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ATP

663: Defending the Honor of The Cheesecake Factory

 

00:00:00   I took a flight last week and I saw two sites that I thought were noteworthy for nerds like us.

00:00:07   Wait, you saw somebody using Overcast in the wild?

00:00:09   I saw someone using Overcast while wearing a Vision Pro.

00:00:11   Neither of those things.

00:00:14   That's impressive.

00:00:14   Well, I don't know how you would see that.

00:00:16   Exactly.

00:00:16   But first, here, I'll send this picture in Slack.

00:00:20   I saw this across the aisle and ahead by one seat.

00:00:24   What app is he using?

00:00:25   Flighty?

00:00:27   That's right.

00:00:28   That is our friend Ryan Jones' app, Flighty.

00:00:31   Look, I'm always looking to see what people are using on planes and trains and stuff.

00:00:35   Is this a rare site?

00:00:36   Isn't Flighty super popular?

00:00:37   I think it is, but I sent it to Ryan and he said he's never seen it in the wild either.

00:00:43   Wow.

00:00:43   So, not only was this person using Flighty, the guy behind him was also using Flighty.

00:00:51   Everybody should be using Flighty.

00:00:53   I don't even fly that much, but seriously, if you don't have Flighty, I fly so rarely,

00:00:57   but it's still worth it for me to track other people's flights.

00:01:00   I track my family's flights.

00:01:01   My wife travels for work a lot.

00:01:02   I have Flighty just to track her flights.

00:01:04   I'm not even the one flying.

00:01:05   It's still worth it.

00:01:06   Yeah, it's fantastic.

00:01:07   And I should briefly interject that when Flighty was new, it was priced fairly.

00:01:15   But for someone who flies only a couple times a year, I found it to be very expensive.

00:01:20   But since that time, and I'm not saying their price was unfair.

00:01:24   It's because I never fly.

00:01:25   I didn't really need it.

00:01:27   But they've since added a pay-as-you-go, like a weekly plan, which is five bucks a week.

00:01:32   Yeah, that's what I get.

00:01:33   Because I don't fly that much.

00:01:35   I think it's something like 50 or 60 bucks a year if you want the yearly plan.

00:01:38   But I don't fly that often.

00:01:40   So, every time I fly somewhere, I just buy the week pass and then end it when I'm back.

00:01:45   And then next time I fly, I buy another week pass.

00:01:46   It's super easy.

00:01:47   Compared to how much you get charged for a nickel and dime for stuff on flights, $5 for Flighty, well worth it.

00:01:52   Absolutely.

00:01:52   That's my whole point is that I think a lot of people, myself included, initially were like,

00:01:56   oh, I'd love that, but it's out of reach expensive.

00:01:58   But it's actually not.

00:02:00   They've adjusted their pricing over the years such that it really is affordable, even for a cheapskate like me.

00:02:05   So, if you haven't looked at Flighty in a long time, you should check it out again.

00:02:09   Because, like I said, there are plans that are much less costly.

00:02:13   Or perhaps, maybe a better way of looking at it is, more attuned to a flyer of my frequency, which is to say, like twice a year.

00:02:20   Yeah.

00:02:20   It's five bucks for a week.

00:02:22   It's like if you buy a bottle of water in the airport, it's so relative to the rest of air travel, it's nothing.

00:02:30   Yep.

00:02:30   So, yeah.

00:02:31   So, not only was this guy using Flighty, on, by the way, on an iPhone Air, which is the first time I've seen anyone with an iPhone Air in the wild.

00:02:38   Yeah, I did notice that.

00:02:39   Yeah, I thought it might be and then I convinced myself I was wrong.

00:02:41   We probably won't put this picture in the show notes.

00:02:42   No, I don't want to, you know, just in case.

00:02:44   But, suffice it to say, it looks, ever so slightly looks like an Air, and as it turns out, apparently it was.

00:02:48   Yes, and this guy, he was a tech enthusiast.

00:02:52   He was carrying multiple phones.

00:02:54   He had an iPhone Air and some kind of Android something.

00:02:57   He was kind of alternating between them, and the entire flight, he was using a 13-inch OLED iPad Pro as, like, his main entertainment device.

00:03:07   So, like, this guy was obviously, like, a nerd of some kind, but nothing compared to the nerd that was sitting behind him, who was also using Flighty here and there.

00:03:15   Here, I'll send this second picture to the guy.

00:03:17   Oh, look at that.

00:03:18   There he is.

00:03:19   Look at that.

00:03:20   So, we're looking at a picture of a gentleman with a Vision Pro on.

00:03:24   It's hard to tell, you know, you can't really tell if it's an M5 Vision Pro or not, but I can tell you it 100% has the new dual-knit, whatever they call it, headband, which is the Pro Move.

00:03:33   And this man looks like he is watching a movie and living his best life.

00:03:37   This is the first time I've seen a Vision Pro being used in the wild outside of, like, Apple events.

00:03:43   So, this man was using a Vision Pro for the entire flight.

00:03:48   He was, based on the fact that he was not moving his hands most of the time, I could tell that he was mostly probably just watching a movie or something the whole time.

00:03:56   But I did see him do the relatively complicated, like, bring up control center and change the volume gesture where, you know, like, you turn your hand upside down.

00:04:06   And, like, I saw him do that once.

00:04:08   Now, this is the brand new strap.

00:04:10   This picture was taken last week, one day after the strap came out.

00:04:15   And he had a third-party case that is not sold in Apple stores.

00:04:19   So, I'm thinking he probably did not just buy the Vision Pro that day or the day before.

00:04:25   Sure, sure.

00:04:26   Because no one on their day two of Vision Pro ownership, nobody would know that gesture.

00:04:30   The volume adjustment, like, you know, weird hand turn upside down thing.

00:04:34   I knew it on day two of having cases.

00:04:36   Well, you're an exception to the rule, sir.

00:04:39   But I do take your point, but you're an exception.

00:04:41   You know, unless it could be, and I hope this doesn't come across in a bad way because I mean this genuinely.

00:04:46   But, like, what if this was – he doesn't strike me from the way he looks.

00:04:49   Again, I'm sorry.

00:04:50   There's no picture in the show notes.

00:04:51   But it doesn't strike me as a person who has saved up for two years to buy Vision Pro.

00:04:55   But, like, in the occasions when I am really amped about getting something and I save my money for it, you bet that me, of all people, has read the manual front-to-back inside and out 13 times before it arrives.

00:05:06   If you bought it and had a flight, you'd definitely be using it on a flight just like you were trying to set up your new phone on the way to the airport.

00:05:11   Exactly.

00:05:12   Exactly.

00:05:12   But, yeah, so my – but because you have a third-party case –

00:05:15   so my theory is either he's a John and has read everything and did everything and even maybe pre-ordered the case or he has either bought both Vision Pros or he at least bought the new strap on day one and then immediately took a flight with it.

00:05:31   But I got to say, seeing it in the wild, it was a weird look to see on a plane, to be honest.

00:05:38   But we did find, like, one person in the wild who uses the Vision Pro on an airplane.

00:05:47   All right, we should do a little bit of shilling.

00:05:52   Let's talk about the ATP Holiday Store, which is BackBaby at ATP.fm slash store.

00:05:57   John, can you take us through maybe not every single product, but at least the highlights or the new products for this season, please?

00:06:03   Yeah, so to start off with the Chicken Hat 2.0, new version of our chicken hat or the reproduction of my really old hat, it's a little bit bigger than the old one.

00:06:10   The logo's in the middle, but that's not the important part.

00:06:12   We have some important chicken hat follow-up from Ben Kane.

00:06:15   Last episode, I was trying to describe the chicken hat for people who'd never heard of it, and I said, well, you know, when you put it on, like, it looks kind of like a triangle on top of your head.

00:06:25   And when you wear it, it's, like, vertically, you know, it makes, like, a ridge in your head, kind of like the comb on a rooster.

00:06:31   And I had said, you know, a rooster, I know it's not technically a chicken, but you know what I mean, like the little flappy thing that's on top of the head of a chicken.

00:06:38   Ben Kane writes, a rooster is, in fact, a chicken.

00:06:40   Male chickens are roosters, female chickens are hens.

00:06:43   That is all.

00:06:43   Thank you, Ben, for the clarification.

00:06:45   I feel better about describing it as a comb on a rooster.

00:06:49   So, anyway, the Chicken Hat 2.0 is there.

00:06:51   Limited quantities.

00:06:52   We had to guess how much we would sell.

00:06:54   We haven't sold them all yet.

00:06:55   Hopefully, we will sell them all.

00:06:57   But if you want one, you should get one because they might sell out or we might be selling them for the next five years.

00:07:01   We'll see.

00:07:02   And speaking of selling out, the mugs have sold out.

00:07:04   Thank you, everybody.

00:07:05   Hooray!

00:07:06   Last episode, we had 10 mugs.

00:07:08   When we finished recording the episode, we had 10 mugs.

00:07:10   So, nobody in the live chat room bought them.

00:07:15   But subsequently, people have bought them.

00:07:17   The mugs are sold out.

00:07:18   Hallelujah.

00:07:19   The mugs are sold out.

00:07:20   Other new notable products, we've got an ATP quarter zip, which is proving popular for people who don't like their zippers to go all the way down.

00:07:26   It's got an embroidered ATP logo.

00:07:27   It looks nice.

00:07:28   We have the ugly ATP Tahoe shirt to memorialize Tahoe, which we may talk about in the topic section.

00:07:35   We have the very popular ATP T568A and T568B Ethernet wiring standard shirts that transform our logo, like to change the six-color apple stripe things in the ATP logo to be the colors of the conductors, the wire jackets in Ethernet connectors.

00:07:51   According to these two different standards, there's different wires in different orders.

00:07:53   If you know, you know.

00:07:54   Lots of people ask.

00:07:56   Hold on.

00:07:57   Are you going to talk about quantities?

00:07:58   That's exactly what I was about to do.

00:07:59   Lots of people asked, how is that going?

00:08:01   How is 568A versus 568B?

00:08:03   What is selling more?

00:08:04   I can tell you that right now, it's basically two to one, B to A. B is selling twice as much as A right now.

00:08:11   Now, on that topic, because I always forget which one of these is which.

00:08:14   So, I went to the Wikipedia page because I personally don't have any experience in working with these wires.

00:08:19   I've never crimped an Ethernet connector, although I've seen these wires inside them and I'm aware of it conceptually.

00:08:22   So, I don't know the cultural, you know, I don't know the cultural weight of these different standards, but I'm kind of surprised that it's two to one B to A.

00:08:30   Here's what Wikipedia has to say on this briefly.

00:08:32   Sorry for the tangent.

00:08:36   The 568 standard recommends T568A pinout for horizontal cables.

00:08:40   This pinout is compatible with one pair and two pair universal service order codes, or USOC pinouts.

00:08:45   The U.S. government requires it, that is, it requires 568A, in federal contracts.

00:08:50   The standard also allows only in certain circumstances the T568B pinout, quote,

00:08:55   If necessary to accommodate certain 8-pin cabling systems, i.e. when and only when adding to an existing installation that uses a T568B wiring pattern.

00:09:03   In the 1990s, when the original standard was published, the most widely installed wiring pattern in unshielded twisted pair cabling infrastructure was AT&T's 258A Systemax,

00:09:14   hence the inclusion of the same wiring pattern as T568B as a secondary option for use in such installations.

00:09:20   Many organizations still use T568B out of inertia.

00:09:25   So, all you B people out there, 2-to-1, B, are you using B out of inertia?

00:09:31   Because you're using an existing thing that used the 18-to-258A Systemax standard in the 1990s?

00:09:37   Why 2-to-1, B? It seems like A is the recommendation.

00:09:40   I recall from our older conversation that one of these was compatible with, like, telephone system, like, analog telephone system wiring, and the other one wasn't.

00:09:48   But these two paragraphs from Wikipedia don't tell me which is which.

00:09:51   But are you still using T568B out of inertia?

00:09:54   Did you buy the B t-shirt out of inertia?

00:09:57   2-to-1, B to A. Fascinating.

00:09:59   I'm assuming this won't change.

00:10:01   I don't want to change anyone's mind.

00:10:02   Say, but you pick whatever you want, you know, B or A.

00:10:04   I just, lots of people really like B.

00:10:06   Some people, we have some follow-up maybe next week or something, saying that they weren't even aware that there were other ways to do it.

00:10:13   Like, they just did B or just did A, and that was just the order they go in.

00:10:16   What do you mean there's another way?

00:10:17   So, anyway, we've got shirts for both, and we've got our M5 shirt and our Mac Pro Believe shirt and all our other ATP stuff.

00:10:23   That's it for the store.

00:10:25   We've got, I think, one more week where we're going to talk about the store.

00:10:27   So, don't dilly-dally.

00:10:29   If you want something from the store, you should get it now.

00:10:31   Oh, and we have ATP membership, gift memberships available as well.

00:10:35   You can buy them anytime, so you don't have to buy them during the store thing.

00:10:37   But just FYI, if you sign in to ATP.fm with your membership account, or even if you don't have a membership,

00:10:43   just sign in to ATP.fm with the account that you made that you can buy membership or not with,

00:10:47   you will get a link on the store page.

00:10:49   You can email that link to anybody who you want to buy you an ATP membership for the holidays.

00:10:54   Say, hey, I want an ATP membership.

00:10:56   Follow this link.

00:10:56   It'll let you buy one.

00:10:57   All it does is pre-fill your email address.

00:10:59   In a form.

00:11:00   But, you know, the email address has to match the email address that you sign in to ATP.fm with.

00:11:04   So, anyway, gift memberships as well.

00:11:06   So, we have to tune in next week for our final pitch for ATP merch.

00:11:11   But that's what we've got.

00:11:12   Since John was courteous enough to speedrun that pitch,

00:11:15   I will just tell you that this is the time where I remind you that every single sale,

00:11:21   someone will tweet at me and say,

00:11:23   oh, no, I'm that person.

00:11:25   I'm that person that forgot to do it.

00:11:27   So, if you're driving, use your turn signal like an adult and pull over and go to ATP.fm

00:11:34   slash store and make your purchase.

00:11:35   If you're walking, meander your way to the side that is not traveled,

00:11:40   typically the right in places like America.

00:11:43   You know, kind of pull over as you're walking and go to ATP.fm slash store and make your purchase.

00:11:49   Do not forget.

00:11:50   Do not be that person.

00:11:51   You will be made fun of mercilessly.

00:11:53   Not really, but still.

00:11:54   I will laugh.

00:11:55   Don't be that person.

00:11:56   ATP.fm slash store.

00:11:57   All right.

00:11:58   Vision Pro.

00:11:58   Let's talk Vision Pro.

00:12:00   And, you know, it's hard to argue with you or Marco when you talk Vision Pro things,

00:12:06   particularly about blurriness, because I know that even though I have like 20-20 vision in one eye

00:12:11   and like 20-25, 20-30 in the other eye when I have my contacts in, I'm not going to sit here and say I have stellar vision.

00:12:16   Like, even if clinically like measured vision is sufficient, I don't have stellar vision.

00:12:21   And so, it's hard for me to make a real, you know, full-throated pitch or defense of the Vision Pro when it comes to blurriness.

00:12:27   But we had some feedback with regard to John's lamenting that the Mac virtual display was no good.

00:12:33   So, John, can you tell me about this, please?

00:12:35   Yeah.

00:12:35   I had said that basically using Mac virtual display with my 2019 Mac Pro and my Pro Display XDR basically unretened my display.

00:12:42   Like, the display was the same as it was in physical space, only now when I'm looking at it in virtual space, it looks like it was no longer a retina display.

00:12:48   Thomas Cheng was one of many people to write in to point out that Mac virtual display when used with an Intel Mac is only up to 3K resolution.

00:12:56   And I had said, can you believe this works with Intel?

00:12:59   Well, apparently it does work with Intel, sort of.

00:13:01   It's limited to 3K.

00:13:02   We'll link to the Apple support document about this.

00:13:05   Apple Silicon is up to 5K and with Sequoia 15.2 or later, you can go up to ultra wide, which is like 10,000 by 2,800 pixels.

00:13:12   And by the way, 1.5K would be a true non-retining of a 6K display because, you know, every non-retina pixel becomes four retina pixels.

00:13:22   So, that's how that math works.

00:13:24   I did try the Vision Pro.

00:13:25   Once I learned this, I tried it with one of my Apple Silicon Macs.

00:13:28   It's way clearer.

00:13:29   It's clearer to the point where I feel like now the clarity is being limited by the displays in the Vision Pro.

00:13:38   Again, as we talked about when we did the math on this, when the product first came out, it's not as sharp.

00:13:43   There's not enough pixels inside that display for it to be as sharp as an actual retina display.

00:13:47   But, boy, is it better.

00:13:48   Going from 3K to 5K does make a significant difference.

00:13:51   In fact, I was using it with the studio display connected to a Mac studio, fittingly.

00:13:55   And I did the thing where you're like, I made the virtual display the same resolution as the physical display.

00:14:00   And I put it directly on top of the physical display.

00:14:03   You know how, like, it snaps to, like, maybe you don't know.

00:14:06   When you're moving the virtual display around, it will snap to the vertical surface of the display like it knows that the display is there.

00:14:15   And then you can size it so that you're looking, like, you know, put pass-through on and everything.

00:14:19   You're looking at your room.

00:14:21   You're looking at your display.

00:14:23   Only what you're seeing is not the light-up pixels that are in your display.

00:14:25   I think the display is turned off when this is when Mac virtual display is happening.

00:14:28   Instead, what you're seeing is the virtual display.

00:14:30   And that's a great A-B test.

00:14:32   And, yeah, it does look a lot better.

00:14:34   It's not as sharp as the display, but it is way better than 3K.

00:14:38   By the way, just to save us some email.

00:14:41   John, you're totally wrong that 1.5K is not the non-retina of 6K.

00:14:45   6K is not talking about the area of the screen.

00:14:47   It's talking about how wide it is on the horizontal dimension.

00:14:50   The Pro Display XDR is 6,016 pixels across the top.

00:14:54   And it's, you know, equivalent in size to a non-retina that would be 3,008 pixels across the top.

00:15:00   So 3K really is the non-retina version of 6K.

00:15:03   6K is not the total number of pixels?

00:15:06   Nope.

00:15:06   It's 6016 by something.

00:15:07   Oh, we should do the math to see if it comes out to be that.

00:15:10   And 5K was, you know, 5120, I think, by something.

00:15:12   Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:15:13   No, now that you say that, you're exactly right, Michael.

00:15:15   So what are you going to think about it?

00:15:15   6,000?

00:15:17   Yeah, I guess so.

00:15:18   I mean, the Ks are in there.

00:15:20   You can guess so, but it's correct.

00:15:21   Yeah, yeah.

00:15:22   Well, what is 4K, though, resolution-wise?

00:15:25   It's depending.

00:15:26   It's either 49 to 6 or 3840.

00:15:28   Depending on, there's like four different standards.

00:15:30   Right.

00:15:31   But there's none of those are 4,000?

00:15:32   Yeah, they round.

00:15:33   There's like weird, there's like differences in standards between TV and other things.

00:15:36   But it's 3840 is the most common one, right?

00:15:39   All right.

00:15:40   Well, anyway, we should do the multiplication to see what the actual, like, I don't know,

00:15:43   because there's no K number for that, I guess.

00:15:46   There's no like equivalent of 4K or whatever to that.

00:15:50   The movie protection industry uses 4096 by 2160, which is DCI 4K.

00:15:55   Intellivision 3840 by 2160, or 4K UHD, with a 16.9 aspect ratio as the dominant standard.

00:16:01   Yeah.

00:16:02   And for computer monitors, 2560 by 1600 was the old, like, you know, big monitor size.

00:16:07   And then 5K was doubled the 2560.

00:16:10   Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:16:11   And then the XDR, it got a little bit bigger, but it was already retina.

00:16:15   So there kind of was no 1X, like, 3000.

00:16:17   What is the XDR again?

00:16:18   6016 by something.

00:16:20   6016 by something.

00:16:22   Yeah, I don't know.

00:16:22   I at least know that part.

00:16:24   Come on.

00:16:24   All right.

00:16:25   I got to get.

00:16:26   I'm looking it up.

00:16:27   I'm looking it up.

00:16:27   I just want to do the math.

00:16:29   And then secondly, while you're doing that, again, like, for people who might be expecting,

00:16:34   like, how this looks in the Vision Pro, everything in a Vision Pro, and this is true of pretty

00:16:40   much any kind of VR thing, everything rendered in a VR headset is going through a lot of different

00:16:45   levels of sampling and of, like, warping of the image and dewarping of the image, you know,

00:16:50   between, you know, what you're viewing, like, what's being rendered in the world is, you know,

00:16:58   a polygon that shows your computer monitor textured onto it that could itself be positioned somewhere in your

00:17:05   field of view, possibly at an angle and not taking up all the pixels in your field of view.

00:17:10   And then your field of view is, you know, a square-ish screen that's being warped to create, like, a dome around you

00:17:19   with optics.

00:17:20   And so there are more pixels per inch in the middle of the field of view than there are as you get closer to the edges

00:17:27   because of that warping effect.

00:17:28   So the number of pixels being theoretically rendered of the source monitor in a polygon rendered in a warped view,

00:17:38   like, you're going through a lot of different levels of sampling and warping here, so it's never going to be sharp.

00:17:44   And you're going to end up seeing effectively far fewer pixels than what these numbers actually are.

00:17:50   Well, I mean, it could be sharp if the display has had way more pixels, but as we calculated when the thing came out,

00:17:55   even dead center in the display is the best-case scenario.

00:17:57   It doesn't have the number of pixels per degree as the actual screen does at normal viewing distances.

00:18:01   And speaking of getting close, I did try that.

00:18:03   Like, what if I shove my face real close to the virtual display, which happens to be mapped onto my physical display?

00:18:09   I think it makes it disappear when you get too close or something.

00:18:12   Like, it doesn't...

00:18:12   There's a point of diminishing returns where it gets angry that you're coming too close to it.

00:18:17   And it's shy.

00:18:18   It doesn't want you to see its flaws.

00:18:19   Yeah, and anyway, like, obviously, if your nose is touching the monitor, you can't really use the monitor at that distance.

00:18:23   So, yeah, it's 6016 by 3384, and that's about 20 million pixels.

00:18:31   The 1.5K thing is interesting because the number of points is 3008 by 1692.

00:18:41   So, it's kind of like 3K points, but 6K pixels, if you're going to use the 6K terminology.

00:18:47   And I don't know what...

00:18:49   Like, when Apple says it's limited to 3K, do they mean it's literally limited to 3008 by 1692?

00:18:56   You know, again, throwing out these casual K numbers for things that are more exact in number of pixels is difficult to understand.

00:19:04   But it seems like 3K, if judging by Apple's pattern of using 6K for its monitors, it seems like 3K may literally be a direct unwrittening of the 6K display.

00:19:14   All right.

00:19:15   And then Nick wrote to point out, which is something I knew but didn't think of in the heat of the moment, tapping and holding on the X, which if you imagine a Vision Pro window, and you don't have to have Vision Pro to have seen this,

00:19:28   under the Vision Pro window is a bar that's very similar to the affordance for swiping, you know, like app switching affordance on the phone.

00:19:37   And it's just a horizontal bar.

00:19:38   And to the left of that horizontal bar, there's a circle with an X.

00:19:42   And Nick writes, tapping and holding the X lets you hide other windows.

00:19:46   And the context here was John saying there is no window management in the Vision Pro, which is mostly true.

00:19:51   But Nick reminded me and reminds us that if you tap and hold the X, it'll let you hide every other window.

00:19:56   Yeah, that goes a long way towards solving my problem, which is like, I don't want all these other windows there, but I also don't want to close them, but I also don't want to move them to the sides, just hide others.

00:20:03   That really helps.

00:20:04   Yep.

00:20:05   All right.

00:20:05   So then there's something in the show notes, in our internal show notes, Vision Pro fit in ski goggles.

00:20:10   Tell me about this, John.

00:20:11   Yeah, I meant to mention this last time.

00:20:13   I was talking about how the thing fits on my face and wondering if I had the right size light shield and all that.

00:20:18   And I was thinking about ski goggles because Vision Pro looks like ski goggles and I have experience wearing ski goggles.

00:20:24   I'm like, these fit issues.

00:20:26   Why did I never have this problem with ski goggles?

00:20:28   And the answer is that ski goggles, even though they look very similar and they even have the same kind of like foam around like the part that smushes against your face.

00:20:35   The thing with ski goggles is the goggles themselves are made of flexible plastic, rubberized plastic, and they bend.

00:20:42   They bend around your face.

00:20:44   So whatever size and shape your face is, they curve in kind of a U shape and the strap pulls them against your face and it bends them.

00:20:51   And then the foam makes up for the lumps of your face and all the other stuff.

00:20:54   And Vision Pro, obviously the aluminum part is not bending, at least you hope.

00:20:58   Now, the light shield, in theory, could accommodate this by being more accordion-like, but the light shield seems pretty rigid.

00:21:06   Like, the light shield will deform a little bit and it does have the interchangeable foamy pads on them.

00:21:12   But the sort of the gray body of the light shield, I wonder if they made that more accordion-like, more squishy so that pressing it against your face would mold that.

00:21:25   I guess part of the problem is that in ski goggles, the straps are pulling the plastic thing back on your face, but the straps don't attach to the light shield.

00:21:33   So there's nothing pulling the light shield back on your face, right?

00:21:36   Like, that's why I was saying I had little gaps by my temples because nothing is pulling that back on my face.

00:21:41   Now, obviously the entire metal frame is pushing the light shield against my face, but you don't want that to push too hard.

00:21:45   So anyway, that's just my thought on the fit of this.

00:21:47   I think if they make a second version of this, they should consider making the light shield more compliant.

00:21:52   I'm not suggesting they make the body of it bend, although they should make it out of plastic.

00:21:55   But I understand making the body of it bend is unfeasible with precisely aligned motorized displays inside there.

00:22:00   Like, I guess that's not going to happen.

00:22:01   But that's my thought about fit for another week of wearing this thing.

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00:24:13   All right, Andy Lang writes,

00:24:19   Now that vapor chamber cooling is a thing in the iPhone, do you think this technology would come to the fanless M5 MacBook Air?

00:24:25   I have an M3 MacBook Air, and sometimes it does get quite hot.

00:24:28   And then Mark Gurman wrote, when was this?

00:24:32   Recently, because I can't tell.

00:24:33   But Mark Gurman wrote,

00:24:35   A vapor chamber in the iPad Pro is on the roadmap.

00:24:37   Now, note I said iPad Pro, not MacBook Air.

00:24:41   Apple is now working on the feature with plans to integrate it as soon as the next round of updates.

00:24:44   The company's on an 18-month upgrade cycle for the iPad Pro, suggesting that the vapor chamber could be added around spring of 2027.

00:24:51   A vapor chamber would help distinguish the iPad Air and iPad Pro lines.

00:24:54   The Air has been drifting further into high-end territory.

00:24:57   It got a Pro-size 13-inch screen for 2024, and is set to receive an M4 chip next year.

00:25:02   So that doesn't answer the question about the Air, but it does mention the iPad Pro, quite obviously.

00:25:06   Yeah, so I think the vapor chamber is particularly useful for devices where you unmove heat, and it has to be really thin.

00:25:15   Because if you watch that vapor chamber video we linked ages ago, the key feature of the vapor chamber is really, really thin.

00:25:23   So if you're going to put this in a phone or in an iPad, and the iPad Pro is even thinner than the phone, you want something thin.

00:25:29   In the MacBook Air, they could just use a thermal pad or, like, you know, maybe there's not enough room for a heat pipe, but, like, they have more options in the MacBook Air.

00:25:36   That said, no one's going to turn their nose up at a vapor chamber in a MacBook Air, and it's conceivable that the MacBook Air could get thinner over time.

00:25:44   So I think it is an appropriate – I think the MacBook Air could use better heat movement.

00:25:50   Let's put it that way.

00:25:51   I mean, we've seen that with Max Tech, always breaks them open and, like, adds whatever cooling thing they can think of inside there.

00:25:59   New thermal pads or some other thing, and that just makes such a huge difference.

00:26:02   And so you're like, there's room to make the MacBook Air spread its heat better.

00:26:07   And if it's not a vapor chamber, then something would be useful.

00:26:10   So I think Andy has a good idea, but it seems like Apple is going to put them into the iPad before they get to the MacBook Air, at least according to Garmer's rumors so far.

00:26:18   I'm a little curious, though.

00:26:20   Like, you know, we've heard in the past, and I believe this has been verified, that, like, the MacBook Air, because of various, like, safety requirements, laptops can't get above a certain exterior temperature because they'll burn people's laps in certain regulatory requirements.

00:26:34   Or maybe just conventions.

00:26:36   I don't know.

00:26:36   But basically, the MacBook Air does not conduct the heat from the processor directly to the exterior casing.

00:26:43   Instead, it kind of just heats up the, you know, the air cavity inside of the MacBook Air.

00:26:49   And that's, obviously, that's limiting in certain ways.

00:26:52   But it doesn't bond the heat directly to the exterior casing.

00:26:56   I wonder if they would switch to something like, you know, a vapor chamber, what are they moving the heat to?

00:27:04   Would it just be like, you know, some other larger piece of metal inside the case?

00:27:08   No, they put it to the case, like, just like they do on the phone.

00:27:11   Like, the whole point is if they had bonded the SoC to the case, it would make one little hot spot because it's harder for the heat to move through the thick aluminum case.

00:27:18   The whole point of a vapor chamber is it moves heat real quick from where it's produced to the outer edges, right?

00:27:23   So if you imagined a MacBook Air-sized vapor chamber, it would solve the problem of the hot spot in the case by not making the heat have to propagate through the relatively thick aluminum of the case and thus forming a really big hot spot that could burn your leg or whatever.

00:27:38   It would immediately spread it over a way bigger area, and that would solve the problem.

00:27:42   Like, I think that's – I'm not sure they would bond it to the case.

00:27:45   They might just have the heat pipe moving it more efficiently to areas where there is cooler air because you still do build up heat inside the case where the SoC is.

00:27:53   But I think they mostly vent – I have to look at the recent teardowns, but I think they're mostly venting the hot air from the MacBook Air out from, like, the little –

00:28:02   Like, the keyboard hinge?

00:28:04   The hinge holes?

00:28:04   Yeah, yeah.

00:28:05   Whatever.

00:28:05   Like, that's where the fans blow on the ones that have fans.

00:28:09   Without the fans, I think it's venting out there.

00:28:11   And back in the day, remember, they used to vent a lot through the keyboard?

00:28:13   I think they still kind of do, I think.

00:28:15   Yeah, I think they do too because it's not like they're waterproof.

00:28:17   But, yeah, any time you can spread heat, I think – and especially since, like, the MacBook Air is – granted, it could make a hotspot or whatever, but it's not – you know, the amount of heat produced by the MacBook Air is much lower than, like, an M4 Max in a MacBook Pro.

00:28:31   So, I think any kind of spreader would make it suddenly viable to bond that to the aluminum.

00:28:37   I mean, also, keep in mind, like, the MacBook Air uses the same chips as the iPad Pro.

00:28:42   It's like, you know, this rumor of it coming to the iPad Pro.

00:28:44   Kind of – I mean, that would kind of make sense.

00:28:47   I mean, yeah, if they can spread it among a big enough area that it wouldn't create enough hotspots.

00:28:51   I do wonder, though – there's also another component here of cost.

00:28:55   You know, keep in mind, the MacBook Air sells for less than the iPhone Pro.

00:29:01   Think about that.

00:29:03   Like, the MacBook Air, much larger screen, much more case – like, much bigger computer keyboard.

00:29:10   Like, the amount of parts in a MacBook Air is substantial compared to a phone.

00:29:14   You know, the phone has things like a cell modem that the MacBook Air probably will never have.

00:29:18   But –

00:29:19   And the phone has way better margins, I believe, than the bottom-of-the-line MacBook Air does.

00:29:22   Right.

00:29:23   So, whatever they're doing in a MacBook Air for the processor, they'd probably do it to all MacBook Airs of that model line.

00:29:29   They might not be able to afford the margins for a large vapor chamber.

00:29:34   That's an interesting point.

00:29:35   I mean, I don't know how much those things cost, but looking at them, they look like they're fairly cheap to manufacture, right?

00:29:41   So, who knows?

00:29:42   Like, it could be that they just don't – I mean, and I kind of agree with them.

00:29:45   Like, heat generation and thermal throttling, it happens in the MacBook Air.

00:29:50   We know it does, but who cares?

00:29:52   Like, that's the machine – like, the tradeoff is you get thermal throttling in exchange for having no fan.

00:29:56   And that is a tradeoff that a lot of people like and I think is appropriate for the bottom-of-the-line MacBook.

00:30:00   If you have – if you need to do these massive sustained workloads, don't buy a MacBook Air.

00:30:03   But, like, for almost all the people who buy one, they're fine with it.

00:30:07   It's fine.

00:30:07   The thing's so freaking fast anyway.

00:30:09   Like, oh, no, I thermal throttled during some sustained activity.

00:30:11   Who cares?

00:30:12   It's a $1,000 laptop.

00:30:14   It's amazing, right?

00:30:14   So, it could be that Apple continues to make the calculation and say, yeah, thermal throttles.

00:30:18   This is the one that thermal throttles.

00:30:19   But the people who buy this, it doesn't matter to them.

00:30:22   It's better to have no fan.

00:30:23   I agree with it.

00:30:24   Honestly, I do, too.

00:30:25   Like, you know, as a frequent MacBook Air owner, I've never cared about thermal throttling.

00:30:31   I've never even noticed it in my eye, including, you know, doing things on it like software development.

00:30:36   I've just never noticed it, you know, because I think you might notice it if you're doing, like, you know, video encoding every single day.

00:30:43   Yeah, some kind of batch job with the progress bar where you time and you're like, boy, this used to take 20 minutes, but now it's taking 37, you know.

00:30:49   Right, yeah.

00:30:49   But, yeah, unless you're really stressing it for, like, more than a couple of minutes straight regularly, I don't think you would even notice.

00:30:58   All right.

00:31:00   Let's talk sports, Marco's favorite thing.

00:31:03   We were talking a lot about Apple's MLS deal and F1 deals in overtime last week, and somehow we all lost sight of the fact that the Apple MLS deal is actually worldwide, but it's for the American Major League Soccer thing.

00:31:19   I can't think of the word I'm looking for.

00:31:21   League?

00:31:21   Thank you.

00:31:22   Gosh.

00:31:23   How did I get that?

00:31:23   It's right there in L. It's the L in Major League Soccer.

00:31:26   I literally just said it.

00:31:27   That's okay.

00:31:28   Anyways, reading from Apple's original newsroom post in June of 2022, the Apple TV app will be the exclusive destination to watch every single live MLS match from 2023 to 2032.

00:31:39   Jake Lee also pointed out Apple put up a billboard in Korea for it, too.

00:31:44   Sun Hong Min, one of the biggest players in Korea, recently moved to the Los Angeles football club, and Apple was marketing that hard here in Korea.

00:31:52   And we'll put a link in the show notes to that billboard.

00:31:56   And as everyone will point out, having the worldwide rights versus the U.S. rights to MLS are basically the same thing, because nobody else in the world cares about MLS.

00:32:04   At least that's what they all tell us.

00:32:05   We are sponsored this episode by Claude.

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00:34:09   John, your shortcuts bug.

00:34:15   If you'd like, I can start reading this and you can interject.

00:34:18   If you'd like to cover it, that's fine.

00:34:20   But we had some feedback with regard to this, and this was discussed in last week's after show.

00:34:23   How would you like to proceed?

00:34:24   Yeah, so the upshot is, I am not the only person who has experienced this bug.

00:34:30   Is that an upshot?

00:34:31   Yeah, you can read what's here, but this is just supporting evidence to say, it's not just me.

00:34:39   All right, so we'll start with Callum, who writes,

00:34:42   I've been experiencing the same shortcuts bug for about the past year.

00:34:44   I have a shortcut that converts a PDF into images and then rearranges the images to create a new PDF.

00:34:50   Every month I run it, rename the new PDF in Finder, and upload it to Google Drive.

00:34:54   Sometime later, it just disappears, and I have to re-download it from Google Drive.

00:34:57   I thought I was going mad.

00:34:59   Then Fleet R writes, I was using shortcuts to apply color correction to several hundred photos of Pixelmator

00:35:04   and ran into your bug with the output photos being completely deleted.

00:35:07   I eventually gave up finding a solution.

00:35:09   This was in early 2023, so it's depressing to know that it hasn't been fixed.

00:35:15   77 on Reddit back in 2024, which was pointed out to us via Euro00, writes,

00:35:20   I have a few shortcuts that create files, but these files seem to keep disappearing.

00:35:24   I've not yet been able to identify any kind of pattern to this, such as whether it happens after X occurrences or after Y minutes.

00:35:30   When they disappear, it seems all files created by any of the shortcuts all disappear.

00:35:35   I've not yet managed to ascertain if this happens at the same time.

00:35:38   Then Gleeful chips in.

00:35:41   Disabling the overwrite flag is a workaround that worked for me.

00:35:44   So there's an image which we put in the show notes.

00:35:46   The shortcut action is save resized image to get parent directory.

00:35:50   And some of the options are ask where to save, subpath, and overwrite file, or overwrite if file exists.

00:35:56   And disabling that apparently is the trick.

00:35:59   Yeah.

00:36:00   So I tried that because this is a screenshot from my actual shortcut.

00:36:04   I did have overwrite if file exists checked because that's what I wanted.

00:36:07   But in practice, it's usually not overwriting a file.

00:36:09   Unchecking that box makes it so the files do not disappear.

00:36:13   In fact, I just did one last experiment before the show started.

00:36:16   Let me check.

00:36:17   Yep, that does it.

00:36:17   So that tells me a lot.

00:36:19   That tells me this is a shortcuts bug.

00:36:21   Shortcuts is the one doing it.

00:36:23   Because when I uncheck that checkbox and shortcuts,

00:36:25   which makes no functional difference if I'm generating the files and there's no conflicting file.

00:36:29   Like, functionally, it shouldn't make a difference.

00:36:31   But it is clearly shortcuts deleting.

00:36:32   Lots of people are suggesting that I use FS usage or LSOF or some other thing to find out which process is deleting the files.

00:36:40   It's some shortcuts-related thing.

00:36:41   Like, it surely is.

00:36:43   Because every other way I do this, including, by the way I made a shortcut that just runs a shell script,

00:36:49   those files don't get deleted either.

00:36:50   It is specifically this save files in directory shortcut option with the overwrite file if it exists option makes the files get written there,

00:36:59   stay there for some period of time, then later it deletes them.

00:37:02   It's the only thing that, you know, and again, if you just have it run a shell script,

00:37:05   and the shell script runs like the SIPs command line tool that does image processing stuff that's built into, that's included with macOS, that works fine.

00:37:13   So, I would say this mystery is essentially solved.

00:37:15   This is a shortcuts bug.

00:37:17   Apparently, it's been there since 2023.

00:37:18   Lots of other people have experienced it.

00:37:20   The workaround is uncheck the overwrite if file exists checkbox in the save file things.

00:37:24   But boy, what a bug.

00:37:25   And the fact that multiple people have seen it and it still hasn't been fixed is kind of depressing.

00:37:30   Not great, Bob.

00:37:30   All right.

00:37:31   Let's talk about the iconic plateau.

00:37:34   Gordon McDowell writes,

00:37:35   The iPhone only needs a protrusion sticking out as far as the camera on the opposite side to eliminate wobble.

00:37:41   It could be another bloody camera.

00:37:42   It could be one of the existing cameras moved there.

00:37:45   Yeah, this was about me saying, like, people were saying they should make the plateau the same, like, thickness as the camera thing, and that would be too much.

00:37:54   And they're like, well, you don't have to make the whole plateau thick.

00:37:55   Just put the camera on the other side.

00:37:57   Lots of other phones do this.

00:37:58   They have lines of cameras that aren't in kind of like a three-dot cluster on one side, like, because Apple evolved from their notion that the cameras were in the corner, and they slowly expanded out from the corner until they were more than half the width of the phone.

00:38:11   But they were still clustered as if they were in the corner, but they weren't.

00:38:14   And that led to the wobble.

00:38:16   So, yeah, Apple could have done kind of a bug-eye thing or a two-in-one thing or spread the three out.

00:38:21   There's lots of things they could have done to make their phones not wobble, but apparently that is not an important design consideration, at least thus far on their phone.

00:38:28   And it's not like, oh, they don't want to look like they're imitating the other phones that do that.

00:38:32   They directly copied the Google Pixel's, like, thing on the back with the iPhone Air.

00:38:37   So I don't know what they're afraid of.

00:38:39   I still think they need to reconsider the camera arrangement.

00:38:42   But, yeah, I mean, hell, they don't need to make a camera.

00:38:46   They just have to put a nub over there.

00:38:47   Like, as I said, just put in some kind of, like, little nub or kickstand or ridge or who knows.

00:38:54   Like, I guess people don't care about their phones wobbling because I guess they're holding them most of the time.

00:38:57   Instead of putting them on the table, but oh, well.

00:39:00   Well, and also, like, most phone cases will just put a huge lip around the camera bump and level it out anyway.

00:39:05   So, like, most people use cases on their phones, and most phone cases remove this problem from being a problem anymore.

00:39:11   I don't think most phone cases do remove it.

00:39:13   Look at the bull strap case.

00:39:14   That doesn't remove the problem.

00:39:15   Like, the bump is so big now that it doesn't, it's impossible to level out with any reasonable case.

00:39:22   Even the bull strap case doesn't do it, and they cover the other part of the non-camera part of the plateau on the pro phones.

00:39:28   I don't know.

00:39:28   The cheap clear case I got and the Peak Design case both level it out.

00:39:33   Well, the bull strap leather ones don't.

00:39:35   Anyway, Apple could solve this problem, but so far they haven't.

00:39:38   All right, so from the ATP Insider episode on The Restaurant Season 1, we fairly briefly made mention of the Cheesecake Factory.

00:39:47   And I think one of us, maybe John, had said, oh, it was Marco.

00:39:51   See, it's always—

00:39:52   We were telling Marco about how fantastically huge the Cheesecake Factory menu is because for some miraculous reason, Marco has never been to the Cheesecake Factory.

00:40:00   We recommend that he goes just to see the menu because it is so huge.

00:40:04   Now that he's a restaurant owner, he can appreciate what it must take to have a menu this big.

00:40:09   And Marco said, well, surely a lot of this stuff is frozen.

00:40:10   And I agreed.

00:40:11   It's like, it's got to be frozen.

00:40:12   Like, there's no way you can have all this stuff available and not have stuff, you know, frozen.

00:40:16   Yeah, so we found—I don't know who pointed this out, I'm sorry, but somebody pointed to the Daily Meal website, which reads,

00:40:24   despite the fact that a long menu is usually a red flag that the food at a restaurant is pre-made and reheated, the opposite is the case of the Cheesecake Factory.

00:40:30   All 250 menu items or more are made from scratch every day with fresh ingredients.

00:40:36   But the same can't be said for the cheesecakes.

00:40:38   All the cheesecakes are delivered to the restaurant frozen and then defrosted before serving to customers.

00:40:42   There's no name associated with this because a lot of people sent this in.

00:40:44   And there's a lot of Cheesecake Factory fans out there who wanted to defend the honor of the Cheesecake Factory and say, no, it's not frozen.

00:40:52   And how excellent is it that a place called the Cheesecake Factory has all fresh food except the cheesecake, which made it a factory?

00:40:58   Well, so if you go through the history of the thing, it started with somebody who was making cheesecakes in their basement,

00:41:02   and then she was making the cheesecakes for the restaurant until it became, like, untenable for her to do it.

00:41:07   But anyway, frozen or not, the cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory is good.

00:41:11   If you like cheesecake, they make good cheesecake.

00:41:14   So I'm not going to besmirch the frozen cheesecake.

00:41:16   I don't care if it's frozen.

00:41:17   It tastes pretty good.

00:41:18   I will still insist that cheesecake is pie.

00:41:20   Well, I'd have to consult the cube rule, and I don't have it in front of me, and I'm not going to do that right this second.

00:41:26   All right.

00:41:27   Let's talk topics.

00:41:29   And we have a smorgasbord of Mac rumors to talk about, starting with the M6 or OLED MacBook Pro.

00:41:36   So we can read from Bloomberg.

00:41:40   Let's see.

00:41:41   The company is readying a revamped MacBook Pro with a touch display for late 2026 or early 2027.

00:41:50   The new laptops will feature OLED displays and will retain a full trackpad and keyboard.

00:41:54   The new machine's code name, K114K116, will also have thinner and lighter frames and run the M6 line of chips.

00:41:59   For the revamped MacBook Pro, Apple is retiring the notch.

00:42:02   In its place, the company will adopt a so-called hole punch design.

00:42:05   This will be similar in concept to the dynamic island on the phone.

00:42:08   The company has also developed a reinforced hinge in screen hardware to prevent the display from bouncing back or moving when touched, a common drawback of the existing touch PCs.

00:42:17   Because of the price of your components, the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros are likely to cost a few hundred dollars more than the current versions.

00:42:23   As of now, Apple isn't actively developing additional touchscreen Macs.

00:42:27   Instead, it's waiting to see the market's reaction to the touch version of the MacBook Pro.

00:42:30   Earlier, Mark Gurman had written in a different article, Apple is investigating the idea of bringing cellular connectivity to the Mac.

00:42:36   Oh, hell yeah.

00:42:38   Cellular connections are unlikely to come to the Mac before 2026 when Apple is planning a second-generation modem that includes support for faster speeds.

00:42:45   So this is a lot of existing OLED MacBook Pro rumors.

00:42:48   Like, again, the OLED MacBook Pro was originally rumored for this year.

00:42:51   Then they said it's actually going to be pushed next year.

00:42:53   So the rumors continue to say next year is the OLED year.

00:42:56   When we were talking about the M5 MacBook Pro, just the plain M5 one, I was saying this generation of M5 MacBook Pros will probably be your last chance to get this design because the new design is coming.

00:43:07   And it looks like the new design is going to be different in many, many ways.

00:43:13   Being thinner, maybe, you know, do you like the current trade-off in terms of size, weight, and battery life?

00:43:17   Will the thinner ones be better because of better battery chemistry?

00:43:20   We don't know.

00:43:20   But, like, if you want a known quantity, the known quantity of the size, weight, and battery life of these ones, it is here for you.

00:43:27   Touchscreen.

00:43:29   This is the first time this has been rumored, like, in a substantial, from, like, German, who usually doesn't just make stuff up, right?

00:43:34   Lots of people have been talking about touch Macs for ages and ages.

00:43:37   This is a German rumor, and it's corroborated by at least one other person.

00:43:41   So it seems like they're going to do this.

00:43:42   They're finally going to bring touchscreen to a Mac.

00:43:45   That involves a new hinge to make it so the display doesn't wobble as much.

00:43:49   There's also the cell modem rumors, which, again, the C2 in 2026, 2027, which is when they're supposed to be coming out.

00:43:54   And, of course, the OLED screen, which is these are the OLED MacBook Pros.

00:43:57   So it's going to be a big change.

00:43:59   This is the biggest change since the Apple, since these new, it's not the Apple Silicon ones because the first Apple Silicon ones look like the Intel ones.

00:44:05   But since whatever we're calling this new design, the kind of boxy ones that we've had for the, well, I guess, M2 through M5,

00:44:11   this will be the end of the line, seems like, for that design in the beginning of an all-new design with a lot of different potential trade-offs.

00:44:18   I'm not saying you should buy these because the new ones are going to be bad.

00:44:21   Maybe the new ones are going to be great and you should wait.

00:44:23   All I'm not saying is it's going to be a change.

00:44:25   And I find this fascinating because we've been waiting for touch Macs for ages, not because we're dying for them.

00:44:31   We're dying for a solid auto Mac.

00:44:32   But for touch Macs, we're like, you know, people want it.

00:44:36   Why shouldn't you do it?

00:44:37   It shouldn't be that hard.

00:44:38   There was another rumor I didn't put in here of, like, the exact technology they're using to put the touch-sensitive thing in the OLED display.

00:44:44   It's some new tech that embeds the touch layer inside the OLED so it's not as thick and yada yada, whatever.

00:44:50   I don't, there's no rumors about software related to the touch thing, but, and I don't, I'm not predicting they should do this.

00:44:58   I'm not recommending it.

00:44:58   But I think if they simply added touch to Mac OS as it exists today, it'd be fine.

00:45:04   Like, yeah, it's not ideal.

00:45:07   It's, you're, it's going to come with the trackpad.

00:45:09   You should use the trackpad.

00:45:10   But how many times have you seen somebody who's accustomed to touch using a laptop and they just want to scroll a webpage and they reach out and do it.

00:45:18   Our dialogue comes up and it's just easier for them to just stab the okay button with their finger instead of hit the thing.

00:45:22   It's a thing that people do and that it's perfectly possible to do with Mac OS.

00:45:26   Mac OS is not made for your finger.

00:45:28   It's made for the pointer, but there are things that your finger can do on existing Mac OS.

00:45:32   So I don't think Apple needs to say, oh, everything has to become Fisher Price huge and everything has to be usable by a finger.

00:45:38   I don't think they need to do that.

00:45:39   I don't think they should do that because that's called an iPad.

00:45:42   Leave the Mac the way it is.

00:45:44   But I think a touchscreen would be a useful addition for the people who want fingerprints all over their laptop screen.

00:45:50   Yeah.

00:45:51   And the reality is like this is one of those areas that like no matter what we as like traditional Mac and laptop nerds think is right.

00:46:00   Like, you know, I don't, I don't want a touchscreen on my MacBook Pro.

00:46:03   However, how many people among us can say we've never unthinkingly just touched our laptop screen thinking it would scroll?

00:46:13   Yep.

00:46:14   That's madness.

00:46:14   I would never do that.

00:46:15   But I will, I will say that I have literally, I have literally pinched to zoom paper, print paper more than once, more than once, multiple, many times over my life.

00:46:25   I have literally put two fingers down on like a magazine page and pinch to make the text bigger.

00:46:30   So, I'm not above doing that.

00:46:32   I just say I haven't done it with the laptop screen.

00:46:34   But, yeah, stab that okay button with your finger.

00:46:38   Yeah.

00:46:38   And even if all it is, is scrolling and zooming, that would go a long way.

00:46:44   Because like the reality is, again, no matter what we think as nerds, this is what people are used to with every other device.

00:46:51   Every Windows PC of any, you know, note has had a touchscreen or at least had a touchscreen option for many years now.

00:47:00   And they added it because like the PC ecosystem is so diverse, someone's going to try everything.

00:47:04   And once somebody tried it and they're like, people, but first of all, people didn't object to it.

00:47:08   And second of all, once it becomes like a thing that you have and, you know, your competitor has, but you don't, you're like, well, maybe we should add that too.

00:47:14   And people just got used to it being there.

00:47:18   Now, was Windows redesigned to be a touch interface?

00:47:21   Hell no.

00:47:21   No, Windows is design optimized for nothing.

00:47:23   Right.

00:47:24   But like the PC manufacturers didn't have to like, it was like, well, we can't put touch on our laptops until Windows is radically redesigned so that everything is accessible with your fingertip.

00:47:34   Nope.

00:47:34   They didn't do that.

00:47:35   They just made, they just put touch screens on it and people started using them.

00:47:38   And it's like the market has decided that this is a desirable enough feature to justify what I assume is the fairly minimal cost for the touch layer to be added to the screens of laptops.

00:47:47   Yeah.

00:47:47   And the reality is like most people out there in the world, especially as you go younger or more novice, most people assume that every screen is a touch screen and they will try to touch it.

00:47:57   And if it doesn't work like a touch screen, they're going to either think it's broken or they're going to think it's not as good as things that are touch screens.

00:48:04   So you have huge market pressure to do it.

00:48:06   And, you know, it's one of those cases where we, I think, have talked a lot about like, you know, purity and like what John was just saying, like waiting until we can redesign everything to do it right, which would be a terrible idea for macOS.

00:48:18   But, you know, like waiting until the perfection is possible.

00:48:21   And this is the thing that Apple, Apple and us, but, you know, Apple often gets stuck in this kind of thinking of, you know, they can't just pinch those and do something imperfect.

00:48:32   They wait until they can do something perfectly.

00:48:35   And in the meantime, they don't address it at all or have something horribly broken, you know, like the because the perfect is the enemy of the good.

00:48:41   And sometimes they compromise on their perfect pure vision.

00:48:45   For instance, slowly turning the iPad Pro into a laptop, which is what they have done.

00:48:51   Like the iPad, it used to the iPad originally was like you pretty much only were intended to use it in portrait orientation unless you were watching some video and you could rotate it.

00:49:01   And remember the first keyboard for the iPad that came out with the iPad one that was portrait.

00:49:05   It was a stand with portrait.

00:49:07   Sure was.

00:49:07   And then everyone was like, hey, you know, this thing actually can work if you just turn it to its side and put a bigger keyboard on the bottom.

00:49:15   And then eventually Apple made the iPad Pro and made their own keyboard that held it to the side.

00:49:20   But still the camera was on the wrong side and the logo on the wrong side and everything like they were like they were insisting.

00:49:25   This is this is an everything device, but mainly a portrait device.

00:49:29   And it's definitely not a laptop.

00:49:30   And then slowly what they've done with the iPad is turn it into a laptop.

00:49:34   They gave you, you know, landscape uses.

00:49:38   They gave you landscape cases with keyboards.

00:49:40   They added a trackpad and a pointer.

00:49:42   Now they have resizable windows and like the finder kind of sort of and they have the dock kind of sort of like they've turned it into a laptop.

00:49:50   All of this was in complete violation of their pure idea, the pure design, the pure ethos.

00:49:58   But it's what customers wanted.

00:50:00   And it made the product generally better for everyone because either you didn't have to use that stuff and you could keep using it the way you always were or you could use it the way you actually wanted to like like more of a laptop.

00:50:11   And it turns out the iPad is a pretty good laptop for a lot of people.

00:50:14   And so I think thinking about touch on the Mac, we should think about it the same way.

00:50:20   The Mac is not going to be a great touch screen device, probably ever, just the same way that Windows PCs aren't great touch screen devices.

00:50:27   But a lot of people want that and are assuming that will be there and are disappointed when it's not there or they have bad experiences because it's not there and they try it and it fails.

00:50:36   And so even though we don't want fingerprints all over our screens, similarly to how many iPad users don't want or use any of the multitasking features and never connect the keyboard to their iPads.

00:50:47   There are so many people who want their MacBook Pros or their MacBooks to have touch screens and assume they will and have bad experiences because they don't that it's it should be there.

00:50:59   It's it has reached the point of popularity and user pressure now that they should have touch screens.

00:51:03   I mean, it reached that point a while ago.

00:51:05   Yes.

00:51:06   And the rest of us who don't want fingerprints all over our screens don't have to use it.

00:51:11   Yeah.

00:51:11   And I think when Apple executives always talked about this, they've even back when Steve Jobs was still alive, I think he said similar things like, oh, your arm gets tired, having your arm up, touching a Mac, touch Macs are no good.

00:51:22   But obviously with laptops, especially if you're literally using it on your lap, the screen isn't out in front of your eyeline like an ergonomically correct desktop display.

00:51:29   It's down.

00:51:30   It's where an iPad screen would be if the iPad was in laptop floppy laptop mode or if the iPad is just up on a stand.

00:51:36   It's lower, it's tilted and it is more viable.

00:51:40   And I'm assuming that's what they'll say.

00:51:41   It's like, we've always said your arms will get tired, but with a laptop, you don't have to hold your arm up.

00:51:45   It's down there.

00:51:46   And I don't know how they'll spin it, but it's like all I'm saying is I think that this doesn't mean that like the new Apple display, which they'll come out with someday, I swear, will be a touch screen.

00:51:56   Because look, in the PC world, there is not a huge number of desktop displays that are touch displays because it is tiring to have your finger up like that.

00:52:04   Now, I'm sure there are some and especially if you have like a drafting table style touch PC, that's a different ball of wax.

00:52:13   But Apple has never really made one of those.

00:52:14   They still could, but they haven't.

00:52:16   Although if they made one of those, it should probably run iPad OS or something.

00:52:18   But like if they do it, what I'm saying is if they do this with laptops, I would imagine, as the article says, although God knows how he could possibly know this, like, oh, they're going to they're going to do it on the laptops and then just wait and see.

00:52:29   And if people like it, maybe they'll expand it out or whatever.

00:52:32   But yeah, laptops first makes perfect sense for putting the touch on things.

00:52:36   And again, it will be fun to see how they market this.

00:52:38   All right.

00:52:39   A few other quick grab bag items.

00:52:40   The other new Macs of development include updated MacBook Airs with the M5 chip.

00:52:45   These devices are slated for release in the spring.

00:52:47   Apple is also working on a refreshed Mac Studio, Mac Mini and a pair of external Mac monitors dubbed J427 and 527.

00:52:55   Sure, they are.

00:52:56   You'll notice that I have not yet mentioned the Mac Pro.

00:53:00   Apple is exploring another major Mac change as well, a shift from the Touch ID fingerprint scanner to Face ID.

00:53:05   But that remains years away.

00:53:06   Years away.

00:53:07   Oh, my God.

00:53:08   Put Face ID on Macs.

00:53:09   You know where you could experiment with that first?

00:53:11   Put it on the laptops.

00:53:11   It's killing me that they don't put like.

00:53:13   Yep.

00:53:14   And the thing is, laptops is the place where they have an excuse, like, oh, the displays, who's in?

00:53:17   They're going to come out with new displays.

00:53:19   These long rumored like Pro Display XDR successor and presumably a Studio Display successor with a 19 Pro and whatever.

00:53:25   There's so much room in those displays for a Face ID sensor.

00:53:28   They're so freaking thick.

00:53:29   Put Face ID on the Mac.

00:53:31   Stop.

00:53:32   What are you waiting for?

00:53:32   It's killing me.

00:53:33   I mean, I know you guys are waiting for cellular, but the Face ID on the Mac is just, it's just, it's just brutal.

00:53:38   I don't, I don't know what they're waiting for.

00:53:39   Like, just gather up those.

00:53:41   Only put it on your own displays.

00:53:43   It's another reason for people to buy your displays.

00:53:44   You don't even have to like have it be third party display.

00:53:46   Only put it on your first party displays.

00:53:47   Anyway.

00:53:47   Yeah.

00:53:48   Originally when I put this in here, it was like these, this German article was like other Macs in development, MacBook Air, Mac Studio, Mac Mini, just not even a mention of the Mac Pro from German.

00:53:58   But then Brendan Shanks to the rescue.

00:54:01   Brendan Shanks writes new and Xcode 26.1 beta three.

00:54:05   This is a, I believe a constant CPU family underscore arm underscore Hydra.

00:54:11   H-I-D-R-A, which is listed as H-1-7-G.

00:54:15   We discussed that, uh, which is apparently an island.

00:54:18   Where is the island?

00:54:19   I forget.

00:54:19   Is it in life?

00:54:20   I remember the discussion.

00:54:21   I don't remember.

00:54:22   Scandinavia or something.

00:54:23   Yeah.

00:54:24   Somewhere up there.

00:54:24   Yeah.

00:54:25   It's not the multi-headed beast of Greek myth versus H-Y-D-R-A.

00:54:28   Anyway, um, this was supposedly the, uh, uh, code name for a, uh, uh, Apple Silicon chip that has not been released.

00:54:36   That is potentially a large beefy chip that would be suitable for a Mac Pro, even though German's not even mentioning that.

00:54:43   It's like, oh, here's some, the Mac rumors for the next year.

00:54:46   They're going to update these Macs and those Macs and those, not even a mention of the Mac Pro, not even like no news in the Mac Pro or Mac Pro, you know, like just nothing just doesn't even get mentioned.

00:54:53   Like it doesn't exist.

00:54:54   Maybe the product is canceled, but then in the new beta of X code, a constant sleep sneaks through that mentions the rumored code name of a chip.

00:55:03   That as far as we know has not shipped is not one of the M5 chips slated for the, uh, MacBook Pros.

00:55:09   Uh, it could be a Mac Pro ship, or it could just be the beefy chip that they ship in the next Mac studio and the Mac Pro really is dead.

00:55:17   Who knows what will happen, but here I am out here trying to sell those Mac Pro Believe shirts, uh, wearing mine in my heart every day.

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00:57:17   All right, let's talk some new developments or new-ish developments in the OS's 26 in the beta 4.

00:57:29   In beta 4 for iOS 26, you can now tone down liquid glass.

00:57:35   And I saw a lot of news articles about this, and they all frustrated me that they didn't have

00:57:41   side-by-side comparisons, or at least not when I first started reading about it.

00:57:44   But our dear friend Stephen Hackett did Yeoman's work to put these together,

00:57:49   and so we'll put a link to Stephen's excellent post in the show notes.

00:57:51   You go into, for iPad OS and iOS, you go into settings and then display and brightness.

00:57:56   For macOS, you go into system settings, appearance.

00:57:58   And there you'll find a new toggle that lets you swap between two looks, clear and tinted.

00:58:03   So I know that the names they put in the UI aren't necessarily connected to the names of the APIs

00:58:13   behind the scenes, but I initially saw this, and I was wondering if this is the same as the API,

00:58:21   at least on macOS.

00:58:22   When you make a glass material thing, you have a choice between clear and tinted.

00:58:25   Like, those are like the constant numbers or whatever, dot clear or dot tinted.

00:58:29   And when you do glass that's tinted, you can also specify the tint color.

00:58:34   So like the, if you have switch glass, my little app switcher thing that looks like the dock,

00:58:39   it has like a background or whatever, and it has materials you can pick for the background.

00:58:42   Then I use all the deprecated constants that Apple doesn't want me to use for the different backgrounds.

00:58:46   Anyway, in Tahoe, you can pick glass, and you can pick clear glass, or you can pick tinted glass.

00:58:51   And then when you pick tinted glass, you can pick the color.

00:58:53   So I wonder if the tinted look is literally, they just change all the things that are dot,

00:58:58   when they see the dot clear constant, they just use the dot tinted one,

00:59:01   and they pick a fixed tint color.

00:59:03   It's hard to say, because just because the name matches doesn't mean it's the same thing.

00:59:06   But anyway, it seems like it might not even be new code, and it's just simply like,

00:59:12   oh, when they do dot clear, ignore that, and really just use dot tinted with white.

00:59:16   As the background with some opacity level.

00:59:17   All right, and then below these selections, there's little teeny tiny gray text,

00:59:23   because of course it's gray, that reads,

00:59:24   choose your preferred look for liquid glass.

00:59:26   Clear is more transparent, revealing the content beneath.

00:59:28   Tinted increases opacity and adds more contrast.

00:59:30   And speaking of Yeoman's work, John has done us a service,

00:59:34   and we'll put a link in the show notes to some examples of tinted versus untinted.

00:59:38   John, do you want to talk these through?

00:59:40   Yeah, so Stephen Hackett's got a lot of before and after.

00:59:44   There's lots of other people on the web since then have had a bunch of before and afters,

00:59:47   and I picked some from, this is actually running the beta, and I took some screenshots of it.

00:59:52   And by the way, the RC is out there, Release Canada is out now,

00:59:55   so this is a little bit old news, but I don't think it's changed.

00:59:56   But side by side, depending on the context,

00:59:59   I don't see that much of a difference between the regular and the new setting,

01:00:06   you know, between clear and tinted.

01:00:08   You can see the background through both.

01:00:10   It's not like reduced transparency where it makes it totally opaque.

01:00:13   Like, I was just in a messages thread.

01:00:15   That's what you'll see is, like, part of messages, and it shows, like, a photo.

01:00:19   You know, like, it's a white background with non-white photos.

01:00:23   And the non-white photos clearly show through the tinted version.

01:00:28   They show through more in the clear one, but it's, there's still, like,

01:00:32   if you're going to make this setting, it seems so subtle.

01:00:36   It seems like it's a little bit more opaque.

01:00:39   Is that better?

01:00:40   Just, like, if people don't want to see stuff that is behind their controls,

01:00:44   don't make them go all the way to reduced transparency.

01:00:47   And if this really is tinted, as I said, like, the actual tinted control,

01:00:51   let people pick the opacity and the color.

01:00:54   Put it, like, you know, or put an opacity slider underneath it

01:00:57   because it would be, you know, when you do tinted,

01:00:59   you can pick the color and you can put an alpha channel on that cover.

01:01:01   Like, I don't know.

01:01:03   Like, it's clear that they decided to do this

01:01:06   because people thought it was too transparent.

01:01:08   But, boy, you give a setting, like, I'm going to be hesitant to even tell this

01:01:13   to, like, my kids because they complain a little bit about liquid glass stuff.

01:01:16   They're going to be like, what difference does that make?

01:01:18   It's the same.

01:01:19   I'm like, well, it's actually a little bit more opaque.

01:01:21   Because if you could see them side by side, you'd notice that, yeah,

01:01:23   I guess if you see them side by side, you would notice.

01:01:25   But I don't, I don't know.

01:01:27   Like, it seems half-hearted to me, I guess.

01:01:30   I can tell you, so as soon as the setting was released in the bid,

01:01:33   as I switched to it for my iPhone, and then at some point later,

01:01:37   I didn't realize that there was also the option on the Mac.

01:01:39   And so then, like, on my laptop that runs Tahoe, at some point, like, a few days

01:01:44   after using it on the phone full-time, I saw a notification show up in Tahoe

01:01:48   with the ridiculous, overly glassy look.

01:01:51   And it was immediately, I was like, ugh.

01:01:53   Like, it jumped out at me so much.

01:01:56   Well, here's the problem.

01:01:57   On beta 4, changing that setting doesn't affect notifications.

01:02:01   Oh, great.

01:02:02   Like, I tried, that's what I tried when I was trying to do the screenshots.

01:02:04   On Tahoe, you mean?

01:02:05   Because on iOS, it does.

01:02:06   Yeah, I know, but when I was trying to do the screenshots, I'm like, I know,

01:02:09   I'll do notifications, because those are so clear, they annoy me.

01:02:11   So I turned the setting on, got a notification, it didn't change.

01:02:14   It looks exactly the same.

01:02:15   Now, maybe that was a beta 4 bug, and maybe in the RSC it does change,

01:02:18   but that's what I was saying about it being half-hearted.

01:02:19   On macOS, it doesn't even look like it's applying the setting to lots of places

01:02:24   where you wish it would be applied, like notifications.

01:02:27   Again, this is beta 4 knowledge.

01:02:28   I haven't installed the RCs yet, but it seems a little half-hearted to me.

01:02:32   And hopefully, macOS will eventually apply it everywhere.

01:02:36   But yeah, maybe it looks a little bit better in iOS.

01:02:38   But yeah, reduced transparency really does reduce transparency,

01:02:42   but it radically changes how things look, and I think it makes things look even uglier.

01:02:46   So that setting is always there for you in accessibility,

01:02:48   but this is pointedly not in accessibility.

01:02:51   It's in, you know, settings appearance or settings display and brightness,

01:02:55   which is a weird place for it to be.

01:02:56   I guess there's no appearance equivalent in iOS settings.

01:03:00   Anyway, when 26.1 comes out, this will be a setting,

01:03:03   and if Liquid Glass is annoying you, you can give it a try.

01:03:05   I can say also, again, like on the phone, having used this now for,

01:03:09   what, it hasn't long as it's been, like, two weeks?

01:03:11   I can say it's great.

01:03:12   It has been going great, and it is generally better.

01:03:17   Liquid Glass is not perfect with it,

01:03:19   but I can say, like, after switching to this

01:03:22   and then seeing, you know, the glassy version on macOS,

01:03:25   it instantly made the regular version of Liquid Glass

01:03:30   look garish and tacky and already old.

01:03:35   Like, Liquid Glass has been out for two seconds,

01:03:37   and it already, once you see something a little bit more toned down,

01:03:42   it makes the shipping version look really old.

01:03:47   It always looked tacky to me, and I think, you can check this too,

01:03:49   but I think even on iOS, you know, like, the play-pause controls

01:03:52   that hover over playing video, like, in a pop-up window?

01:03:55   The ones that directly get in the way of your content

01:03:57   that it's trying to spotlight? Yes.

01:03:58   Yeah. I don't think those honor the setting either.

01:04:00   I think they look exactly the same with the setting on or off.

01:04:03   Well, those were, so that's the clear style.

01:04:05   That's clear. I know. That's what I'm saying.

01:04:06   But, like, I just, I'm, it seems weird to me.

01:04:09   Like, those are the most egregious.

01:04:10   Those are so, because the content behind them is always, you know,

01:04:13   it's guaranteed to be something, you know, uncontrolled because it's video.

01:04:17   And those are the glassiest of the glassiest things

01:04:20   for controls that I don't need to be glassy.

01:04:22   Like, I think they're too big and obtrusive as it is.

01:04:24   I don't want them to have specular highlights

01:04:25   and be warping and refracting things and all that crap.

01:04:27   So I wish this setting applied to them,

01:04:29   even if it only applied a little bit.

01:04:31   It's so weird to me that you would put the setting in and say,

01:04:34   yeah, but the clearest controls, those are accepted from this.

01:04:38   Maybe, but, to be fair, like, that was, those kind of controls,

01:04:41   the ones, like, the playback over the video,

01:04:43   those were always a more clear version than the default.

01:04:47   That's not the default look.

01:04:48   Yeah, those are, like, that's what I'm saying, the constants.

01:04:51   It's confusing whether they're using the same languages as the constants

01:04:53   because the settings here are clear and tinted,

01:04:55   but there's clear and tinted glass in the OS,

01:04:57   and this clear tinted setting only seems to apply

01:05:00   to the not clear API, you know, constants.

01:05:04   It's confusing.

01:05:05   Yeah, and I think, you know, kind of broader picture,

01:05:08   I think the fact that they had to add this so soon

01:05:11   shows that they're getting a lot of pushback

01:05:15   and people are having a lot of problems with liquid glass.

01:05:17   And ultimately, there's a lot about the liquid glass design language

01:05:22   that I don't think is good.

01:05:25   There are some things that I think are nice.

01:05:28   It's going to need a lot of tweaks.

01:05:29   It's going to need a lot of adjustments.

01:05:32   I think, generally speaking, we will get to a place with it,

01:05:36   with a bit more iteration, where it is actually pretty nice.

01:05:39   But it's going to need a lot.

01:05:41   It's going to need, you know, work and time.

01:05:43   And the fact that they're already fixing it, number one,

01:05:45   you can say, like, wow, lol, what a failure that they had to fix it so soon,

01:05:49   which is valid.

01:05:51   But at least they are fixing it.

01:05:53   At least we are going in a direction where they're toning this down so quickly

01:05:58   because maybe they got enough pushback that it needs.

01:06:01   It needs the work that it needs.

01:06:02   So that's promising, at least to me.

01:06:05   And I think we will look back, you know, similarly to how

01:06:08   when iOS 7 was first unveiled at its WWDC,

01:06:13   the fonts were these, like, super thin, like, ultra-light Helvetica.

01:06:18   And over the course of the beta that summer,

01:06:20   they iterated the design of iOS 7 to be less egregiously thin

01:06:24   so that you could actually read text anywhere in the OS.

01:06:27   That's happening to Liquid Glass.

01:06:29   It just didn't finish during the beta.

01:06:31   But I think we're seeing that process now in the point releases that,

01:06:35   oh, the most egregious versions of this are being tweaked now.

01:06:41   Yes, it should have happened in July.

01:06:43   It didn't, but at least it's happening now

01:06:45   instead of having to wait until next summer.

01:06:46   Well, it kind of happened in the betas.

01:06:48   Do you remember there was, I forget which beta it was,

01:06:50   maybe beta 3 or something?

01:06:51   Yeah, it added basically this.

01:06:52   Super frosty.

01:06:53   Yeah.

01:06:54   Right?

01:06:54   And I think, someone should dig up these screenshots,

01:06:57   but I think it was the beta 3 version of this

01:07:00   showed less stuff through controls

01:07:02   than this new version does with the tinted setting turned on.

01:07:06   So it's not like they, because they turned it on

01:07:09   and then there was some outcry from developers,

01:07:11   as we talked about on the show,

01:07:11   like, oh, you've, you know,

01:07:13   you said it was called with a liquid glass,

01:07:15   but now I can barely see through the controls.

01:07:16   It doesn't look like glass anymore.

01:07:17   And they, and they,

01:07:18   so like during the beta, it went really, really opaque.

01:07:21   And then it went back,

01:07:22   it went back to be more transparent.

01:07:24   And the more transparent ones,

01:07:25   the one they released,

01:07:26   maybe not as transparent as the very first beta,

01:07:28   but certainly more,

01:07:28   it was not the,

01:07:29   the most opaque of the betas, right?

01:07:32   And then after release,

01:07:33   now they're adding a setting

01:07:35   to make it slightly more opaque.

01:07:37   I haven't seen a lot of outcry about this,

01:07:40   but we're all kind of sitting here waiting

01:07:41   for when Apple starts forcing this update on people,

01:07:43   which I'm assuming will happen.

01:07:44   26.1.

01:07:45   Is that when they usually do it?

01:07:46   Usually.

01:07:47   Like, and what we mean by that is like,

01:07:49   if you,

01:07:50   lots of people were surprised about it,

01:07:51   they're always surprised about this every year.

01:07:52   Like the new OS comes out and they're like,

01:07:54   I went to system settings on my phone

01:07:55   to get the new OS.

01:07:56   And can you believe it was trying to tell me

01:07:58   like there's a new version of iOS 18?

01:08:00   You have to scroll down.

01:08:01   And it's like,

01:08:02   oh,

01:08:02   and by the way,

01:08:02   there's also a thing called 26.

01:08:04   Do you want that one?

01:08:05   But the top one on the phone was 18.

01:08:07   They don't sort of like shove 26 in your face,

01:08:11   at least on the phone,

01:08:12   until the 0.1 release.

01:08:14   And then people's phones are going to like,

01:08:16   they're going to,

01:08:17   it's going to prompt them.

01:08:18   It's going to be in system settings.

01:08:19   It's going to be a badge.

01:08:20   It's going to auto update overnight.

01:08:21   Like all sorts of,

01:08:22   like when they really push this out

01:08:24   to the general public,

01:08:25   and it's,

01:08:25   it's a good move because 26.0 was a mess

01:08:27   and you don't want to push that up,

01:08:28   push that out to everybody.

01:08:29   26.1 will be better.

01:08:30   I will note that on the Mac,

01:08:32   the day Mac OS 26 came out,

01:08:34   system settings got a badge

01:08:35   and it's still there

01:08:36   and I can't make it go away.

01:08:37   It's like,

01:08:38   you know,

01:08:38   26 is out.

01:08:39   I'm like,

01:08:39   oh,

01:08:39   I don't have one.

01:08:40   I do.

01:08:41   It's been there since the day

01:08:43   Mac OS 26 was launched.

01:08:44   Software update available.

01:08:46   Badge with a one in it.

01:08:47   Cannot make it go away

01:08:48   no matter what I do

01:08:49   because there is one.

01:08:50   If I go to system settings,

01:08:50   it says,

01:08:51   hey,

01:08:51   Tahoe's available.

01:08:52   Do you want it?

01:08:52   Not only that,

01:08:53   but every 15 update,

01:08:55   like 15.7.1,

01:08:56   if you weren't careful,

01:08:58   like if you have auto updates off

01:08:59   and you go to manually

01:09:00   install it,

01:09:01   if you weren't careful

01:09:02   and you tried to install Sequoia,

01:09:03   it would install 26.

01:09:05   If you didn't go in

01:09:06   and like uncheck the 26 checkbox,

01:09:08   it was,

01:09:08   it's like,

01:09:09   it's been pushing 26 so hard

01:09:11   on the Mac.

01:09:11   I'm like,

01:09:11   Apple,

01:09:11   you don't want to do this.

01:09:13   I mean,

01:09:13   it doesn't really matter

01:09:13   because there's so few Mac users

01:09:14   and we're technically,

01:09:15   more technically savvy

01:09:16   than the average phone user,

01:09:17   I suppose,

01:09:17   and blah,

01:09:18   blah,

01:09:18   blah.

01:09:18   But,

01:09:18   but yeah,

01:09:19   on the phone,

01:09:20   they hold back.

01:09:21   So I'm still kind of waiting

01:09:22   for 26 to get pushed

01:09:24   to quote unquote everyone

01:09:25   to finally decide

01:09:28   what the public reaction to it.

01:09:29   But I feel like the public reaction

01:09:31   to 26

01:09:32   as it exists right now

01:09:34   has been,

01:09:35   people aren't super big fans of it,

01:09:37   but I haven't seen any,

01:09:39   you know,

01:09:40   complaining on the level

01:09:41   of like the new photos app.

01:09:42   And we'll see,

01:09:43   I don't remember,

01:09:43   did the new photos app complaining

01:09:44   only start after they pushed 18.1

01:09:46   to everybody

01:09:47   or did it happen with 18.0?

01:09:49   Yes.

01:09:49   It was both.

01:09:51   Well,

01:09:52   we'll see when they,

01:09:53   when they push it to everybody.

01:09:54   But right now,

01:09:55   even my kids who were like,

01:09:56   who refused to use a Mac

01:09:57   that had Tahoe on it,

01:09:58   they've got it on their new phones

01:10:00   and they grumbled a little bit,

01:10:01   but otherwise they're like,

01:10:02   yeah,

01:10:02   it's fine.

01:10:02   And I think we're going to see like

01:10:04   what,

01:10:05   what has happened

01:10:06   throughout the course

01:10:07   of computer interface history

01:10:08   whenever anyone

01:10:10   has used transparency

01:10:11   because it looks cool.

01:10:12   What happens over time?

01:10:13   They make it less transparent

01:10:15   because transparent

01:10:16   UIs don't work very well.

01:10:18   And that's happening here.

01:10:20   We are going to see this progression.

01:10:21   It will,

01:10:22   it will have,

01:10:22   it will end up

01:10:23   somewhere that is reasonably fine.

01:10:26   Um,

01:10:27   I there,

01:10:28   and the translucency

01:10:29   is not liquid glass's only problem,

01:10:30   but,

01:10:31   uh,

01:10:32   this is probably its biggest.

01:10:34   And so we're going to end up

01:10:36   somewhere that's better.

01:10:36   Yeah.

01:10:37   And unfortunately

01:10:38   for liquid glass,

01:10:39   it's in the name,

01:10:40   the glass part of it.

01:10:41   Um,

01:10:42   and you mentioned like,

01:10:43   oh,

01:10:43   we'll eventually find a happy medium.

01:10:44   Like the correct move

01:10:46   is not to show things

01:10:48   through controls,

01:10:49   especially controls

01:10:49   that have text on them

01:10:50   because it doesn't serve

01:10:51   a functional purpose.

01:10:52   It's only there for aesthetics

01:10:53   and it only hurts your legibility.

01:10:55   So like,

01:10:55   why are you doing this yourself?

01:10:56   Why are you choosing this?

01:10:57   Like,

01:10:57   well,

01:10:58   don't you understand it's glass?

01:10:59   Okay.

01:10:59   If that's your controlling metaphor

01:11:01   and your aesthetic

01:11:02   and your marketing,

01:11:03   then you're kind of stuck

01:11:04   with showing stuff through

01:11:05   because glass doesn't show

01:11:06   anything through really

01:11:07   is like opaque glass.

01:11:08   Like I guess it could be shiny

01:11:09   on the edges,

01:11:10   but people think of glass

01:11:11   as being able to see

01:11:12   something through it.

01:11:13   that's just a fundamentally

01:11:14   wrongheaded idea.

01:11:15   Nothing behind that button

01:11:17   needs to contribute

01:11:18   to the content of that button.

01:11:19   To the extent that you show

01:11:21   it through the button,

01:11:21   it can only make the button

01:11:23   more misleading and obscure.

01:11:25   So the correct amount

01:11:26   of transparency in a button,

01:11:27   if there is content

01:11:29   behind it,

01:11:29   is zero.

01:11:30   Uh,

01:11:31   and they're like,

01:11:31   but what if we,

01:11:32   how close can we get?

01:11:33   We don't want to do zero

01:11:34   because it doesn't,

01:11:35   can we,

01:11:35   and yeah,

01:11:36   they'll probably find something

01:11:37   that is like makes people,

01:11:38   it's like,

01:11:39   all right,

01:11:39   it's fine,

01:11:40   but it's a fundamentally

01:11:40   wrongheaded idea.

01:11:41   I also think the floating

01:11:42   controls off the edge

01:11:43   is a fundamentally

01:11:44   wrongheaded idea

01:11:44   in terms of efficiency

01:11:46   and space usage,

01:11:46   especially on the phone,

01:11:47   but that is a separate issue.

01:11:49   But yeah,

01:11:50   that's,

01:11:50   that's kind of the problem

01:11:51   with this.

01:11:51   Whereas the fonts,

01:11:52   like,

01:11:52   well,

01:11:52   we can just make the fonts

01:11:53   thicker,

01:11:53   done and done.

01:11:54   But this is like our,

01:11:55   one of our basic ideas.

01:11:56   Like I said,

01:11:57   it's the floating

01:11:58   the controls off the edge,

01:11:58   showing through the content

01:12:00   and whatever third one

01:12:00   that I can never remember.

01:12:01   Detox targets are too small.

01:12:03   Everything has no contrast

01:12:04   around it.

01:12:05   I mean,

01:12:05   there's multiple issues.

01:12:06   Yeah,

01:12:06   well,

01:12:07   there's something pre,

01:12:08   there's some preexisting

01:12:09   problems,

01:12:09   but like,

01:12:09   but it's kind of hard

01:12:11   to have a thing styled

01:12:13   on glass where you don't

01:12:14   have it show stuff to,

01:12:15   but they don't put content

01:12:16   behind buttons.

01:12:17   And if you do put it

01:12:18   through behind buttons,

01:12:19   don't make the button

01:12:20   show the content through.

01:12:21   Don't make the text field

01:12:22   show the content through.

01:12:22   Like where I'm still

01:12:24   seeing screenshots,

01:12:24   granted from the nerds

01:12:25   that are in my circles

01:12:26   on like Mastodon of like,

01:12:28   look at this scrolling text

01:12:29   region that is fading

01:12:31   up behind some header text,

01:12:33   making the header text

01:12:34   completely illegible

01:12:35   because right behind it

01:12:36   offset by one pixel

01:12:37   is other text.

01:12:38   And it's just,

01:12:39   it looks like an error

01:12:40   and like,

01:12:40   this is the UI that you want.

01:12:42   Like that whole fade thing

01:12:44   where text scrolls behind text

01:12:45   with a gradient fade.

01:12:48   That's a bad idea.

01:12:50   You can never make that work.

01:12:51   You have to stop doing that

01:12:53   and use the hard edge

01:12:53   scrolling thing like,

01:12:54   like,

01:12:54   you know,

01:12:55   like an iOS 18

01:12:56   and all the ones before.

01:12:56   There's no amount of fading

01:12:58   and adjusting of contrast

01:13:00   or whatever.

01:13:00   They will ever make

01:13:01   that a good idea.

01:13:02   It is just a bad idea.

01:13:04   And so we just have to live with it

01:13:05   until somebody wakes up

01:13:06   and says,

01:13:06   you know that thing

01:13:07   where we put text behind text?

01:13:08   Let's not do that anymore.

01:13:09   Then,

01:13:10   uh,

01:13:11   one more quick item.

01:13:12   There's now an option

01:13:13   to disable the lock screen swipe

01:13:15   to get to the camera.

01:13:17   This is in settings camera,

01:13:18   lock screen swipe to open camera.

01:13:19   I didn't know this was a thing

01:13:21   that people hated,

01:13:22   but I guess this is a thing

01:13:23   that people hated.

01:13:23   It's accidental input.

01:13:25   It's not that people hate it.

01:13:26   If you use it,

01:13:26   it's great to have it.

01:13:27   But if you never use it intentionally,

01:13:29   but only ever accidentally use it,

01:13:31   uh,

01:13:32   that's the thing.

01:13:32   What they need is some kind of,

01:13:34   I don't know how to implement this,

01:13:35   but what they need

01:13:36   is butt dial protection

01:13:37   because my parents

01:13:39   butt dial me all the time

01:13:40   and there is no explanation.

01:13:42   Like my,

01:13:43   the best I can come up with

01:13:44   is they don't,

01:13:45   they don't sleep their phone

01:13:47   before they put it in their pocket.

01:13:49   Oh yeah.

01:13:50   That's a common thing.

01:13:50   I do that sometimes.

01:13:51   Or they do sleep their phone

01:13:53   like they press the sleep wake button,

01:13:54   but their,

01:13:55   their phone is like bogged down

01:13:57   or slow or something

01:13:58   and it doesn't like,

01:13:59   doesn't go to sleep

01:14:00   until they've begun

01:14:01   putting it in their pocket.

01:14:02   But the bottom line is

01:14:02   somehow their hands

01:14:05   are touching the screen

01:14:06   and activating stuff

01:14:07   that's causing them to call me

01:14:08   and I get a call

01:14:09   from inside of their pocket

01:14:10   and I can hear them talking

01:14:11   and I say,

01:14:11   dad,

01:14:12   butt dial me.

01:14:13   He usually can't hear me.

01:14:15   I just hang out.

01:14:15   But like,

01:14:16   and I've,

01:14:17   you know,

01:14:17   I've been with him

01:14:18   when this has happened

01:14:19   and like,

01:14:19   what did you just do?

01:14:20   Tell me.

01:14:20   And he can't explain it,

01:14:21   but there is some kind of

01:14:22   accidental input user interface

01:14:25   thing going on here.

01:14:25   Again,

01:14:26   my leading theory is

01:14:27   they just are simply

01:14:27   not sleeping the phone,

01:14:28   but like,

01:14:29   so,

01:14:29   all right,

01:14:29   so say they don't sleep the phone.

01:14:30   How do you accidentally,

01:14:32   I'm probably in their favorites

01:14:34   or maybe in their recents,

01:14:35   like,

01:14:35   but how do you accidentally

01:14:36   initiate a call to me

01:14:38   by accidentally rubbing

01:14:41   your fingers?

01:14:41   Slide to,

01:14:42   slide to go to the camera.

01:14:43   I can see happening

01:14:43   because that's just,

01:14:44   it's a pretty simple move.

01:14:45   You just slide sideways.

01:14:46   But anyway,

01:14:46   lots of accidental input happening.

01:14:48   I'm glad to see this setting.

01:14:49   I'm sure it will still be on by default,

01:14:51   but if you find yourself

01:14:52   accidentally going to the camera

01:14:53   when you don't want to

01:14:54   and you never use the shortcut,

01:14:55   now you can turn it off.

01:14:56   All right.

01:14:57   I have a question for you.

01:14:58   Is Tahoe safe to run yet?

01:15:01   Because I am not currently running Tahoe

01:15:03   and I've seen a medium amount of chatter,

01:15:06   particularly around one in particular bug

01:15:10   that we'll discuss in a minute.

01:15:12   But I've been reluctant to upgrade,

01:15:16   which is not unusual these days,

01:15:18   but I used to be like a day one person

01:15:20   for everything.

01:15:21   So what's the deal?

01:15:23   Are you two running Tahoe?

01:15:25   Do you recommend it?

01:15:26   Do you recommend me holding off?

01:15:27   Where do we go from here?

01:15:28   Let me start with Marco.

01:15:29   I am running it on my small travel laptop.

01:15:33   I am not running it on my main,

01:15:35   my desktop laptop.

01:15:37   And so far,

01:15:38   like what I,

01:15:39   as I'm using it on my little laptop

01:15:41   and then I go back and forth

01:15:43   between my desktop and my laptop,

01:15:44   I'm not motivated to upgrade my desktop to Tahoe.

01:15:48   So like when I'm not using Tahoe,

01:15:50   I don't miss it.

01:15:51   There's no feature I miss.

01:15:53   There's nothing about it that's motivating me

01:15:56   that I should update my desktop,

01:15:57   except that eventually Sequoia

01:16:00   will stop getting updates meaningfully from Apple.

01:16:03   But right now,

01:16:04   like there is no motivating reason

01:16:06   for me to do it.

01:16:07   Now, also,

01:16:08   when I am on Tahoe on my laptop,

01:16:10   I don't care.

01:16:12   Besides my stupid glassy notifications,

01:16:14   like it's fine.

01:16:15   Everything looks different.

01:16:17   Everything's lower contrast.

01:16:17   I don't think liquid glass holds up well at all

01:16:21   on the Mac,

01:16:22   especially the treatment of toolbars and sidebars.

01:16:25   I think it looks ridiculous.

01:16:26   The corners of everything are really massive,

01:16:29   like the rounded corners,

01:16:30   massive corners.

01:16:32   So there's a lot of like little noises with it,

01:16:34   but like whenever I'm on either computer,

01:16:38   I'm never wishing that it was the OS of the other one.

01:16:42   And I'm never looking at it and saying,

01:16:44   wow, I love this OS.

01:16:46   Like it's fine.

01:16:49   Everything looks different.

01:16:50   Yeah, it's a different skin on the OS.

01:16:52   Things work fine.

01:16:55   I don't have many major problems with either one,

01:16:59   to be honest.

01:16:59   But again,

01:17:00   like it's not motivating a change in either direction.

01:17:02   That being said,

01:17:03   something's up with my tethering setup on my phone.

01:17:10   And I don't know.

01:17:11   I don't know.

01:17:12   Again,

01:17:13   it's 26.1 on both.

01:17:14   And on,

01:17:15   you know,

01:17:15   I have the 26.1 beta on the Mac

01:17:17   and I have the 26.1 beta on the phone.

01:17:19   It's an iPhone 17 Pro.

01:17:21   Cellular and tethering have been really unreliable to the point where I'm frequently having to reboot the iPhone to get cellular data to keep working.

01:17:33   And that's oftentimes happening when I'm tethering with a laptop.

01:17:38   So I don't know if tethering is somehow,

01:17:40   like I don't know if it's like a Tahoe bug that's breaking the phone cell connection

01:17:44   or if the phone has a broken tethering implementation.

01:17:48   This is also all to say that that was all only with the betas of 26.1.

01:17:53   The RC came out,

01:17:54   I think,

01:17:54   what,

01:17:54   today or yesterday?

01:17:56   And I've only just installed the RC like tonight.

01:17:59   So I don't know if it's fixed in the RC,

01:18:01   but I honestly,

01:18:03   it's been so bad in the betas.

01:18:04   I don't know how it would be.

01:18:06   I don't know how it would be fixed.

01:18:08   But something is really broken with cellular data or tethering or both with 26.1 on an iPhone 17 Pro.

01:18:18   And I don't know if that's part.

01:18:19   And I don't know if it's related to the way Tahoe is using it from the Mac or not.

01:18:22   I don't know.

01:18:22   But tethering and data are super broken for me.

01:18:25   And it could be,

01:18:27   it could even be like my phone could be bad.

01:18:29   It's that bad to the point where I cannot,

01:18:31   I cannot get through a train ride without having to reboot my phone for tethering connectivity.

01:18:36   Anyway,

01:18:37   all that being said,

01:18:39   Tahoe in general,

01:18:43   again,

01:18:43   it's been fine.

01:18:45   The design is stupid on the Mac,

01:18:48   but it's been fine.

01:18:49   If you need to upgrade for some motivating reason,

01:18:52   go for it.

01:18:54   If you don't have such a motivating reason,

01:18:57   I don't see any reason why you would need to rush it.

01:18:59   Fair enough.

01:19:00   What about you,

01:19:00   John?

01:19:01   Is Tahoe safe?

01:19:02   26.0?

01:19:03   No,

01:19:04   not safe.

01:19:05   I rarely say that about the point,

01:19:07   really the point out releases.

01:19:08   I usually update them as soon as possible,

01:19:10   although that's been moderated in my podcast in years by whether or not the

01:19:14   Rogue Amoeba,

01:19:15   like audio hijack stuff is updated or whatever.

01:19:17   but 26.0 just said I've read about too many problems with that.

01:19:20   Now,

01:19:21   26.1 is going to be out soon.

01:19:22   So maybe this will change with 26.1.

01:19:24   I've been running the betas,

01:19:25   but 26.0 just has so many problems I've heard about,

01:19:29   not just like little things like,

01:19:30   well,

01:19:30   I don't use tethering,

01:19:31   but like fundamental sort of OS wide slowdowns that people don't have good

01:19:35   explanations for.

01:19:35   And we're going to get into one possible popular culprit here in a second.

01:19:40   but I'm not saying don't upgrade because it's ugly and it is,

01:19:42   or because of the UI just because it seems buggier than usual.

01:19:46   And there's one particular,

01:19:47   there's one known particular bug that may affect a lot of people and there's no

01:19:52   real work around for it.

01:19:53   Dan Morin has been chasing this for a while because he thought it was the bug

01:19:56   we're going to talk about,

01:19:57   but he's like,

01:19:57   now I'm pretty sure it's not that bug and it's still happening to me.

01:20:00   Lots of people complaining about slowdowns.

01:20:02   And I know it's like,

01:20:03   Oh,

01:20:03   liquid glass is doing more effects and whatever,

01:20:04   but those effects are very well accelerated.

01:20:07   And maybe it'll use like someone tried,

01:20:10   do a battery test recently.

01:20:11   Like I'm going to use like liquid glass versus like,

01:20:14   uh,

01:20:15   I think with the setting on and off to see if like one uses more power than the

01:20:18   other,

01:20:18   you could probably isolate that if you took great pains to do so,

01:20:21   but it's dominated by other things.

01:20:22   So I don't believe the hype that like liquid glass is so much more processor

01:20:27   intensive,

01:20:28   that it's making things slow down and causing your battery to drain.

01:20:31   I do believe there are bugs that are causing things to slow down and make

01:20:35   your battery drain.

01:20:35   And those are the things to avoid.

01:20:37   So I would say if you're not updated to Tahoe,

01:20:40   and there's no thing that you really,

01:20:42   really want out of,

01:20:42   even if there is something that you really,

01:20:43   really want out of,

01:20:44   like you would like the new shortcuts features,

01:20:45   or you want like to be able to put a,

01:20:47   a dark mode,

01:20:48   light mode toggle in your menu bar,

01:20:50   using the new control center thing,

01:20:51   which is the thing that I do because it's convenient.

01:20:53   Uh,

01:20:54   still wait till 26.1,

01:20:56   do not upgrade to 26.0,

01:20:58   26.0 is bad.

01:20:59   Uh,

01:21:00   and the main culprit is Casey,

01:21:02   please tell us about it.

01:21:03   Yeah.

01:21:04   so there's an electron bug because of course there is,

01:21:08   uh,

01:21:09   the bug is being tracked on the electron GitHub.

01:21:11   It is a number four,

01:21:13   eight,

01:21:13   three,

01:21:14   one,

01:21:14   one,

01:21:14   uh,

01:21:15   I have our air rights.

01:21:17   I believe I found the root cause and it's not Apple's fault.

01:21:20   It turns out electron is overriding a private app kit API underscore corner

01:21:24   mask to apply custom corner masks to vibrant views.

01:21:28   This method is called by window server to calculate the shadow of the

01:21:31   window.

01:21:31   I'm speculating that Apple uses some sort of memoization by reference.

01:21:36   And this method breaks the memoization and forces window server to

01:21:38   repeatedly recalculate and repaint the shadow.

01:21:40   What's particularly funny is that even a simple override that does nothing but

01:21:44   call super,

01:21:45   which is to say call it's like parents,

01:21:47   so to speak still presents the issue.

01:21:50   a nine to five Mac writes recent electron versions no longer use utilize

01:21:53   this private API and developers have begun updating their electron version

01:21:56   to mitigate the issue.

01:21:57   Uh,

01:21:58   there's a app,

01:21:59   a detector app by Thomas Kafka that,

01:22:02   uh,

01:22:02   Craig Hockenberry pointed us to and posted about that.

01:22:05   We'll look at your system and tell you which of the apps that you have on

01:22:08   your system are offending.

01:22:09   And there's also a website where you can go to that is all about shaming

01:22:14   electron,

01:22:15   particularly for this specific bug.

01:22:17   Uh,

01:22:17   and you can see the status of,

01:22:19   of a whole bunch of popular apps.

01:22:21   And so we'll put all those links in the show notes.

01:22:23   So electron is the web rendering engine used by lots of popular Mac apps

01:22:27   because people don't want to make native Mac apps.

01:22:29   They just want to wrap a web app in some Chrome,

01:22:31   uh,

01:22:32   the Slack app for the,

01:22:33   uh,

01:22:33   we're all running right now probably does that.

01:22:35   And many,

01:22:36   many others,

01:22:37   uh,

01:22:37   they use the electron engine.

01:22:38   Electron engine has this bug.

01:22:40   The electron folks fixed the bug,

01:22:42   but requires every single app that is built on electron to update their version of the electron

01:22:47   engine that they're using and release a new version of their app that uses the new updated

01:22:51   electron version.

01:22:52   And people are slow in doing that.

01:22:54   I'm not sure these apps even always use the latest version of the electron,

01:22:57   uh,

01:22:58   engine because,

01:22:58   you know,

01:22:59   that could affect things in the app and they might be a few versions behind or whatever.

01:23:02   So the,

01:23:02   this website,

01:23:03   the shame electron thing,

01:23:05   it's basically say,

01:23:06   here are the popular apps that use electron.

01:23:08   And here are the ones that have been updated.

01:23:10   And here are the ones that haven't,

01:23:11   uh,

01:23:12   from what I've heard from the people who suffer from this bug,

01:23:14   if you're using an electron app every day,

01:23:16   and it hasn't been updated with this bug fix,

01:23:18   again,

01:23:20   do not upgrade to Tahoe because it's going to cause slowdowns,

01:23:23   like system-wide slowdowns.

01:23:25   I guess if you could not run Slack and not run the,

01:23:27   like,

01:23:27   but if you have to run those apps all day,

01:23:29   don't upgrade to Tahoe.

01:23:30   Now,

01:23:30   again,

01:23:31   is this technically Tahoe's fault?

01:23:32   No,

01:23:32   like it was an electron using a private API,

01:23:34   blah,

01:23:34   blah,

01:23:35   but practically speaking,

01:23:36   it means that if you're perfectly fine in Sequoia,

01:23:38   and then you upgrade to Tahoe and you're running five electron apps all day,

01:23:41   all of a sudden your whole system bogs down.

01:23:43   And again,

01:23:43   Dan Morin has that problem.

01:23:44   And he's like,

01:23:45   I think every single one of my apps has been updated to the new version of electron.

01:23:48   And still I'm getting these horrendous slowdowns that I can't explain.

01:23:51   And that's 26.0.

01:23:53   So just say no to 26.0,

01:23:56   26.1 may be okay.

01:23:59   Again,

01:23:59   we'll see what Marco finds out about the tethering.

01:24:01   stuff,

01:24:01   but like Tahoe is definitely a year where you might want to wait a little bit before upgrading,

01:24:07   especially if they're like,

01:24:08   Marco said,

01:24:08   if there's no thing that you really,

01:24:09   really want,

01:24:10   like,

01:24:11   you know,

01:24:11   if there's some feature that you got to have or some new setting or whatever,

01:24:15   if there's nothing like that,

01:24:16   just wait.

01:24:18   Like I'm,

01:24:18   you know,

01:24:19   I think Rogue and Mavis stuff is all updated.

01:24:20   So technically I could update.

01:24:22   Obviously I'm running Tahoe.

01:24:23   I boot,

01:24:23   reboot this into Tahoe all the time to do dev stuff and test things.

01:24:26   My laptop is running Tahoe over here.

01:24:30   but like Marco,

01:24:31   I feel no compulsion to upgrade.

01:24:33   And unlike Marco,

01:24:34   I go back and forth with my,

01:24:36   my laptop's over there.

01:24:37   My desktop's over here.

01:24:37   I go back and forth between them all the time.

01:24:39   Uh,

01:24:41   and I,

01:24:41   I just like how Sequoia looks better.

01:24:43   So I,

01:24:44   I,

01:24:44   I definitely,

01:24:45   I have a,

01:24:47   uh,

01:24:47   an attraction to not looking at that hideous UI and looking at it.

01:24:51   And so I'm enjoying this one while I can,

01:24:53   uh,

01:24:53   even simple things like the menu bar,

01:24:55   like they made the menu bar transparent.

01:24:56   And then there's that option that says like,

01:24:58   Oh,

01:24:58   make the kind of like the clear and tinted option.

01:25:00   The option on a Tahoe that says,

01:25:02   don't,

01:25:03   don't make the menu bar not be there.

01:25:05   It,

01:25:05   instead of it being completely,

01:25:07   you know,

01:25:08   no background whatsoever.

01:25:09   Uh,

01:25:10   it gives it a background.

01:25:11   That's like the barest of tint.

01:25:13   Like it's like a really like a 50% transparent black,

01:25:16   like tint things.

01:25:17   Like people who want that option,

01:25:19   just make it opaque.

01:25:20   Just like if they're clicking that option,

01:25:21   they probably just want to be opaque.

01:25:22   And by the way,

01:25:23   I have to use that option because if you don't use that option,

01:25:26   it puts like a one and a half inch gradient at the top of your screen

01:25:30   that casts a gradient shadow onto the icons that are on your desktop,

01:25:34   which I don't,

01:25:35   I think that's a bug.

01:25:36   Like it shouldn't do that.

01:25:37   It does the gradient to try to make the text more visible,

01:25:40   like whatever.

01:25:41   And,

01:25:41   and it depends on what your desktop background is.

01:25:43   Cause if your desktop background is,

01:25:44   um,

01:25:44   very dark,

01:25:45   it will do light.

01:25:46   And if it's very light,

01:25:46   it will do dark and yada,

01:25:47   yada right now in Sequoia,

01:25:49   uh,

01:25:49   with my background that I'm using,

01:25:51   my menu bar is white ish.

01:25:54   Uh,

01:25:55   but with the same background Tahoe,

01:25:56   my menu bar is black ish.

01:25:58   And I don't like that because then all my menu titles are in white.

01:26:01   And anyway,

01:26:01   I don't like how it looks.

01:26:03   So I don't know when I'm going to upgrade,

01:26:04   but I'm not being compelled to do so,

01:26:06   especially since I can reboot into it whenever I want.

01:26:08   And I have a laptop that's running it all the time.

01:26:10   All right.

01:26:11   So it sounds like when 26,

01:26:13   one lands presumably soon,

01:26:14   then I'm probably okay.

01:26:16   I'm,

01:26:17   I'm just real nervous.

01:26:17   Cause I'm a very,

01:26:19   very heavy spaces user.

01:26:20   And I believe Dan Morin had said that,

01:26:22   you know,

01:26:22   he is as well.

01:26:23   And that's apparently been a little janky.

01:26:26   So yeah.

01:26:27   Like that's one of the slowdowns,

01:26:28   like switching spaces is like slow and stuttery.

01:26:30   And people like,

01:26:30   is it because liquid glass is like,

01:26:32   that's just a bug that some kind of,

01:26:33   and is it electron related?

01:26:34   Doesn't seem like it,

01:26:37   but maybe,

01:26:37   but like,

01:26:38   I would say like Casey,

01:26:40   what is making you want to update?

01:26:43   Nothing in particular.

01:26:44   I mean,

01:26:45   honestly,

01:26:45   I'm sure that,

01:26:46   well,

01:26:47   right.

01:26:47   I'm sure there's something there that I am interested in that.

01:26:50   I remember that,

01:26:51   you know,

01:26:51   that I was like,

01:26:52   Ooh,

01:26:52   during June,

01:26:53   but whatever it is,

01:26:55   I have forgotten about it since then.

01:26:56   So granted,

01:26:57   yes.

01:26:58   Ha ha.

01:26:58   My memory.

01:26:58   But,

01:26:59   but no,

01:27:00   I mean,

01:27:00   I don't feel like there's anything that I've been like,

01:27:02   yes,

01:27:02   yes,

01:27:03   yes,

01:27:03   yes.

01:27:04   It's finally time.

01:27:05   You know what I mean?

01:27:05   And so maybe I'll just hang on for another month or two and see what happens.

01:27:09   Yeah.

01:27:09   I mean,

01:27:09   there are cool features like the new control center thing that gives you more flexible,

01:27:12   you know,

01:27:13   customizable control center and put a different menu bar icons in the menu bar.

01:27:17   Although there's also bugs related to that.

01:27:18   Someone posted a thing recently on there,

01:27:20   like MacBook Pro with some other laptop with a notch,

01:27:23   the right half of the menu bar was gone.

01:27:25   Like it just wasn't there anymore.

01:27:27   The whole thing with like the,

01:27:29   you know,

01:27:29   the date and everything like that.

01:27:30   I occasionally get like a weird thing where when I log in for the first time,

01:27:34   the,

01:27:35   the date and time is pushed off the right edge of the screen.

01:27:38   And the only way to get it back is to log out and back in.

01:27:39   That's in Sequoia.

01:27:40   That's bug has been around for ages,

01:27:41   but they,

01:27:42   their whole right side of the menu bar was just gone.

01:27:44   There was nothing there.

01:27:45   Which is weird.

01:27:47   But yeah,

01:27:47   like I just,

01:27:48   there are cool features in there.

01:27:50   Like there's the new,

01:27:51   there's the new phone app,

01:27:52   the short people who like shortcuts has lots of cool automations there.

01:27:55   Although you can,

01:27:56   as you can imagine with my recent bug experience,

01:27:58   I'm a little bit wary of shortcuts these days.

01:28:01   But if you don't upgrade to them,

01:28:02   you don't miss those features.

01:28:02   So,

01:28:03   you know,

01:28:04   just stick with what you got,

01:28:06   unless you,

01:28:07   if that's just some reason that you want to upgrade,

01:28:10   maybe like 26.1 is surely going to be better than 26.0.

01:28:14   I can tell you from an app developer's perspective,

01:28:15   they've fixed tons of bugs,

01:28:17   but have they fixed all the bugs in their OS?

01:28:19   That has every Electron app updated.

01:28:21   Maybe wait till 26.5.

01:28:23   Cool.

01:28:26   All right.

01:28:27   Thank you to our sponsors this week,

01:28:29   Claude,

01:28:30   Skims,

01:28:31   and Paka.

01:28:31   And thanks to our members who support us directly.

01:28:33   You can join us at atp.fm slash join.

01:28:36   One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime,

01:28:38   our weekly bonus topic.

01:28:40   Every week,

01:28:40   there is usually between 15 and 30 minutes more of the show

01:28:44   that is in ATP Overtime for members only.

01:28:47   This week in Overtime,

01:28:48   we're going to be talking about

01:28:49   making an app,

01:28:51   an explanation of how an app is created for non-developers

01:28:55   to kind of help understand the process.

01:28:56   You can join once again to listen,

01:28:58   atp.fm slash join.

01:29:00   Thanks everybody.

01:29:01   And we'll talk to you next week.

01:29:03   Now the show is over.

01:29:08   They didn't even mean to begin.

01:29:10   Cause it was accidental.

01:29:12   Oh,

01:29:14   it was accidental.

01:29:15   John didn't do any research.

01:29:19   Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

01:29:21   Cause it was accidental.

01:29:22   It was accidental.

01:29:23   Accidental.

01:29:24   It was accidental.

01:29:26   Accidental.

01:29:27   And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.

01:29:32   And if you're into Mastodon.

01:29:34   And if you're into Mastodon,

01:29:35   you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

01:29:41   So that's Casey Liss.

01:29:42   M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.

01:29:46   anti-marco armen s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a-s-y-r-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a-c-u-s-a. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long.

01:30:06   All right, John. So you've had some more time with, I'm going to call it your Vision Pro, at least for now. And I was wondering, have you done any other things with it? You said in the main show that you tried another attempt at Mac virtual display and that went better. Have you done any of the other stuff? And one of the things I was most curious about, and maybe this will be a short conversation if you haven't done it yet, but when we talked a few months ago, there was that Bono documentary, one-man show thing, not documentary, like a one-man show.

01:30:36   That came out and they had the same source material, but they treated it two very different ways. And there's a non-immersive version where it's just him on stage by himself chatting and talking to you slash at you. But the immersive version is way, way, way different with lots of animations and stuff. Have you had the time to at least watch a portion of the immersive version of the Bono thing?

01:31:01   When I talked about my experiences with the M2, with Casey's M2 Vision Pro, one of the things I left out was a lot of the stuff that I had already done with it, just because it's kind of some of the same things that you guys had already done. And one of those was watching a lot of the content.

01:31:14   And so, yes, I did watch the immersive version of the Bono thing, not the whole thing, but I scrubbed around and watched it because I'd seen the whole thing before and I didn't want to sit through the whole thing again.

01:31:23   And it is very different. Like they really do spend a lot of energy embellishing with graphics and stuff.

01:31:29   Now, I'm not sure if it adds much to the experience.

01:31:32   It's like it's certainly there's lots of more visual flair and lots of interest and makes it makes it so there's more things for you to look at than just like the guy's face talking or whatever.

01:31:42   But I'm not sure how successful it is artistically as an interesting experiment, but I feel like the like the boring like non-Vision Pro, you can just watch it on your television version, gets you most of that experience and maybe less distracting.

01:31:55   So I wasn't that big of a fan of that.

01:31:57   I did watch not all the other content.

01:32:00   In fact, one of the things that I realized I forgot because Steve Trout and Smith's got a Vision Pro now and he's going through some stuff and I forgot to try like the Disney immersive environments.

01:32:08   Like there's one for Alien Earth, which I just talked about in a recent rec diffs and there's like Star Wars-y ones and like there's some Marvel stuff.

01:32:15   I have to try that.

01:32:16   Yeah, there's Avengers Campus is one of them, for example.

01:32:18   Yeah, I didn't do that Marvel thing that you watched.

01:32:21   I'm going to watch that eventually.

01:32:22   But I did watch like a lot of the that that one line of immersive content with the demos and she's like, where's all the immersive content?

01:32:31   I'm like, you see that thing?

01:32:32   She's like, that's it.

01:32:33   Like, that's it.

01:32:33   I watched a bunch of that stuff.

01:32:36   Surprisingly, one of the ones I found most affecting was the the Highline one where the woman is walking on a tightrope above thing.

01:32:45   And I'm not particularly scared of heights, but I feel like that that was an effective use of a thing that is you don't get as big an effect.

01:32:52   On a flat screen as you do in a 3D appearance.

01:32:54   I thought that was a cool one.

01:32:56   Did you do the the parkour one in Paris?

01:32:59   Because that was similar.

01:33:01   I agree with you that the the tightrope walking was more affecting, but that also had a similar vibe to it.

01:33:06   Well, I think the thing about it, I haven't done the Paris one yet.

01:33:09   That's on my list.

01:33:09   But like, I think part of the the tightrope walking one is like, I'm also judging.

01:33:14   I'm not judging these just based on like how well it takes advantage of Vision Pro.

01:33:17   I'm judging them the same way you like not technology wise.

01:33:20   It's like how good a story does it tell like these are all very kind of short things.

01:33:23   They're not, you know, they're they're more like little tone poems or whatever.

01:33:27   Like how effectively do they convey a story and emotion?

01:33:30   I felt like the Highline one did a good job of that, even though it is very similar structure.

01:33:34   The other ones just narrated by a person talking about that.

01:33:36   I just I thought it was well written and affecting and the visuals match the other stuff.

01:33:41   And by the same token, I also found the one with sharks, even though it's just like a bunch of sharks swim around you.

01:33:47   That is very compelling content in 3D.

01:33:49   I didn't think the story of that one was as good, but that's a that's a good demo.

01:33:56   And surprisingly, one of the other ones that I found was good.

01:34:01   Again, this is like has even less to do with Vision Pro and more to do with just the content was the the Moto GP one, the motorcycle ride.

01:34:09   I was just about to ask you the French motorcycle riding guy.

01:34:11   Well, here's the thing for reasons that make sense to me.

01:34:14   They did not have Vision Pro cameras on the motorcycles like they don't put them on the F1 cars and motorcycles even smaller.

01:34:20   Like there's no room to put a gigantic like they're in a competitive race like here, put this giant thing on the front of your bike.

01:34:25   No, thanks.

01:34:25   So if you think you're going to be like now, I'm going to be like, it's like I'm riding the motorcycle.

01:34:30   No, that's not what it is.

01:34:31   This is actual competitive.

01:34:33   As they say in the thing, it's like F1, but for motorcycles, right?

01:34:36   They are professional motorcycle racers.

01:34:38   They're trying to run a race.

01:34:39   They don't care that Apple is there.

01:34:40   So it was just shot like a documentary.

01:34:42   We're like, OK, the cameras were on the sidelines watching the motorcycles go by.

01:34:46   And the cameras were on the guy when he was in, you know, getting ready in his trailer and talking, you know, to his coaches and everything like that.

01:34:53   And the reason I found compelling was when I thought it was like a good story of, you know, this underdog athlete, it's a French rider.

01:34:59   A French person has not won this French Grand Prix in like 70 years.

01:35:04   And how is, you know, is he going to do it?

01:35:06   And he he keeps falling and he's having problems.

01:35:09   And, you know, like it's it's it's underdog type sports story.

01:35:12   One of the things I found most interesting about it was to get an up close look at those motorcycles, because that interests me.

01:35:19   Yeah, like like you're because you're like the cameras are like inches from these motorcycles.

01:35:23   Because you can and I guess it's part of the 3D is like it feels like it's really there because you've got the 3D camera.

01:35:27   But you're just looking at them.

01:35:28   But these motorcycles are amazing looking.

01:35:29   I'm more interested in these than I am at F1 cars at this point, maybe because I know more about F1 cars than I do about the motorcycles.

01:35:35   But like just how they're put together and how they differ from like a road bike, like these racing bicycles and like the equipment that he puts on.

01:35:42   And like just I found that fascinating and super interesting.

01:35:46   And that and I think I would have found that just as fascinating outside the Vision Pro.

01:35:52   just a flat 2D thing, because, again, it wasn't really taking much advantage of the immersive thing.

01:35:58   Maybe when you're up close to the motorcycle.

01:36:01   But like that was interesting.

01:36:03   I did watch Submerged.

01:36:04   I didn't think it was very good.

01:36:05   Interesting.

01:36:06   Why not?

01:36:06   Again, not nothing to do with the Vision Pro-ness, just to do with the like short film.

01:36:11   Like it's very challenging to make a compelling short film.

01:36:13   And I think that one was like, yeah, like just I don't I don't know if it was scripted well and the number of events took place and the characterization and just it didn't all work that well.

01:36:22   If you have a fear of being submerged in water, maybe you'll find it more affecting.

01:36:26   But the Metallica one, I watched all of that one.

01:36:28   I am not a Metallica fan, but I feel like I know what it's like to be on a Metallica concert now.

01:36:33   And I think job done short film, right?

01:36:35   Like it may like if you're ever wondering what those shows are like, this is feels like what they're like, you know, like it gave me that experience.

01:36:44   And it let me see the band performing.

01:36:47   It was a little bit of the production, a little bit hokey with sort of over dramatizing and slow-mo pans on the person's face backstage when they're probably bored out of their mind.

01:36:56   But you get to see how the band performs, how they're, you know, what what what what do people like about Metallica?

01:37:03   I think it conveys that again, I don't like particularly like Metallica, but I you watch this and you understand what people like about Metallica.

01:37:09   What are these fans like about it?

01:37:10   What do they have to offer?

01:37:11   Why are they a famous good band?

01:37:14   And before you move on from that, the moment that Marco and I talked about a lot when the James Hetfield, I think is the singer's name is like right in the face of the fan.

01:37:26   And they they actually did.

01:37:28   I'm recounting from several months ago now, but they they actually held the shot on that fan instead of following James as he walks away.

01:37:35   And I just thought that was just such an incredible moment.

01:37:38   And if I recall correctly, Marco, you felt very similarly.

01:37:40   Yeah.

01:37:40   Did that affect you in any way, shape or form?

01:37:43   Or are you just kind of like, yeah, whatever?

01:37:44   Yeah, no, I remember you guys talking about it and I wasn't looking for it.

01:37:48   But when it came up, I'm like, oh, that must be the thing they were talking about because it was affecting.

01:37:51   And here's the thing about all these little short films.

01:37:53   The hard part is not the Vision Pro part.

01:37:56   The hard part is making a compelling short film.

01:37:58   That moment is compelling outside the Vision Pro.

01:38:01   The reason you're reacting to that is because it's one of the more affecting moments in the short film and other parts are less so.

01:38:06   So like it's kind of like any type of thing where there's a technology, you know, like the movie with like the, you know, the trains coming out of the screen with the first moving pictures.

01:38:13   Like you can do that once or twice, but eventually it's like, OK, well, show me a compelling story.

01:38:17   I'm no longer interested in in the the fascinating medium of the moving picture.

01:38:21   Now you got to actually write a good script, get good actors.

01:38:24   And, you know, like I feel like Vision Pro, these little demo things demonstrate that because very quickly the Vision Pro-ness takes a backseat to.

01:38:32   Is this a thing that I find interesting to watch?

01:38:35   You know, and you can make interesting little short things and you can also make ones that just feel kind of flat.

01:38:41   And what I find is that very quickly I started judging all these based on how much I would like them if I was just watching them on a TV.

01:38:50   Even like I said, even the Highline one, I think that's good, even if you're not in a Vision Pro.

01:38:54   Now the Vision Pro-ness adds to it, but that can only be an ad.

01:38:59   It can't make up for, you know, a bad script, a bad story, bad editing or whatever.

01:39:04   And the other thing I'll add in all this content that I'm watching so far, I haven't watched the parkour one.

01:39:10   So far, fingers crossed, zero motion sickness.

01:39:13   I'm genuinely shocked by that.

01:39:16   I'm as shocked as you are.

01:39:17   I didn't have it in the demo either, but I'm like, of course, I saw very little things.

01:39:20   I haven't watched the parkour one.

01:39:22   I did watch all of the flying over like scenic places like the Hawaii and all that stuff.

01:39:27   I thought maybe that one would make me motion sick.

01:39:29   But no, they fly so gently.

01:39:31   You know, I got to say, I am not prone to motion sickness, but, and I can't remember a specific example of a particular moment, but there's been times, particularly in flight, where not that I've been motion sick, but I've had a little bit of like maybe light vertigo where I'm kind of like-

01:39:45   In flight as in you're on an airplane wearing the Vision Pro?

01:39:46   No, no, no, no.

01:39:47   I'm sorry.

01:39:48   When you're doing like a soren in Disney World, like, you know, you're the perspective of the plane flying over the land.

01:39:53   Boundless, I think that's called.

01:39:54   Is that what it's called?

01:39:55   Yeah.

01:39:55   And I mean, this will happen to, or like, I think during Submerged, if I recall correctly, we talked about this,

01:40:01   that there was a moment where the camera's moving and it's, it's just kind of off-putting, not, I'm making it out to be worse than it is, but it's a little bit off-putting because your body expects to feel.

01:40:12   And all the feelings that you associate with your body moving because the camera's moving, but you're stationary and yet your body's expecting a feeling it's not getting.

01:40:22   And it's, it's, again, it's a lightly off-putting.

01:40:25   And, and I feel like I've gotten that from time to time when doing like flying scenes, which is weird to say, to hear you say that you're unaffected by it because you're, you're affected by everything.

01:40:36   And I'm affected by nothing.

01:40:38   And there's occasions.

01:40:38   Yeah.

01:40:39   Like the, but the flying ones, they fly.

01:40:40   So like, they're not moving fast.

01:40:42   They're not swooping.

01:40:43   Like, it's just more kind of like a slow, uh, moving over stuff.

01:40:47   Like, uh, I also watched the, uh, the, um, ice surfing and Iceland.

01:40:51   I thought that story was interesting.

01:40:52   Um, but you know, like, you know, I, my memory of these and my ranking of them has nothing to do with the, the, how well they take advantage of the vision pro.

01:41:01   And I, you know, you guys talked a lot about like, what's too much cuts, what's not enough or whatever.

01:41:06   I, you're right that like cutting too much doesn't lend itself well to the vision pro, but also again, if these were flat 2d, bad editing is bad thing, right?

01:41:15   Like, like it's, it's, uh, it's difficult to, to pull this off with or without the 3d cameras.

01:41:21   Um, and it's a challenge to make compelling content yet.

01:41:23   So I haven't seen every single thing, but I've seen a lot of the stuff and I will go back and watch the rest of it just because each one of them, I feel like, you know,

01:41:30   I'd like to see someone, you know, and I don't blame like the submerged people or anything.

01:41:34   I was like, it's new technology that let's, let's figure out what we can do.

01:41:38   Let's try some stuff.

01:41:38   So this is stuff you try.

01:41:39   It doesn't work.

01:41:40   Like I think a lot of the shot design and editing and submerged does not work, but someone's got to try it to find that out.

01:41:46   You know, it on paper, it looks like it might be compelling in practice.

01:41:50   Uh, having shallow depth of field, uh, is not really great inside the vision probe because your eyes try to focus on the part that they can't focus on.

01:41:57   And it's never going to come into focus.

01:41:58   Yeah.

01:41:59   That's, that's the part that gives me, I think a little bit of motion sickness, like, or at least like eye strain or like some version of it.

01:42:06   Like I, like whenever I, whenever I try to focus on something that, that is no, that is not in focus and I can't focus on it, that messes with my feelings.

01:42:15   I think more than the motion does.

01:42:16   Yeah.

01:42:17   We talked about this when we were, before the vision bro came out about like having variable focal and the various technologies to do that.

01:42:22   But that doesn't exist in the vision pro it's a fixed focal distance.

01:42:25   Um, and so when anything's out of focus, it will never be in focus.

01:42:28   Um, and the way that manifested not for motion sickness, but for like eye crossingly headache inducing annoyingness.

01:42:37   It's on the moto GP one people talk in French and they have subtitles and this is, I don't know if it's an inherent problem of the vision pro, but the choice they made to deal with this was difficult because here's the thing with the subtitles.

01:42:49   The subtitles are on the screen as like a tinted black rectangle with white text on it or whatever.

01:42:54   Right.

01:42:55   Uh, you're watching the vision pro you're watching these guys.

01:42:57   They're walking around by the motorcycle or they're sitting on a couch talking to each other.

01:43:00   He's riding on a stationary bike or whatever.

01:43:02   And he's talking and the subtitle stuff appears very, very often the subtitle stuff in like picture space on the screen was not at the depth.

01:43:15   It was in focus wise on the screen.

01:43:17   If that makes sense, like my eyes would try to focus on where the text would be if it was floating.

01:43:25   Where it appears to be in the scene.

01:43:26   Like it looks like it's floating between this guy and that guy or like two feet in front of the couch, but it's not there.

01:43:32   I have to like to look at these subtitles.

01:43:35   They're overlaid on top of everything.

01:43:36   I have to focus on whatever the fixed focal distance of the display is, but my eyes would try to focus on not the fixed focal distance of the display, but like further into the image where it looks like that thing is hovering in the space of the 2d image that's behind it.

01:43:52   And it would make me essentially go cross-eyed and double vision on.

01:43:55   I couldn't read the subtitles because I kept double visioning.

01:43:57   I'm like, why is this happening?

01:43:59   Are the subtitles blurry?

01:44:00   It's like, no, you keep thinking the subtitles are somewhere in the space of the scene.

01:44:05   They're not.

01:44:06   They're not in the scene.

01:44:07   They are at the fixed focal distance of the display and you have to focus on them there.

01:44:14   Even though looking at that part of the picture, which by the way, you can see through the little subtitle thing, right?

01:44:18   Even though focusing on that part of the picture, like Marco said, would require you to focus on a distance that is not the same as the focal distance of the vision pro.

01:44:26   And so you're getting that Marco when you just see a blurry version in the, you know, on the screen, I'm getting it trying to read the subtitles.

01:44:33   And that's a difficult problem because it's so convincing that the subtitles are there floating in the scene that it causes my eyes to pick the wrong focal distance.

01:44:42   So maybe I could get used to it or maybe they could put the, put the subtitles lower down or make them opaque or I don't know, like make them go edge to edge.

01:44:52   So they, so it's so clear that they couldn't possibly be floating, floating between the ottoman and the couch, you know, like it's a tricky problem to have, but it's something I didn't, I didn't think of before.

01:45:02   Subtitles in a fixed vision, fixed focal length VR subtitles.

01:45:06   Your brain might think they are not where they are and you might get double vision.

01:45:10   Yeah, it's very, when, when you're, I don't know if it's just like me or my eyes or like the way my eyes work.

01:45:19   I don't know what it is, but like when I, like in real life, in regular life, as I have needed reading glasses for up close focus over the last, you know, three, three to four years, when I am not wearing reading glasses or progressives, and when I try to look at something up close that, that I can't get sharp, it causes similar kind of like eye strain.

01:45:39   Like I, and I think people who have lived with imperfect vision for their whole lives, maybe, maybe they're more used to it than I am and maybe it doesn't have the same, you know, effect or noticeability for them.

01:45:50   But for me, it's like really uncomfortable and I start getting like headaches and eye strain and, you know, like it's, it's very uncomfortable for me to be unable to focus on something that, that I'm trying to read or, or look at.

01:46:04   Um, and so I switch to glasses whenever possible or avoid doing those things, you know, close up when I can't in the vision pro, nothing is ever that much in focus.

01:46:15   And I have the reading inserts for it.

01:46:17   They don't seem to make a difference for the distance that it's rendering things at.

01:46:21   And it's because of, as we were mentioning earlier, all of those different layers of image processing and slight, you know, softening or sampling or warping that are occurring to make all the optics work in the vision pro.

01:46:35   Nothing in the vision pro is super sharp to my eyes.

01:46:38   Some things are more than others, but like nothing is really, really sharp all the time.

01:46:44   And when I'm watching immersive video, that is made even more obvious to me.

01:46:49   And part of that's just because immersive video oftentimes is not shot super high resolutions or not delivered at super high resolutions yet because everything is so young around it.

01:46:56   Uh, but also part of that is just like the screens and the realities of it and the optics of things not being fully in focus.

01:47:02   And so when I'm watching that immersive video, so often I'm feeling that same eye strain feeling that as I'm, as if I'm trying to read my phone without my glasses on and I can't quite get it sharp.

01:47:14   And it really throws me off and it makes me feel like kind of unwell and certainly unpleasant.

01:47:20   And I don't know if I'll ever be able to solve that problem.

01:47:23   That might just be how my eyes react to that kind of thing.

01:47:26   Maybe this will just never work for me.

01:47:29   I don't know.

01:47:30   Uh, I, I think the eye strain you're talking about, like it's, it's less familiar to me because I'm nearsighted, which means I can't see things far away.

01:47:37   Uh, and when you can't see things far away, there is no thing that my, my understanding, at least my experience and some optometrists can write in and tell me if I'm wrong about this, uh, is that there's nothing the muscles that squish your eyeball can do to make you see things far away.

01:47:56   They're far away.

01:47:58   They can't, the muscles can't push.

01:47:59   They can only pull.

01:48:00   That's all muscles do is they contract.

01:48:02   They either contract or don't contract.

01:48:04   And there's not two opposing sets of muscles.

01:48:06   One of them that pulls your eyeball out of your face.

01:48:08   And one of them pulls your eyeball in.

01:48:09   There's no, right.

01:48:11   Uh, if you're looking at something that's up close, what you're trying to do is have those muscles in your eye, squish your eyeball so that it can focus on the things that are closer to you.

01:48:21   And as you get older, uh, your lens gets less flexible because it gets harder and yellowed and gross and just like the rest of your body.

01:48:29   Um, and, and the lens doesn't squish as much, but damned if your muscles in your eye won't try to squish it.

01:48:37   And that's, I feel like that eye strain feeling.

01:48:40   I can get that by either putting on my distance contacts or putting on my distance glasses and trying to look at my phone screen.

01:48:45   And my eyes are like, come on, squish those frigging lenses just a little bit more and you'll be able to focus.

01:48:53   And it's never going to happen because you're old and lenses just aren't going to squish like that anymore.

01:48:59   And you get eye strain, uh, if that's happening inside the vision pro, like maybe I don't know what the solution is, but like I, I went back and forth on this back when the vision pro came out and also for this M2 one to figure out what I was going to do with my contact lenses and stuff.

01:49:14   Um, I'm pretty sure Apple recommends, according to all the texts that I could find, they use your distance glasses prescription in the vision pro, which makes me think Marco that you should not be using any kind of lenses.

01:49:26   If you don't need a glasses to drive, if your distance vision is uncorrected, then you shouldn't have any lenses in the vision pro.

01:49:32   Yeah.

01:49:33   I, but I, I've tried it both ways.

01:49:35   Like I spent, I spent significant time with it, both with, with no corrections and with the plus one reading glasses, uh, reading inserts.

01:49:43   And in, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.

01:49:46   Like I, I really can't tell any difference at all when I use them versus not using them.

01:49:49   Do you get less eye strain with no inserts?

01:49:51   No, it's exactly.

01:49:52   Because when I'm, when I'm looking at the vision pro, the sharpest things in the vision pro are the UI.

01:49:58   It's like the windows, the controls.

01:50:00   Those are actually the sharpest things.

01:50:01   What is not sharp is video content.

01:50:04   And I, and it seems like it's a combination of like low resolution of the signal and also, you know, the optics of not having everything in the scene be in focus.

01:50:15   And, and it just, it never looks good to me.

01:50:18   It always looks a little bit soft, a little bit blurry or a lot blurry if I'm trying to look around the scene more.

01:50:24   And all it, like the only way I can watch immersive video on the vision pro without having really bad eye problems or motion sickness or other things is if I diligently never look at the periphery.

01:50:37   If I only look straight ahead and never look around the scene, which is really hard because you can see the whole scene.

01:50:44   So I always want to look, Hey, what's over there?

01:50:46   Like it's really hard to not look around.

01:50:49   And to be clear, what you're talking about is moving your eyeballs, not moving your head.

01:50:53   Yes.

01:50:53   Like I want to look around the scene and maybe even move my head a little bit.

01:50:58   Sure.

01:50:58   Well, because moving your head, you can keep your eyes focused on the center of the displays where most of the information is.

01:51:03   Yeah.

01:51:03   But, but the problem is the video itself is not shot with the edges of the scene in focus, but you can see what's there sort of.

01:51:10   And it's just, that comes down to what the, what the video content is.

01:51:13   But like I was saying, when I was comparing the iPad to the vision pro, I can tell that the vision pro has less dots per degree than the iPad held at the distance close to my face that I, in my retina iPad.

01:51:24   You know, like it looks softer, but I, I mean, TV looks softer before it was HD as well.

01:51:31   We're fine with it.

01:51:32   Like 720p versus 1080 versus 240 or whatever standard def was.

01:51:36   I, I like softer video video with less information bothers me less.

01:51:43   It seems like what your eyes are constantly trying to make those sharper as if, as if you have like your distance glasses on and you're trying to read your, as if you were trying to look at your phone without your reading glasses.

01:51:53   Right. And you're like, if I just, if my eyeballs just squish a little bit, surely that becomes sharper, but like you're never going to add more pixels to that display.

01:51:59   And maybe your vision is good enough to really see the limitations of them.

01:52:03   I, I, again, I see the softness as well.

01:52:05   Like I said, with Mac virtual display, I see how much less crisp it is than the actual display, but I also see how much more crisp it is in the 3k display on the Intel thing.

01:52:15   But my eyes are not saying if only you squish more, that will get sharper.

01:52:19   It's just, I'm accepting of the, the resolution that it is.

01:52:22   Um, and, and speaking of Steve Trouten-Smith, who's got his as well, he's like, I don't think they need to add any more pixels to these display.

01:52:27   I disagree.

01:52:28   I think you disagree as well, Marco.

01:52:29   They need to more, add more pixels to these display.

01:52:31   Like it's not pressing, but like technology should march on in the next few decades.

01:52:35   If they can add twice or four times as many pixels to these displays, first of all, field division has to get bigger.

01:52:42   Like the FOV, I forget what it is, but it is narrow and that could be much better.

01:52:47   And second of all, even within the existing FOV, we need more pixels.

01:52:51   Like, I think you should be able to get it so that it is the same number of pixels per degree as a retina display at normal viewing distances.

01:52:58   And even then I would say you could go a little bit farther if you wanted to make it look more realistic than a retina display.

01:53:04   Because let's be honest, even though you, I can't see the retina pixels, kind of see them a little bit if you get real close.

01:53:11   So do you have, I'm sorry, maybe you said this and I missed it.

01:53:15   Do you have Zeiss inserts yet or no?

01:53:17   I do not.

01:53:18   I'm working on that, but I currently do not have them.

01:53:20   So I'm, I'm, uh, you know, knowing that I have to do vision, uh, that my distance vision, I am trying to cobble together.

01:53:28   A set of distance vision contact lenses from old and new contact lenses that I have hanging around because unfortunately my eyes are, my eyes are different from each other.

01:53:35   And my actual real current contact prescription intentionally has one eye for distance and one eye for up close, which sounds terrible, but it's better than not being able to read your phone with your contacts.

01:53:44   And believe me, and your brain gets used to it.

01:53:46   Right.

01:53:46   Um, so I'm cobbling together a slightly inaccurate, uh, prescription with contacts, which means every time I want to use the vision pro, I have to put in contacts because as soon as I'm done using the vision pro, I need to take those out.

01:53:58   Because I cannot use a computer or a phone with those contacts.

01:54:01   And so it's kind of a, it's kind of an ordeal to use the vision pro, which is, uh, you know, if, if, and when I get lens inserts, that will go a long way towards making it easier just to pop on the vision pro.

01:54:11   What I will say though, is I've become very good at using the vision pro without contacts in like I take off my glasses and I put on the vision pro and it's as blurry as hell in there.

01:54:21   It's like, you know, 20, 350, 24, like whatever my vision is like without them.

01:54:26   But if you know what the UI looks like and you know, can sense changes in like saturation and brightness, like I can actually use the UI.

01:54:34   The problem is like, when I was trying to like, I was trying to test the, like hold down on the X button thing that, uh, that, uh, who was it?

01:54:41   Nick wrote in about.

01:54:42   I'm like, Oh, let me put the vision pro on and try that.

01:54:44   So here I am blurry in the vision pro.

01:54:46   I get the X button.

01:54:47   I pinch to hold down the menu pops up.

01:54:49   I'm like, does that say hide others?

01:54:54   Maybe like if, because I knew what it was supposed to say beforehand, I could believe that.

01:54:58   And then, you know, I could select the option and do it or whatever.

01:55:01   So I don't recommend using the vision pro that way, but let's be honest.

01:55:04   If I take off my glasses and walk around the house, it's a very similar experience.

01:55:09   So, uh, uh, sitting here now, what a week and a half, two weeks in or whatever it's been, uh, vision pro quote unquote ownership, uh, granted the price was incredible.

01:55:20   So the price was right for you, but do you, uh, on a broad level, and I'll probably ask you this again in a couple of weeks.

01:55:28   Are you enjoying it?

01:55:29   Do you, do you not like it?

01:55:30   Is it burdensome?

01:55:31   Is it fun?

01:55:31   Is it crappy?

01:55:32   What, what is your current thinking on a macro level?

01:55:35   I like having it here.

01:55:36   It's a fun, cool gadget to play with.

01:55:38   I'm glad I didn't pay for it.

01:55:40   Fair.

01:55:40   Like it's, it's ideal.

01:55:42   Like, Oh, if someone's going to lend you one for free for a while.

01:55:44   Sure.

01:55:44   Yeah.

01:55:45   It's good.

01:55:45   If someone offers you that, take it.

01:55:46   Uh, you know, it's, it's a cool thing to try out.

01:55:49   Um, but when I have to send it back to you, I'm probably not going to be too broken up about it.