00:00:32 ◼ ► together, and I think we've told this story, but not in a long time, one of the things that
00:00:36 ◼ ► Marco and John and I all said to each other was, look, we're not going to stop being friends
00:00:41 ◼ ► on account of any of this. And at the time, that was hilarious because it was us talking
00:00:44 ◼ ► about cars, and that didn't amount to all that much in the grand scheme of things until
00:00:48 ◼ ► you get to ATP. I stand by that. I think you two stand by it. I think we've done a great
00:00:53 ◼ ► job of it, except now everything is the show. And so in our internal show notes, we have
00:01:02 ◼ ► a section for the pre-show. And sometimes there'll be stuff there. A lot of times Marco will just
00:01:05 ◼ ► make something up, or sometimes the two of us will. But for the last 48 hours, I've had
00:01:10 ◼ ► to stare at pre-show colon, John made an important purchase. And I don't know what it is. And
00:01:16 ◼ ► I'm dying. And this is why maybe this whole, maybe we should shut it all down. Cause I don't
00:01:20 ◼ ► want to have to wait to know what your important purchase was, John. But finally, the time has
00:01:26 ◼ ► I spent so long trying to decide whether I should put anything there. Cause a lot of time I just
00:01:30 ◼ ► don't surprise you with it, but I did want to like reserve the slot, but I didn't want to
00:01:43 ◼ ► see me, like see me after class or like we need to talk or something terrible like that.
00:01:49 ◼ ► So I wanted to tamp it down to be like, this is not, this is a pre-show. It's not a big
00:01:52 ◼ ► thing issue with your performance. I did want to reserve the spot in the pre-show. So no,
00:01:57 ◼ ► it's nothing that exciting. Um, John, everything we purchase can be exciting if we, if we talk
00:02:02 ◼ ► about it in the right way or if we care enough about it. Yeah. I think this one is, this one
00:02:07 ◼ ► is significant in, uh, in stupid ways. Um, so picture it June 11th, 2011, San Francisco.
00:02:17 ◼ ► Got anything Casey? Your toaster. Yeah, actually that's true. Wow. I got it immediately. I was
00:02:23 ◼ ► going to say WWDC and I thought that that was keynote day of WWDC of that year. And that was
00:02:28 ◼ ► the first time that I had met you in person. And we kind of sort of knew each other at that
00:02:36 ◼ ► toasters. Well done, Marco. I am shocked that Marco had that in a nanosecond. I thought for
00:02:41 ◼ ► sure you'd be like, huh, I don't know. Is that back where anyway? Yeah. So I was to take a
00:02:45 ◼ ► look in the show, uh, in the, in the chat room, take a look at that image. You may remember
00:02:48 ◼ ► this. Yes, I do. I, I might have even taken that photo. I was certainly there for it. And
00:02:53 ◼ ► I think I took it. I think you probably did take that photo anyways, but yes, I do remember
00:02:57 ◼ ► it's advertising iOS five in the background for WWDC. And iCloud. Right. Right. So, uh, fast
00:03:18 ◼ ► Did you buy a backup of the toaster? The real question is why, why did I put it in order for,
00:03:26 ◼ ► and I didn't plan this? I didn't like, I just looked at the dates. I looked on the Amazon order
00:03:29 ◼ ► history of like, it was exactly 14 years to the day. That's incredible. 2011 to 2025, June 11th,
00:03:35 ◼ ► both times I put in order for a toaster. What's your guess, Casey? My guess is either the first one
00:03:40 ◼ ► finally died and he put in an order for the exact same one again, because nothing better has been
00:03:45 ◼ ► made since to his standards. Or he is buying a toaster for somewhere that one of his kids will be
00:03:52 ◼ ► living like for college. Do you need me at all for the show? Because I was absolutely going to say
00:03:58 ◼ ► both of those things. Probably, he probably would buy the toaster for, he'd buy the replacement toaster
00:04:02 ◼ ► definitely the same one, because nothing else is as good for his standards. He'd probably buy the same
00:04:10 ◼ ► That's good that you are both on the same page here. Oh, here's what happened. The toaster that I've had
00:04:16 ◼ ► for 14 years has served us well. But in recent months, it started doing a thing where it would
00:04:23 ◼ ► work almost all the time. But once in a blue moon, you would press the button to begin whatever toast
00:04:29 ◼ ► thing that you're doing. And the screen would change from blue to orange, like it always does. And the
00:04:35 ◼ ► timer would start counting down like it always does. But the heating elements would not get hot, which is
00:04:40 ◼ ► an important function. Oh, no, for a toaster. And it and you'd be like, huh, like, I put this bread in here
00:04:46 ◼ ► and I pressed the button and it changed color and counted down. And I came back and the bread was stone
00:04:50 ◼ ► cold. And then a person will come up to it and said, What do you mean? And press the button and then it will
00:04:53 ◼ ► work. But you can't have that. It's got to work all the time. So unfortunately, that toaster had to be
00:05:00 ◼ ► retired. It's interesting that you mentioned potential kid things. It's like, what did you do with your
00:05:04 ◼ ► retired toaster? Did you chuck it? Did you, you know, bring it to the single stream recycling center?
00:05:10 ◼ ► along with the air conditioner that also died this year? And the dehumidifier that also died this
00:05:13 ◼ ► year? No, because it works like 92% of the time. Is that packed up and put it in the attic in case a
00:05:23 ◼ ► kid wants it when they go. Okay, what kid is gonna want a toaster that works most of the time? It's a
00:05:30 ◼ ► good toaster. It still works great. Almost all the time. Nothing is wrong with it. Except for the
00:05:36 ◼ ► times when you press the button, nothing happens. Okay, I cannot think of very many appliances that
00:05:43 ◼ ► I could tolerate that kind of failure in. Like, I would rather go to Target and get a toaster oven for
00:05:49 ◼ ► 30 bucks that works 100% of the time. Oh, have you have you tried a $30 Target toaster lately? Because
00:05:55 ◼ ► I have because we bought a toaster for my son for his like apartment style accommodations in his junior
00:06:01 ◼ ► year. And it's terrible. Like I wouldn't I just yeah, so maybe it turns on all the time, but it is
00:06:07 ◼ ► terrible all the time. It's being terrible all the time. Better doesn't do a good job of any of making
00:06:15 ◼ ► your food hot and toasting it. It's all uneven. And it's just it's like it's unsatisfying to use it
00:06:21 ◼ ► doesn't do its job. Well, like it's bad. So this this toaster, even if it only works one out of every,
00:06:26 ◼ ► you know, 90 times or whatever, still way better than that. So anyway, it may eventually end up
00:06:31 ◼ ► getting chucked. But for now, it is a mostly functional toaster. So what did you replace it
00:06:36 ◼ ► with? I mean, the same toaster. Yeah, okay. There it is. There it is. Luckily, they still sell this
00:06:42 ◼ ► toaster. I've tried a lot of toasters since. And I haven't found like the only one that I think
00:06:49 ◼ ► bested in some ways is the Panasonic Flash Express, whatever thing, which is just so much faster than
00:06:54 ◼ ► this toaster. But it is smaller, oddly proportioned. And I don't like the UI. And so I need something
00:06:59 ◼ ► that's the size of this one is perfect for my kitchen, because it's basically is as big as will
00:07:04 ◼ ► fit. There is a much bigger one, which I literally can't fit. And honestly, my friend has the other
00:07:08 ◼ ► one. So I'm very familiar with it. I don't think I would like that bigger one is just too big. So
00:07:12 ◼ ► this is the size for me. And by the way, my parents have the smaller one. So I have some experience
00:07:15 ◼ ► with that when I'm over their place. So the Breville 650 XL, they still sell it. I just got another
00:07:21 ◼ ► one, the same toaster. But I want I want to salute this toaster that you gave me generously as a gift
00:07:28 ◼ ► in 2011 that I did not ask for that, that you got me this toaster, which we later learned through
00:07:34 ◼ ► extensive Casey off a link to your page, extensive reviewing of other contemporary toasters that you
00:07:40 ◼ ► basically stumbled upon by going into the rich person store, the best toaster that was available
00:07:47 ◼ ► I think it was Nordstrom. I thought Nordstrom. There you go. You went into the rich person store,
00:07:51 ◼ ► paid way too much money for a very fancy toaster and then paid even more money to have it shipped
00:07:54 ◼ ► back to my house, which is very nice of you. And I had it for 14 years. So that's a good run for an
00:07:58 ◼ ► appliance. That's an amazing run. It technically isn't entirely dead. That's amazing. And by the way,
00:08:03 ◼ ► I think it was Merlin who paid for it to have it shipped back to you. But yeah. Right. But now here's
00:08:07 ◼ ► a review of the new toaster, because although it is the same model number, they've changed some stuff.
00:08:12 ◼ ► All for the good. So first of all, the toaster that I had, the place where I put it, the plug
00:08:19 ◼ ► for the toaster is basically directly behind it, dead center. And because my house is ancient and weird,
00:08:24 ◼ ► it is directly behind a dead center and very low in the wall. And the plug, like the, you know,
00:08:32 ◼ ► thing that goes into the wall on the toaster that you guys got me is like Breville's patented thing.
00:08:38 ◼ ► Have you seen it where like the end of the plug has a hole in it where you could put your finger
00:08:41 ◼ ► through the hole to yank it out? Have you seen that? Yep. Right. That's really bad when the plug
00:08:47 ◼ ► for your toaster is directly behind the toaster because that thing sticks out really far. Like
00:08:52 ◼ ► so much so that if I plugged in my toaster and then tried to slide my toaster towards the wall,
00:09:00 ◼ ► Have you ever tried one of those like right angle adapters that has like a six inch cord on it that
00:09:04 ◼ ► just like has like a flat right angle plug that goes on the wall and then just ends in like
00:09:08 ◼ ► a three prong plug six inches later down a short cord? Yep. So I have a whole bunch of those when
00:09:13 ◼ ► you back in 2011, when I got this toaster, I knew this wouldn't work. So I took about one of the right
00:09:17 ◼ ► angle things and I connect up a toaster to it. But now I have some extra cord to get rid of. So the
00:09:22 ◼ ► right angle thing is flat. It's in the wall. The toaster cord goes down and to the right. The thing,
00:09:28 ◼ ► the thing in the wall, the flat thing goes down and to the right. I just connect them all.
00:09:35 ◼ ► Right next to the toaster is our stove top slash oven. And so I was going to chuck the cord behind
00:09:42 ◼ ► our stove top slash oven. I don't know what you call that. We just call it an oven here. But
00:09:47 ◼ ► on the top of it is a range with burners. And then underneath it is an oven with a door that opens that
00:09:51 ◼ ► thing. I put the cord behind there and it was, you know, I don't know, maybe like two feet of cord or
00:09:56 ◼ ► whatever, because again, it was the toaster is right next to that. But if I'm going to put some
00:10:01 ◼ ► electrical cord behind a thing that gets really hot, I'm going to try to protect it. So 14 years ago,
00:10:07 ◼ ► I wrapped that cord in a whole bunch of aluminum foil and various other things to sort of make a
00:10:13 ◼ ► giant sort of heat sink muffler heat shield thing around the cord that was behind there.
00:10:19 ◼ ► To get it out, I realized I had to pull the oven out. I must have pulled it, pulled it out to put it in
00:10:24 ◼ ► there. And so I was wondering, after 14 years, does that thing finally melt through? And that's
00:10:29 ◼ ► the problem with my toaster or something? Didn't seem like it because the lights were all turning
00:10:32 ◼ ► on and everything. But anyway, I pulled out the oven, did some cleaning. It's pretty gross back
00:10:35 ◼ ► there. Pulled out the cords, unwrapped all the aluminum foil, looked as good as new, like the day
00:10:42 ◼ ► I got it. So aluminum foil or tin foil, as you would call it if you're my age, amazing as a heat
00:10:49 ◼ ► shield, totally protected the cords. They were perfectly good. The new toaster has a flat
00:10:54 ◼ ► right angle plug. Good job, Breville. They realized that that patented thing that they're so proud of,
00:11:00 ◼ ► it sucks for a toaster. So I didn't have to use the adapter for the new one. And it was only a tiny
00:11:05 ◼ ► little bit of cord that I tucked behind the oven and I wrapped it in some aluminum foil. So that's
00:11:09 ◼ ► great. The next thing is there are little offset pegs on the back of the toaster. They're trying to
00:11:14 ◼ ► stop the hot back of the toaster from burning your wall. Yeah. So you have to put it like at least an
00:11:19 ◼ ► inch away from the wall. Yeah. Like the little standout peg. So first of all, my house being
00:11:24 ◼ ► terrible and old, the essentially the backsplash or whatever you would call it on the countertop
00:11:29 ◼ ► does not go up as high as the pegs. So the pegs basically are above it. And so if you, if on my
00:11:35 ◼ ► old toaster, if you were to push it against the wall, setting aside the plug, you got the right
00:11:38 ◼ ► angle plug in there. It's all flesh and everything. If you were to push the toaster up against the wall,
00:11:41 ◼ ► the pegs would go over the backslash, touch the wall. And then the hot back of the toaster is like
00:11:48 ◼ ► a millimeters from the wall, which is bad. So I had like standoffs on there. Like I had it. I basically
00:11:52 ◼ ► I was using like, um, the things you put on the bottom of a chair legs to keep them from scuffing
00:11:58 ◼ ► your floor, right? Those things I had them. I was extending the standoff. So it actually stayed far
00:12:03 ◼ ► away from my wall. New toaster, longer standoffs. Number two in Breville's comp. Great. And then
00:12:10 ◼ ► the final thing, I can't tell if this is an improvement or just the fact that my old toaster
00:12:13 ◼ ► was 14 years old. The screen is way brighter. Maybe it's led. And the other one was like the
00:12:19 ◼ ► cold cathode things. Cause it was so old. I don't know, but the screen is so bright. I'm actually
00:12:23 ◼ ► hoping it fades a little bit. This is incredibly bright. It's again, blue when you turn it on and
00:12:27 ◼ ► orange when it's going. Otherwise toaster works amazingly best toaster ever Breville 650 XL.
00:12:33 ◼ ► Uh, salute to the 14 year old one that you guys got me, but now I've moved on to another
00:12:38 ◼ ► toaster, which is the same toaster, but better. Pour one out, John. All right. I'm curious. I mean,
00:12:44 ◼ ► I, I'm, I'm pretty sure this will be a predictable answer, but I'm curious like if why you didn't
00:12:49 ◼ ► consider other things that are now more popular than they were 14 years ago. So if like the,
00:12:54 ◼ ► we now have all sorts of like smart ovens, we have combination steam ovens. Uh, obviously everything
00:13:01 ◼ ► says it's an air fryer. Now there's like, you know, different brands that have, you know,
00:13:05 ◼ ► taken on like, you know, Ninja is really well liked among rich people. Um, there's the Anova
00:13:10 ◼ ► precision oven, which I've been lusting after, but it sadly is like one inch too deep to fit on my
00:13:15 ◼ ► countertop. Um, you know, it was all sorts of like smart and more functional countertop ovens.
00:13:22 ◼ ► I mean, I'm aware of all of those and I've seen them as they've been introduced and flown by, but
00:13:28 ◼ ► like, first of all, space considerations exclude a lot of bigger, fancier things. Even something as
00:13:34 ◼ ► simple as like the, there is a Breville one that has like convection or whatever those that doesn't
00:13:38 ◼ ► fit or smaller models that have like room for a convection fan. Convection is honestly the only
00:13:43 ◼ ► feature that I would even remotely be interested in, but the space available, it's just not going to
00:13:46 ◼ ► happen. Any of the smart things that are like, we look at your food with the camera and figure out,
00:13:54 ◼ ► Yeah. 14 years. Forget it. Like I just, this thing does what I needed to do. It has adjustable
00:13:58 ◼ ► temperature and time and you press a button and it gets hot and it evenly heats and it gets hot pretty
00:14:04 ◼ ► quickly and it is durable and all the places, the parts on it that could potentially like get gross
00:14:09 ◼ ► or easy to replace. I did, I did replace the wire tray once in 14 years to tell you how sturdy this is
00:14:14 ◼ ► still have all the original trays. It's a workhorse. Like I just, this is, and this is a situation
00:14:19 ◼ ► where I can get it again. They still, they still make it. In fact, they make a better version. So
00:14:22 ◼ ► I'm not interested in any of the fancier stuff. Uh, I don't have room for like convection. And even
00:14:27 ◼ ► then I would be at a problem because I feel like those convection ones are much more interested in
00:14:32 ◼ ► being ovens. And honestly, most of the time I'm using my toaster for toast type things like toasting
00:14:38 ◼ ► bread or toasting bagels or even like reading pizza, which is not on the toast setting, but still.
00:14:44 ◼ ► Uh, and then occasionally we use it as a small oven, but it mostly serves as a toaster that can
00:14:48 ◼ ► also serve as a small oven. Or when I'm toasting like on for Thanksgiving, I can toast like six slices
00:14:53 ◼ ► of bread at the same time for stuffing, which saves a lot of time. Um, so no, uh, nothing else out there
00:14:58 ◼ ► interests me. Uh, this one does the job. If someday I get a better, different kitchen that's larger,
00:15:03 ◼ ► I'll probably still go with this just because I would probably get a convection like regular oven
00:15:08 ◼ ► because my regular oven doesn't have convection. I would get a convection regular oven and stick
00:15:11 ◼ ► with this for the toasting stuff. Um, just to get ahead of all the feedback, half of which has
00:15:16 ◼ ► probably already been sent. We all agree that slot toasters are very, very interesting in their own
00:15:22 ◼ ► right, but pretty much useless in our personal opinion. I don't agree to that first half at all.
00:15:26 ◼ ► All right. You don't, you think they're completely useless in every way. I mean, they're really,
00:15:33 ◼ ► I think, I think there are very few things that they are better at than toaster ovens. And there
00:15:39 ◼ ► are a lot of things they are worse at. I actually agree with you. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the only
00:15:43 ◼ ► slot toaster that, uh, that would have any interest in me is if I was constantly making breakfast for
00:15:47 ◼ ► huge numbers of people, I get one of those ones that has like 12 slots. Cause you can make a lot
00:15:51 ◼ ► of toast at that point. Just get one of those roller toasters. No, like those are faster. The ones
00:15:56 ◼ ► where you can cook a huge amount of toast very quickly. Cause the slot toasters are faster. The heating
00:16:00 ◼ ► elements are closer to the bread. They're like, they're just playing faster. And if I just have
00:16:04 ◼ ► to, if I had to make a lot of toast fast all the time, a giant slot toaster that a huge number of
00:16:09 ◼ ► slots is the way to go. But any other situation, I'm not interested. Yeah. I was trying to provide a
00:16:16 ◼ ► little bit of an olive branch because the people who are fans of slot toasters while being wrong,
00:16:21 ◼ ► they are extremely dedicated to their wrongness. And I was trying to be nice about it, but since
00:16:24 ◼ ► we're all in agreement, yeah, slot toasters are silly. So, well, I mean, it's part of the problem
00:16:28 ◼ ► is we've been saying, Oh, you got a new toaster. John's toaster toaster, toaster, this toaster that.
00:16:31 ◼ ► And everyone is hearing this and in their head, they're picturing the flying toasters from the
00:16:35 ◼ ► after dark screens. They're picturing slot toasters. Every time I say toaster, what I meant was toaster
00:16:40 ◼ ► oven. That's what I grew up with. That's what I have. That's what I want. If you could find a slot
00:16:45 ◼ ► toaster that was flying though, that would be a pretty good feature. Yeah. Hard to get the toast though,
00:16:50 ◼ ► because it jumps from one toaster to the other, you know. We are sponsored this episode by Factor.
00:16:56 ◼ ► Summer is here. More sun, more light, more time to do all the things that make summer so special.
00:17:01 ◼ ► And the number one thing I don't want to be doing all summer is spending hours cooking and chopping
00:17:07 ◼ ► and prepping stuff inside. That's where Factor comes in. Factor's chef-crafted, dietitian-approved
00:17:13 ◼ ► meals are ready in just two minutes, taking the hassle out of eating well. Factor meals are
00:17:18 ◼ ► fresh and ready to eat, perfect for any active lifestyle over summer and beyond. With 45 weekly
00:17:24 ◼ ► menu options, you can pick gourmet meals that fit your summer gains and goals. Choose from options like
00:17:29 ◼ ► calorie smart, protein plus, keto, and many more. Factor can power your day from sunup to sundown too.
00:17:36 ◼ ► With nutritious breakfast options, on-the-go lunches, premium dinners, and guilt-free snacks and
00:17:41 ◼ ► desserts, Factor has your whole day covered. Enjoy more this summer with Factor. Get Factor if you want
00:17:47 ◼ ► all the flavor and none of the fuss. And they've sent me some sample boxes, and I gotta say,
00:17:51 ◼ ► Factor was a hit with me and my family. Everyone loved the flavors, the quality. I appreciated the
00:17:58 ◼ ► proteins were pretty generous and pretty well-cooked, and you just put it in the microwave or the oven
00:18:02 ◼ ► for two minutes, and it's done. It's so easy. And it's really, honestly, it was a lot better than I
00:18:08 ◼ ► expected for the amount of effort I was spending. So check it out today. Get started at factormeals.com
00:18:14 ◼ ► slash ATP50off and use code ATP50off to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. That's code
00:18:23 ◼ ► ATP50off at factormeals.com slash ATP50off for 50% off plus free shipping. Factormeals.com
00:18:35 ◼ ► All right, let's do some follow-up. And hey, here's the thing. We're not really saving lives
00:18:44 ◼ ► like the Apple Watch. Well, maybe. But Tim wrote to say, I want to thank you for turning my spouse
00:18:49 ◼ ► and I onto the Yolink, Lora, L-O-R-A family of smart home stuff, and especially your advice to get
00:18:55 ◼ ► water leak detectors. Today, that advice paid off. We were away for three weeks, visiting family for the
00:19:00 ◼ ► first time since we bought our old New England home a year ago. Beyond a friend checking daily,
00:19:04 ◼ ► we'd put your advice into action and install the detectors around the house. We left yesterday.
00:19:08 ◼ ► This evening, I got a notification that one had tripped. A neighbor with a key was able to drop
00:19:12 ◼ ► by and discover that the water line to the fridge for the ice maker that we never use, please, John,
00:19:17 ◼ ► focus, had burst and was pouring water on the kitchen floor and down to the basement. Our friend
00:19:22 ◼ ► had last checked our house at 4.45 p.m. We got the leak notice at 8 p.m. If not for your advice,
00:19:27 ◼ ► the fridge would have been pouring water into the house for close to 24 hours. Thank you,
00:19:32 ◼ ► Leak detectors. If you've got an old New England house and you unwisely got a water feature on your
00:19:37 ◼ ► refrigerator, leak detectors. They're cheap. They're so cheap. They're so cheap. They're
00:19:42 ◼ ► like 15, 20 bucks each, I think, for the Lora ones. I've sprinkled them all around our house,
00:19:46 ◼ ► and I am not looking forward to the time that they eventually get set off, but it gives me incredible
00:19:52 ◼ ► peace of mind to know that they're there. One of mine tripped recently, by the way. One of my in-wall
00:19:56 ◼ ► ones is underneath my bathtub trying to detect leaks from the wall. It tripped. I'm like, oh my god,
00:20:01 ◼ ► the wall's leaking again. I opened it up. I looked inside, and there was like one tiny drop of water
00:20:07 ◼ ► that had fallen on the thing, and I still don't know where that water came from. So I'm like, all right,
00:20:12 ◼ ► well, I'm going to keep an eye on this. I'm going to wipe off the thing of water, put it back,
00:20:24 ◼ ► There's like a, well, if you had an old New England home, you'd know. Very often there's like a panel.
00:20:29 ◼ ► Yeah, there's like a panel on the wall that you can unscrew and remove to get access to the plumbing that
00:20:33 ◼ ► you otherwise wouldn't have access to. And it's all like raised edge panel and painted and blah,
00:20:38 ◼ ► blah, blah. And yeah, it's the way I get into the walls that are underneath and behind my tub,
00:20:46 ◼ ► You always want to have a test, you know, to see if it's working. I've got them. I recently bought
00:20:50 ◼ ► a couple extra ones for like the basement near the lines that go to the washing machine too.
00:20:58 ◼ ► Yeah. And then speaking of saving lives, we talked last episode. Why did we talk about this? About
00:21:13 ◼ ► I never expected my profession to be applicable to ATP feedback, yet here we are. Quick aside,
00:21:17 ◼ ► that is like one of my favorites. We've heard that same statement made many times over the course of
00:21:22 ◼ ► the show. One of my favorite things to read. It really is. Anyways, Jason writes, as a travel advisor,
00:21:26 ◼ ► I talk about travel insurance every day. Travel insurance has two components. Pre-trip cancellation,
00:21:29 ◼ ► which is what everyone thinks insurance is, and during the trip, emergency coverage. Nearly all
00:21:34 ◼ ► United States-based health insurance policies do not work outside of the country. And this is where
00:21:38 ◼ ► travel insurance is critical. Alliance is my preferred company, and the policy I sell serves
00:21:43 ◼ ► as a primary source of payment to hospitals outside the country. I rarely purchase travel
00:21:48 ◼ ► insurance for domestic trips, but I never leave the country without travel insurance. I could write a
00:21:53 ◼ ► small book about my clients that have declined travel insurance and have been in tough situations
00:21:57 ◼ ► outside America. More positively, I could write a book about Alliance saving the day for clients that
00:22:02 ◼ ► have purchased it. Additionally, Levi Dalton writes, in reference to the travel insurance
00:22:06 ◼ ► discussion in episode 645, I'd like to note that many credit cards offer some form of travel insurance
00:22:10 ◼ ► when trip purchases have been made using the card. This can either be the primary, as in you don't
00:22:14 ◼ ► have other travel insurance, or secondary. You have other travel insurance, but this acts as an
00:22:17 ◼ ► additional coverage. For someone traveling a fair amount, it is worth looking into which cards
00:22:21 ◼ ► provide travel insurance automatically and what specifically is covered. I'd also like to note that
00:22:25 ◼ ► Allianz and presumably other companies sell yearly all trips insurance if you go to them
00:22:30 ◼ ► directly. This can price out to be a better deal than purchasing individual trip insurance each time
00:22:34 ◼ ► if you're taking multiple trips a year. For example, I have yearly coverage for my entire family,
00:22:37 ◼ ► and if any of us goes anywhere, we have coverage. For our plan, it works out to $150 a year a person,
00:22:42 ◼ ► and it is a set-it-and-forget-it option where I don't have to wonder about whether a certain trip
00:22:46 ◼ ► is covered or not. Allianz's plans also include a travel concierge, which can help with dinner
00:22:51 ◼ ► reservations in a foreign city and so forth, by which I mean the concierge can assist with trip
00:22:54 ◼ ► planning, not just with insurance-related issues. Of course, some credit cards offer something
00:22:58 ◼ ► similar, but not everybody knows that they don't have to personally fire up a translation app and
00:23:01 ◼ ► make calls at weird hours because of time differences to restaurants in Greece or France to make a
00:23:05 ◼ ► reservation. A concierge can do that for you. Maybe this is old news to everyone else, but I didn't
00:23:11 ◼ ► I didn't know most of it. I do, though, think it's probably not as much of a, like, you should
00:23:17 ◼ ► always do this, as they say. But, you know, it certainly seems like when traveling internationally
00:23:24 ◼ ► and therefore health insurance or health coverage becomes more of a thing, that's obviously a bigger
00:23:31 ◼ ► factor to consider. But I still am not convinced about its value for most people most of the time.
00:23:36 ◼ ► I like the people responding on Mastodon. They're like, oh, they were saying the same thing, basically.
00:23:41 ◼ ► Oh, you should definitely get it if you travel overseas from the U.S. because your U.S. insurance
00:23:45 ◼ ► won't work here and the health insurance in our country, we have, you know, we have universal
00:23:49 ◼ ► coverage, but it's not for you because you're from America, so we'd have to charge you. And then they
00:23:53 ◼ ► would show us the amount that they would charge and we'd just laugh at it. Like, three days in the
00:23:58 ◼ ► hospital, we'll charge you $5,000. You're like, ha, ha, ha. We can't know, we can't even look at us for 30
00:24:05 ◼ ► seconds for $5,000 in this country. So paying out of pocket for coverage overseas. No, you don't want
00:24:11 ◼ ► to do it. You want insurance to cover it, but you can't scare us with health care costs, out-of-pocket
00:24:17 ◼ ► health care costs in France or whatever. You've got that tooth looked at in a dentist, that'll be 50
00:24:21 ◼ ► bucks. Oh, yeah, yeah. All right, John, do you want to tell me about this next item, please?
00:24:27 ◼ ► Sure. Avi Drissman writes in about a window widget size in Tahoe. He says, in episode 644,
00:24:34 ◼ ► you quoted my toot about how window control size on macOS 26 is gated on the SDK linked against.
00:24:38 ◼ ► You thought that the size might be connected to toolbar visibility. It is not. As I said,
00:24:42 ◼ ► if you link to an SDK less than 26, you get compatibility size window controls. And if you
00:24:46 ◼ ► link to the macOS 26 SDK, you get window controls with the new size. This is the sole determining
00:24:51 ◼ ► factor. So there you have it. Big window controls. No matter whether the toolbar is visible or not,
00:24:58 ◼ ► toolbar controls the corner radius and maybe also the position of those things because they
00:25:03 ◼ ► got to have concentricity. But the size is always big with 26, which honestly, I think is a reasonable
00:25:09 ◼ ► thing to do. Like the window widgets have changed size a little bit over the course of macOS all these
00:25:14 ◼ ► many years, making them a little bit bigger. Or maybe it's because I have a huge screen now and I'm
00:25:18 ◼ ► getting old. But yeah, they can stand to be a little bit bigger. So I kind of like the new size in Tahoe.
00:25:22 ◼ ► So any app that links against the new SDK, which that whole concept, I know if you're not a
00:25:27 ◼ ► developer and you're like, what are they talking about? Does that mean when I get Tahoe, they'll all
00:25:31 ◼ ► be bigger? Like it's not a thing that you would otherwise have to know or care about. But if you're
00:25:35 ◼ ► wondering when you get Tahoe, some apps have the big window widgets and some apps don't. It's basically
00:25:40 ◼ ► the ones that do were built using the API set that comes with the new OS. And the ones that have the
00:25:52 ◼ ► Apple intelligence is now allowed when booting from an external drive in Tahoe beta 2. And John
00:25:58 ◼ ► Val writes, unlike on Sequoia, which required a hack to activate Apple intelligence while booting from
00:26:03 ◼ ► an external drive on Tahoe, that hack is no longer needed. I didn't even know about that hack and I
00:26:07 ◼ ► would have liked to know by the hack, but it's good that it's no longer necessary. Whatever the deal
00:26:10 ◼ ► was with the whole like Apple intelligence can only be on the internal drive. I'm glad to see that go.
00:26:15 ◼ ► Ian writes, you've been complaining about the new liquid glass tab bar bar on iOS because it can
00:26:19 ◼ ► obscure the content. I've been playing around with it and I'm finding that when I scroll to the bottom
00:26:22 ◼ ► of a view, the content scrolls above the tab bar, even on websites. It seems to me like they were well
00:26:28 ◼ ► aware of this potential folly when designing. And so they do some view magic to make sure you don't
00:26:32 ◼ ► end up with content stuck under the bar when you scroll to the bottom. Am I missing something?
00:26:36 ◼ ► See, I'm still not able to figure out whether I should make a blog post about this because it does kind
00:26:41 ◼ ► require visual aid, but I'll try expressing again why this whole design draws me up a wall. What we're
00:26:48 ◼ ► talking about is the little lozenge that floats over the top of your content at the bottom of the screen.
00:26:53 ◼ ► People don't even like that. I call it lozenge because technically lozenge is like a hexagon. But anyway,
00:26:59 ◼ ► toolbar thing floating at the bottom of the screen, which means there is a margin on the left, on the right,
00:27:05 ◼ ► and on the bottom where you can see the stuff that's behind it. And I was complaining about things
00:27:10 ◼ ► getting stuck behind there and things being obscured by it. And he is saying, well, I've been trying these
00:27:14 ◼ ► various apps. And what happens instead is they let you scroll the content. So it goes up. So it's above
00:27:20 ◼ ► that thing when you have the content. So it's scrolled above that. Now you have the problem of what do I show
00:27:27 ◼ ► in the empty region that is below the end of the content? Say the webpage, the very bottom of the
00:27:33 ◼ ► webpage, there's a word. You scroll, that word is up above the little floating toolbar. Great. I can read
00:27:37 ◼ ► the word. But the toolbar is still floating. What is it floating over? Should they draw the checkered
00:27:44 ◼ ► pattern there from back in early versions of iOS or early versions of iPhone OS? That would have been
00:27:48 ◼ ► amazing. Scrolling couldn't keep up. It would show the gray and white checkerboard pattern. Should
00:27:53 ◼ ► they detect the main color of the body of the page and extend it down there? What if it's a photo that
00:28:00 ◼ ► you've scrolled up and they want to let you scroll it so the photo is visible and the photo ends before
00:28:05 ◼ ► the toolbar begins? Do they say, let's say, reflect and blur the photo like they do with the sidebar thing?
00:28:13 ◼ ► These are all problems of their own making. Because if you're not going to show the content
00:28:18 ◼ ► behind there, but always scroll it up above there, what then is the function of leaving that space around
00:28:23 ◼ ► the edges? Because you can't see anything there of consequence when you're scrolling through the
00:28:27 ◼ ► content. And when you get to the end of it, if they're pushing that content above the toolbar,
00:28:31 ◼ ► hey, how about just make the toolbar cover the bottom of the screen at that point? Which is the design we
00:28:35 ◼ ► had before, which is so much more straightforward and doesn't have any of these problems of Apple's own
00:28:39 ◼ ► creation. That is what I find so frustrating about this control, that it serves no purpose,
00:28:43 ◼ ► that it introduces problems that they must solve for no reason, for no benefit. Anyway, I don't like it.
00:28:56 ◼ ► in their beta releases to make the tech press feel like they've achieved some victories so that they
00:29:02 ◼ ► don't make as big of a deal about the things that didn't change? The left-aligned image on the
00:29:06 ◼ ► macOS dialog boxes comes to mind as a candidate. And so a duck we can define, or this started on,
00:29:13 ◼ ► what is it, Jeff Atwood, right? His blog. And this is a feature added for no other reason than to draw
00:29:20 ◼ ► management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the
00:29:25 ◼ ► product. And John also pointed out, see also the Architect's Lions, which is by a friend of the show,
00:29:29 ◼ ► Anthony Johnson, or a story retold by a friend of the show, Anthony Johnson, which we will also link to
00:29:35 ◼ ► in the show notes. Yeah. The idea is put something in there so the people in charge have something to
00:29:39 ◼ ► focus on and you know you're going to let, it's something that they're going to say, what's that
00:29:43 ◼ ► doing there? I want to get rid of that. And you fight them on and fight them on and eventually let them
00:29:47 ◼ ► have their way. And the whole time you're fighting about that, they're not paying attention to anything
00:29:49 ◼ ► else. The thing about the duck slash Architect's Lions theory for Apple's OS is they don't need to do
00:29:55 ◼ ► that. They don't care what we think. We have no, we're not their manager. They have no reason to put
00:30:02 ◼ ► dumb things in the OS to allow the community to notice them, get angry about them and fix them
00:30:08 ◼ ► because they don't, they don't care that we're that stuff. Like they honestly don't like they'll
00:30:12 ◼ ► accept our feedback that that works, but they're, they're not intentionally releasing things that
00:30:17 ◼ ► they know will get negative feedback to make us feel like we're affecting things. That's not how they
00:30:22 ◼ ► work. They would never do that because they not because they're so good and kind, but because they
00:30:27 ◼ ► were not there, man, they have no reason to, there's no motivation for them to do that. We're not
00:30:31 ◼ ► their boss. They, what we do and say, uh, is doesn't need to be corralled in that way. Um,
00:30:37 ◼ ► and interestingly, I meant to mention this, one of the shows after WWDC, but if you watch a lot of
00:30:41 ◼ ► the WWDC sessions and especially when, um, I know you were in some of these Casey, the, uh, I forget
00:30:49 ◼ ► What were those things called? But the labs where it's a bunch of people and like at the
00:30:52 ◼ ► Webex call. Oh, oh yeah. The group labs group labs. Yeah. So those were live where there was
00:30:58 ◼ ► some number of WWDC, uh, attendees slash developers. They're all at home on our computers going to a
00:31:05 ◼ ► Webex and then in the Webex hosting the Webex were like, you know, five or six Apple engineers
00:31:10 ◼ ► and managers or whoever, whatever the topic happened to be. And the audience gets to submit questions
00:31:16 ◼ ► through text in like the Webex, like submit your questions thing. And then the, there's no other,
00:31:21 ◼ ► like speaking or, you know, you don't see any of the audience. You just see the Apple people.
00:31:25 ◼ ► Anyway, during those things, very often there would be questions that would ask some question
00:31:29 ◼ ► about like a glass or whatever. And all of the people in all the sessions would say that they'd,
00:31:35 ◼ ► you know, say whatever to say, I would look at glass. And then they'd say, if you have any feedback
00:31:38 ◼ ► about this, please submit your feedback to whatever, you know, they'd tell you we're interested in
00:31:42 ◼ ► hearing what you think. What do you think about this? What are the areas where it can be
00:31:45 ◼ ► improved or whatever? They were basically soliciting feedback about the UI and they're all so
00:31:50 ◼ ► disciplined. But my little radar was up the whole time going, which one of these people
00:31:55 ◼ ► is desperately hoping that you send feedback because they also hate the thing that you just
00:32:00 ◼ ► complained about. Right. And they're so disciplined about like, you know, here's how it is. And here's
00:32:06 ◼ ► the, here's what we're doing. A rarely have any feedback about it. And like, I have a feeling a lot of
00:32:15 ◼ ► carefully, kindly, and gently suggesting to you that if, that if you have feedback about the new UI,
00:32:21 ◼ ► they'd love to hear it because they're like, please, please send them this feedback because
00:32:27 ◼ ► in the community or whatever. So that's another reason I think there's no reason to put out ducks
00:32:32 ◼ ► because there's plenty of people, Apple employees who are expressing this feedback inside Apple.
00:32:38 ◼ ► because you keep, you know, never, never let anyone outside the family know what you're
00:32:40 ◼ ► thinking. That's a reference, Casey. But they did solicit feedback in all these sessions. And so if
00:32:46 ◼ ► you, if there's something about this UI that you don't like, please send it to Apple. I'm sure Apple
00:32:50 ◼ ► employees would say the same thing, whether they are desperate for you to send that feedback. So it
00:32:55 ◼ ► counts more than their internal opinion or whether they're just saying that because that's what
00:32:59 ◼ ► All right. Adrian Mester writes with regard to SD cards, you said on PCs, you can just yank out a memory
00:33:06 ◼ ► card. That's not true. You should still eject it first by PC. I assume you meant Windows, but it's
00:33:11 ◼ ► the same on Linux. And Adrian provided a link to the Windows knowledge base, if you will, to talk
00:33:16 ◼ ► I don't find it surprising that these features exist. I do wonder how many people use them in
00:33:21 ◼ ► Yep, that's fair. I mean, I know I, when I was a Windows user, I pretty much always just yanked
00:33:25 ◼ ► whatever out pretty much immediately, which I know is not the right answer, but I don't believe I
00:33:34 ◼ ► I mean, the new versions of Windows might complain about it. That's what maybe make people do
00:33:38 ◼ ► If you yank it out and it throws a dialogue in your face, they haven't actually tried it.
00:33:55 ◼ ► nagged by the system for stuff that you just have to say, okay, okay, cancel, cancel, dismiss,
00:33:59 ◼ ► whatever. Like, that's... Even Apple stuff. Like, this is just... This is the reality that most...
00:34:03 ◼ ► How most people see computers is a series of interruptions to their work that they just
00:34:07 ◼ ► have to, quote, cancel out of. So if some box comes up that says, you go to eject first,
00:34:15 ◼ ► I can't run Windows 11 on my Mac, unfortunately, because it doesn't... It's not compliant with
00:34:19 ◼ ► the trusted compute whatever thing. But I can run... I do run Windows 10. So next time I'm
00:34:26 ◼ ► All right. John, it's not everyone else... It's not all of us that are right and you that
00:34:31 ◼ ► is wrong. Really, you are right and everyone else in the world is wrong. But it's okay because
00:34:38 ◼ ► So I got the iPhone 16 Pro when it launched. It was the introduction of the camera control.
00:34:46 ◼ ► Lots of people, case manufacturers just put a big hole in the case for the camera control.
00:34:50 ◼ ► So I got my preferred open bottom leather case for my iPhone and it has a giant hole where
00:34:56 ◼ ► the camera control is and I didn't like it. And I said, boy, I hope some of these third-party
00:35:01 ◼ ► case manufacturers produce cases that are like the one I have, but that have the pass-through
00:35:07 ◼ ► button that Apple had on lots of its launch cases, which is like another button that presses
00:35:12 ◼ ► the actual camera control button below it so that you won't have a giant hole in your case.
00:35:16 ◼ ► What you instead will have is a camera control on your iPhone case that works and feels just
00:35:21 ◼ ► like the camera control that's under your iPhone case. Just like the volume buttons and
00:35:27 ◼ ► Here we are a year later and they finally did it. A little while ago, Ryan London did a case that had
00:35:34 ◼ ► a camera control button on it that I believe had an open bottom, but it had a metal ring on the back
00:35:39 ◼ ► around the camera mesa. And I don't like that. But finally, Bullstrap came out with essentially the
00:35:45 ◼ ► same case that I had because my previous one was a Bullstrap case. The only difference is instead of a
00:35:50 ◼ ► giant hole for the camera control, it has a little pass-through button thingy. And I found this out
00:35:55 ◼ ► because I got an ad on Instagram that said, we messed up with a broken heart emoji. And the text
00:36:02 ◼ ► says, for months, you asked, where's the button? Or I would buy this if it had a camera control button.
00:36:06 ◼ ► And for months, we gave you a cutout. Yeah, we know. But now we finally got it right. A year later,
00:36:11 ◼ ► a year later, they've introduced the case with a button on it. For me, better late than never,
00:36:17 ◼ ► because I keep my phones for two years. So halfway through the life of this phone, I swapped out the
00:36:22 ◼ ► Bullstrap case for another Bullstrap case with the camera control and immediately realized
00:36:31 ◼ ► I mostly got over it. And now it is way better in all ways. But I was shocked to learn,
00:36:37 ◼ ► boy, I guess I put my finger in that hole a lot when I pick up my phone. And now that there's a
00:36:42 ◼ ► button there, I can't press it as much. But yeah, it's way better. Last year, I also changed cases a
00:36:47 ◼ ► year into my phone simply because I had bought multiples and I just swapped an old case for a
00:36:52 ◼ ► new case because the old one was a little beat up. But anyway, I've got a brand sprinkin new
00:36:55 ◼ ► Bullstrap case. It is leather. It is black. It has an open bottom and it has a pass through camera
00:37:01 ◼ ► control button. Only took a year. Our long national nightmare is over. And it's an incredibly expensive
00:37:07 ◼ ► case and I don't care. It looks really nice. And I've had this case before, like, you know,
00:37:12 ◼ ► before this generation of phone. If you're going to, if you want a leather case on your phone,
00:37:16 ◼ ► this is the best option I have found. A hundred dollars is not cheap, but it looks very nice.
00:37:22 ◼ ► It is. And it is. I believe if you care about these specific things that I care about, I believe this
00:37:26 ◼ ► is the only leather, black, open bottom, no metal ring around the camera Mesa camera control button
00:37:32 ◼ ► case sold anywhere. Well, I'm happy you found it. Finally, for follow up ads in YouTube, Igor
00:37:39 ◼ ► Coleman writes, why not just use you block origin? You all, if you also add sponsor block,
00:37:43 ◼ ► you get a much better experience and paid YouTube. Uh, and additionally, Michael Brown writes,
00:37:48 ◼ ► just use the vinegar app on iOS and Mac OS, which not only gets rid of YouTube ads, but also gives you
00:37:52 ◼ ► the system video player instead of the YouTube one. Uh, I can't speak to you block origin. I can speak
00:37:57 ◼ ► to vinegar. I have bounced in and out of vinegar over the last couple of years. I feel like it, when it
00:38:03 ◼ ► works, it works incredibly well. And I really, really like it. But then oftentimes I have weird little
00:38:08 ◼ ► hiccups with it, especially if you increase the speed that it's the playback speed. And I don't know,
00:38:13 ◼ ► just, I have had weird problems with it from time to time. Uh, and the way I solve this problem,
00:38:18 ◼ ► which I forgot to bring to the show is that like a week or two ago, I finally signed up for YouTube
00:38:23 ◼ ► premium light or whatever it is we talked about where it's like eight bucks a month for ad for YouTube
00:38:27 ◼ ► in most cases. And I got to tell you, my life has dramatically improved on account of this. And you
00:38:38 ◼ ► What's annoying though, is that nobody else in the family has noticed. Now, Aaron doesn't typically
00:38:42 ◼ ► watch YouTube, but Declan loves a couple of like Minecraft YouTubers. And I'm a little annoyed that
00:38:53 ◼ ► I mean, people don't really notice the absence of ads nearly as much as they notice the addition of ads.
00:38:59 ◼ ► That's very true. Um, but yeah, I've, we, we got a lot of feedback about you block origin. I can't,
00:39:03 ◼ ► maybe one of you can, I can't speak to it one way or the other. I think vinegar is worth giving a shot.
00:39:07 ◼ ► It is not a bad app by any means. It's very good. It just, like I said, especially on Mac OS,
00:39:12 ◼ ► I've had problems from time to time that maybe, maybe I'm holding it wrong. I don't know, but, uh,
00:39:16 ◼ ► we'll put a link to both in the show notes. You should check at least vinegar out and potentially
00:39:20 ◼ ► you block. Setting aside the, uh, the convenience versus like futziness of trying to block ads with
00:39:26 ◼ ► a program versus just paying the fee to get the ads. If you can afford it, paying is always much
00:39:31 ◼ ► more convenient, but especially in the case where we, with YouTube, where I feel like part of the
00:39:35 ◼ ► solution that Casey's going for and the definitely I was going for is let's get it. So my whole family
00:39:41 ◼ ► doesn't see ads in YouTube. And in that situation, trying to use some kind of ad blocking thing
00:39:47 ◼ ► is the worst idea ever, because that means on everybody's device, every, every device that
00:39:51 ◼ ► every person in your family uses, you now have to carefully maintain, configure, uh, all of these
00:39:57 ◼ ► different things to make sure they work right. And by the way, when those ad blocking things mess up
00:40:01 ◼ ► in some way or cause some other site not to work, now you're on the hook to fix that. And once they
00:40:05 ◼ ► find out that it's the weird ad blocking thing that blocks ads on YouTube is making it so they can't
00:40:09 ◼ ► use their favorite website or whatever, they're going to ask you to uninstall it. Just pay for the thing.
00:40:17 ◼ ► grand scheme of things to not be bombarded by those ads. And once you do that, as long as
00:40:21 ◼ ► everybody is signed in to their accounts for their Google accounts for YouTube, and unlike many other
00:40:27 ◼ ► sites, YouTube will keep you signed in essentially forever. Like you won't have to constantly be
00:40:30 ◼ ► signing them in, then you're done. It doesn't matter what devices they get. It doesn't matter if
00:40:33 ◼ ► they're on their computer or on their iPad or on their phone or whatever. So much better than trying
00:40:38 ◼ ► to maintain a fragile fleet of ad blockers. Yeah, I think it's very telling that both of these
00:40:50 ◼ ► Just use the Vinegar app. And ad blockers are never a just. There's always more complexity than
00:40:57 ◼ ► that. They're always going to mess up certain things. And then you have to troubleshoot,
00:41:00 ◼ ► oh, turn the ad blocker off, see, you know, reload, see if it fixes the thing you're blocking.
00:41:04 ◼ ► I mean, obviously, in the case of trying to block specific behavior on a specific site,
00:41:09 ◼ ► YouTube in this case, you know, the the surface area for it messing up pages is much narrower,
00:41:14 ◼ ► obviously. So you have a lot less of that drama to deal with. But you still don't have zero. And
00:41:21 ◼ ► it's a cat and mouse game. You know, YouTube keeps trying to block all these different things. Then
00:41:25 ◼ ► these things develop new, you know, heuristics and new strategies to unblock themselves and get
00:41:30 ◼ ► working again. And then YouTube blocks it again. Like, there's a lot of situations in which it is worth
00:41:35 ◼ ► people saving the eight bucks a month to not to, you know, to do this. But, you know, if you have
00:41:41 ◼ ► the eight bucks a month, you just spend it on this and you and you can move on with your life and not
00:41:46 ◼ ► spend so much time playing this cat and mouse game. And by the way, I don't like the system video
00:41:52 ◼ ► player versus the YouTube one because the YouTube one has features that the system video player does
00:41:55 ◼ ► not like the little graph that shows you like the the lump where like most people watched that type
00:42:02 ◼ ► of thing. If you're watching like a how to video to find out the good part where they actually show
00:42:05 ◼ ► you what they're supposed to be doing, like, that's not you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty
00:42:09 ◼ ► sure that's not visible. If you use the system player. Similarly, I'm not even sure if chapters
00:42:15 ◼ ► are visible. If you use the system player. And I you know, the keyboard controls might be different
00:42:21 ◼ ► as well. So anyway, for YouTube's player, it's not made with flash anymore. You know, I prefer it
00:42:27 ◼ ► because it has more features. And whenever YouTube adds a feature, they add to their player. So my
00:42:32 ◼ ► personal preference is not to actually switch it to the system video player, which is separate from
00:42:39 ◼ ► We are sponsored this episode by OnePassword. Over half of IT pros say securing SaaS apps is their
00:42:46 ◼ ► biggest challenge. With the growing problems of SaaS sprawl and shadow IT, it's not hard to see why.
00:42:52 ◼ ► Thankfully, Trellica by OnePassword can discover and secure access to all of your apps, managed or not.
00:42:59 ◼ ► Trellica by OnePassword inventories every app in use at your company. Then pre-populated app profiles assess
00:43:06 ◼ ► SaaS risks, letting you manage access, optimize spend, and enforce security best practices across
00:43:11 ◼ ► every app your employees actually use. So you can manage shadow IT, securely onboard and off-board
00:43:18 ◼ ► employees, and meet compliance goals. Trellica by OnePassword provides a complete solution for
00:43:22 ◼ ► SaaS access governance. And it's just one of the many ways that extended access management helps teams
00:43:28 ◼ ► strengthen compliance and security. OnePassword's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users,
00:43:34 ◼ ► and over 150,000 businesses, including, by the way, mine, from IBM to Slack. And now they're securing more
00:43:42 ◼ ► than just passwords with OnePassword extended access management. And OnePassword is ISO 27001 certified with
00:43:50 ◼ ► regular third-party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. OnePassword exceeds the standards set by
00:43:56 ◼ ► various authorities and is a leader in security. Take the first step to better security for your team
00:44:02 ◼ ► by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged shadow IT. Learn more at
00:44:08 ◼ ► OnePassword.com slash ATP. That's number one, OnePassword.com slash ATP, all lowercase. Thank you so much to
00:44:23 ◼ ► Marco, please feel free in the edit to insert taps right here because apparently Tahoe has finally
00:44:33 ◼ ► This is kind of like dropping x86 support. So FireWire is an old interconnect standard that was used for
00:44:42 ◼ ► digital video, personal digital video cameras that used to record a digital video on tiny little tapes
00:44:48 ◼ ► at home. Uh, and it was also on Macs, not just for video, but also for peripherals, um, like hard drives. Uh, it was expensive. It was fancy. It had lots of important features to reliably carry things like audio that are latency sensitive while making sure that things arrive on time. Um, it didn't require the host computer to do as much sort of, uh, traffic control and computation.
00:45:14 ◼ ► So if your computer was slower or your computer bogged down, FireWire would keep chugging along because
00:45:20 ◼ ► it wasn't dependent on your computer to shuffle the bits like USB was that made it more expensive because USB could be cheaper because it made your computer do a lot of stuff. Um, and, uh, I guess the reason most people even know that this exists is if they got one of the early iPods, which if you didn't have a digital video camera, uh, maybe the first time you ever saw a FireWire port, uh, the original iPod came with a FireWire port that ended pretty quickly once they started putting like 30 pin connectors on them or whatever. Uh, but anyway,
00:45:44 ◼ ► Uh, it came in, uh, 400, what is that? Megabits per second? Megabits, yeah. FireWire 400 and 800 transfer speeds. Um, you can listen to our, uh, member special about connectors to learn about the FireWire 400 connector versus the 800 connector, but the bottom line is the 800 connector was terrible mostly. Um, and eventually it faded away and USB remained and went through several iterations and got faster and Thunderbolt basically replaced FireWire as the big expensive, really fast bus. Uh, but Macs have still had support for it.
00:46:14 ◼ ► So if you found a way to get an adapter somehow to plug in FireWire to your modern computer, or you were able to run a semi-modern OS on a computer that had a FireWire port, you could still plug something in like a FireWire hard drive or even an iPod, I would imagine.
00:46:28 ◼ ► And Mac OS would recognize it and still do all the old stuff. But apparently they are ripping out that software from Mac OS, which kind of like the x86 support. It's like, well, was that hurting anybody? And it's like, oh, we don't want to have to keep maintaining that and making sure it works and making it part of our potentially non-existent QA process. Can't we just remove that code? Nobody has FireWire portals anyway. And if they do, they can choose an old Mac with an old version of the OS.
00:46:51 ◼ ► So it seems like, I mean, this may change. We'll put a link to the Mac rumor story that links to a Reddit post, uh, that has some qualifiers like, well, maybe, you know, Apple hasn't said one way or the other, maybe a later release of Tahoe will have FireWire back.
00:47:05 ◼ ► But it just seems like they've removed that code so they don't have to maintain it anymore. And it's gone. And you'll have to remember that for like when, for people like in the retro computing world, like, oh yeah, um, this Mac can run Tahoe.
00:47:17 ◼ ► But if you want to do any FireWire stuff, you have to, you know, put an older version of an OS on it or whatever. So yeah, pouring out for FireWire. It was weird. It was expensive. Most people didn't have it, but it did an important job for when it existed.
00:47:29 ◼ ► Yeah. I have heard, I don't know if how true this is. I guess maybe listeners can write in and tell us. I have heard that a surprising number of audio interfaces in production studios still are FireWire.
00:47:44 ◼ ► And people have just been daisy chaining, you know, Thunderbolt adapters to them over the years to keep them working with modern Macs. If that is still the case, I can imagine this being a pretty big deal to them because what that would basically mean is you have to buy a new, you know, audio board or whatever, you know, whatever is outputting Thunderbolt or I mean FireWire.
00:48:02 ◼ ► Um, so that, that could be a significant deal to those people. Uh, but I don't, I don't know how many of those there still are.
00:48:09 ◼ ► Yeah. And again, FireWire was ideal for that because it was really good about delivering data on time all the time without hiccups or glitches, which is really important for audio and like a studio environment.
00:48:20 ◼ ► So that's part of the reason you'd still see those things around because they were big and expensive. And if they're still doing the job, why should you ever need to replace them? And the answer is, well, if you upgrade all your Macs in the studio to Tahoe and they can't talk to it anymore, it's time to upgrade or downgrade your computers.
00:48:34 ◼ ► All right. Apple has done another, uh, thing where they put up some marketing material and then almost immediately say, just kidding. And in this case, uh, they put together a press, a like PowerPoint and keynote.
00:48:49 ◼ ► And I think one of the Google present or whatever it's called, I forget what it's called a presentation about convincing your parents to get you a Mac. And they also put together like a 10 minute video of a guy, a comedian, um, who, who was on some movie that everyone loved recently.
00:49:04 ◼ ► What was that movie live? It's Martin Heerly or something. Yeah. Something like that. Anyways. Uh, I, they, they put up this video. It was like 10 minutes long. He's going through this presentation and teaching the kids how to give the presentation.
00:49:15 ◼ ► And I didn't care for it. Like, I didn't think it was a problem, but I just didn't think it was clever or funny. And I think they were trying for both and they pulled the video. I think the presentation is still available, but they pulled the video after like 24, 48 hours, something like that. Um, Oh, here we go. Let me just read from the show notes.
00:49:32 ◼ ► One day after publishing it, Apple has taken down its parent presentation video on YouTube. Apple has also moved the parent presentation slides to the bottom of its college students page, effectively burying it. Just one day earlier, the presentation was prominently featured at the top of the page and the YouTube video comedian, Martin Heerly, he showed a group of high school students how to effectively use the parent presentation.
00:49:51 ◼ ► Yeah. So this is, there's two stories here. One is it seems like Apple's been pulling a lot of ads lately. I think some, uh, other people talked about this counted up four of them. There was like the crush ad where they smushed all those musical instruments and a hydraulic press thing that was ill considered. And they kind of pulled that there's the Bella Ramsey Siri ad thing that never shipped. And they pulled that there's the parent ad. And there's a fourth one that I cannot remember. Oh, it was a, it was like a vacation ad where like a family was like flying to Thailand.
00:50:19 ◼ ► It was like super racist. So they pulled that one. So it's, I think it's within the past 12 months or so they have, you know, distributed and then pulled four different ads for four different reasons. So there is the question of like, what's going on over there with advertising? Maybe they should have, uh, people with more taste to take a look at the ads before they go out into the world. Ideally more taste to look at the ads before they decide to pay all this money to make them. But you know, they do a lot of advertising and I don't, you know, it's, it is, it's,
00:50:49 ◼ ► potentially a thing, uh, the case where, uh, there's some cracks in their, uh, their system where people with taste are not in the right place to make these decisions, unfortunately, but you know, it's not the end of the world. They make the right decision, you know, a day later, uh, as opposed to just leaving it up. Right. The second story is, and the reason I put this in here, I'd like the idea of them trying to convince people to buy max. I know that sounds so dumb. Like, aren't they always trying to convince people to buy max? Don't they advertise max all the time?
00:51:19 ◼ ► Isn't that part of their business? But time was when the whole company was focused on trying to get people who don't use max to try a Mac because they're a better kind of personal computer. And that is not the focus of the company anymore. Obviously there's other products that are so much more important, make so much more money. And it seemed like they basically gave up on, yeah, we also sell max and the people who like them, like them, but we don't need to actually try to expand a Mac market share. Like the hell is how these statistics, like, you know, 50% of the people buy a Mac. It's their first Mac. And they would say that, but it's like, does that, because of any advertising you're doing? Like they,
00:51:49 ◼ ► they didn't, they became uninterested in trying to convince the world that max are a better PC, that max are better than windows, that you should buy a Mac instead of a PC. It's like, ah, people, people who want one will buy one and it's fancy. And if people can't afford one, they'll get one. We don't have to do much advertising.
00:52:05 ◼ ► This ad seemed like it was from another era. Seemed like it was from an era when kids would go off to college and maybe the kid would say, maybe I should try one of those Apple computers. And the parents would say, you can't use an Apple computer. It's not compatible with the world. You have to use windows. That's not the world we live in today. Go look in a college classroom and count up how many Macs you see versus how many non Macs you see.
00:52:28 ◼ ► It is so lopsided. Macs are everywhere in higher education. And yet this ad is out there saying, you know, it's a, it's a bad ad. I agree with you, Casey. It didn't do the job. It's not funny. It was ill-considered in a thousand different ways.
00:52:41 ◼ ► But the concept of Apple trying to convince college students to get a Mac because a Mac is better for their purposes than a Windows PC is just blowing my hair back. I'm like, wow. Remember that? Remember when Apple had this confidence in its computers? Remember when we would have, I mean, I still have confidence. The computers that you, if you're going to get a laptop for school, you should get a Mac. Like, but like, I just, I just don't see ads like this anymore.
00:53:05 ◼ ► So it's a shame that them actually doing this. It's a sort of throwback head on Macs are better than PCs and you should buy one because they're good.
00:53:14 ◼ ► Ad turned out to be such a stinker. Uh, and even like the Apple parent presentation, like it was like, it doesn't, it doesn't reflect the reality of parents or kids or anything, but I like, I like the idea.
00:53:29 ◼ ► Yeah. Like, I mean, I mentioned this in one of my posts that I was writing about how like the Apple seems to have given up on trying to gain market share from Android and just like the deciding that it is what it is. And we'll just sell iPhones to iPhone people. And Android can still have 70% of the worldwide market share. Right. Why should Windows still have as much market share as it does? Apple's hardware is amazing. And it's a West for all our complaints. I like it better than Windows.
00:53:50 ◼ ► And at the very least, it's probably a wash for most people who don't care about computers, but like this should be an easy thing to convince people to buy, especially once you've got things like the, the M4 MacBook air for under a thousand dollars, barely that comes in 60 gigs of Ram.
00:54:06 ◼ ► That is perfect for any college student, right? It is expensive. It's more expensive than a $400 PC. Like I get that, but within the realm of people who are buying thousand dollar laptops for college, Apple should be able to win a lot of those sales by doing good ads.
00:54:19 ◼ ► And I know they have ads on TV and sports and backup catalogs or whatever, but there are always so much like modern Apple ads, which is like Apple were wonderful by our stuff and not just like coming out, punching and saying windows sucks.
00:54:30 ◼ ► Max are great. Look at all like that for crying out loud. This ad had like a blue screen of death thing. And it's like, all right, all right, come on. Like what, what century is this? But anyway, uh, I find it delightful that Apple still seems to have a little bit fight in it about Mac versus PC.
00:54:49 ◼ ► Yeah. What are you going to do? But I mean, I agree with you. At least they're trying to be aggressive. That that's kind of fun.
00:54:55 ◼ ► All right. Uh, we had some late breaking news as we record this on Monday, the 30th of June, Apple ways using Anthropic or open AI to power Siri.
00:55:05 ◼ ► This is from Bloomberg. Apple's considering using artificial intelligence technology from Anthropic PBC or open AI to power a new version of Siri, sidelining its own in-house models.
00:55:15 ◼ ► Apple has talked with both companies about using their large language models for Siri, according to people familiar with the discussions and its discussions with both Anthropic and open AI.
00:55:23 ◼ ► The iPhone maker requested a custom version of Claude and chat GPT that could run on Apple's private cloud compute servers.
00:55:29 ◼ ► Apple's investigation into third party models is at an early stage and the company hasn't made a final decision on using them.
00:55:34 ◼ ► A competing project internally dubbed LLM Siri that uses in-house models remains an act of development.
00:55:39 ◼ ► The project to evaluate external models was started by Siri chief Mike Rockwell and software engineering head Craig Federighi.
00:55:45 ◼ ► They were given oversight of Siri after the duties were removed from the command of John, Gina, Andrea, the company's AI chief.
00:55:52 ◼ ► After multiple rounds of testing, Rockwell and other executives concluded that Anthropic technology is the most promising for Siri's needs.
00:55:57 ◼ ► That led Adrian Perica, the company's vice president of corporate development, to start discussions with Anthropic about using Claude.
00:56:03 ◼ ► Apple's models are developed by a roughly 100-person team run by Ru Ming Pang, an Apple distinguished engineer who joined from Google in 2021 to lead this work.
00:56:14 ◼ ► The proposed shift has weighed on the team, which has some of the AI industry's most in-demand talents.
00:56:19 ◼ ► Some members have signaled internally that they are unhappy that the company is considering technology from a third party, creating the perception that they are to blame, at least partially, for the company's AI shortcomings.
00:56:28 ◼ ► They have said that they could leave for multimillion-dollar packages being floated by MetaPlatforms, Inc., and OpenAI.
00:56:34 ◼ ► Apple this month also nearly lost the team behind MLX, its key open-source system for developing machine learning models on the latest Apple chips.
00:56:41 ◼ ► After the engineers threatened to leave, Apple made counter-offers to retain them, and they're staying for now.
00:56:46 ◼ ► Tune into overtime for more on this particular issue about poaching people, but this fits with what we had been hearing, and rumors from Gurman, about what's going on now that there's new leadership for the whole Siri thing, which is no more not-invented-here syndrome.
00:57:02 ◼ ► Willing to look outside the company going so far as to say, hey, we've got a team working on that LM Siri thing.
00:57:07 ◼ ► Shouldn't we also talk to the people who already have chatbot-type models and see if their technology might be farther ahead than our technology is?
00:57:18 ◼ ► And I kind of feel for the 100-person team working on this stuff because, like, from the reports that we've heard, it is entirely plausible to believe that those teams were not adequately resourced to make products that are competitive with Claude and ChatGPT.
00:57:35 ◼ ► I mean, it's totally reasonable to think of, because we know how much money, like, OpenAI is spent on ChatGPT, and Claude has been around for a long time, and has been out there in the world, and they've been iterating on it, and this is Apple trying to do their version 1.0 of anything remotely close to that, and they've been flailing.
00:57:50 ◼ ► So that team maybe hasn't been resourced to do a good enough job, but certainly they probably started later than their competitors, and so I think it is the right thing to do for Rockwell and Federighi to say,
00:58:03 ◼ ► We shouldn't just assume we're going to use our internal thing. Let's at least look at the external things.
00:58:08 ◼ ► It does really highlight the not-great position they're in, because regardless of whether having a particular LLM is a competitive advantage,
00:58:19 ◼ ► it's the type of thing that every big player in the tech space has felt the need to have.
00:58:27 ◼ ► Facebook's got their own model. Microsoft has basically got OpenAI by having that big investment.
00:58:33 ◼ ► Google's got their own models. Apple, in theory, has their own models, but nothing like Gemini, nothing like Claude, nothing even like the LLM stuff, nothing like ChatGPT.
00:58:44 ◼ ► So they're behind, and if they come out and say, well, it turns out the most expedient thing we could do to make Siri not suck in the fastest time possible was to license Claude or something,
00:58:53 ◼ ► You know, all right, well, that's what you had to do, but now you are beholden to another company for a key technology,
00:59:00 ◼ ► which, to the extent that you believe that the Cook Doctrine is a reasonable thing to do, does fly in the face of it,
00:59:06 ◼ ► owning and controlling the primary technologies behind your most important products, blah, blah, blah, even if there's no moat,
00:59:12 ◼ ► even if LLMs are commodity, if you don't have one of those commodities, but instead have to buy it from some other vendor,
00:59:17 ◼ ► other vendor that may compete with you once they come out with an egg that sweeps the world or something,
00:59:34 ◼ ► And if that means paying someone to use their model because it's better than our model, then by all means, they should do it.
00:59:41 ◼ ► But I also hope they retain their own team because I think in the long term, it is important for Apple to have its own model,
00:59:46 ◼ ► not because every company needs to have its own model, but because A, Apple has the money to do that,
00:59:50 ◼ ► and B, like any other thing that Apple does, them being able to make exactly the thing that they need is part of their competitive advantage.
00:59:57 ◼ ► I don't think their model is going to be better than their competitors in some significant way.
01:00:00 ◼ ► I think it'll just be, could be competitive and in the ballpark if they put enough money and time into it
01:00:14 ◼ ► I hope they can retain them because they should still be working to say, hey, your goal is now to replace Claude.
01:00:18 ◼ ► Get something as good as is better than Claude so we can end this contract and have our own internal thing.
01:00:23 ◼ ► Kind of like how we used to process us from other companies until we eventually could make some
01:00:31 ◼ ► I think I'm actually optimistic about it, but it does really, does really highlight the corner that Apple has painted itself into.
01:00:56 ◼ ► How many different times over the last 10 years, 15 years, whatever it's been, have we seen jokes on national television about how bad Siri sucks?
01:01:13 ◼ ► And I couldn't agree with you more, John, that this is showing at least a little bit of fire, a little bit of urgency, a little bit of enthusiasm about finally fixing it.
01:01:24 ◼ ► And to build on another thing you said, just because they might be doing this soon doesn't mean they're doing it forever.
01:01:30 ◼ ► There is no reason they couldn't use like Claude or whatever for the next couple of years, two, three, four, five years, and then eventually swoop in and have their own internal thing that maybe would be even better.
01:01:47 ◼ ► And it's going to be super demotivating for that team that's worked since 2021 on Apple's own internal models, probably being frustrated the whole time by, like, the Siri team and they're not being funded or whatever their issues are internally.
01:02:10 ◼ ► So it's going to be a difficult challenge to convince them to stay at Apple and continue their work, right?
01:02:19 ◼ ► You know, even if Apple wants to keep them, they could go and get much more money elsewhere.
01:02:30 ◼ ► And I do like the fact that they that Apple is going to apparently, according to this German rumor, wants to run these models on private cloud compute, because I think that is Apple's one of Apple's key competitive advantages is the privacy angle that they have a way to run server side models in a privacy preserving way.
01:02:47 ◼ ► Which their competitors don't seem to care about because it's not part of their it's not part of the value proposition.
01:02:59 ◼ ► Apple's whole thing is we can't even look at the stuff that you are, you know, conversing with the models and that's the way they like it.
01:03:07 ◼ ► And so having a third party model, but saying, OK, we'll license this from you, but we're not going to send like what they're going to now, I believe, is when we use ChatGPT through Siri, it's going to open AI servers.
01:03:18 ◼ ► And, yeah, Apple has this thing about, well, we do it in a more privacy preserving way.
01:03:23 ◼ ► But I don't think, and someone can correct me who knows if you're listening, if I'm wrong about this, I don't think when you send a query to ChatGPT through Siri today that ChatGPT is running on private cloud compute on Apple.
01:03:55 ◼ ► So it's still like they need an LLM engine that can do good things for them that they can build on top of.
01:04:01 ◼ ► And this would just be a piece of what would be the new Siri, which allows them to swap it out.
01:04:11 ◼ ► You're talking to Siri, which does all the Siri things, only now it just does them competently and faster and better, hopefully.
01:04:20 ◼ ► You know, it plays into the narrative that we heard about, you know, over the rumor mill over the last few months that, like, you know,
01:04:27 ◼ ► that basically that Apple's high ups are taking the, you know, the poor state of Siri and their AI efforts seriously.
01:04:40 ◼ ► And, you know, it started out, like, obviously, like, the restructuring of the, you know, Jean Andrea and going over to Rockwell.
01:04:48 ◼ ► We heard reports of Federighi, you know, issuing directives now of, like, you know, look, if somebody else does a better job of it, use it.
01:04:55 ◼ ► We've seen now from what they did at WVDC, from what they're releasing, that they have more integration than ever within these new OSs and products with third-party LLM and AI providers.
01:05:09 ◼ ► This is showing us that, like, the not invented here syndrome is finally being, like, a little bit turned down for AI stuff.
01:05:17 ◼ ► And it needs to be because the obvious reality to everyone in the entire market is that these companies are dramatically outpacing Apple in this area.
01:05:41 ◼ ► Like, that's, or buy the people completely, buy the company, or have a big partnership with the company with some huge investment so that you have rights to stuff the way Microsoft did with OpenAI.
01:05:50 ◼ ► Oh, on the financial front I saw earlier today, on the news that Apple was doing this, on this story that's in Bloomberg, German, or whatever, Apple's stock price went up the equivalent of two Anthropics.
01:06:05 ◼ ► Like, as a percentage, like, that's not, like, it isn't, like, the double or anything, but, like, that should show you, even all, like, the stock market, I mean, we know how incredibly fickle that is and how.
01:06:17 ◼ ► It is funny, but it's also, like, the stock market, upon news that Apple might be spending a whole bunch of money soon, jumped in value for Apple.
01:06:28 ◼ ► Like, that's significant, because that shows you, like, the confidence that the investing world has in Apple doing its own AI stuff is very low, and once the news came that Apple's going to be, you know, probably doing even more with a third-party company to, you know, for AI stuff, the value of Apple in their minds jumped.
01:06:52 ◼ ► And, again, if Apple's worried about the price, their stock price just went up enough to essentially fund, probably, a purchase of Anthropoc as I'm assuming they're willing to sell.
01:06:59 ◼ ► Like, you don't know what these things would actually sell for, because people have Zuckerberg disease, which, one of the stories about Zuckerberg that I forget if it was in the original Social Network, and if not, it will surely be in the now-planned sequel.
01:07:12 ◼ ► But his whole deal is, you know, he started Facebook, and at various times, other companies wanted to buy Facebook, because they could see it was being successful.
01:07:21 ◼ ► And he turned down what was, at the time, big offers that would have made him very wealthy, you know, millions and millions of dollars.
01:07:29 ◼ ► Because he said, I don't want to be somebody who starts a company and then becomes a multimillionaire by selling it.
01:07:44 ◼ ► And I feel like a lot of these AI companies fancy themselves the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
01:08:08 ◼ ► Like, to be, to have this company, this, like, world-conquering force be a personification of you and be under your sole control is so much more attractive than any of the money.
01:08:16 ◼ ► So when you say, oh, Apple's stock price went up the price of two Anthropics, like twice Anthropics market cap, that doesn't necessarily mean that the people behind Anthropics would be willing to sell it for their current market cap according to the stock market or their private valuation or whatever.
01:08:33 ◼ ► If those people decide, no, I'm never selling because I'm the next Mark Zuckerberg, God forbid.
01:08:38 ◼ ► The reality is, like, there's multiple companies that Apple could partner with or buy that would be substantially better than what they are doing internally right now.
01:08:49 ◼ ► So I saw some article saying, like, let's go through all the companies and see who would entertain and offer from Apple.
01:08:59 ◼ ► Because it's Facebook, I think it's steal llamas, open source things, or not steal, but take llamas, open way to things or whatever.
01:09:08 ◼ ► And then you get Anthropic, and I forget what their reason was, that Anthropic probably wouldn't.
01:09:16 ◼ ► Like, it's like everyone's already, it's like the dance and everyone's already all coupled up and Apple's just like on the wall and has no one to dance with.
01:09:29 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, and I think one of the biggest problems here that got them to this point and will hinder them going forward is, you know, certainly one of the things that got them here is that, as mentioned many times in the past, I think Apple fundamentally underestimated the value and importance of this kind of technology.
01:09:54 ◼ ► And one of the root causes of that, besides Tim Cook being a terrible product person and not seeing the value in anything, is Apple is really cheap.
01:10:04 ◼ ► One of the ways they are cheap is they didn't want to, you know, give their teams GPUs and stuff to, you know, to start developing these things.
01:10:09 ◼ ► Another way they're cheap is they just don't pay good salaries necessarily in a lot of areas, in a lot of, you know, competitive markets.
01:10:18 ◼ ► Their attitude, from what I've gathered from people, has always kind of been, it's an honor to work for us.
01:10:23 ◼ ► You should be so happy to work for us that you don't need necessarily the highest salary you could get in the market.
01:10:28 ◼ ► And, you know, certainly with the AI story, you know, we're going to talk about this in overtime about, like, you know, there's a lot of high value going on in the AI market because there's a lot of hype.
01:10:49 ◼ ► Whether you are developing your own stuff, you know, spending a whole bunch of money on various computing resources and GPUs to get that done.
01:10:57 ◼ ► Or spending, and or, you know, hiring a huge team of very talented, very in-demand people right now.
01:11:06 ◼ ► Or buying one of these companies that has, or, you know, very heavily partnering with one of these companies that has all of those things already.
01:11:14 ◼ ► It's all going to take a lot of money, and Apple's cheap, even though they have all the money.
01:11:22 ◼ ► They have all the money to do whatever they want, but they are really, really stingy with it.
01:11:46 ◼ ► From the time Giandre came, though, the story was that the reason there was resentment in his group is because he came and hired a bunch of people.
01:11:55 ◼ ► Which you can imagine bringing resentment to the rest of the employees who are like, we work on the products that pay the bills around here.
01:12:18 ◼ ► But when it came time to staff the AI people, they're paying them super high salaries because you got it.
01:12:26 ◼ ► And but now you have a problem in the company because you've got one part of the company, this new shiny part that is getting paid more than you.
01:12:31 ◼ ► And you've been working there for 10 years and you're making the iPhone and you're like, what the heck?
01:12:39 ◼ ► You really have to say, OK, well, we're not going to do what we've historically done, which is pay competitive salaries.
01:12:44 ◼ ► But most of it is made up with the fact that our stock price keeps going up so we can pay you a little bit less.
01:12:49 ◼ ► And, you know, like if all of a sudden you need to hire people who are in high demand and pay them more money, if you don't do that for the rest of your company, it makes people sad.
01:13:01 ◼ ► And even then, I'm not even sure they were paying the people in their group as much as the other companies are and certainly not as much as the new things.
01:13:09 ◼ ► So, yeah, they've they've got themselves in a difficult situation and they're they're under investment in this, whether it's under investment or they didn't have enough time or they didn't have enough people or like or maybe maybe it's entirely on.
01:13:23 ◼ ► Maybe they have models that could potentially have been used and were competitive when they were ready, but Siri wasn't ready to integrate them.
01:13:29 ◼ ► And now they've fallen behind like it's hard to tell what kind of mess they have over there, but it's clear that they have a mess and we can see the results.
01:13:49 ◼ ► And yeah, so I hope they I hope they figure out a way to retain their existing team and to hire more of them.
01:13:58 ◼ ► And I don't know what you do with the rest of the people like they could get themselves into a situation where they are kind of already there and have been in the past where the people who have the skills that Apple needs are not actually that common.
01:14:12 ◼ ► It used to be you had to find people who knew Objective C, which wasn't that many people.
01:14:18 ◼ ► But still, especially if Apple's weird about working remotely, like many more people can make a website with React than can make an app with Swift, let alone a Mac app with Swift or something like that.
01:14:30 ◼ ► Not that Apple is filled with COBOL engineers or something, but like the skills need because native apps are a bit of a native native apps on Apple's platforms are a bit of a niche thing.
01:14:49 ◼ ► So I kind of feel like most of the people who are really good at the skills Apple needs for its bread and butter platforms are underpaid simply based on how rare they are in the market.
01:14:59 ◼ ► As evidenced by our, you know, perennial complaint that it seems like there's nobody left at Apple who knows how to make a good Mac app because they've all retired.
01:15:09 ◼ ► So highly in demand skills, AI people or anybody knows about how to make a decent app on an Apple platform.
01:15:18 ◼ ► It's a tough nut to crack and I don't know what the right answer is, but I agree with both of you that the fact that they're willing to change the modus operandi from everything being trash and that's just the way it is.
01:15:32 ◼ ► And so I really am hopeful that we get to see the results of these efforts and sometime before we all die.
01:15:42 ◼ ► So it's going to come as no great surprise to anyone listening to this that I am not the world's most fashionable human.
01:15:47 ◼ ► And in particular, my summer wardrobe is basically entirely ATP t-shirts and some sort of shorts.
01:15:54 ◼ ► I am happy to report I've graduated from cargo shorts, but nevertheless, it's ATP shirts and shorts.
01:15:58 ◼ ► And one of the things I love about podcast sponsors like Quince is that it exposes you and me to new stuff.
01:16:06 ◼ ► And even though many of you may have already heard the good word about linen pants, let me tell you, it wasn't until Quince that I had the opportunity to try linen pants.
01:16:13 ◼ ► And try I have because Quince sent me a pair of their 100% European linen pants and they are so nice.
01:16:27 ◼ ► One of the things I love about these linen pants is that they feel light and airy, but even more, they don't look like you're just bumming around on the beach.
01:16:36 ◼ ► They look like you're ready to go out for a night on the town to the degree that I would ever do that sort of thing.
01:16:47 ◼ ► And the best part is that everything with Quince tends to be about half the cost of similar brands.
01:16:58 ◼ ► And finally, and this is actually my personal favorite, Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical, and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes.
01:17:11 ◼ ► Well, if you want to stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from Quince, go to Quince.com slash ATP for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.
01:17:41 ◼ ► I was planning on purchasing a MacBook Pro, but I got some unexpected bills recently, so I had to put it off.
01:17:46 ◼ ► I was going to wait for the M5 models, but I just realized that these come with macOS Tahoe.
01:17:57 ◼ ► Should I stretch my wallet and buy an M4-based MacBook Pro now so I can stay on Sequoia for as long as possible?
01:18:03 ◼ ► But before we answer this, I get what Francois is saying, Francois Olivier is saying, and there was somebody that wrote us via email that had a pretty much identical question.
01:18:12 ◼ ► Let me just say, don't throw out iOS 19, or 26, excuse me, iOS 26, don't throw out Tahoe yet.
01:18:21 ◼ ► Like, yeah, it's a little bit rough now, but I really think it's not going to be as bad as pretty much everyone says it's going to be.
01:18:29 ◼ ► That being said, if it were me, and I guess because I'm more optimistic, I would say just get the M5 when it's available and just be happy with that, and don't worry about Tahoe so much.
01:18:46 ◼ ► Whenever Apple does something that radically changes things about their OSs, a lot of people say,
01:18:54 ◼ ► I'm going to hold on to the old version either for a long time or for as long as I can or for forever.
01:19:14 ◼ ► But the moment you say, I'm going to not update to the latest version, I'm going to not buy new products that come with the latest version, and I'm going to stand here as long as possible.
01:19:24 ◼ ► The moment you start that, you start feeling resistance from all sides in various ways.
01:19:31 ◼ ► Obviously, this takes the form in hardware of, well, if you need to buy new hardware, you have to buy something old somehow.
01:19:54 ◼ ► And one of the aspects about the redesigns, like any other major system redesign, is it triggers a lot of redesigns and rewrites of software, of application software.
01:20:10 ◼ ► So, many apps raise their deployment minimum, their minimum OS target, to the new version because it makes it a lot easier.
01:20:22 ◼ ► There will be some apps, mostly indie apps, on day one that will be like iOS 26 slash Tahoe only.
01:20:41 ◼ ► So, again, you can keep the old versions of those apps going, but you'll stop getting updates.
01:20:53 ◼ ► Eventually, there's going to be some compelling new feature of something that will require you to update.
01:21:10 ◼ ► But it's probably like, I bet you're not going to want to keep this strategy going for more than a year.
01:21:18 ◼ ► And so, you might as well, you know, if new, you know, updates to the, you know, the M5 models might be compelling for you, I'd say just suck it up and just do it.
01:21:33 ◼ ► The MacBook Pro, you know, we've heard it's rumored sometime in the next two years, I believe, to probably go to an OLED screen to have a...
01:21:47 ◼ ► So, you're probably not going to get that by waiting for the M5, but, you know, at some point, you're going to be forced to make this transition.
01:21:54 ◼ ► So, don't expect to hold onto it for too long, and it's probably going to be harder than you think within about a year, because all those apps are going to start requiring it just to make the redesigns, you know, at all, tackleable.
01:22:08 ◼ ► Yeah, so this question is slightly different than the similar sounding question, which is, hey, I have a computer, should I buy a new one or should I just keep using my old one?
01:22:17 ◼ ► If you have an old one that's still serving your needs, like if you have an M4 or you have an M3 and you're like, oh, should I use this for another year?
01:22:25 ◼ ► Like, but if the question is, I'm going to buy a new computer, should I buy an M4 based one now?
01:22:34 ◼ ► Should I, especially if you're in a situation where you're like, I can't afford to do it, I have to wait a little bit, but should I stretch just, and should I buy one now so I'll have something that doesn't have to run Tahoe so that I can plan on using that for years and years and avoiding Tahoe?
01:22:54 ◼ ► If you have something you can use now until the M5 comes out, because that seems like you do, you may use a little bit longer.
01:23:00 ◼ ► When the M5 comes out, wait six months, like you can wait for the bumps to be ironed out, but like there's no holding back the tide.
01:23:20 ◼ ► The Mac moved to macOS 10 and you can use classic for a real long time, but eventually that's not what the Mac is anymore.
01:23:30 ◼ ► So I think, uh, it's why, you know, if you don't have the money for an M4 right now, wait, save your money, buy an M5.
01:23:41 ◼ ► But like, and like I said, my personal experience with Tahoe is despite all my complaints about the UI, actually using it day to day is not shocking.
01:23:56 ◼ ► Like there's things that annoy me that I feel like are regressions from a UI perspective, but you get used to just plain sitting in front of the OS and using it pretty fast.
01:24:08 ◼ ► Yes, things look different and things are too light and high contrast or whatever, but like it's, it's fine.
01:24:13 ◼ ► So my advice is get that M5, I think you'll be happy with it, and if not, get an M5 and a half or an M6.
01:24:20 ◼ ► What is, the email question we got, which I don't have in front of me, asked something.
01:24:39 ◼ ► Everything's possible with hacks, but I don't think that's a supported configuration for Apple, which is why I would not recommend.
01:24:45 ◼ ► If that's your plan, if you need to run pre-Tahoe, don't get a machine that doesn't support pre-Tahoe.
01:24:51 ◼ ► Because yeah, if you can get it to work, fine, but like you're just, you're just asking for trouble.
01:24:55 ◼ ► Like if you're that desperate for something and you have to buy something and you can't afford to buy something, buy a new M4 now or later on buy a used M4.
01:25:01 ◼ ► Or like, it's much better to do that than to try to force an older OS on hardware that doesn't support it.
01:25:08 ◼ ► Yeah, like because whenever, when Apple releases new hardware, that hardware is only supported by the OS that was current when it shipped and then all OS is forward.
01:25:19 ◼ ► So, like right now, the M4 MacBook Air, say, that's the current M4, that's the current MacBook Air.
01:25:26 ◼ ► This fall when Tahoe ships, they will still probably be selling that same M4 MacBook Air.
01:25:30 ◼ ► If you buy one and it comes with Tahoe, you can probably easily downgrade it to Sequoia because that exact hardware shipped with Sequoia at some point.
01:25:38 ◼ ► But then later on in the fall, if an M5 series of MacBooks comes out and that comes out after Tahoe, then Sequoia will never be updated to get hardware support for that hardware.
01:25:53 ◼ ► Astrology writes, I have a Mac Mini M1 with 16 gigs of RAM, which I primarily use for Xcode.
01:26:07 ◼ ► I don't know, to be honest with you, but I don't imagine it'll be that much faster, will it?
01:26:13 ◼ ► I mean, the M4, so keep in mind, like, as you go from M1 to M4, a lot of other things have also changed about these chips.
01:26:34 ◼ ► And then, of course, M1 to M4, as awesome as the M1 was, that was, what, five years ago now?
01:26:58 ◼ ► So, I would say, if you're going from M1 16 gig to M4 16 gig, you will probably notice generally faster performance with almost everything that is a taxing operation on the computer.
01:27:12 ◼ ► Now, I would also suggest, though, if you're using this for Xcode, that 16 gigs is starting to look a little skimpy these days.
01:27:20 ◼ ► So, if you can at all afford, if you're going to replace it, and if you can at all afford more RAM than that, I would suggest get more RAM than that.
01:27:27 ◼ ► You know, if you're doing Xcode, if you've been living with 16 and you're doing Xcode, I'd say at least go to 32 if you can.
01:27:36 ◼ ► An M4 family chip, whichever one it is, with 32 gigs of RAM can last you a very long time, I think, in today's software.
01:27:48 ◼ ► But I agree that, like, the place where you'd probably notice it for, like, starting up a simulator is probably going to be SSD speed that I don't actually know what the bottleneck is for simulator startups.
01:28:07 ◼ ► But then, like, phones would come with, like, a terabyte, and it's like, I don't want to do a local backup of a terabyte phone on my Mac.
01:28:25 ◼ ► And so, yeah, if you're simulating a high RAM device and it is faithfully simulating the amount of RAM that device really has, that's going to eat up some of your max RAM.
01:28:35 ◼ ► But I felt like if you're doing iPhone dev and you have a 16-gig Mac and the only thing you're running is Xcode, I thought you'd be okay.
01:29:00 ◼ ► If your M1 is feeling a little pokey, like you're wondering if you'd get a thing, like, you waited a good amount of time.
01:29:08 ◼ ► It lasted you reasonably because it's not like you're just using it for casual web browsing.
01:29:23 ◼ ► The problem with any kind of thing like this, of noticing, is you'll notice the day you get it, and then you'll get used to it the next day.
01:29:32 ◼ ► I guess you leave the old one around, so after a month you can go back to the old one and try building your app and going, oh, yeah, I remember this.
01:29:38 ◼ ► I did just, by the way, I just went to the configurator to see, like, okay, so a Mac Mini base model is $600, which for the computer that it is, it's 16 gigs, 256, yeah, 256 sucks.
01:30:05 ◼ ► You're at $1,000 for that, which, again, like, when compared to Apple's other desktops, like, that's a pretty good deal.
01:30:36 ◼ ► And so, there's all sorts of little complexities to it that, like, you think, you know, DC is much simpler.
01:31:18 ◼ ► Add up how many watts I think you're going to use and how long do you think you want that to last and put your thumb in the wind?
01:31:37 ◼ ► They're both cyber power tower style UPSs, which actually Marco might have been the first of the three of us to have one of these.
01:31:52 ◼ ► I will say that mine, after only like three-ish years, the internal batteries did go on them.
01:32:16 ◼ ► And other than the slack on a couple of the cables being very, very taut, you know, there was not enough slack in a couple of spots.
01:32:25 ◼ ► But in terms of how to choose, I don't know, do either of you have a recommendation in this regard?
01:32:30 ◼ ► And the answer is always the unsatisfying, like you said, like, you know, add up all the power and the devices you have and see how much you need.
01:32:39 ◼ ► Every UPS seller will have something on their website that purports to do this for you.
01:32:45 ◼ ► Their interests are not aligned with yours, let's say, because they'll let you enter a bunch of information and they'll tell you what UPS you should buy from them.
01:32:53 ◼ ► If every one of your devices is pulling the maximum power, it's allowed to fall at the same time, which honestly, like, that's the conservative answer.
01:33:00 ◼ ► But that will cost you a lot of money, which, again, is in their interest because they sell UPSs, right?
01:33:05 ◼ ► For years, I bought, because I remember when I first got my, like, I guess, Power Mac G5, maybe even when I got my G3, I did the calculations on the various websites, got a number that said I should buy this UPS that was more than I could afford.
01:33:24 ◼ ► And for just years and years, I had a series of UPSs that, yes, I would replace the batteries when they died.
01:33:33 ◼ ► Anyway, when the power went out, I had about two minutes and 30 seconds to shut down my computer.
01:33:39 ◼ ► And they have a thing that most of the good ones have a thing where you can connect your Mac through USB to the UPS.
01:33:52 ◼ ► So even if you're not there to shut it down, the Mac will shut itself down based on knowing that it's on UPS if you can figure that.
01:33:59 ◼ ► You don't even need to use third-party software, although they used to come with it back in the day.
01:34:04 ◼ ► And I think built into macOS is a thing that will shut itself down with X amount of time remaining on the thing or whatever.
01:34:10 ◼ ► What I'm saying is you can get away with a UPS that is massively undersized for your uses.
01:34:15 ◼ ► If you have, let's say, a dual Power Mac G5 that could potentially use a huge amount of power with like an NVIDIA graphics card in it and you buy a dinky UPS that could barely handle an iMac, it will protect you when the power goes out as long as you shut down within two to five minutes.
01:34:30 ◼ ► And sometimes that's enough, especially if the power like flickers or whatever, or you just want time to save your stuff and shut down.
01:34:37 ◼ ► And in my experience, having experienced many blackouts and many flickers or whatever, I have never lost anything or had any problem due to having a massively undersized UPS.
01:34:46 ◼ ► That said, once I got fancier computers and could afford a UPS that was closer to being sized correctly, that's better.
01:34:55 ◼ ► The reason I linked to the CyberPower one in the show notes is I had a series of APC UPSs and other brands that were more of like the horizontal kind.
01:35:21 ◼ ► Anyway, and those were fine, but when I got my 2019 Mac Pro, the place where I was putting it was on a little skinny table that is the proportions of a tower computer and a tower UPS fit perfectly under a tower computer on a tower-shaped table.
01:35:49 ◼ ► And a lot of the fancier ones that support a lot of power do, in fact, have fans in them.
01:35:55 ◼ ► And you're always, like, reading the comments, reading the help, saying, okay, it's got a fan.
01:36:06 ◼ ► And I can tell you that the model that I'm going to link in the show notes, and I'm assuming Casey will say the same of his, does not make any noise in normal operation.
01:36:23 ◼ ► Can it keep my computer alive when the power is out long enough for me to save my work and shut down?
01:36:31 ◼ ► I think I have one of the ones that Casey's going to like, and I have one of the newer ones.
01:36:55 ◼ ► The one thing, we actually, back in episode 569, I mentioned that there was, I have Tesla Powerwall batteries as a solar backup battery at the beach.
01:37:09 ◼ ► I had a UPS plugged into one of the outlets that is backed up by the solar panels, or by the batteries.
01:37:15 ◼ ► And I had said, like, for some reason, like, when it goes on solar power, like, if there's a blackout from the utility company,
01:37:22 ◼ ► and it switches over to the batteries providing the power to those outlets, then the UPS that I had put into that,
01:37:27 ◼ ► you know, the standard CyberPower UPS, would think it was, like, a blackout, even though there is power going to the outlet,
01:37:34 ◼ ► and it would cut off the supply, and it would just use its battery until it died, and then everything would just die.
01:37:41 ◼ ► And there was some issue with, like, the way that, like, Powerwall batteries, when supplying power, supply a different frequency of AC.
01:38:07 ◼ ► And there's a brand called Eaton, E-A-T-O-N, that makes UPSs that cost about the same as everybody else's, maybe a little bit more,
01:38:27 ◼ ► My solution was I just disconnected the UPS and just plugged directly into the wall and let the Tesla batteries do their jobs.
01:38:57 ◼ ► We're going to kind of continue what we talked about earlier about the AI stuff by talking about our developers.
01:39:09 ◼ ► that AI developers are allegedly being offered or taking right now in the open marketplace?
01:40:41 ◼ ► Okay, so these are two things that you guys have talked about in the past that I have recently come to need that I have really appreciated.
01:41:08 ◼ ► I don't know if they're sponsoring again, but they have been a sponsor, so to disclose that.
01:41:14 ◼ ► But so what TailScale does, as you've heard Casey talk about in Sponsor Reads, is basically it's like a network routing software.
01:41:26 ◼ ► So when you hear about TailScale, and I didn't know I was going to talk about this tonight, but hand to God, I love TailScale so much that whether or not they've ever sponsored, which they have, I would talk it up anyways because I really do love it that much.
01:41:43 ◼ ► And it works with VPN, the same kind of technology that runs VPNs, but that's not the way you should think of it.
01:41:51 ◼ ► The way you should think of TailScale is, what if all of my devices could talk to each other irrespective of how they're actually connected to the internet?
01:42:00 ◼ ► So what if I had a server at Linode, and I had my laptop here at my house, and I wanted them to be able to talk to each other as though they're on the same local network?
01:42:12 ◼ ► So all of your devices that are on your TailNet, which is what they call your account, if you will, your network of devices, all of the devices on your TailNet can pretty much always talk to each other irrespective of how they're connected to the internet and irrespective of where they are geographically.
01:42:27 ◼ ► Yeah, and so where this became useful for me is I have my Mac Mini doing basically like file server type work in my garage over on Long Island.
01:42:44 ◼ ► And I want to be able to do screen sharing and stuff like that and access the network volumes.
01:42:55 ◼ ► And I installed it on my iPad for some testing things because I wanted to like, when I was on Long Island, I wanted access to the network at the restaurant.
01:43:16 ◼ ► You can basically say, sir, like whatever device I'm using right now, tunnel all the traffic so that it comes out of that device over there.
01:43:34 ◼ ► I can say, go, you know, connect to my Long Island, you know, home Mac Mini and route all traffic through that.
01:43:43 ◼ ► But also, you know, you can like I can screen share right now to the Mac Mini back at home and it just works like it like you, you know, the tailscale menu, like it copies the IP address you need to use.
01:43:55 ◼ ► And I just go into, you know, the finder, I hit command K, you know, VNC colon slash last paste the IP address.
01:44:05 ◼ ► And like, this is the kind of thing that like you, you, there have been ways to do this over time with like, all right, port forward things or dynamic DNS and like all these different things that were a pain in the butt and fragile.
01:44:16 ◼ ► And this takes all of that pain and pain in the buttery and fragility out of the situation.
01:44:22 ◼ ► And it's like, oh, here's here is an IP address that you can use from your local device to connect to this thing over there.
01:44:32 ◼ ► If you, if you have devices that are not geographically next to each other, pretty much ever tailscale really is incredible.
01:44:40 ◼ ► And to build on what Marco said, the way it works is it kind of, it's kind of sort of layers another network on top of all of the network that your device is currently on.
01:44:50 ◼ ► A carrier grade network address translation that you get a 100 dot XYZ IP address for each of your devices.
01:44:57 ◼ ► And so while your device may have the 192.168.1.whatever IP address, tailscale adds to that another IP address that that device will answer to.
01:45:13 ◼ ► And so if you use that 100 dot IP address to access your other devices, that, that tells your device and tells tailscale, oh, I'm going to go through tailscale to get to this other thing.
01:45:22 ◼ ► And then like Marco said, you can use exit nodes, which is what they consider like a way of egressing onto the internet.
01:45:29 ◼ ► So you can be in London, but have an exit node in Long Island and you're effectively getting on the internet from Long Island.
01:45:35 ◼ ► They also have the idea of subnet routers, which is to say, what if I want to access a non tailscale device on my in-home network?
01:45:43 ◼ ► Well, I can set up one of my in-home tailscale devices to allow me to tunnel through that onto my local network.
01:45:50 ◼ ► You can do some really crazy stuff where my parents, for example, they have a 192.168.1.x network.
01:45:58 ◼ ► And I want to occasionally be able to get on their network to do some maintenance things for them.
01:46:02 ◼ ► And I don't want to do the standard subnet router thing where it just says, okay, anything that is 192.168.1.x, that's going to be served at Casey's parents' house.
01:46:21 ◼ ► It's kind of complicated to talk about, so I'm not going to spend any more time on it now.
01:46:24 ◼ ► But my point is just that you can use this really cockamamie IPv6 address to get into this other network via IPv4.
01:46:50 ◼ ► Well, at the restaurant, I needed some ways to monitor the temperatures in the walk-in fridges.
01:47:09 ◼ ► So, I have, you know, so we have three walk-in coolers, you know, a freezer and two fridges.
01:47:23 ◼ ► Because, you know, for food safety, basically, you need to keep things within a certain range so that your food doesn't spoil, your frozen stuff doesn't thaw, your refrigerated stuff doesn't freeze.
01:47:31 ◼ ► Like, there's all sorts of, you know, bad things that happen to food and drinks if they are in the wrong temperature zone.
01:47:38 ◼ ► So, and for a restaurant, for health code compliance, you have to keep things in certain ranges and it's very important.
01:47:45 ◼ ► So, you can go to my preferred brand, ThermoWorks, for, you know, high quality thermometers and stuff.
01:47:53 ◼ ► And ThermoWorks will sell you a, you know, a Wi-Fi app-enabled temperature logging kit for a walk-in.
01:48:01 ◼ ► It has a couple of sensors and, you know, it has, like, a module that, like, connects to your network and, you know, you can then view the historical data.
01:48:21 ◼ ► So, the only weird thing about putting the Yolink thing in the fridge was the, I was like, how do I attach this to the fridge wall?
01:48:35 ◼ ► It is basically, like, a, you know, like a, like a three by three inch by one inch, you know, rectangular solid-ish.
01:48:58 ◼ ► But on the back of the, of the Yolink sensor is a battery door and a few holes that are probably to let some of the air in to measure the temperature.
01:49:06 ◼ ► So, you can't really, I don't want to, like, stick it to the wall and then the battery, you can't, like, take it off easily every, probably, you know, six months or a year to replace those batteries.
01:49:16 ◼ ► So, what I did was I actually, you know, we have an old 3D printer that mostly Adam and Tiff play with.
01:49:45 ◼ ► Like, you know, that kind of, like, shape, you know, like a, like a straight edge, like, you know, back, little arms and little front lips so that it rests in there.
01:50:18 ◼ ► And I can see, oh, is it out of range right now because they just, like, loaded the freezer and so it went up by, you know, by a couple degrees for a few minutes?
01:50:37 ◼ ► And then I noticed a couple days ago or about last week, I noticed, huh, it stopped that pattern.
01:50:43 ◼ ► And now it's, like, two degrees higher and it's kind of, it looks like it's having trouble keeping up.
01:50:47 ◼ ► So I called the fridge repair guy and it turns out, oh, there was, you know, some frost somewhere.
01:50:58 ◼ ► If it was any other situation where we just, like, you know, relied on, like, people noticing, hey, the fridge is warm, it would have taken a lot more of a temperature delta before people noticed.
01:51:11 ◼ ► So it was still within the safe range, but I could tell something's wrong or something's different and get it fixed before it becomes a bigger problem.
01:51:19 ◼ ► So it's actually keeping our food safer and it's keeping our butts better covered in a lot of those ways.
01:51:30 ◼ ► So I am now, I just, just a few days ago, bought myself a second Yolink hub, this time for my house.
01:51:45 ◼ ► They have one of those, like, you know, cone-shaped things that you can float in the hot tub and monitors.
01:51:48 ◼ ► There is, you know, they have, I noticed they have smoke alarms now, which that I would very much like.
01:51:55 ◼ ► Because when we're not, if we're not here, I want to know that the smoke alarm is going off.
01:52:17 ◼ ► And what I have found with their service is, like, I mean, yeah, the app is what you would expect the app to be.
01:52:37 ◼ ► So, given, given how inexpensive their stuff is and how low needs it is in terms of, like, you don't need to hardwire everything.
01:52:46 ◼ ► Like, I have, for temperature monitoring in my house, what I've previously used is these little EVE, I think they're called EVE rooms, EVE room sensors.
01:53:00 ◼ ► And they are powered, you have to, like, you have to power them by micro USB with some kind of charger pretty often or just leave them plugged in all the time.
01:53:09 ◼ ► And so, I have one of those, like, there's, like, a room in the basement that the water main runs through.
01:53:20 ◼ ► And I have one of these monitors to make sure, like, if it ever gets below, you know, 40 degrees, alert me, you know.
01:54:09 ◼ ► The other thing I'm waiting for, inevitably, is for you to decide, you know what I'd like to do is have more control over exactly when this triggers and how it triggers and so on and so forth.
01:54:19 ◼ ► Or, you know, maybe it should send an email to certain people when such and such happens.
01:54:24 ◼ ► So, what I'm saying is the next time you bring up one of these that's inspired by John or me, it's going to be Home Assistant because Yolink has a really solid, I don't think it's first party.
01:54:38 ◼ ► Like, oh, if it's been higher than such and such a temperature for such and such a time and it's not whatever time of day when we know that they're always opening the fridge and leaving it open for 10 minutes, you can get just utterly bananas with this stuff.
01:54:48 ◼ ► But, that being said, I'm genuinely very glad that you found them and like them as much as John and I do.
01:55:07 ◼ ► Like, there's not many options that you can do with wireless transmitting technology that will work well inside of a metal box.
01:55:19 ◼ ► I've never, like, each one of them reports in to the, you know, base station on a regular basis.
01:55:35 ◼ ► And, when you compare it to, you know, the stuff in the kind of, you know, consumer home kit ecosystem that connects directly to Wi-Fi or even Thread, it's night and day difference in range and battery life.
01:55:59 ◼ ► Like, they're just, I just chuck them in the fridge like they're any other thing that's in the fridge.
01:56:05 ◼ ► They're just on the shelf with the pickles or, like, somewhere in the, I don't even know where it is in the freezer.
01:56:12 ◼ ► I just chuck the thing in the freezer and it's just, you know, I have one in the downstairs, like, it's just, they're not fragile.
01:56:18 ◼ ► I mean, I guess if you want to be really careful, like, oh, don't put it, like, in the hottest or the coldest part in your fridge.
01:56:30 ◼ ► So, like, you know, our refrigerator repair guy, when I first complained that, like, that the fridge was running a couple degrees warm and something must have been wrong, he looked at where I put it next to the door on the inside.