00:00:00 ◼ ► I just barely made it here. I had to rush, pair all the socks and the laundry before I came in here.
00:00:07 ◼ ► I thought you were going to say you had to rush home from Manhattan, you know, you're living the fancy lad life or something like that. Nope. Just matching socks.
00:00:16 ◼ ► On the bed was a whole bunch of unsorted socks. And usually, as I've discussed on the show, my roles in the household are kitchen dog, wires, and puke. And Tiff is soft things, plants, school, and fun.
00:00:27 ◼ ► Now, soft things would typically be her purview, so she does all the laundry. However, there are occasional exceptions that poke holes in those boundaries because one person really hates something or doesn't mind something.
00:00:39 ◼ ► And one of the things is that Tiff does all the laundry but really hates pairing socks. So that is my job. So I wanted to hurry up and...
00:00:46 ◼ ► You can't do that in a hurry, though. If you do it in a hurry, you're not going to match them up right.
00:00:57 ◼ ► I think you both underestimate the sneaky, sir. And that's a reference. I bet Jon didn't even get "what now?"
00:01:05 ◼ ► Yeah, no. The thing about matching socks is it's not so much just finding the sock that is the same sock as that one. They go in pairs in terms of wear and age, you know what I mean? And right and left. So you really want to pair the ones that have always been together to be back together.
00:01:23 ◼ ► Even when you have 16 of the same socks that came in a pack when you bought them all, you can't just match them up willy-nilly with their other socks when they come out. They have to go back with their partner.
00:01:37 ◼ ► Well, so, okay, yeah. So one of them, yes, one of them is my favorite socks are from former sponsor Marine Layer. And they're one of those things where they'll have five pairs of socks in stock at any given time and they just rotate out all the time.
00:01:52 ◼ ► So you kind of have to buy them if you see them, if you like them. And so as a result, I have all sorts of different socks from Marine Layer and I try never to buy two of the same pair. So I actually don't have two identical sets of the same socks except for the summer short socks, which is just like some big Adidas bulk pack of ankle socks I bought.
00:02:11 ◼ ► So far, those are just so interchangeable that it doesn't really matter. They're just all a bunch of gray socks.
00:02:15 ◼ ► That's what I'm saying. You're not as discerning. You're like, "Ah, you've seen one Adidas athletic sock. You've seen them all. They can go with any of them." But no, there are pairs.
00:02:23 ◼ ► There aren't. Not for those. But the other thing is what really dramatically shrinks the time for any kind of laundry folding, especially with socks, is I used to do the service to my family of turning them all the right way as part of this process.
00:02:41 ◼ ► Is that a service? That's just called folding laundry. Are you putting socks in your drawer inside out?
00:02:45 ◼ ► Well, if you ball the socks up, it kind of doesn't matter whether they're inside or not. And so I've decided that when I remove my clothing, not to get TMI listeners, but when I remove my clothing, I leave it in the laundry the right side in or out or whatever.
00:03:03 ◼ ► So my laundry does not have to be turned back because I'm conscientious on the way into the machine. So all my laundry comes out, for the most part, the right way. So my socks are all the right way. And the rest of my family's socks, I just fold them exactly the way they left them.
00:03:21 ◼ ► That's spiteful. And if you put them into the washing machine inside out and they have crap on them, the crap is going to stay stuck inside the socks. Like if you get a bunch of little bits of leaf or wood chips or whatever stuck to the bottom of your sock and you take it off inside out and it goes in the washing machine, that stuff's not coming out. It's going to be right in there when you turn it the other way. So you're not even getting your stuff clean.
00:03:52 ◼ ► Well, see, one of the services you provide by doing laundry is turn them right side out before you put them in the washing machine.
00:03:58 ◼ ► Yes, that's what, well, when I take my own clothes off and put them in the laundry, that's what I do. But the rest of my family, hey, they can do what they want to do. They're people.
00:04:10 ◼ ► Alright, let's do some follow-up. I know everyone is waiting with bated breath to know how football went this past Sunday. The Giants lost, as they always do.
00:04:20 ◼ ► But I'm happy to report that the system worked and I was able to watch a game on Fox that was not in my local area and it was pretty much flawless and I'm very happy about that.
00:04:28 ◼ ► So I know the two of you, especially Marco, the new-found football fan, were deeply concerned and I'm happy to put your mind at rest. All worked according to plan.
00:04:36 ◼ ► And to be clear, this is the VPN method or is this some kind of weird cable home run thing?
00:04:40 ◼ ► This is a combination of actually today's sponsor, Tailscale. It legitimately is using that. This isn't a clever plug for a sponsor. It really truly is a legitimate honest to goodness thing.
00:04:50 ◼ ► But it's Tailscale, the channels app, and TV Everywhere. A combination of those three things basically got me where I needed to be. So happy to report it did work.
00:05:00 ◼ ► Now, moving on. It is holiday season and so we are going to talk more about Festivitas, which is Simon Staubering's, I think, holiday light app.
00:05:10 ◼ ► And one of us, I think it was John, I'm not 100% sure, probably John, was wondering how does Simon figure out how to hang the lights on the dock.
00:05:18 ◼ ► And I'm sorry, I should back up a half step. This is a thing, it's just for fun and it's really cute where you can put holiday lights on your menu bar on your dock and whatnot.
00:05:25 ◼ ► And John, I believe it was you wondering about how Simon figured out where to hang the lights, especially during magnification and stuff. And I understand that you have answers for us.
00:05:34 ◼ ► Yep, Simon wrote in to say Festivitas. Festivitas, I think. Festivitas. Okay. Anyway, his app is not using a private API. It's using the accessibility API to read the frames of every tile in the dock.
00:05:50 ◼ ► And based on those frames, create a CG path. This requires sandboxing to be disabled so the Mac App Store is still a no-go.
00:05:57 ◼ ► So this is one of the other unfortunate situations that I've talked about on the Mac before where there is an API to do something.
00:06:03 ◼ ► It's a public API, but it's old. Apple has deprecated it and if you want to submit your app to the Mac App Store, you can't use this API.
00:06:12 ◼ ► And believe it or not, the accessibility APIs on Mac OS fall into that category. So no, they're not private as in you're not supposed to use them, period.
00:06:20 ◼ ► Although you could. But no, this is a public API. But Apple says you can't be on the Mac App Store if you use the accessibility APIs.
00:06:27 ◼ ► And it's basically because they're old and their permission level is not granular enough. I mean, they're old and creaky APIs to begin with.
00:06:34 ◼ ► They don't really want to use them, but they do what you need them to do. But they're too powerful, essentially. Like if you get accessibility permission for your app in the Mac App Store, you could do all sorts of nefarious things and Apple just says flat out, "Okay, well, unless you have one of these super secret private exceptions, quote-unquote temporary exceptions, you can't do that."
00:06:51 ◼ ► And I understand all that except I feel like, okay, but how many years into Mac OS X or whatever you want to call it do we need to be before a modernized version of the accessibility API comes along that you can use and ship in the Mac App Store?
00:07:06 ◼ ► So anyway, there you go. Not technically a private API, but still something that keeps the app out of the Mac App Store. The sad story on the Mac continues.
00:07:14 ◼ ► Truer words never spoken. So I have not tried this yet, but a handful of people have written in with regard to my forthcoming adventure in trying to figure out when my washing machine has finished washing.
00:07:28 ◼ ► And a lot of people said, "Oh, you should use a power outlet thing that will read how much power the machines are using."
00:07:35 ◼ ► And that's reasonable, although for personal reasons, I don't love the idea of a big appliance going through one of these little dinguses in the wall.
00:07:44 ◼ ► And so I was thinking about using a vibration sensor to figure out when the washing machine or the dryer has completed.
00:07:51 ◼ ► And a few people wrote in to say, "Another thing you can do potentially is use an accessibility feature called recognize sounds using iPhone.
00:07:59 ◼ ► And what this does is your iPhone can continually listen for certain sounds such as a doorbell siren or crying baby and notify you when it recognizes these sounds."
00:08:07 ◼ ► And there's a Knowledge Base article that we will put in the show notes. This all sounds well and good, and it very well may work.
00:08:13 ◼ ► I had intended to try it before recording, and I apologize. I just didn't have the chance.
00:08:17 ◼ ► But the real crux of the issue is that our laundry room is actually upstairs, which sounds kooky at first, but is really convenient because most of your laundry is generated, so to speak, or put in the hamper anyway upstairs.
00:08:31 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. So it's one of those things where at first when we were looking at the house many, many years ago, we were like, "What?"
00:08:40 ◼ ► Yeah, laundry chutes are the best. But anyways, the problem is often that the little siren-y doodad, if it isn't set loud enough, which is a user error, or if we're just downstairs on the other side of the house,
00:08:53 ◼ ► again, as I've said many times, our house is not that big, but it's big enough and there's enough activity, especially with small kids, that oftentimes we just can't hear it.
00:09:00 ◼ ► And I'm skeptical that my phone would be able to hear it, but I am definitely going to give this a shot and see what happens. But we'll see.
00:09:07 ◼ ► We have some interesting feedback from Ricky Haas. Ricky writes, "While it's true that the Apple Store only sells SSD modules for the Mac Pro, Apple also has a first-party parts store, the self-service repair store for Apple products, which somehow is the domain selfservicerepair.com."
00:09:25 ◼ ► Yeah, you'd think Apple would be in there somewhere. We talked about this back when we first rolled this out and we were talking about the giant expensive set of tools that you get that you have to return and everything.
00:09:35 ◼ ► No, I mean, I think honestly, I think that was intentional. When Apple launched this, they did so extremely quietly and kind of like holding their arm out all the way, like at arm's length.
00:09:45 ◼ ► Like, here, you guys just take this. I don't think they want a ton of people to know about this and they certainly don't want their brand associated with it.
00:09:52 ◼ ► Yeah, so it's very weird. It's worth you loading the web page or website just to see how not-Apple-y it is.
00:10:01 ◼ ► Either way, so Ricky writes, "It typically takes some time after product launch for parts to show up, so they don't have components for the new Mac Minis yet.
00:10:08 ◼ ► However, if they sell the same components as those available for the Mac Studio, they should eventually offer storage upgrades.
00:10:14 ◼ ► Unfortunately, Apple doesn't allow you to simply browse all available parts. You need to enter a serial number."
00:10:20 ◼ ► And so I saw this and I immediately said, "Okay, well, I've got a serial number for my MacBook Pro. This is a year ago MacBook Pro.
00:10:26 ◼ ► It's a M3 Max MacBook Pro." And so I entered my serial number and I was just goofing off looking at different options.
00:10:34 ◼ ► And for my MacBook Pro, it would appear that the SSD is soldered into the logic board or is certainly not considered a separately removable and serviceable part.
00:10:50 ◼ ► Excuse me. A logic board for my MacBook Pro, they bill you $4,751.12. This is 64 gigs and 8 terabytes. $4,700.
00:11:08 ◼ ► Well, it's fair. But still, I mean, the whole machine, I think, was like $5,000, $5,500 or something like that.
00:11:13 ◼ ► I know. Well, that 8 terabytes thing is made of tiny diamonds. I'm not sure if you know this.
00:11:17 ◼ ► Apparently. Apparently. But in the defense of Apple, I then continued reading down a little bit and it says, "Replaced part return credit is $4,312."
00:11:29 ◼ ► So actually, according to Apple, if I understand this right, the price is, and they list it right there, price after credit, $439.12.
00:11:42 ◼ ► But, ooh, baby, you got to shell out five grand to get there and then they'll eventually give you a whole pile back.
00:11:53 ◼ ► I wonder if you could get a cheap 8 terabyte NAND that way, like if something goes wrong on your laptop.
00:11:57 ◼ ► Because you don't, does it say that you have to have like a broken one? You know what I mean? I guess you have to send one back.
00:12:03 ◼ ► Well, you have to return the board back. I don't know how you would, you probably shouldn't be defrauding their repair system by stealing the NAND off the motherboard somehow.
00:12:16 ◼ ► No, you'd return your intact one, but you'd get a fresh one. You basically get a fresh logic board.
00:12:22 ◼ ► You know what I mean? Because it's so cheap. Obviously, you don't pay for your own labor and probably you're screwing up your computer every time you open it up and close it back up.
00:12:31 ◼ ► Right, so anyway, so I went on a little side quest there and let me get back to what Ricky was writing.
00:12:36 ◼ ► So Ricky writes, and let me repeat, "Unfortunately, Apple doesn't allow you to simply browse all available parts and you need to enter a serial number."
00:12:42 ◼ ► So Ricky continues, "I managed to find one from a Mac studio via a YouTube unboxing video."
00:12:54 ◼ ► And so Ricky was kind enough to send some screenshots and various different modules are available. 512 gigs, 1, 2, 4, and 8 terabytes.
00:13:01 ◼ ► The cheapest at 512 gigs is $395.12 and then you get $44 back if you replace the return part.
00:13:16 ◼ ► On the flip side, 8 terabytes, like yours truly, $2,464. Then you get a measly $369.60 back.
00:13:31 ◼ ► Yep, this is a profit center. I mean, look, this is like when you buy parts for an expensive car from the manufacturer.
00:13:39 ◼ ► Like if you're going to have some kind of high-end sports car, if you want to go to the manufacturer to buy their brake pads,
00:13:48 ◼ ► But that's kind of their privilege. Some of it is like, "Well, we have very high specs for our brake pads."
00:13:54 ◼ ► But a lot of it is just their profit, right? That's the business model and that's what this is too.
00:13:58 ◼ ► And actually in the realm of expensive cars, the parts when you buy them aftermarket from the manufacturer,
00:14:05 ◼ ► like the original actual genuine parts, cost way more. Way more than you can possibly imagine.
00:14:11 ◼ ► Like if you add up the price of all the parts that you would have to buy to build the car that you just bought,
00:14:16 ◼ ► it would cost just many, many times more. Whereas these prices are merely pretty much exactly the same as the insane prices that Apple charges when you buy the Mac.
00:14:24 ◼ ► I think the prices are very close. Like maybe they're actually a little bit cheaper, but as we saw before with the Bugatti headlights,
00:14:31 ◼ ► it just doesn't make any sense if you look at the prices. And that's because, especially with very fancy expensive cars,
00:14:36 ◼ ► they don't want to keep a lot of parts in stock. And the few that they do keep in stock, to make it worth their while to keep any in stock,
00:14:42 ◼ ► they charge huge amounts of money for one little piece of plastic, one, you know, forget about like panels and body panels in the car.
00:14:49 ◼ ► Just any little thing in the car, there's like seven of these in the world and if you want one, you have to pay a huge amount of money.
00:15:01 ◼ ► One of my favorite kinds of product is one where there's something that's just generally trash and someone comes in and says,
00:15:08 ◼ ► "No, no, no, we're going to do this right." We saw this with the iPod as a great example.
00:15:13 ◼ ► You know what another example of this is? And I really mean it. They didn't ask me to say this. It's Aura Frames. That's Aura. A-U-R-A Frames.
00:15:21 ◼ ► What these are, are a really great, well-designed version of those really chintzy photo frames we got like five, ten years ago
00:15:33 ◼ ► Aura has done it and done it right. They're so incredibly good and there's several different options to choose from.
00:15:40 ◼ ► And they've done everything so right that one of the things you can do is like crack open a little cover on the box for a frame
00:15:47 ◼ ► and there's a QR code or something like that that's in there that lets you pre-hydrate the frame so that the moment it is opened by the person you're giving it to,
00:15:58 ◼ ► it will automatically connect to their Wi-Fi network and start downloading photos. They have thought of darn near everything.
00:16:03 ◼ ► It really, truly is extremely well done. We have one of these in the house. I freaking love it.
00:16:08 ◼ ► Every time I go into our living room where it's mounted on the wall, I look up at it and I see just a delightful picture of Aaron or the kids
00:16:15 ◼ ► and it makes me so genuinely happy. We sent one to my parents and you think I'm happy about these things. Oh boy!
00:16:21 ◼ ► My parents love seeing pictures of their grandkids and their friends and I guess their kids too scrolling through their living room as well.
00:16:29 ◼ ► It really is incredible, incredible stuff. They have a bespoke iPhone and Android app where you can beam things to the frames from afar.
00:16:36 ◼ ► It really, really, truly is excellent. So you can save on the perfect gift by going to auraframes.com to get up to $35 off Aura's best selling Carver matte frames
00:16:45 ◼ ► by using the promo code guesswhatatp at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-F-R-A-M-E-S dot com promo code ATP.
00:16:53 ◼ ► This deal is exclusive to listeners so get yours now in time for the holidays if you have to. Real quick, terms and conditions apply.
00:17:01 ◼ ► Alright, more from our friend of the show, Jonathan Dietz Jr. with regard to SSD performance. Here again, there's a lot here and I'm going to read pretty much all of it.
00:17:14 ◼ ► So bear with me, but it's really fascinating. So Jonathan writes, "The state of SSD benchmarking on the Mac is pretty sad. Nobody should be making buying decisions or even be particularly concerned about the sequential read and write speeds of Mac SSDs."
00:17:26 ◼ ► Let me pause there for a second because thank you Jonathan for saying what I always try to say whenever we talk about benchmarks and what used to be one of the main activities that I participated in online, which was technical people complaining about how benchmarks are not representative.
00:17:39 ◼ ► We'd argue about Mac versus PC and CPU benchmarks and Altavec versus MMX, right? And it was all about like, well, you know, bite marks versus spec int versus this and it was people arguing that benchmark is not a good one.
00:17:56 ◼ ► It can be gamed, it can be cheated, it's not representative of real performance or, okay, well, I'm playing a game, I get better frame rates than this.
00:18:02 ◼ ► Well, that has a good port on this platform, but a bad port on that platform, so that's not good a benchmark either. All we did was argue about how benchmarks didn't mean anything.
00:18:10 ◼ ► And now in the modern age, go to any YouTube video, listen to any podcast and you're just like, oh, well, this is what Geekbench says and this is what the benchmarks say and nobody argues about it anymore.
00:18:19 ◼ ► They're just like, yeah, the benchmark says this is faster, so I guess it must be faster.
00:18:22 ◼ ► There's so much to be argued about these benchmarks, especially with things like Geekbench, which we really don't have, I mean, you have some knowledge of it, you can get kind of into technicality, but it's nothing like the open source spec benchmarks were back in the day or like, you know, running games that are open source that you can compile for any platform and then it becomes like a compiler benchmark.
00:18:39 ◼ ► So kudos to Jonathan for doing what was once a great pastime and has now fallen by the wayside, which is complaining about benchmarks. They're no good.
00:18:49 ◼ ► Gracious. The results of the two most popular benchmarking tools, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and AJA, system test, AJA, are akin to comparing quarter mile times for a car.
00:19:04 ◼ ► A morphous disk mark is better, but still miles from the type of in-depth testing that non-tech, rest in peace, used to conduct.
00:19:12 ◼ ► All of them appear to report optimistic write speeds, probably due to the effects of write caching by the system.
00:19:17 ◼ ► Perhaps the biggest problem with these numbers, though, is the inability to identify the actual hardware being tested.
00:19:23 ◼ ► Knowing the specific Mac model and disk size being tested is the bare minimum for making these results comparable.
00:19:29 ◼ ► Ideally, you'd also want the I/O reg entry for the controller characteristics property of the Apple ANS3 NVMe controller or Apple ANS3 CGV2 controller object.
00:19:42 ◼ ► Man, I don't really miss Objective-C naming. That is not something I miss in my life. Anyway, the property provides many details about the underlying architecture of the SSD.
00:19:50 ◼ ► In particular, the "dies per bus" key reveals the total number of NAND dies in channels, from which we can infer the number of NAND packages.
00:19:57 ◼ ► And the NAND marketing name key tells us the type of NAND used, number of planes, and density.
00:20:04 ◼ ► All you have to do is pop open the terminal and run the following command, "No tear down necessary" for M1 through M3, I/O reg, well, I'll just put it in the show notes. It's a bunch of stuff.
00:20:14 ◼ ► This is an I/O reg command with some flags with those two names that were read earlier.
00:20:22 ◼ ► So, anyways, Jonathan continues, "The only thing that people should be concerned about, storage-wise, when buying a Mac is selecting the right SSD, right size, excuse me, SSD for their needs.
00:20:32 ◼ ► In most cases, selecting the next higher capacity drive will double the endurance and improve performance, but there's no underlying problem with the speed or endurance of any of the SSDs found in any of the M series Macs at any capacity.
00:20:42 ◼ ► However, if you fill the drive, performance can be severely impacted, so you really do want to avoid that.
00:20:47 ◼ ► For those planning on using their Mac for eight or more years, as I generally do, 256 gigs may become a pain point even for casual users.
00:20:54 ◼ ► Fortunately, Apple will likely transition to one terabit NAND dies as soon as next year, and the 256 gig capacity will go the way of the dodo, just like the 8 gig as the entry-level RAM level did as well."
00:21:11 ◼ ► Although, I still feel like a 512 might be small, but I think this is the rings true to me in all of our, you know, over a decade now doing this show or whatever.
00:21:26 ◼ ► But Apple has not historically had, as far as I know, any Macs that they've, especially in the ARM Mac era, any Apple Silicon Macs where the SSD was like really bad.
00:21:36 ◼ ► I remember there was a big kerfuffle that we talked about on the show back when I think the M1s were first out, when they were like, "Oh, you buy it with too little RAM and it's swapping to it."
00:21:43 ◼ ► And there was something that tried to show how much life is left, how much endurance is left on the flash memory based on how many writes it's getting and some tools reporting really huge numbers.
00:21:57 ◼ ► And that turned out mostly, I think, to be a problem with the tool reporting bad numbers and a problem with interpreting the numbers it did return.
00:22:03 ◼ ► And in the end, people with M1 Macs didn't all have their SSDs fail after the first year, right?
00:22:10 ◼ ► But I also agree that one of the things, well, Mac OS doesn't like this and add to the pile now, NAND flash drives don't like this.
00:22:20 ◼ ► Don't get close to the disk storage limit. Bad things happen. Bad, upsetting, terrible things happen.
00:22:30 ◼ ► It's just, you're just asking for trouble, which is why it really is important to get as big an SSD as you can or be very studious about getting stuff off of that SSD.
00:22:39 ◼ ► Because unfortunately, Mac OS is not great about helping you when you start pressing up against your disk limit.
00:22:46 ◼ ► It will just sort of like complain feebly for a few seconds until it's too late and then just keel over, and it'll be a sad situation.
00:23:00 ◼ ► M4 Extreme's chip, or the M4 Extreme chip, is unlikely after Apple quote-unquote "cancels" the high-performance chip, reading from MacRumors, who is in turn quoting from the information.
00:23:12 ◼ ► "Apple is working on AI chip with Broadcom," is the title, the headline of the post on the information.
00:23:19 ◼ ► "Apple Silicon design team in Israel is leading development of the AI chip. That team was instrumental in designing the processes Apple introduced in 2020 to replace Intel chips and Macs.
00:23:29 ◼ ► Apple this past summer canceled the development of a high-performance chip for Macs, consisting of four smaller chips stitched together to free up some of its engineers in Israel to work on the AI chip," one of the people said, highlighting the company's shifting priorities.
00:23:41 ◼ ► "To make the chip, Apple is planning to use one of TSMC's most advanced manufacturing processes, known as N3P.
00:23:47 ◼ ► Apple plans to manufacture at least one of its iPhone chips next year using N3P. The other upcoming AI chips, designed by OpenAI and NVIDIA, are expected to use the process as well to improve performance.
00:23:57 ◼ ► For its AI chip, Apple plans to utilize a chiplet design that AMD pioneered more than a decade ago.
00:24:02 ◼ ► Rather than build a single chip with sections for different functions, Apple will break up the chip and functions into smaller pieces or chiplets and then stitch them back together as one.
00:24:14 ◼ ► So this was a kind of, I don't know if this is a separate story or just confirmation of the vague rumor we got, I think multiple years ago, which was, I think this was back when the M1 Extreme, the big M1, the quad M1 chip was canceled.
00:24:31 ◼ ► And that was just an anonymous tip from, I don't remember the sourcing, but it wasn't any particularly reliable source, but just something we were told and it was, "Hey, if you're waiting for something on that size, the earliest it could possibly appear is the M7."
00:24:45 ◼ ► And that was back when I think the M2 was just on the horizon or coming out. So M7, no chance of any chip like that until the M7, given the lead times.
00:24:53 ◼ ► To jump in really quickly, that I believe the original source of that was actually upgrade if I'm not mistaken, because someone had anonymously written into upgrade and because this was covered in Gruber's coverage of all this, he reminded me of, in his post, it reminded me of the feedback that upgrade got wherein someone allegedly with inside knowledge said, "Hey, this isn't going to happen until the M7 at the earliest."
00:25:13 ◼ ► And I'm thinking maybe this team in Israel was the team working on the M7 thing and then they just got pulled off. And here's the thing, many things are thwarting this chip.
00:25:25 ◼ ► The fact that it's very expensive, the fact that Apple doesn't want to do it for such low volumes, you know, like this, you really need to believe in something like this to make it happen.
00:25:31 ◼ ► As my blog post said, the only way cars like the LFA happen at a company like Lexus is a bunch of people really, really want to make it happen because it just does not make economic sense, but it makes sense for the company and you need to have enough people who believe in that.
00:25:45 ◼ ► That's the whole point of the Mac Pro Believe shirt, which will be coming back someday because its job is still not done. The Mac Pro Believe shirt will be back next year at WWDC.
00:25:55 ◼ ► Well anyway, once again Apple has found a reason not to make this chip, which is pretty easy to do. And in this case it makes some sense, like obviously Apple, you know, AI is a big thing.
00:26:06 ◼ ► Apple doesn't want to just pay Amazon to use all of its chips, although Apple recently, I think someone from Apple spoke at like the AWS Reinvent to talk about how they're using all of Amazon's AI training chips and they're loving it and blah blah blah.
00:26:18 ◼ ► So, you know, Apple's doing what it has to do, but we also know from past stories we've discussed in the show that Apple has its own Apple Silicon in its own data center, is running its own AI workloads with the private cloud computing thing that they made, supposedly a bunch of M2 Ultras, so on and so forth.
00:26:30 ◼ ► Makes perfect sense that Apple would decide, you know, to use its own Silicon in its data center to run AI workloads. The M2 Ultra is not a chip that was really designed for that.
00:26:40 ◼ ► It's designed to be in Macs. Making a purpose-built AI training inference, whatever, purpose-built Apple Silicon for the data center for AI workloads makes sense and I think Apple will do a good job at it.
00:26:53 ◼ ► The rumors are that Apple is going to make that chip, Broadcom is helping them, yada yada.
00:26:57 ◼ ► They're not, as usual, Apple will not sell this chip to other people, it will just be a thing that Apple makes for its own data center. So no customer will ever see this.
00:27:04 ◼ ► They're not going to sell access to it like Amazon and Google and stuff do. It's just going to be for them. It'll probably be big and complicated and expensive, but what it won't be is a Mac Pro type chip.
00:27:15 ◼ ► Because obviously a lot of things that the Mac Pro needs to do, a chip inside a data center doing AI workloads does not need to do.
00:27:22 ◼ ► And if you want people to make a big monster chip that can do this, probably the team that was working on the Mac Pro chip has the people that you need and it's not like you can just leave them there and hire a bunch of new people.
00:27:31 ◼ ► So I understand from a business perspective why they're doing this. And yet, if you're ever going to make a chip that makes sense in that gigantic case, you gotta actually make one someday.
00:27:43 ◼ ► Or is it just going to be a series of Mac Studios in a giant case for the next five years? Stay tuned and find out.
00:27:49 ◼ ► I mean, there are also, in all fairness to them, this might not be purely economic, this might also be, you know, maybe they made these prototypes and they weren't as good as they thought.
00:28:02 ◼ ► Because if you look at the Ultra chip, which is the two Maxes talking to each other over the silicon interposer, it does not scale perfectly in all useful ways.
00:28:15 ◼ ► There is some degree of overhead, the scaling is not complete, you don't get 2x of everything when you do that.
00:28:27 ◼ ► So obviously they're not actually achieving perfect scaling, there's other bottlenecks somewhere or the limitations.
00:28:33 ◼ ► Maybe when they tried a 4x design, it just wasn't worth it, because maybe a 4x design, rather than reaching 4x performance, maybe it only reached 2.5x performance or something like that.
00:28:45 ◼ ► Like maybe it just wasn't technically compelling and would you pay four times as much or whatever, I'm sure the cost would be absurdly more expensive.
00:28:54 ◼ ► Would you pay that much for quote "only two or three times the performance"? Maybe not.
00:29:00 ◼ ► Maybe they decided the better way to go was maybe to wait for something like a chiplet design, where they could do things like the parts that scale well, offer more of those, like the GPU cores maybe.
00:29:13 ◼ ► And maybe not duplicate the entire chip design in all the other ways in order to achieve more GPU cores.
00:29:19 ◼ ► When you look at CPU performance, the CPU performance I think is probably what scales the worst as you add more cores here, because of various limits and stuff.
00:29:30 ◼ ► What the Mac Pro needs to be more competitive with its previous market as well as the current market, what it needs is more neural engine cores and/or more GPU cores for certain configurations.
00:29:45 ◼ ► So if they're moving to a system of chiplets, which sounds very promising, where they're able to isolate these components a bit more, and to be able to say, make a chip that keeps the same CPU core count as an Ultra, but gives you twice the GPU core count for instance.
00:30:03 ◼ ► And to make that somewhat economically, that would be more compelling than if you doubled everything and didn't quite get all of that performance.
00:30:16 ◼ ► So anyway, I'm guessing the reason they canned the first quad was not purely economic, I'm guessing the reason it hasn't come back is also not purely economic.
00:30:27 ◼ ► And if they are going to bring something like that to market, I bet it's going to take a very different strategy than just give us two Ultras glued together.
00:30:47 ◼ ► I was talking to Gruber about this, but I didn't read his article about it. But anyway, one of the things I was saying was that, like we've discussed in the past episodes, I wish I could see what the M4 Max die looks like, because if it doesn't have an Interposer, that means they're not going to stick two of them together to make an Ultra.
00:31:06 ◼ ► I think the M1 Ultra was the one that had really bad GPU scaling, like the GPU was the one thing that should scale close to linearly, and it wasn't because of interconnect issues.
00:31:15 ◼ ► So what I've always been hoping was that the M3 or M4 Ultra will not be two Maxes stuck together, but instead will be a dedicated custom chip that just has more stuff in the right things.
00:31:28 ◼ ► Single die, you know, single, massive, super expensive die, but not two Maxes stuck together.
00:31:33 ◼ ► Because the two Maxes stuck together approach made some sense economically, and it was worth a try, but I think with two tries at it, with the M1 and M2 Ultra, it's a little bit wasteful.
00:31:44 ◼ ► It doesn't have the greatest performance benefits, and that's not always the worst thing, though, by the way, because when you're shopping for high-end stuff, very often you are paying much, much more for just a little bit more performance.
00:31:54 ◼ ► That's why it's so important to essentially make the fastest whatever that you can make, because you can say, "Well, look, it is five times more expensive for only two times the speed, but it's literally the fastest thing that you can get."
00:32:06 ◼ ► So if you want to spend money and get the fastest thing, if that makes a difference to your business or to your job or whatever, that you just want the fastest, you don't care that the price doesn't scale linearly with the performance, you just want the fastest.
00:32:15 ◼ ► But you do want something that, you know, performs as good as possible, and part of that is not wasting performance and money on overhead that's not giving you better performance.
00:32:25 ◼ ► So, you know, one of the things I was hoping before reading the story was that the M4 Ultra would appear, and it would not be two M4 Maxes stuck together, but it would be its own dedicated chip, and it would be really powerful.
00:32:40 ◼ ► And so they could design them in that way, so that gives you a more economical Extreme, because you're just taking two Ultras, but the two Ultras have their parts arranged such that it makes a little bit more sense to put them together.
00:32:51 ◼ ► Yeah, and the Chipola design, once you get to a certain size, like the Ultra with the Interposer, that's basically pushing the limit.
00:32:57 ◼ ► We talked about this before, the radical limit, like how big can you even make things, not just economically, but practically speaking at all.
00:33:07 ◼ ► Yeah, we keep referring to it at the quad, because we're basically trying to say something twice as big as an Ultra, but it doesn't mean four of anything, it just means count up all the stuff, count up all the transistors, all the die area, something that is twice as big as an Ultra.
00:33:21 ◼ ► That's when we're doing all the back of the envelope math, like how many GPU cores and what it would be competitive with, assuming the GPU scale is close to linearly, ah, ah.
00:33:28 ◼ ► So I'm not holding out for four of anything stuck together, I just want something that is roughly sized, like four of those things, with a much better arrangement of parts, less used than overhead.
00:33:39 ◼ ► I don't need four copies of the Thunderbolt controllers, I don't need four different media concoders, and only one of which is used at a time.
00:33:44 ◼ ► You know, like, they can do better, but anyway, it just seems like this is not going to be in the cards for a long time.
00:33:49 ◼ ► So now, the only thing I have left to hope for is that the Ultra will be better than the previous Ultras, hopefully by not being too maxed and stuck together, but just being a dedicated Ultra that is its own thing, or if it is too maxed and stuck together that they've resolved the issues.
00:34:04 ◼ ► Again, my memory is still on this, but I seem to recall the M1 Ultra, the GPU scaling was really terrible because of some, ah, you know, thing that they didn't do right, and some buffer or something was under resourced somewhere and it really killed the performance, and that's just a shame.
00:34:18 ◼ ► Because the GPU transistors were there, they had enough of them, if they were all in the same die they would have worked great, but because they were separated and because there was a problem with the interconnect, you lost a lot of performance.
00:34:27 ◼ ► So, we'll see, but yeah, this is, you know, not that it was ever likely that I was going to get the next Mac Pro, but it's definitely looking more like Mac Studio for me.
00:34:40 ◼ ► It'll be weird for you not to have a Mac Pro. I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable for the record, but it'll be weird.
00:34:51 ◼ ► Because the studio, like, it can continue to be here like a piece of furniture and the studio will just be on the desk, it's so small, it doesn't take up any room.
00:34:56 ◼ ► I mean, if you get a second one, you can make them into a desk. Just take, you know, those are the two legs, get a tabletop or a door and just stick it across the top and there you go.
00:35:04 ◼ ► That's what people do with the old cheese graters, but they're a little low and I would never do that, this beautiful computer.
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00:36:55 ◼ ► All right, Jon, so potentially in preparation for you getting a Mac Studio, you've been doing some house cleaning. What's going on?
00:37:12 ◼ ► I think we were talking about like, maybe we were talking about our photos, workflows or something under the member special.
00:37:18 ◼ ► Anyway, to refresh everyone's memory, I have a shared iCloud photo library thing. I love it.
00:37:41 ◼ ► So it's like, yeah, those are my, but I have a very small, and also pictures of the backs of appliances and stuff like that.
00:37:56 ◼ ► And because Apple hasn't really finished the fight in Halo parlance on the shared photo library, some things are still not shared, like albums and people.
00:38:06 ◼ ► And so I still need to switch to my wife's account on my Mac sometimes to do photo stuff, because if I were to do them in my account, it wouldn't have any effect because they're not shared in the shared photo library.
00:38:25 ◼ ► So our full photo library is on my Mac through her account because it's set to download originals.
00:38:36 ◼ ► And when I launch photos, I'm essentially looking at the same photo library that she's looking at, the shared library.
00:38:53 ◼ ► And somebody wrote in a while back, and I think we talked about it on SKTP or something, asking,
00:38:57 ◼ ► "Does Mac OS do, or does Photos do anything smart with the fact that it's the same shared library and two accounts on the same Mac?"
00:39:06 ◼ ► Or, if I set my account to download originals, would it download two complete copies of my library?
00:39:12 ◼ ► And I told this person, "I think it will download two complete copies of your library, and it's incredibly wasteful that it does that."
00:39:22 ◼ ► But it had been sticking in my mind going, you know, I wonder, especially as my disk fails and I get close to my storage limit,
00:39:29 ◼ ► and I'm always fighting against that, how much space am I wasting on my Mac by having the same photo library as hers downloading originals and mine not?
00:39:58 ◼ ► Using PHP for an extended amount has made me hated more, if that's even possible to imagine, but it's true.
00:40:16 ◼ ► Anyway, ran my script, and it crawled over her photo library, my photo library, and found all the files that are identical.
00:40:28 ◼ ► Oh, if you include, like -- are we including all the little previews it generates and everything like that?
00:40:38 ◼ ► Like, .photo library is the extension, but it's a directory, and in there is a bunch of stuff that Photos uses to keep track of your files.
00:40:43 ◼ ► So obviously the originals are in there in my wife's account, but also all the other crap of, like, the thumbnails and previews and stuff like that.
00:41:04 ◼ ► But keep in mind, my photo library is -- how big is it? Maybe, like, 2.5 terabytes, 3 terabytes, 200,000 photos. That's how big it is.
00:41:18 ◼ ► Now, I don't know if that's because I kind of stay away from my photo library and don't, like, scroll back in time and, like, load the full-resolution images and stuff or whatever.
00:41:54 ◼ ► Are you going to use the special cp copy command that does the APFS deduplication thing for the same file?
00:42:04 ◼ ► APFS, the file system that Mac OS and iOS and all the other devices use, Apple's file system,
00:42:10 ◼ ► has a feature that lets you make a "clone" of a file where you get a complete independent copy of that file
00:42:31 ◼ ► They do not affect each other in any way, but while they are identical, they share the same storage.
00:42:38 ◼ ► If you duplicate a file in the Finder, go to your Finder now, find a 10 gig file and make a thousand duplicates,
00:42:43 ◼ ► you will not take up any more space except for the space required to store the file names of those files.
00:42:50 ◼ ► Go to find a 300 gig file and hit duplicate and be like, why was there no progress bar?
00:43:10 ◼ ► It's the magic of copy on write. It's one of the advantages of having a modern file system.
00:43:14 ◼ ► And most people don't even think about it, but the cp command from the command line will do this.
00:43:18 ◼ ► There is a flag to tell it to do it. If you don't even pass the flag, it does it all the time anyway.
00:43:26 ◼ ► I do it all the time for podcast recordings. When I record a podcast, whatever folder I end up in,
00:43:48 ◼ ► But anyway, I can get the space back. Take those 73,000 files and every one of them that I find
00:43:54 ◼ ► where there's identical content in my photo library, clone the one from her photo library
00:44:05 ◼ ► Because they have identical content and you got to do it carefully because just because they have identical content,
00:44:09 ◼ ► they're still different files. They have different creation dates, different modification dates,
00:44:39 ◼ ► Well, I mean, it's not pain. The first Perl script to find out how many files were the same, real quick.
00:44:49 ◼ ► But doing this, like, you know, swapping in place within the photos library mega mega air quotes database?
00:44:57 ◼ ► Yeah, so that's one of the things. It's like, okay, well how can I do this in a way where I feel like I'm not hosing myself, right?
00:45:06 ◼ ► One of the ways I decided to tackle this was I will choose her library as the source and mine as the target.
00:45:16 ◼ ► Because hers is like the canonical good one where it's downloaded originals blah blah blah.
00:45:24 ◼ ► Because there's so little that's actually in my photo library proper, it's all in the shared library, right?
00:45:29 ◼ ► So that's what I did. I used hers as the source, mine as the destination to copy the files.
00:45:42 ◼ ► I couldn't find a good way to do that except I eventually found someone on GitHub who had a tool that did a best effort at it.
00:45:51 ◼ ► And as far as I could tell it worked. They did a bunch of test cases and always got the right answer.
00:45:55 ◼ ► It essentially walks the entire extents tree for each of the files and sees if they're identical.
00:46:09 ◼ ► Like "May? Well that's not really helpful to me. I need to know if they do share blocks, right?"
00:46:15 ◼ ► So I use "that was written in C", I have my thing written in Perl, there's a command on the Mac called "ditto" that will copy a file with all of its metadata and stuff.
00:46:23 ◼ ► And then I wrote in Swift a thing to do the extended attributes, creation dates, blah blah blah.
00:46:29 ◼ ► Some things you can't restore because I think there's a thing called like an access time or attribute modification time that you can't actually update.
00:46:38 ◼ ► Like it gets updated by the file system and you have no way to, there's no APIs for updating it.
00:46:43 ◼ ► So anyway, I was comfortable that it would be, say if I did a test on one or two files, I looked at before and afters, I examined them with every tool I had and said the before and the after file really do look identical in every way that I can determine that I care about.
00:47:16 ◼ ► Obviously there are fewer redundant copies of bits on the SSD, but I'm not relying on the redundancy of the bits on my SSD to say those things.
00:47:47 ◼ ► If you go to the Mac App Store, you'll find tons of file deduplicators that will find duplicate files, but it wants you to delete the other ones.
00:47:54 ◼ ► Like they all offer, like, "I know, I'll delete them. I'll save the newest one. We'll save this..."
00:48:20 ◼ ► But it's a technical ability that people aren't leveraging on their own because it's too onerous to do it.
00:48:37 ◼ ► No. Well, here. So, because I've written the Perl scripts, I'm like, this couldn't be that hard to make as a Mac App.
00:48:53 ◼ ► I made, you know, because I like doing Mac development and my apps are essentially feature complete, although I do have a couple ideas for one of them.
00:49:08 ◼ ► I did the programmer's UI that you're all familiar with, which is a giant window with a bunch of text and buttons on it.
00:49:22 ◼ ► And while I was doing this, I was like, you know, probably someone already wrote this program.
00:49:31 ◼ ► Eventually I remembered someone did write the program. We talked about it on the show. I feel like Casey now.
00:49:54 ◼ ► I'm not sure how many years old it is, but it does exactly what my app is trying to do.
00:50:00 ◼ ► It's not the most polished app in the world, but it's been developed for a little while.
00:50:10 ◼ ► But I'm still making my app. Other people made podcast players too, but it doesn't stop Marco.
00:50:17 ◼ ► And the reason I'm making the app, well, so I'm making the app just because I like doing Mac development. It's fun.
00:50:22 ◼ ► And I think there is a place in the market for a slightly more polished version of this.
00:50:28 ◼ ► One is after I got like a thousand lines into this app and it was basically working but with an ugly UI,
00:50:46 ◼ ► But still, you do it when there's a thousand lines. It's better than doing it when there's a hundred thousand.
00:51:05 ◼ ► It essentially deletes and then reincarnates arbitrary files that it knows nothing about.
00:51:14 ◼ ► Because that's what it does. Like it doesn't, if you point it at a directory, it doesn't know what those files are.
00:51:18 ◼ ► It just knows these two files have the same content and I'm going to magically do some magic with cloning.
00:51:28 ◼ ► Unfortunately, Mac OS being a Unix derivative does not have a really great way to tell if someone else is messing with a file.
00:51:33 ◼ ► You want to run LSOF on every file. It will take a year and a day and the kernel will get angry at you.
00:51:37 ◼ ► And even that is not going to tell you anything because there's a million race conditions.
00:51:47 ◼ ► But then on the other hand, that's why a polished version of this that is very cautious and careful maybe has a place in the market
00:51:53 ◼ ► because no people are never going to do this on their own. They're not going to run a Perl script.
00:51:56 ◼ ► They're not going to run a Perl script as root like I did that calls out to a Swift program that they wrote and a C program that they downloaded from GitHub.
00:52:03 ◼ ► Like no one's going to do that. They just want a polished single Mac app that does all this stuff.
00:52:11 ◼ ► It is essentially working now. It just has half a UI. I'm noodling with the UI to try to make it not heinously ugly.
00:52:18 ◼ ► But I'm having fun. And the other thing I'm going to do with it is, so the existing app that does this is a paid up front app.
00:52:31 ◼ ► If you can't save any space, you don't find whatever. But if it turns out you can save 10 gigs, then you get the in-app purchase.
00:52:37 ◼ ► And that gives me an opportunity to play with in-app purchase which I've literally never written in any app before.
00:52:42 ◼ ► So I want to do in-app purchase in a Mac app this time to see what that experience is like because it could be fun.
00:52:57 ◼ ► No, no. That's what I'm using. And it's still trash. It's gotten a lot better but it's still trash.
00:53:17 ◼ ► Because here's the thing with naming. I have very particular opinions about app naming on the Mac.
00:53:31 ◼ ► And if you don't know what your app is going to be named, you got to call it something.
00:53:40 ◼ ► That is one of the reasons why I typically cannot start a new project until I have the name.
00:53:50 ◼ ► Yeah. Here's the other thing about names. Depending on which naming theme I'm going with, I very often have spaces between words.
00:53:57 ◼ ► But if you put spaces between words in your Xcode project, it puts underscores in files and it's just like...
00:54:03 ◼ ► And then if you go, "Okay, well put underscores in files, we'll just remove those underscores."
00:54:06 ◼ ► But then your whole project is screwed up because you haven't found every reference to that file and it's just like you got to...
00:54:11 ◼ ► So obviously I made a project and I gave it a name. It is not going to be the name of the app.
00:54:24 ◼ ► My thinking on the name, I talked about this briefly with Merlin on the rectives that will come out in a little bit.
00:54:28 ◼ ► My other apps are a little bit more fanciful in names, but this one I actually want people to find when they're searching for something that does what it does.
00:54:38 ◼ ► I can't just call it like Lemonade or something that's just like, you know, just nothing that has anything to do with anything.
00:54:43 ◼ ► Even though it might be good branding to come up with like a very unique, interesting name.
00:54:46 ◼ ► No one will ever find it. I don't trust the app store search and my keywords and my description or whatever.
00:54:51 ◼ ► So I want the name to at least give you a hint that it might have something to do with disks or storage or duplicate files or something like that.
00:54:58 ◼ ► And that really puts you squarely into the namespaces of the million other apps that delete duplicate files that are on the Mac App Store.
00:55:12 ◼ ► Can you think about like words that are like about like finding free, finding resources out in the world, like, you know, mining, miner, stuff like that or...
00:55:24 ◼ ► But disk, people don't have disks anymore. They don't even think of it as disks. It's certainly not hard drives.
00:55:29 ◼ ► Yeah, I would use it. I would call it if you're going to refer to the medium, I would call it storage or space or something like that.
00:55:45 ◼ ► I don't want to guess, but I think it's got to have been overdone a trillion times. But the obvious answer for this is Highlander because there can be only one.
00:55:53 ◼ ► Yeah, there already is an app called Highlander, obviously. One of the names I came up with, obviously it's not a real name that I would use for reasons that you'll understand in a second, Super De-Duper.
00:56:09 ◼ ► That's called Trade Dress, which I try to name my app after a well-known, beloved, multi-decade old...
00:56:17 ◼ ► Yeah, which is also Super Duper, for those of you who don't know, is a Mac cloning app that I in fact use to clone my hard drive. So Super Duper.
00:56:23 ◼ ► There's also Carbon Copy Cloner, but anyway, Super De-Duper would be a great name if we were at the same company, but we're not.
00:56:32 ◼ ► Yeah, people aren't going to guess that that's a disk. I might have to give up on the people can guess that it's a disk thing.
00:56:39 ◼ ► I mean, naming anything these days, you know, anything in tech is a very crowded market these days.
00:56:45 ◼ ► And naming something that solves a common problem that has existed for a very long time, like freeing up disk space on your computer, that's going to be extra difficult because there's going to be so many.
00:56:55 ◼ ► Space Doubler, oh wait. You guys don't remember Space Doubler, but it was the name of a classic Mac OS utility.
00:57:00 ◼ ► Didn't do this, but it was another thing that... I think it was like a compression, on-the-fly compression thing.
00:57:05 ◼ ► You know, Stacker is one of those too, and the funny thing is that name actually kind of makes sense here.
00:57:11 ◼ ► Real time follow up, I knew I recognized Canonical from somewhere. They're the people who do Ubuntu. I can't believe I didn't realize that immediately.
00:57:19 ◼ ► So anyway, a few more things like, now that I have this program up and running, it's obviously a two-phase thing.
00:57:23 ◼ ► One where you scan where it tells you how many duplicates it found, and two is where you consolidate them.
00:57:30 ◼ ► I pointed it at my Documents folder. Believe it or not, only 14,000 documents, but 12 gigs.
00:57:37 ◼ ► More duplicates in my own, just in my Documents folder, my own Documents folder only, than there was when I was cross-comparing the two photo libraries that I extensively looked at this year.
00:57:49 ◼ ► Dropbox, I'm probably just going to literally forbid in my app you ever pointing it at Google Drive, Dropbox, or anything because I have no freaking idea what Dropbox will do when I yank the file out from under it and replace it with a clone.
00:58:02 ◼ ► I'm just going to be like, nope, not anything that's running on a file provider type of API thing like Google Drive, OneDrive, my app is just going to flat out refuse to do just for safety reasons, probably.
00:58:14 ◼ ► But anyway, I got a gig, 626 files in Dropbox. My home/library folder, which I will also forbid, for what I hope are obvious reasons, stuff that's in your library is stuff that other apps are using that you have no idea when they're touching it.
00:58:29 ◼ ► Things that are being touched by the CF prefs daemon, containers, sandbox containers, whatever. 15 gigs in my library folder. 15 gigs of duplications.
00:58:41 ◼ ► So that's the type of situation where you shouldn't run it, but I might run my Perl script on it.
00:58:45 ◼ ► John, I am in full support of you doing this for yourself. I am at best half-hearted support in you selling this as a product because I feel like the support burden would just be awful.
00:58:59 ◼ ► It will be ruinous. And then you're going to not do a bunch of work for ATP that I've been happy for you to have been doing recently.
00:59:06 ◼ ► That's the whole point of this program. The one I said, the disk dupe thing or whatever, that has been on the Mac App Store, it doesn't really have any guardrails. It will just do what you tell it to do, for the most part.
00:59:18 ◼ ► And I don't think it's a very popular program and I don't really care about it, despite the fact that I apparently bought it years ago. Even I didn't use it that often.
00:59:26 ◼ ► I want to make something that's more polished, that has enough guardrails, that it will prevent you from really hosing yourself. Really cautious in what it does, just totally refusing to do anything that it knows is potentially dangerous.
00:59:42 ◼ ► In terms of support burden, we'll see. This is one of the things that was preventing me from doing it. You're just making an app for people to hose themselves. Now they're going to be angry and you're not going to get one-star reviews or whatever.
00:59:56 ◼ ► But this app is already on the Mac App Store. It's got great reviews, it has no guardrails. People love it. So maybe people find those apps find their audience. So, we'll see.
01:00:05 ◼ ► I mean, look, I am an expert in bad ideas. And I don't think... This is not jumping out at me as a bad idea. So I think you might be onto something here. This might be a good thing for you to do.
01:00:19 ◼ ► It is a risk. I think, like any new app, it will be way more time consuming than you think it will. The support burden will be larger than you expect and predict. And it will be difficult to market it even though you have one of the best marketing channels in the indie Apple scene by your existing presence in the internet and on this podcast and on your blog and everything else.
01:00:45 ◼ ► But I think you could do it. And I think you could do a good job of it. And some people would buy it. I don't know how the heck you're going to price it. I don't know anything about this market. But I think you can make it happen.
01:00:58 ◼ ► Here's the thing. Any competent, experienced Mac developer could bang this out between the time this podcast is released. Anyone who's good at Mac development could do this so much faster than I will. Part of the reason I'm doing it is because I enjoy Mac development. It's a thing I discovered from my other two apps. I just enjoy doing it. Period.
01:01:17 ◼ ► And I'll learn a lot. One of the things I enjoy is learning stuff. But I am by no means an experienced Mac developer. I am stumbling my way through this. So it's going to take me a long time. Anybody good, like one of the many good Mac developers that are out there that make these things.
01:01:32 ◼ ► Like, Guy Rambo probably made this app already. And they'll do a better job than me too. But maybe they're not interested in that market. Maybe they know that this is a dangerous tool. I just don't understand why more people haven't made it. This is probably not the only one. There's probably other apps that also do this.
01:01:51 ◼ ► When we discussed it on the show, I think I probably said someone should totally make an app like that. And then someone said, here's this app. And then I bought it. Right? So this is not a new idea. I just think this is an idea that more people should be implementing. And if people aren't going to do it, then I will do it. And again, even if they do do it, I'm still going to do it anyway because I'm having fun. And if it turns out to be a disaster, I just pulled the app from the store.
01:02:14 ◼ ► To be absolutely clear, as your friend, I'm nervous for you. And I don't love it. As your co-host, oh hell yes. Because we will get so much good stuff out of it.
01:02:31 ◼ ► I'll give you the source code. You can look at it. You can step through the debugger to see that it's not really doing anything terrible.
01:02:39 ◼ ► I mean, I think there is honestly, there is a lot to be said for taking something that, yeah, anybody, any programmer can write a script to do this in a couple hours at most.
01:02:52 ◼ ► And there is something to be said for wrapping that idea and functionality in a really nice app. And there is a market for that.
01:03:02 ◼ ► And honestly, there is a lot, when you look at iOS, iOS because it is so big, the entire world is iOS.
01:03:21 ◼ ► You can't get an iota of attention on iOS without paying for it. And you're going to be competing with everyone else who is paying for it with all the money they're making from their scam subscriptions and all that other crap that goes on on iOS.
01:03:40 ◼ ► True. But just kind of like, the dynamics of the market on iOS are just cutthroat and brutal and it's hard to do something nice there as an indie.
01:03:52 ◼ ► Honestly, it really is hard. On the Mac, though, I think part of the beauty of the Mac software ecosystem that I think really peaked a lot in the mid 2000s and maybe 2010s,
01:04:06 ◼ ► and we've kind of been going down since then, is people who were really just making nice versions of simple tasks.
01:04:15 ◼ ► Like, apps that did something that, yeah, anybody could write something to do that, but here's a really nice version of it.
01:04:25 ◼ ► That was a huge part of the Mac indie software scene and that's part of what drew a lot of us to the Mac in that time span.
01:04:39 ◼ ► And so I love the idea of you going into this and doing something like this, even though if you look at like, okay, how should you spend your money,
01:04:48 ◼ ► how should you spend your time to maximize the amount of money you can make with Apple platform software?
01:04:59 ◼ ► And I think that we need more of that and I really miss the era of that being the thing we were all really paying attention to and doing and using.
01:05:08 ◼ ► And selfishly, it's easy for me to say this because I don't have to handle the support load that you do.
01:05:20 ◼ ► But I think odds are if you finish this and release it and let me pick your price, I think you'll make more money from this than your other two apps combined.
01:05:33 ◼ ► Yeah, this definitely has more potential customers, but also it's much more potentially dangerous.
01:05:57 ◼ ► But when you're running a company, you can think about what kind of products our company make in terms of product market fit and total addressable market and so on and so forth.
01:06:06 ◼ ► But when you're an indie developer, you're in the situation where essentially you can't pick what you're interested in building.
01:06:23 ◼ ► Even when I was thinking of doing a Mastodon client, which is a much more difficult task, and I started it and it turned out I didn't like iOS development that much, right?
01:06:37 ◼ ► It's like, I mean, let's just throw out my alley. I love file system stuff. I love, like, this actually surprisingly large overlap between this app and the stuff I did in my web dev career.
01:06:50 ◼ ► One of the biggest things I made was like an S3-like service that had to deal with all sorts of file system things in addition to being a web service type thing. Right?
01:06:59 ◼ ► And you just don't get to pick what you're interested in when you're an indie. You're interested in what you're interested in.
01:07:04 ◼ ► So you end up making what you want to make. And if you're lucky, you get something that overlaps with a lot of customers.
01:07:11 ◼ ► But if you're unlucky, like, you can't force yourself to be like, I should make a to-do app. I don't want to make a to-do app. Right?
01:07:17 ◼ ► Never mind that market is saturated anyway. But whatever. Like, anything with wide appeal. Right?
01:07:21 ◼ ► So, or if you're a very skilled developer, you can just, you know, do the underscore method and you have so many interests and so many apps and you can turn them out so quickly that you make lots of bets and eventually some of them pay off.
01:07:32 ◼ ► But you have to be, A, a really good experience developer to do that. And B, I think Underscore actually is legitimately interested in every app that he makes.
01:07:39 ◼ ► He's got a wide-ranging interest. My interests are narrower and more obscure. And this is one of them, unfortunately for me and potentially unfortunately for the world.
01:07:49 ◼ ► Well, again, I am in full support of this as a co-host. I am sort of in support of it as a friend. I just, the support burden is what worries me so deeply. Like everything else about it, I think, heck yeah.
01:08:03 ◼ ► But I am deeply concerned about the support burden. But if you say you're comfortable with, you know, shouldering that, then power to you. Let's do it.
01:08:14 ◼ ► It's not a very complicated app in terms of, you know, there's not a lot of complicated UI people who have trouble with. It's just only going to be a question of, oh, you broke my computer and deleted all my files.
01:08:24 ◼ ► But it's pretty easy. Not it's easy. But if you're super cautious in your app, you can severely limit the damage.
01:08:32 ◼ ► I mean, my evidence is the Disk-D-Duper app that's on the Mac App Store now is not bombarded with terrible reviews.
01:08:39 ◼ ► People like it. People like getting free disk space back and the operation it's performing is not complicated. It's officially supported. You can put it in the Mac App Store. It's not using private APIs.
01:08:57 ◼ ► Turns out you don't need it because it's very confusing on Mac OS. One of the things I discovered is it does not work the way you think it does.
01:09:05 ◼ ► Was in one of the Mac development channels discussing like how does full disk access interact with sandboxing, interact with user expressed intent through the open save dialog box?
01:09:20 ◼ ► Yeah, I think you and me both. I couldn't believe it either. But I literally don't need it because everything that it does is user initiated.
01:09:29 ◼ ► Like and once you get a user initiated permission through the open save dialog box, I essentially have full access to the thing that they chose to open in the app.
01:09:38 ◼ ► So would you just like have them open like the root of the drive basically and then you can?
01:09:42 ◼ ► No, they just they just pick whatever they're going to pick whatever folder they want to do. So they pick the documents filter and that's it.
01:09:54 ◼ ► Now one of the things I'm also looking into for a future version of this goes well is a privileged helper tool where you ask for admin permissions.
01:10:12 ◼ ► No, I of all the things I thought we were talking about tonight, this was not on the list.
01:10:20 ◼ ► I mean literally the show notes are internal show notes read John is saving space photos iCloud shared library multiple accounts on the same Mac.
01:10:28 ◼ ► When I wrote that in the show notes I hadn't I hadn't done anything except for muse about it in between the time I wrote that and now I wrote a Perl script and wrote a Mac app.
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01:12:32 ◼ ► You're going to install it on at least two devices and then you're going to send me a tweet or whatever and say holy cow Casey you were so right.
01:12:51 ◼ ► I think was yesterday afternoon IOS 18 to Mac OS 15 to vision OS 2.2 all launched and I was not on the beta train on anything for the dot 2 releases and I have been very excited to try the dot 2 releases the 15.2 and vision OS 2.2 releases Mac OS 15.2 and vision OS 2.2.
01:13:22 ◼ ► So if you are not caught up the way it worked up until literally yesterday as we record this is that if you wanted to kind of suck your Mac into the vision OS world you could use either the vision OS control center or if you have a laptop you can just look at your laptop in a little button will appear over it.
01:13:45 ◼ ► This is connect and then it'll whatever you know laptop or other even desktop if you go in through vision OS control center whatever computer you're bringing into the vision OS you get a 4k display in vision OS and you can resize that display in so far as you can make it you know the equivalent of 10 feet in front of your face but it's still only ever 4k.
01:14:08 ◼ ► And I've used this a handful of times I used it kind of a lot when traveling but I don't travel that often so I've only used it a little bit here and there.
01:14:16 ◼ ► And I've used it on the train and on the plane and it's very very cool and really nice that not only do you have a large display in the in a train or in a plane but nobody can see what's happening on your Mac it's not like you know screen sharing where a lot of times your Mac will be displaying what's on screen and then some other computers also displaying it.
01:14:34 ◼ ► And when you do this Mac virtual display thing the Mac screen or screens go dark in so no passerby or bystander whatever looky-loo can see what's going on.
01:14:44 ◼ ► And I always thought this was good. It wasn't perfect wasn't stellar but it was good and I typically do this with the developer strap on my vision pro.
01:14:53 ◼ ► If you recall you can replace the right hand side audio pod I think they call it which in the in the strap that it's that it's a part of and you can get one that has a little USB-C dongle on it then you can plug USB-C from the vision pro into your computer and it will actually do Mac virtual display over that rather than like local Wi-Fi or whatever.
01:15:13 ◼ ► And I always thought it was good maybe even great I don't know somewhere between good and great Marco up until yesterday if I recall correctly you found the Mac virtual display to be a little bit blurry and you didn't really care for it very much is that accurate?
01:15:32 ◼ ► Okay fair enough. So yesterday we got the new Mac virtual display which does a few things I believe the standard display is now 5k instead of 4k.
01:15:44 ◼ ► Additionally you have two other modes that you can optionally choose between. You can choose between what do they call it?
01:15:55 ◼ ► Now I should also note that up until yesterday even the standard display was well there was that was the only option you had and it was flat whereas now all of the displays are curved a little bit which generally is not something I particularly care for but in this context I think does make a fair bit of sense.
01:16:12 ◼ ► God help me if I end up buying one of these 40 inch curved computer displays from my desk.
01:16:17 ◼ ► In all fairness I would say like based on the virtualized size of them the wide and ultra wide I think basically have to be curved especially the ultra wide the it takes up like I mean I'm just estimating here maybe like 90 degrees of your field of view so if that was just a big flat pane window in the in the view the left and right edges would be substantially further away from your eyes than the center would be it would be a little weird.
01:16:44 ◼ ► Yeah, so yeah so they added wide and ultra wide and wide is let's see so the standard I think what I forget the resolutions Oh here we go.
01:16:54 ◼ ► So when I was in ultra wide mode, it offered 5120 by 1440 which is the default in up to 10 240 by 2880 which is bananas.
01:17:05 ◼ ► But suffice it to say I have tried this out. Holy freaking crap this is amazing. I am so in love with this.
01:17:14 ◼ ► Now if you recall I'm the kind of lunatic and this is partially Marco's fault for having sent me one but I'm the kind of lunatic that runs three 5k displays at home.
01:17:24 ◼ ► I have my studio display directly in front of my face. Then I have at you know like a 45 degree angle to either side I have I have LG ultra fine 5k.
01:17:35 ◼ ► So I'm used to having an overabundance of real estate and I'm used to having to move my head in order to use my computer.
01:17:46 ◼ ► The ultra wide is so freaking big in the fiction pro that I actually think it might even be too much and I am so happy that that is the problem I have that this might be too much.
01:17:57 ◼ ► It is unreal. I have many more thoughts about this but I'd like to pause myself and hear Marco you were assigned yet more homework and listeners I have to tell you Marco has been a very good sport about all the homework I've assigned.
01:18:10 ◼ ► And you have done more homework and I appreciate you and I appreciate that rain on my parade and I'll go back to telling you about how amazing it is.
01:18:23 ◼ ► I this where I am with the vision pro is I have my feelings about it. I can tell you how well it works for me but a lot of other people it works better for them.
01:18:32 ◼ ► And so if it works better for you who cares if it doesn't work very well for me. That's my loss and your gain.
01:18:40 ◼ ► So anyway I did try this. It is substantially better than the original version in terms of screen space and therefore the usability of that screen space.
01:18:53 ◼ ► I found the ultra wide the biggest setting to actually be way too much space. I had to do so much head turning. I'm like this is ridiculous.
01:19:02 ◼ ► So I actually stuck with the middle setting the wide. It was a lot of screen space. Plenty of screen space on the middle setting for me without too much head turning.
01:19:18 ◼ ► The main problems I had with the original version were number one I could notice the foveated rendering which is bad.
01:19:30 ◼ ► You see kind of out of the corner of your eyes which parts of the screen are blurry that you're not quite looking at.
01:19:41 ◼ ► That I did not notice that this time. So I don't know if they've actually improved that or if I've stopped noticing.
01:19:48 ◼ ► I think they might have actually improved it. So you don't notice the foveated rendering blurriness on the stuff you're not looking at anymore.
01:19:54 ◼ ► At least I didn't. I did still notice the two other major problems I had with it the first time which are a lack of sharpness and latency.
01:20:06 ◼ ► One of the first things I tried when I first got the Vision Pro, I tried editing a podcast in it with Logic.
01:20:17 ◼ ► If you're just typing in a document you won't see it. But when you start moving stuff around you do see it.
01:20:24 ◼ ► You do feel that latency and it feels really bad and really wrong and it makes certain types of work very difficult to do in that environment without driving yourself nuts.
01:20:34 ◼ ► So latency is still there. I still notice it. And that alone would be enough for me to not really want to use this very often if ever.
01:20:43 ◼ ► Now quick interruption. Are you using this via wifi or are you plugging in via the developer strap?
01:20:48 ◼ ► The laptop it was connected to was connected to ethernet. But the Vision Pro was on wifi.
01:20:55 ◼ ► That being said the wifi router is like 10 feet away and nothing else ever says this is a bad wifi connection right here in my seat at my desk.
01:21:05 ◼ ► So anyway. And I would argue that's the way to actually judge it anyway is when using it on wifi because that's how it's really made.
01:21:13 ◼ ► Because the developer strap gives you a second cable down the other side of the Vision Pro.
01:21:18 ◼ ► By the way I actually did solve my Vision Pro standby issues. Quick aside here. I've decided when I'm not using the Vision Pro I just disconnect the battery cable from it.
01:21:28 ◼ ► Which is obviously like unplugging the desktop. It powers off immediately and it does not do a clean shutdown.
01:21:34 ◼ ► But I don't care. And when I disconnect the battery cable for storage I did that last time and put it away.
01:21:40 ◼ ► That was probably what two weeks ago. I got it out this time. Perfect charge. It booted up just fine. The battery still showed green. Like everything was totally fine.
01:21:49 ◼ ► So if you actually unplug it from its battery it does last substantially longer in standby mode.
01:21:55 ◼ ► Anyway so going back to the screen. The MAG Virtual Display update. The latency is still a problem for me. The sharpness is still really poor.
01:22:05 ◼ ► When you look directly at something and you kind of stabilize yourself. I'll get to that in a second.
01:22:10 ◼ ► You can see what it is. It's not like the pixels are so blurred that you can't read lettering or you can't see lines. It's not that bad.
01:22:21 ◼ ► But it is blurred. And when you look at the optical pipeline of what is being shown on a Vision Pro.
01:22:28 ◼ ► It has to be blurred. We are nowhere near the optical resolution or screen resolution required to actually replicate the pixel density of a computer monitor at a regular distance inside the Vision Pro.
01:22:44 ◼ ► We are nowhere near it. We are many generations away from that being realistically possible if it ever comes.
01:22:50 ◼ ► So it is substantially blurrier than looking at a real monitor. It has substantial latency. And then one of the big killers for me is the Vision Pro has significant motion blur when you move your head or eyes very much.
01:23:04 ◼ ► When you look at the design of Vision Pro native apps. Everything is huge. The windows are huge. The buttons are huge. The text is pretty big.
01:23:15 ◼ ► Everything about Vision Pro or Vision native apps, everything is big. And it's simulated to be somewhat far away from you too.
01:23:23 ◼ ► And so everything like, you don't notice the motion blur as much. And then the best thing to do in my opinion with the Vision Pro is watch 3D video content or immersive content.
01:23:35 ◼ ► And with that you don't really see it at all because of the type of viewing you're doing in there. The small amount of motion blur when you move your head is kind of just blurred away and compensated for with everything else you're seeing.
01:23:44 ◼ ► But when you're looking at a computer screen which has a very high pixel density trying to make all these nice sharp windows and nice sharp text in this window.
01:23:53 ◼ ► The motion blur of the Vision Pro of just moving your own head, even very slight movements as you operate your computer, you notice it constantly. At least I did.
01:24:03 ◼ ► And so I found it very unpleasant to use. If you have already been using the Vision Pro virtual display mode like before this update and it was fine for you, then this is even better for you. So enjoy it.
01:24:17 ◼ ► If you had the problems with it that I had of latency, blurriness, and motion blur, those are not improved.
01:24:26 ◼ ► And I don't think it's possible too meaningful to improve them with the current hardware. So basically if you already have a Vision Pro, this is a useful thing to try and this might get you to use it more.
01:24:38 ◼ ► If you don't already have a Vision Pro, this probably is not a good enough reason to go out and buy one.
01:24:44 ◼ ► I was with all of your summary until that very last line. So let me reiterate that for me, and maybe it's because my eyes are not great, and I know I've said this a thousand times, but just one more time to set the stage.
01:24:57 ◼ ► I have a weird eye disease called keratoconus. That means I wear hard contact lenses. It's actually been said on Apple's documentation that you shouldn't wear hard contact lenses with the Vision Pro. It probably won't work. I've never had a problem with that.
01:25:09 ◼ ► My vision is actually pretty good with my contact lenses in. I'm like 20, 30 or something like that. I forget what I am. But it's actually not bad. But without my contacts, I'm even more blind than Jon, and that's saying something.
01:25:23 ◼ ► So I think it is possible, it is certainly possible, if not probable, that maybe some visual wonkiness that is really a shortcoming of the Vision Pro is actually my own eyes.
01:25:36 ◼ ► I don't know. This is the only eyes I've got, so I can't tell you one way or the other. But whatever the case may be, be it because of the Vision Pro, be it because of my eyes or whatever, I don't find it to be that off-putting.
01:25:47 ◼ ► I don't really get the motion blur. Occasionally I find it's a little difficult to focus, but it usually goes away very, very quickly. That might have to do with maybe my eyes settling down and the foveated rendering calming down. I'm not sure.
01:25:58 ◼ ► But generally speaking, I find this works really well. So this morning I had the occasion to go to a local library and I needed to be there to return something.
01:26:09 ◼ ► And I figured, well, I'm just going to chill and work for a little bit. So I am enough of that guy to use the Vision Pro at the library, but I'm not enough of that guy to do it in the middle of all the other people working at the library.
01:26:21 ◼ ► So I, I want to say rented, I reserved a study room at one of the local libraries and I sent this picture to Marco and I forget exactly what you said, but you said something along the lines of, "Holy crap, could you not have found a bigger place to work because it is effectively a closet?"
01:26:37 ◼ ► That's true. But I sat myself in this little study room and I put on my Vision Pro and I looked like a damned fool, but thankfully I wasn't in the middle of everyone and I was using the Vision Pro and I was using Mac virtual display.
01:26:53 ◼ ► And I agree that the ultra wide, while incredibly novel, is generally speaking, just too much, especially since like the menu bar runs the entire width of the display. You know, if you think about the way it is on my desktop, on my desktop at home or my laptop desktop at home, I have three different displays so they each get a menu bar and I can use the dock on any of them.
01:27:16 ◼ ► Right. And it'll be centered, the dock will be centered at the bottom of each individual display and the menu bar is repeated across, well, effectively repeated across each of these three displays. On the ultra wide, it's just one freaking huge display that, like you said earlier, something like 90 or 120 degrees of your vision.
01:27:34 ◼ ► So if you need to find the menu bar, you got to crane your turn your head all the way to the left to go find it. And I don't mean to imply that it's a burden, but it's it's striking, right? I think the ultra wide is a bit too much, but the wide is incredible.
01:27:48 ◼ ► And I got a lot of work done with this on. Now, granted the comfort, I think I've actually while I was sitting there, I ordered one of the $50 Belkin head strap things that I should have ordered a while ago.
01:28:00 ◼ ► And apparently my local store doesn't have in stock, which was a bummer. I was literally going to drive home by the Apple store to grab one of them, but it was not in stock.
01:28:09 ◼ ► So leaving the comfort behind or aside for a minute, it was so incredible to be able to have all of this real estate. And it's all right there. I'm in this little closet of a room.
01:28:22 ◼ ► And I have a what like effectively a pro display XDR, maybe not literally, but effectively a pro display XDR right in front of me. It was phenomenal. And not only that, but I could put music, the music app, like above the display.
01:28:36 ◼ ► So I'm using the native vision OS music app that's in 3d space above my ultra wide display, excuse me, my wide display or whatever. It was so amazing.
01:28:48 ◼ ► So over the last few years, what I've really wanted to do, and this started especially during COVID is I want to be able to work wherever I want to work. Right. And leave aside the vision pro for a second. Just, just in general, I want to work wherever I want to work.
01:29:00 ◼ ► And when I entered the pandemic, when we all entered the pandemic in 2020, if I'm not mistaken, I still had an iMac pro and a very serviceable 13 inch MacBook pro.
01:29:11 ◼ ► And over time, I feel like we're answering more and more or Apple is answering more and more questions. So I was thinking about this. Like the first question is, can I take my, my computer with me?
01:29:25 ◼ ► And that's a solved problem, right? If you want to take your computer with you, you can just get a laptop that, that is not up for grabs. We've solved this problem for 30, 40 years now or something like that. Not a big deal.
01:29:37 ◼ ► The second problem is can I power it? And that isn't much of a problem. Generally speaking, if you go to a library or something like that, typically you can plug into power, but even if you can't, you can always bring like a USB-C battery or something like that to give you another hour or two.
01:29:55 ◼ ► There's plenty of ways that you can solve this problem. So neither of these are really new problems or really that terribly interesting.
01:30:02 ◼ ► But where things got interesting, I think was starting in around 2020 with Apple Silicon. And when Apple answered the question, can I get my work done on it?
01:30:10 ◼ ► And that started in 2020 with Apple Silicon, because now the computer that is portable, that I can pick up and walk away with is just as powerful, if not more powerful than that iMac pro that was sitting on my desk.
01:30:25 ◼ ► And part of the reason why I returned to the full-time laptop lifestyle was because my MacBook Pro, my M1 Macs MacBook Pro at the time was considerably quicker than my iMac Pro.
01:30:37 ◼ ► And my M3 Macs MacBook Pro is considerably quicker than a lot of Apple desktops. And, and I don't have to really make any compromises.
01:30:46 ◼ ► Like it was such an incredibly freeing feeling. If you're still on Intel, it is such an incredibly freeing feeling to know that you can take this incredibly powerful computer and just walk away with it.
01:30:57 ◼ ► You can just buy a laptop and walk away with it. And you don't need a MacBook Pro to do that. Like, as we've said many times, the MacBook Airs are also incredibly powerful computers that you can easily walk away with.
01:31:08 ◼ ► It's unreal. And then, so can I get my work done on it? Hell yeah, I can, because they are so darn powerful.
01:31:17 ◼ ► And then the other thing, and this is where the Vision Pro comes in, is do I have the space to get my work done on it? And I mean screen real estate.
01:31:26 ◼ ► A 13-inch laptop is not a fun way to get work done, unless you're doing very, very basic stuff.
01:31:31 ◼ ► But typically in the last couple of years, and I've talked about this on the show, I bought a like 2K portable display, a bus-powered portable display.
01:31:41 ◼ ► It is a piece of trash, but I love it because that gives me a second display that I can set next to my MacBook Pro.
01:31:47 ◼ ► It's super thin, super light. It doesn't need a power supply. Like I said, it's bus-powered. It's great.
01:31:52 ◼ ► And that would get me enough that I could do development work in a pinch on the go. Wasn't fun, but I could do it.
01:32:00 ◼ ► With the Vision Pro, I can legitimately do my development work, and it might be a little less convenient than having my full array of three 5K displays, but not that much.
01:32:13 ◼ ► The compromise, even with that spare physical 2K display, the compromise was still quite large.
01:32:19 ◼ ► But now, if you can leave aside the fact that you look like a friggin' idiot, the compromise is really not that much at all.
01:32:26 ◼ ► And in fact, for most people that don't have 15Ks sitting in front of them, it's actually arguably better in the ultra-wide display.
01:32:35 ◼ ► Now, I agree with Marco. I think the ultra-wide is actually too much. But that's neither here nor there.
01:32:39 ◼ ► My point is just that I am now able to set up an entire workstation by way of a MacBook Pro and a Vision Pro.
01:32:49 ◼ ► And I just think that is so incredibly cool. That is so cool that one of the things I can do, which I haven't done yet, but one of the things I could do is during the workday, if I feel like I'm just a little uncomfortable in my desk chair or what have you,
01:33:04 ◼ ► I can go down to my couch, and I can sit on my couch with my nerd goggles on my head, and I can be doing work on my couch.
01:33:15 ◼ ► There's nothing wrong with it. It's almost as good as on my desk. And I just think that is such an incredibly powerful, cool thing.
01:33:23 ◼ ► And again, there's so many things I could say to poo-poo this. I'm talking about what, $9,000 worth of hardware or something like that?
01:33:30 ◼ ► It is an absolutely asinine amount of money that I'm talking about. I said earlier the laptop was like $5,000, the Vision Pro was $3,500, plus the $400 developer strap went out like $9,000.
01:33:40 ◼ ► That is bananas. But it is so incredibly cool to have that future, I was going to say in my hands, but also on my face today.
01:33:50 ◼ ► And I think that that's so incredibly powerful. But here's where I'm going to drag Marco back in.
01:33:55 ◼ ► You know what else is missing? You know what the thing is that would really make this truly and incredibly, just perfectly portable?
01:34:04 ◼ ► I can figure out power. I can figure out my display. But Marco, what do I not have yet? What is not internal to my MacBook Pro?
01:34:15 ◼ ► Internet. I cannot imagine how cool it will be when Apple finally one day, when I'm 95 years old, decides to put a cellular modem in this MacBook Pro.
01:34:27 ◼ ► Because then, then, this literally could be used anywhere, anywhere there's civilization. I'm sure there's an asterisk there, but you know what I'm saying.
01:34:36 ◼ ► I could go to my beloved park bench/picnic table. I could go wherever the hell, I could be in the car in the passenger seat.
01:34:43 ◼ ► I could be wherever. And I can have my MacBook Pro and my Vision Pro, and I can get work done damn near as well as I can do it on my desk.
01:34:53 ◼ ► And whether or not you think that's a wise use of my money, whether or not you think it's a smart idea to put this nerd goggles on your face, it is so powerful.
01:35:04 ◼ ► I would say empowering, but I think that might be a little dramatic. But it's powerful that I can get my work done in the same fidelity, for lack of a better word, as my desk.
01:35:14 ◼ ► And I can do that almost anywhere. I can do it anywhere that I have internet. And that, to me, is so cool.
01:35:21 ◼ ► And I still mostly agree with Marco that, well, I 100% agree with Marco that if this is something that didn't work for you before, like the Mac virtual display thing didn't work for you before, you're probably not going to like it now. I concur.
01:35:34 ◼ ► It is better, as Marco had said, but it's not, you know, night and day better. But if you're like me, and this is something that worked before, but now you want to see what it's like now? Let me tell you.
01:35:47 ◼ ► Oh, it's so good. It's so good. And this is the sort of thing that if you have the money to spend on this sort of thing, and the desire to be able to work wherever, maybe it's only that you travel a lot, you want to be able to work really efficiently in a hotel room or whatever the case may be.
01:36:06 ◼ ► Suddenly this is becoming, and many other people have said this over the last few days, this is starting to become a killer feature for me. And I think that this will genuinely, I genuinely think that this will make me want to use my Vision Pro more.
01:36:18 ◼ ► Not in the house necessarily. I still think all the problems we've talked about many times about not being enough content is still true in the house. But it's going to make me use it out of the house, especially on the occasions that I travel much, much more. And I cannot say enough good things about it.
01:36:35 ◼ ► If Apple really cared about this use case with the M5 powered successor to the Vision Pro or whatever, they should just let you plug a Thunderbolt cable from the headset into your Mac to get rid of the latency thing that Marco was complaining about.
01:36:46 ◼ ► Like just fully embrace the idea of it as an external monitor. And yeah, it'll still have to do all the 3D and the tracking and the blah, blah, blah, but the latency should be gone thanks to whatever clever thing they do over Thunderbolt.
01:36:56 ◼ ► You know, essentially rendering into a virtual display somewhere inside the Vision Pro that it then puts into 3D space in front of you without having to do any Wi-Fi or compression shenanigans or stuff like that.
01:37:07 ◼ ► But I don't, I'm not sure Apple cares that much about this use case. I know Casey, you love this use case, but I think Apple probably thinks the appropriate level of technological and cost, technological innovation and cost is what they're doing now.
01:37:19 ◼ ► Pretty good, pretty good resolution, very big display, wireless, convenient, no cables. You don't have to put all the extra hardware and memory inside the Vision Pro to support it and stuff like that.
01:37:30 ◼ ► But yeah, you can see how if the Vision Pro was emphasizing this use case much more and de-emphasizing many other ones, you, first of all, would have to make the Vision Pro even more expensive just for the memory stuff, but you could do that.
01:37:43 ◼ ► And if you want to go really expensive, you know, the Vision Pro with an M5 in it, you know what that could do? It could just fricking run macOS.
01:37:51 ◼ ► In addition to Vision OS, you know what I mean, like with virtualization, blah, blah, but like you could just run your Mac, like why do you need to have this laptop that you bring with you?
01:37:58 ◼ ► What is the purpose of the laptop? It's just sitting there over in the corner, right? Again, that would make it even more expensive, heavier, hotter.
01:38:05 ◼ ► You'd have to have an external compute thing. The battery would have to be bigger, but that's not the use case that Apple is going for, so I don't think they're going to do any of that.
01:38:13 ◼ ► But technologically speaking, because Apple, like Taco Bell, is using all the same different ingredients to make lots of different things.
01:38:23 ◼ ► Yeah, but you look at the Vision Pro and you're like, you know, all the pieces are there. Like if you could arrange these Lego pieces to make Vision Pro, like Casey's dream, like on-the-go Mac development thing, all the pieces are there except for Apple's cell modem that's going to put cellular into Mac someday, which we'll have a story on in a future episode if we remember to do it.
01:38:44 ◼ ► It's a race between a worthy Mac Pro chip and cellular in Macs, and it looks like Casey might win this one.
01:38:51 ◼ ► You never know. I'm glad actually you brought up the plugging it in via Thunderbolt thing, because I should say that my experience, I believe I've only exclusively used it with the developer strap with the thing plugged in, so that's another reason why Marco's experience might have been slightly worse than mine.
01:39:07 ◼ ► And it does appear that by default it will try to hop on Wi-Fi between the computer and the Vision Pro, but then, and I think it negotiates this via Bluetooth, but I definitely noticed once I plugged it in, and I think I actually killed Bluetooth on my Mac if I recall correctly, it clearly renegotiated the connection over the cord, over the cable.
01:39:28 ◼ ► And then I pulled it out because I realized like a ding-dong, I had taken the cable that's coming out my right ear and connected it to the left side of my computer. I don't know what I was thinking.
01:39:37 ◼ ► So I unplugged it and moved it to the right side of my computer, and the screen immediately went black, and once I plugged it back in, it took a few seconds before it renegotiated, but it did come back on its own.
01:39:46 ◼ ► But I think that that certainly helped latency and stuff like that, some of the legitimate complaints that Marco had.
01:39:51 ◼ ► But yeah, either way, it is so cool, and there's no easy way for Apple to demo this when they do the Vision Pro demos or whatever, because it all is relying on your Apple ID or whatever, it's Apple account now.
01:40:07 ◼ ► And it would be a lot to get this to work, but oh man, if you have a friend where you could just strap their face computer on your face for a minute, it's worth trying because it is so freaking cool.
01:40:38 ◼ ► This week on Overtime, we're gonna be talking about the story about there's a Mac emulator called MiniVMAC that was being rejected by Apple's notarization.
01:40:54 ◼ ► So we're gonna be talking about the MiniVMAC notarization rejection from the EU app stores.
01:41:01 ◼ ► Anyway, you can hear our coverage of that in Overtime this week by joining ATP.fm/join.
01:41:24 ◼ ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.
01:42:14 ◼ ► Before we get to Casey's thing on the aftershow, can I do a quick "this is not an ad" discussion of one of our sponsors this week?
01:42:25 ◼ ► If you're listening to the non-member version, you by now probably have already heard the ad for Our Frames.
01:42:30 ◼ ► This is not the ad, this is just me talking about Our Frames, which they did send us one of them for free, so take that with a grain of salt, I got mine for free.
01:42:43 ◼ ► Honestly, I thought they were like, "why would anyone want that, it's just like a really low quality screen in your house, I have plenty of actual pictures up on the wall or whatever."
01:42:51 ◼ ► So whatever they sent it to me, it's free, I guess I'll set it up to see what it's like.
01:43:04 ◼ ► It's not like, because it can't be, it's not thousands of dollars, it's an inexpensive small color screen, kind of like Casey's 2K monitor thing that he loves even though it's not super high quality.
01:43:15 ◼ ► I didn't, like who would care that you have like, I see my pictures, they're on my phone, they're on my Mac, like why do I want to have a frame in my house that rotates through those pictures?
01:43:27 ◼ ► I can't, I get so much enjoyment of looking at which picture it's showing right now, I pointed it at my favorites library which has like 30,000 photos and something, it was like, no problem.
01:43:36 ◼ ► I love the thing like, "oh what was that picture you just swipe on the top to go back to the previous one?" I know this sounds like an ad.
01:43:41 ◼ ► Honestly, like, and probably this is like a gift, like I would not have bought this for myself.
01:43:47 ◼ ► I would not have ever bought a digital frame, as evidenced by the fact that I literally never bought one, I never bought one for someone else, I always thought they were dumb.
01:43:53 ◼ ► Having been gifted this one essentially as part of a sponsorship made me realize I like digital picture frames.
01:43:59 ◼ ► That's it, it's not an ad, I just wanted to say that I've discovered that I like digital picture frames.
01:44:04 ◼ ► Yeah, the Aura stuff is legitimately really, really good and you will hear me, or some of you have heard me do the sponsor read, but for real, and I'm now kind of regurgitating the sponsor read,
01:44:16 ◼ ► but if you've had one of these in the past, this is not like that because the ones in the past you have to put an SD card in and it's just trash.
01:44:23 ◼ ► And I'm not going to repeat the ad, but suffice to say this is all that but done right. It's really quite good.
01:44:28 ◼ ► I took like, you know, two minutes to set it up ages ago and have not touched it since.
01:44:36 ◼ ► Alright, so I have a conundrum and I'm probably making a mountain out of nothing because, hi, have we met?
01:44:43 ◼ ► But I am, I think at the point that I'm ready to release the briefly previously mentioned, or I guess not so briefly, actually previously mentioned update for Call Sheet where you can have multiple lists of pins.
01:45:02 ◼ ► But then it occurred to me, you know what, Apple has said to developers a handful of times recently, you know, you can tell us when you're going to be doing a new app or a new feature or whatever, and maybe you'll get a feature on the App Store.
01:45:19 ◼ ► And I know full well that the likelihood of my little dinky app getting a feature on the App Store is not great.
01:45:26 ◼ ► But I thought, what's it going to hurt to do what they ask you to do and report in and say, yeah, I've got this big new feature.
01:45:38 ◼ ► And so I went down the path of telling Apple, hey, I'm going to be doing this probably in the next week or two.
01:45:44 ◼ ► And completely fairly, especially given the time of year, very early on in Little Wizard, they have you go through to get the information that they want.
01:45:53 ◼ ► They say, hey, we really prefer for you to give us three weeks before your launch, which in and of itself is fine.
01:46:06 ◼ ► And my question to the two of you, and I think I'd like to start with Marco if that's OK, is knowing that there's no real urgency to get this out,
01:46:16 ◼ ► other than a completely self-imposed deadline of wanting to be done with it before the end of the year.
01:46:21 ◼ ► Should I hold on till like the first full week of January, so like two or three weeks from where, I guess three-ish weeks from where we are now,
01:46:28 ◼ ► and give Apple the chance to feature me, even though I intellectually know that there's almost no chance of it happening?
01:46:34 ◼ ► Like what's it going to hurt to delay and try? Or should I just get this out the door now?
01:46:42 ◼ ► Do you know if Apple, not insist, but if Apple wants you, won't feature you if you launch without them?
01:46:52 ◼ ► Like is the featuring contingent on you launching coordinated in time with their feature?
01:46:59 ◼ ► That is an excellent question, and I don't know the answer, but I thought that I think they want you to release as they feature.
01:47:11 ◼ ► Okay, so this is why I came to the show. So tell me, what am I doing? What should I be doing? What am I doing wrong? What should I be doing? Help me.
01:47:20 ◼ ► They want you to coordinate your other marketing with them. They don't want to be the only place promoting an app.
01:47:32 ◼ ► They want to jump on a bandwagon, and they want you to be doing a big push, and they want to be a part of the big push.
01:47:39 ◼ ► That's not always the case. That's not the only way they'll promote something, but that's why they want to coordinate with your release.
01:47:57 ◼ ► Anyway, yeah, we get a lot of PR email. Anyway, that being said, when you are trying to coordinate something like that,
01:48:04 ◼ ► by submitting it to them in advance with the number of weeks of notice and everything, that's kind of what you're going for.
01:48:12 ◼ ► What also happens is if they see another app that, like, hey, the blogs are posting about this app,
01:48:24 ◼ ► If they see that, the App Store editorial team, they have people who look for that kind of stuff.
01:48:29 ◼ ► If they see that, they will come to you and send you a message in App Store Connect saying,
01:48:34 ◼ ► there's a promotional opportunity if you just submit artwork of these specs by this date.
01:48:55 ◼ ► And so they'll say, all right, they'll link to some document somewhere on Apple's site that says,
01:49:01 ◼ ► we're currently looking for this type of -- and it will say in the request, like, a home screen header or whatever.
01:49:08 ◼ ► There's different names for the different positions in the App Store, different formats and everything.
01:49:16 ◼ ► And it's like, you know, you have to have -- design your artwork within these safeguards and have it, you know,
01:49:22 ◼ ► feature these things but not these things and don't include screenshots, don't include words, you know,
01:49:29 ◼ ► So then that's then placed on you and they'll say, give us the promo artwork by, you know, so and so date.
01:49:41 ◼ ► Anyway, as developers, we are given that chance and we say, okay, well, we can either rush to put this promo art
01:49:48 ◼ ► together ourselves if we even can and if it will look any good or we can hire a designer or, you know, tell --
01:49:59 ◼ ► Like, they assume you either are a designer or have one on staff because they assume everyone's a big company.
01:50:03 ◼ ► So anyway, so as an indie, though, then you're stuck with, like, all right, all right, I have to, like,
01:50:08 ◼ ► find the designer and pay them to do this for me and then you have to start weighing, like,
01:50:14 ◼ ► is this going to be worth it or should I try to do it myself, like, do my own custom promo artwork,
01:50:23 ◼ ► And the worse it looks, the less likely they are to actually use it and actually feature your app,
01:50:30 ◼ ► because when you submit that promo artwork to them, they basically say, thanks, we might feature you.
01:50:37 ◼ ► Like, so you're kind of, you know, throwing it into a black hole and hoping someday they may be using it.
01:50:43 ◼ ► They won't tell you where they're featuring you. They won't tell you when they're featuring you.
01:50:46 ◼ ► They won't tell you if they choose to or not to. You just kind of have to watch for it.
01:50:50 ◼ ► Although I think they've recently added a notification that if they do feature you, now it finally tells you.
01:51:02 ◼ ► It requires you to -- if you're going to go through what you were asking about, about notifying them ahead of time,
01:51:08 ◼ ► that's one level. If it's going to be, like, you know, you having to make promo artwork, which is usually required,
01:51:15 ◼ ► that's a different level. There is a certain amount of work and cost that is going to be put on you.
01:51:29 ◼ ► I think usually for indies who already have marketing channels, usually I think it's not worth it to do -- to bend over backwards.
01:51:37 ◼ ► Now, if you can address what they're asking for without too much sweat off your back, without too much work,
01:51:43 ◼ ► without too much cost, then sure, do it. You might as well do it if it's going to be easy.
01:51:48 ◼ ► But if what they're asking for is going to cost you, like, you know, thousands of dollars in designer time,
01:52:00 ◼ ► Because the thing is, an App Store feature used to be worth a lot more than it's worth now.
01:52:07 ◼ ► Because not a lot of people, it seems, are just casually browsing the App Store, looking around for new apps to install.
01:52:22 ◼ ► when people were, you know, were actually, like, getting their first iOS devices still,
01:52:30 ◼ ► Like, I remember back in my Instapaper days, Christmas Day used to be a huge sales day for me.
01:52:41 ◼ ► Instapaper had pretty good business on the iPad, and so many people would get iPads for Christmas,
01:52:50 ◼ ► And so they would then immediately go browsing around, "Hey, what can I do on this thing? Let me install a bunch of apps."
01:53:08 ◼ ► and now there's so much out there, there's so many apps, that I don't think a lot of people are just kind of browsing the editorial sections of the iOS App Store.
01:53:22 ◼ ► but I see, like, when you look at the sales that happen as a result of that, it's hard to see a bump anymore.
01:53:28 ◼ ► I'm sure it helps, I'm sure, you know, any bit helps, and if you don't already have a ton of exposure in any other way,
01:53:42 ◼ ► I think it's more of a vanity and honor thing than an actual thing that translates to sales.
01:53:48 ◼ ► And so you should account for that in deciding how much to either spend accommodating their plans,
01:54:03 ◼ ► Release it when you want to release it, and if they want to feature it, they'll come to you.
01:54:15 ◼ ► Like, what's it gonna hurt to throw this over the wall, give myself the remainder of the year to breathe,
01:54:23 ◼ ► And yeah, I have, I guess, failed in that I haven't released the thing that I've been working on,
01:55:06 ◼ ► Like, that's why I want to get it out, and for the wisdom of releasing it just before the holidays aside,
01:55:12 ◼ ► I would want to have my, be sure the app that was going to be featured was stable and working.
01:55:18 ◼ ► Which is fair, but if I'm also coordinating the big release with Apple, I can't have both, right?
01:55:26 ◼ ► or do they just want to feature you? Because if they don't care if you coordinated the release,
01:55:33 ◼ ► maybe get one or two bug fix updates out, and then get featured if they don't insist that you not release your app until,
01:55:55 ◼ ► not necessarily whether or not I'd be featured, but just, you know, what is the expectation?
01:56:06 ◼ ► ask everyone you know who has apps in the store. They're all going to tell you the same thing.
01:56:15 ◼ ► and they did actually, if not write about them, then at least, like, list them somewhere at some point in the past,
01:56:21 ◼ ► but no, they did not tell me when they were doing this. I found out because other people told me,
01:56:30 ◼ ► and you can also, like, I've been notified through app figures, like, they have a thing,
01:56:33 ◼ ► if you use app figures, they'll tell you, but it is mostly just, like, you kind of just rely on people telling you on social networks,
01:56:39 ◼ ► "Hey, I saw your app on this thing." And again, like, it's nice, but it's really hard to see much of a bump from those anymore,
01:56:47 ◼ ► just because, I think, again, I think the number of people who are just casually browsing, looking for new apps to install,
01:56:53 ◼ ► I think that number is very small these days. The reality is, because, as I was saying earlier,
01:57:04 ◼ ► with just huge amounts of apps, you usually have to pay to get people to install your app.
01:57:09 ◼ ► Like, you have to buy search ads, you have to buy Facebook ads, whatever, like, and paying for app installs is not cheap,
01:57:16 ◼ ► because there's so much competition from everyone else trying to get people to install their apps.
01:57:21 ◼ ► So the bids all get bid up. So, like, it's actually, it's really hard to get installs of your app, because no one is going out there
01:57:29 ◼ ► and just looking organically, unless they hear about it from your other marketing channels, from your podcast, from your blog.
01:57:35 ◼ ► Like, that's, that's where to promote your app, and just talking about it on here is worth way more than most types of app store features
01:57:44 ◼ ► that any of us would be likely to actually get. Now, if you happen to be, like, the app of the day on the front page of the app store,
01:57:50 ◼ ► then you're talking about different numbers. That is more substantial, and that is worth it, of course, if you can get it.
01:57:57 ◼ ► But this kind of smaller feature is like, "Oh, top apps to be cozy this winter," or whatever, like, that kind of stuff,
01:58:04 ◼ ► you're not gonna see much from that. It is a nice honor, again, like, it's an honor to be featured, and it's nice to have your work recognized by Apple,
01:58:12 ◼ ► and it feels good. But in terms of translating to actual, like, really meaningful sales and downloads, it's not much.
01:58:19 ◼ ► Your plans are more important. So launch your app when you want to launch your app, and you can tell them afterwards,
01:58:27 ◼ ► like, once it's launched and once it's settled, you can email that address and say, "Hey, I got this new update out, and it's being well received,
01:58:33 ◼ ► and here's, you know, positive reviews," or whatever. You can tell them afterwards, but don't change your plans for them,
01:58:37 ◼ ► because, first of all, they wouldn't do it for you, and second of all, you're better off serving your customers directly in the best way you see fit,
01:58:45 ◼ ► not bending over backwards trying to accommodate something that you might get from Apple that probably wouldn't have a ton of value.
01:58:51 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, I appreciate the conversation. I'll noodle on it and see what I decide to do.