.
John:
So much so that if I was to come downstairs at 3 a.m.
John:
and try to use my computer, I would notice that Backblaze is running because I've intentionally said, use it all, peg everything, go as fast as you can, and believe me, it makes a big difference because I have a fast internet connection, but just the process of finding all the change files, reading all those change files, and sending them up to fill my one gigabit upwards pipe,
John:
I need to be reading and sending from as many files at once as I want.
John:
Backblaze gives me that option.
John:
The right click menu in the finder for compressing files does not give you that option.
John:
So the answer, I think in this case, without knowing anything about the compression algorithm or how a parallelizable zip is, is that Apple is doing this to try to help you.
John:
And in this case, you do not want this help from Apple.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our sponsors, Squarespace and Uncommon Goods.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime.
Marco:
This is a bonus topic that we do every week.
Marco:
This week in ATP Overtime, we're going to be talking about what is the right product mix for the iPhone?
Marco:
Like what models should we have in the iPhone line?
Marco:
So we will talk about that in overtime.
Marco:
Join now to listen at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you, everybody.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you later.
Marco:
Next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-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-
Marco:
I've discovered a feature on the BMW iX that I didn't even know it offered and is quite interesting.
Marco:
So most high-end cars these days have some kind of
Marco:
what what tesla called auto steer back in the day some kind of like lane keeping plus radar cruise control so that if you're driving on the highway and you just want to stay in the lane that you're in and stay you know an appropriate distance from the vehicle in front of you the car will drive itself for you in that context as long as it can you know see the lane markers and stuff like that
Marco:
So I knew going into this car that BMW had some kind of system that was very similar to this and that it worked pretty well.
Marco:
I tried it briefly during the test drive and it was fine.
Marco:
So I now have more time with it.
Marco:
And I learned, as I was driving, I kept seeing, as I would engage the system that works very similarly to Tesla AutoSteer, I would engage it and you keep your hands on the wheel and everything.
Marco:
And then it kept saying in little text below the indicator that
Marco:
Assist plus ready.
Marco:
And I thought, well, that's interesting.
Marco:
What's ready that I'm not already doing?
Marco:
Eventually, I figured it out.
Marco:
Assist plus is like Tesla auto steer.
Marco:
However, you take your hands off the wheel and just leave them off.
Marco:
And so it's hands-free.
Marco:
And I think it seems to be using cameras or something to look at me to make sure I am paying attention to the road.
Marco:
But it is otherwise hands-free.
Marco:
And so you can just like, you know, put your hands in your lap.
Marco:
I mean, you know, insert joke here, but like you just, you just put your hands down.
John:
And by the way, the reason it's looking at you, presumably, I don't know if it's using like IR cameras.
John:
The reason it's looking at you to make sure you're looking at the road is because although it allows you to take your hands off the steering wheel, what it's trying to tell you is that at any moment, Marco, the driver of this car, we may ask you to take over.
John:
We may throw up our hands and say...
John:
Can't do it.
John:
Driver, human, you're up.
John:
And by the way, if we do that, it may be because something catastrophic has happened that we can't deal with.
John:
So you better be looking at the road because at any second we may ask you to make a life or death decision.
John:
But anyway, for now, you can put your hands in your lap.
John:
It's fine.
Marco:
Yeah, be chill.
Marco:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
See, you may think like I thought when I first learned that I could do this, I thought, well, how different could that be from what, you know, the Tesla AutoSteer version of it is just like, well, you have to have your hands on the wheel because it's like sensing whether you're applying any kind of resistance or touching the wheel or anything.
Marco:
But if you take your hands off for like, you know, more than a few seconds, it'll start yelling at you saying, put your hands on the wheel.
Marco:
I'm like, well, how different can that really be?
Marco:
Because
Marco:
When you're doing that, you're kind of loosely resting your hands on the wheel, but letting it steer itself.
Marco:
So you're not really applying any pressure.
Marco:
You're just kind of loosely resting your hands there.
Marco:
Let me tell you, it's very different when you don't have your hands on the wheel at all.
Marco:
I don't think I like it, and I don't think it should be legal.
John:
I mean, for one thing, it is ever so slightly decreasing your minimum possible response time because now you have to move your hands to the wheel in a situation where something is emerging and saying, you've got to take over right now.
John:
And at least with Tesla, if it is correctly policing you and saying, keeping your hands on the wheel.
John:
At least your hands are hopefully already on the wheel.
John:
But if they're on your lap or in your pockets or you're picking your nose or whatever you're doing, oh, time to take over.
John:
Now there is some fraction of a second where you have to correctly find and grip the steering wheel before you can begin to do the steering that you need to do at that moment.
John:
And that is probably not a good thing.
Marco:
Right, and you're going 70 miles an hour down the highway when this is happening.
Marco:
How many feet have you covered during that fraction of a second?
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
So let me tell you, it is so unnerving.
Marco:
Because first of all, okay, so you take your hands off the wheel and it activates and it lights up and everything.
Marco:
And you're like, okay, well, what do I do with my hands?
Marco:
I know, insert joke.
Marco:
But like...
Marco:
You have to keep looking at the road.
Marco:
If you look away too much, it'll go boom, driver distraction detected, and then it'll start yelling at you.
Marco:
And I assume it will disengage after a while if you keep doing it, but I haven't gotten to that point.
Marco:
And honestly, the funniest thing about it is that the first time during any drive that you take your hands off the wheel and therefore engage Assist Plus...
Marco:
it shows up this it shows this giant disclaimer like this two paragraph thing on the screen you die it's not our fault that you have to just that you have to dismiss but it's like well i have to look away from the road for a few seconds to dismiss this tremendous wall of text that you show me every time it's like the tutorial level that teaches you that it's watching where you look
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But yeah, so like it's really unnerving because like the Tesla auto steer and the Rivian to some degree, Tesla was a little worse.
Marco:
But like what those taught me is these kind of systems mostly work but occasionally make mistakes.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Where they might like, you know, steer me a little too close to a divider or, you know, like the car in front of you might merge into your lane and it might react a little slowly or a little bit harshly or whatever.
Marco:
And so what I learned is sometimes you give little corrective feedback with the steering wheel while using these.
Marco:
But when your hands are in your lap, that you can't really do that.
Marco:
And so, even though the BMW system so far, whether my hands are on the wheel or not, has not given me any reason to doubt it.
Marco:
Like, it seems very good so far.
Marco:
I've only done, you know, local Long Island Highway so far.
Marco:
I haven't been off the island yet with it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It seems very good so far.
Marco:
So I trust it so far.
Marco:
But the level of trust you have to have to just put your hands in your lap is so much higher than having your hands still on the wheel.
Marco:
Because suppose it tries to jerk the wheel really hard left or right.
Marco:
If your hands are on the wheel, you'll catch it really quickly and possibly even physically prevent it from doing that.
Marco:
If your hands are in your lap, it's going to make that full movement before your hands even get there again.
Marco:
So I kind of want... And what it's gaining me is... I'm not sure what.
John:
Well, I mean, you mentioned that you have to have so much higher level of trust.
John:
You, Marco, have to have so much higher level of trust.
John:
But I think a lot of the average people, what it will essentially do is make them so much more likely to...
John:
Zone out in daydream.
John:
And the thing that is looking at their eyes will say their eyes are still on the road.
John:
But what they actually have is a thousand yard stare where they're not looking at anything.
John:
Their eyes are pointed forward ostensibly to the road, but they're thinking about what they're going to make for dinner like these type of things.
John:
The more it allows you to stop paying attention and zone out, which you can totally do while still, quote unquote, looking at the road.
John:
the more likely it is that you're going to be in a bad situation when they suddenly ask you to take over.
John:
And so even though you're thinking like with your tech brain, like, oh, I need to trust this and so on and so forth, people are like, well, the car wouldn't let me do this if it wasn't safe.
John:
And it's just human nature.
John:
You'll be on the long trip and you'll be looking forward because the thing will have trained you.
John:
Hey, if you don't keep looking forward, the thing is going to bing at you and whatever.
John:
So you're like, fine.
John:
And your neck's just going to be pointing your eyes straight at the thing.
John:
And you're going to be like staring straight forward like that cat with the newspaper saying...
John:
I should buy a boat.
John:
And then you're going to, you know, go underneath the truck and kill yourself.
John:
Right?
John:
Like that's, that's the, this is the dangers that I've talked about a million times.
John:
Don't ask humans to maintain vigilance when there's nothing for them to actually do until a split second later when they have to save everyone's life.
John:
Right?
John:
Either make them do stuff enough to pay attention or remove the steering wheel, and then it's all on the car to steer.
John:
And these in-between things, this is the terrible in-between thing that I don't know if they should be illegal, but I would never recommend anybody that I cared about to use whatever system makes them stop being vigilant.
John:
I think, Marco, you're probably still vigilant with this because already you're like, I got to trust this thing and it's weighing me out or whatever.
John:
So you're still vigilant at this point.
John:
But like, don't don't push that line.
John:
Right.
John:
Like use the thing that helps you have a more relaxing drive while still paying attention.
John:
And whatever level allows you to zone out.
John:
crank it back one right and that's an individual thing but honestly i think from the manufacturer's perspective it would be more responsible for these car manufacturers to not to like skip that middle part to say driver assistance nothing in the middle and we figured out
John:
you know full self-driving no pedals no steering wheel right but in that middle gray area i wish automakers would avoid they're not gonna because of competitive pressure pressure isn't because people do like it but it just seems like such a terrible idea i mean there's ongoing in this country uh nits investigations of tesla auto steer and all sorts of higher accident rates based on driver assistance or whatever and
John:
this varies from brand to brand and everyone will argue that their brand does it better than other brand and you know it's it is a fluid thing but like this is something like you don't want to be a beta tester with your life if you can possibly avoid it even if the features ship even if they don't have a beta label on them or whatever you don't have to use every feature that your car has right just you know be safe out there
Marco:
By the way, you know who is even more weirded out by this feature?
Marco:
The passengers of the car when you're using it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Let me tell you, they do not like that at all.
John:
No, because this is like a, you know, what do you call it?
John:
trust multiple times removed you have to trust the car and they have to trust you trusting the car and they don't know anything about the car and maybe they know anything about you if it's a stranger right so it's like can you imagine taking an uber and it's like a bmw and the person takes their hands off the wheel now you have to trust trust both this bmw and this uber driver you've never met in your life i mean you have to trust them anyway when they're driving but like
John:
You know, at least at least your their hands are on the wheel and you hope that they will do something sensible to save their own life.
John:
Whereas they're they're zoning out while they're quote unquote driving you somewhere.
John:
It's like maybe I should just take a Waymo.