00:00:14 ◼ ► context of the Mac pro? I think we can. Um, but you're welcome world, uh, because we have
00:00:20 ◼ ► apparently caused Apple, just us, nobody else has caused Apple to ship a more sane workouts app
00:00:27 ◼ ► in watchOS 26.4. Uh, I haven't actually tried this myself, but allegedly, uh, in the new version of
00:00:34 ◼ ► watchOS, you can actually press on a workout type to start that workout. You don't have to wait for
00:00:39 ◼ ► the stupid animation for the stupid play button to show up. You can actually just hit the giant green
00:00:44 ◼ ► thing that says, you know, like traditional strength training or whatever, or outdoor run or what have
00:00:50 ◼ ► you. Uh, allegedly that is now fixed. You're welcome world. Yeah, that's, uh, that's very
00:00:55 ◼ ► promising. I'll also, um, a couple of quick notes. Um, when, when I was last ranting about the workout
00:01:00 ◼ ► app, I did, I mentioned that I wish they had some smarter, smarter settings around like reminding you
00:01:07 ◼ ► to unpause workouts when you like, you know, when you start moving again, this actually is a built-in
00:01:13 ◼ ► feature. They do have reminders automatically to remind you to pause a workout. If you've like
00:01:18 ◼ ► stopped moving for a while and to unpause it. And in fact, there's even a feature where we'll try to
00:01:23 ◼ ► automatically pause and unpause it when you start, you know, if you like stop in a, in a run, um, and
00:01:27 ◼ ► then you, you resume again, it will actually try to remind you. What I found though, is that those are
00:01:32 ◼ ► first of all, very annoying. Like when you, if you're actually on a run, I have used those and I have found
00:01:38 ◼ ► them to be just so aggressive of just like, if you stop for a second, like if you stop like at, at an
00:01:44 ◼ ► intersection, tap, tap, you want to pause your workout? Like, no, I'm just, I'm going to be here for
00:01:48 ◼ ► eight seconds. Like no. Um, so I, I don't like those for that. But then also I have found that
00:01:53 ◼ ► in walking workouts, they tend to be a lot less, uh, accurate. And I don't know if they're just
00:01:58 ◼ ► looking for bigger changes in speed. Um, so I have, I have not found the current implementation of those
00:02:03 ◼ ► to be very good. It also doesn't address things like ability to undo a bad GPS point or undo a missed
00:02:09 ◼ ► save. Um, there is however, at least a setting that I turned on the, the end workout button.
00:02:15 ◼ ► there's an option to have it prompt you before it officially ends with a confirmation step that
00:02:19 ◼ ► helps accidental endings become less likely. Um, but it's still, it still needs a lot of just kind of
00:02:26 ◼ ► polish. Like there's what we like about Apple, what got us all to Apple in the first place
00:02:32 ◼ ► was lots of little smart design and lots of little delights throughout much of their user interface and
00:02:38 ◼ ► many of their features of their, of their software and hardware. And the Apple watch seems to have like
00:02:42 ◼ ► none of that. Like it just seems like the Apple watch has was designed in a very rigid way to have
00:02:49 ◼ ► exactly these features, nothing else. And again, part of that was, you know, for hardware constraint
00:02:55 ◼ ► reasons that were very good reasons, but so many of those kind of like little nice delights of like,
00:03:00 ◼ ► Oh, that was smart. And I needed that. Thank you. Those things seem to be mostly missing on,
00:03:04 ◼ ► on watchOS. Um, and so the workout app is, is one example of many where like there's a lot of room
00:03:09 ◼ ► for that. And I wish they would add more of it. What they have is a nice start, but considering
00:03:14 ◼ ► we're like, what, 11 years into the Apple watch platform, something like that. Um, it could be a
00:03:22 ◼ ► All right. Let's enter a formula one corner for hopefully just a couple of minutes. Um,
00:03:30 ◼ ► They sure do have corners. Although I think you can come up with a better name for this instead of
00:03:33 ◼ ► calling it formula one apex. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know enough formula
00:03:38 ◼ ► We'll workshop it. But anyways, uh, first of all, I wanted to very briefly, uh, spoil last,
00:03:44 ◼ ► this past Sunday's, uh, China grand Prix and say that this really so far is a very interesting
00:03:49 ◼ ► season to start watching formula one to briefly recap. There's all new rules, all new regulations.
00:03:53 ◼ ► The cars are totally different. And, uh, my favorite team McLaren, they have two drivers as
00:03:58 ◼ ► every team does. And neither of their drivers made it to the starting line. This, this last
00:04:03 ◼ ► race, which stank, but I'm going to claim that that left the space for a very interesting podium.
00:04:09 ◼ ► So the winner of the race, uh, is a 19 year old who races for Mercedes. His teammate was, uh, I believe
00:04:18 ◼ ► second. And then former Mercedes superstar now at Ferrari, who has not done anything good in the last
00:04:24 ◼ ► season or two, Lewis Hamilton, arguably the greatest of all time, potentially, I think by wins, he is the
00:04:30 ◼ ► greatest of all time was also on the podium and it made for a really adorable moment where you have these
00:04:34 ◼ ► two actual current Mercedes drivers and a former Mercedes driver and they're the race engineer for
00:04:40 ◼ ► the winner, which is basically the dude on the other end of the, um, radio was formerly Lewis Hamilton's
00:04:45 ◼ ► race engineer. And so, you know, it was a really, really lovely podium, even though my particular team
00:04:51 ◼ ► didn't even make it. Um, and so again, really good time to pick up formula one, if you're at all
00:04:56 ◼ ► interested, but that I will stop trying to sell it. I'll stop being a shill at this point.
00:05:00 ◼ ► With regard to follow-up, uh, we have a little bit of information about cameras. John and I got
00:05:04 ◼ ► ourselves wrapped around the axle with regard to cameras. When we talked about it last week, Matt
00:05:08 ◼ ► Rigby writes in the TV broadcast, I'd say that onboard cameras are perhaps 15% of the coverage at
00:05:13 ◼ ► most. And they mostly use the track mounted cameras like any other sport, which is exactly true. I should
00:05:17 ◼ ► have made that more plain when we were talking about it. Uh, but again, you know, you can choose if
00:05:22 ◼ ► you'd like to view other cameras, uh, a account that goes by the name, the racing line. Uh, if an onboard
00:05:27 ◼ ► camera fails during a race and no action is taken, the only time an onboard camera failure
00:05:31 ◼ ► has had a direct impact on a race was the 1995 Italian Grand Prix. Ferrari was leading first
00:05:36 ◼ ► and second when Jean Alessi's, I hope I had that right, camera detached from the lead car and
00:05:41 ◼ ► hit Gerard Berger in the second car, breaking the suspension. Whoopsie-dipsies. Alessi's leading
00:05:46 ◼ ► car broke down a lap later with an unrelated wheel bearing failure. Ferrari throwing away race
00:05:50 ◼ ► wins is a constant in F1 history, can confirm. Uh, also, uh, the racing line pointed us to a really
00:05:55 ◼ ► great about 10 minute YouTube overview of all the cameras in the car of which I think there's seven or
00:05:59 ◼ ► eight or something like that. The video said it's very, very interesting, very cool stuff.
00:06:03 ◼ ► Additionally, uh, something I should have talked about when we were discussing cameras and whatnot,
00:06:08 ◼ ► uh, Eric Fox reminded me that one thing you didn't mention was that the other, that the other two might
00:06:13 ◼ ► find interesting as in Marco and John, uh, for follow-up is how the driver feeds also give you
00:06:18 ◼ ► access to their radio communications with their respective teams. Of course, the best radio messages,
00:06:22 ◼ ► red, the whiniest, uh, get put on the main broadcast, which is true. And I don't think I mentioned that
00:06:27 ◼ ► at all. And that's a really great point from Eric. And that can be very fascinating. Normally it's not
00:06:31 ◼ ► that interesting, but it can be fascinating. And then finally, with regard to F1, uh, Brendan Webb
00:06:36 ◼ ► writes, I'm not sure why Apple hides the Sky Sports replays on the main navigation, but you can search
00:06:42 ◼ ► for Sky Sports China or whatever race you're looking for and they magically appear. So I should have said a
00:06:46 ◼ ► little context. I had said in the last episode that, uh, as far as I could tell, at least in replays,
00:06:51 ◼ ► there's no way to get the Sky Sports feed, which is mostly about the commentators. Um, I, I like the,
00:06:58 ◼ ► the Sky Sports commentators. I find them to be egregiously, uh, UK biased, you know, Lewis Hamilton
00:07:04 ◼ ► and George Russell, you know, and, and Lando Norris can never put any foot wrong anywhere for any time.
00:07:10 ◼ ► And that's, I mean, hi, I'm American. I know how that goes, but, uh, it gets to be a little
00:07:14 ◼ ► much from time to time. Well, anyways, a lot of people prefer it because that's what F1 used to,
00:07:18 ◼ ► or excuse me, that's what ESPN used to broadcast. Well, apparently instead of just using it as like
00:07:22 ◼ ► a different audio track, which I think is all it really is, Apple treats it as an entirely different
00:07:27 ◼ ► broadcast. But I think the only way I've been able to find it is exactly what Brendan says. You have
00:07:32 ◼ ► to actually search for Sky Sports, whatever, in order to find it, which again, is just bananas to me.
00:07:45 ◼ ► you know, the American partner for F1 coverage, but golly, it's been slow out of the gate,
00:07:49 ◼ ► but what are you going to do? All right. Let's talk Rosetta. Colin McKellar writes with regard
00:07:54 ◼ ► to processor emulation and how long it lasts. I did some Wikipedia diving and put together this post
00:07:59 ◼ ► about how long Apple's processor emulation lasts on the Mac. This looks like a three mile long post,
00:08:04 ◼ ► but it's actually a bunch of charts and stuff. It's pretty good stuff. Um, and John, I think you've
00:08:09 ◼ ► extracted some stuff, which we'll talk about in a second. Yeah, that's Colin continuing here.
00:08:13 ◼ ► Yeah. So Colin continues and writes, in short, 68K emulation was supported on PowerPC for as long
00:08:18 ◼ ► as classic macOS existed, including when it lived on as the classic environment in macOS 10. PowerPC
00:08:24 ◼ ► emulation, the original Rosetta, was around for five and a half years after Mac's transition to Intel.
00:08:28 ◼ ► According to Apple's present plans, Rosetta 2 will last about 18 months longer than Rosetta 1.
00:08:34 ◼ ► Yeah. And then I pulled out the, some more interesting info from, uh, this post, which is how long, uh,
00:08:40 ◼ ► each architecture was the current architecture for the Mac. So 68K was the, the architecture for the Mac
00:08:47 ◼ ► for 10 years and seven months. PowerPC for 11 years and eight months and Intel for 14 years and four months.
00:08:53 ◼ ► And so far, Apple Silicon has just been five years and four months. So Intel, uh, the Mac has been Intel
00:08:58 ◼ ► longer than any other processor. Um, and maybe that's why I feel like, uh, even though they're,
00:09:03 ◼ ► according to these, uh, stats, it's going to be 18 months longer than Rosetta 1 lasted. It just feels
00:09:08 ◼ ► shorter because Intel has been around so long. Maybe it's just because of the prevalence of Intel
00:09:11 ◼ ► software, like going to Intel opened up this whole new world of stuff that became easier to compile for
00:09:18 ◼ ► Darwin essentially. Um, but yeah, uh, it's, uh, you know, I, I, my recollection of 68K to PowerPC is
00:09:26 ◼ ► basically what they said. Like it basically never went away. It didn't go away until classic Mac OS
00:09:31 ◼ ► went away. Even then it was classic, classic environment inside Mac OS 10. Uh, but PowerPC to
00:09:36 ◼ ► Intel, PowerPC didn't stick around that long at all. The other thing was Intel was so much faster than
00:09:40 ◼ ► PowerPC. And I guess that's also true of, uh, Apple Silicon with, uh, Intel. So anyway, um,
00:09:45 ◼ ► it's really is just a feel thing. Like it just feels like it's a little bit too soon because
00:09:49 ◼ ► circumstances are different, but it will in fact be 18 months longer than one of their transitions,
00:09:53 ◼ ► but shorter than the other. Then related to Tom Obarsky writes on Reddit. I saw that a user received
00:09:59 ◼ ► a pop-up warning of upcoming deprecation from a fresh install of final cut pro non-subscription on a brand
00:10:06 ◼ ► new Mac book Neo. That's something else. And so, uh, we'll put a link to the Reddit post, but the little
00:10:10 ◼ ► notification reads support ending for Intel based apps. This version of final cut pro will not open in a
00:10:19 ◼ ► That's a terrible message because I'm assuming it's not final cut pro is not the problem.
00:10:24 ◼ ► Yeah. So, uh, Tom continues. There's some speculation as to whether this is because the
00:10:29 ◼ ► A18 pro is not seen as an M chip and therefore is assumed it must be Intel or whether a component
00:10:34 ◼ ► within an FX library could still be flagged as Intel and thus would invalidate the whole install
00:10:39 ◼ ► weird edge case to say the least. If I were to guess the, hi, this is Casey. Uh, if I were to guess,
00:10:44 ◼ ► I would say that it's probably a library or something like that, but I mean, I don't think
00:10:48 ◼ ► that the, the A18 not being seen as an M chip is definitely wrong. It's plausible for sure.
00:10:52 ◼ ► I don't think that's very plausible. I mean, there's a bunch of ways to look up the architecture
00:10:57 ◼ ► and they, you know, the answer is, is it arm or is it not arm? And the A18 pro is very clearly
00:11:01 ◼ ► arm. Uh, if you were to look it up on a phone that ran it, I think it would, the answer would
00:11:04 ◼ ► come back as arm. So I think it's got to be a library or a plugin or something. And speaking of
00:11:09 ◼ ► that, I don't have the notes, but Apple just bought whatever that, uh, that Final Cut Pro
00:11:12 ◼ ► plugin company. Oh yeah. Yeah. I do wonder if they're, uh, you know, the best way to make sure
00:11:17 ◼ ► that any Intel only plugins are no longer Intel only, just buy the company and make sure they're
00:11:25 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Lisa. So a few months ago, I was looking to get a new mattress
00:11:31 ◼ ► for Michaela because we bought something unremarkable off of Amazon. And despite being well-reviewed,
00:11:35 ◼ ► it's a pile of trash. I felt terrible about it. And I, at this time that I was looking about for a good
00:11:41 ◼ ► mattress for Michaela, Lisa reached out and said, Hey, would you like a mattress so you can talk about
00:11:45 ◼ ► it on the ad read? And I said, yes, please. And I got Michaela a natural hybrid mattress and then
00:11:53 ◼ ► immediately regretted my choices because I wanted a natural hybrid mattress after sleeping on it for
00:12:02 ◼ ► Lisa has a whole lineup of beautifully crafted mattresses tailored to how you sleep. Each mattress
00:12:07 ◼ ► is designed with specific sleep positions and feel preferences in mind. Their mattresses are
00:12:12 ◼ ► meticulously designed and assembled here in the United States for exceptional quality. Plus they back it
00:12:16 ◼ ► all up with free shipping, easy returns and a 120 night sleep trial. Lisa isn't just about sleep
00:12:23 ◼ ► either. It's also about impact. They donate thousands of mattresses each year to those in need while also
00:12:27 ◼ ► partnering with organizations like clean hub to help remove harmful plastic waste from our oceans.
00:12:31 ◼ ► And who doesn't like that? So like I said, we got Michaela a natural hybrid mattress. This features
00:12:36 ◼ ► some moisture wicking organic cotton that apparently is from New Zealand, uh, on the top of it,
00:12:42 ◼ ► which keeps you cool, but also warm all at the same time. And it gets that sweat away from you.
00:12:45 ◼ ► It is genuinely very, very good. And I'm pretty darn sure a Lisa mattress is in my future. So
00:12:51 ◼ ► if you like me are thinking about buying a Lisa mattress, go to Lisa.com for 20% off mattresses. Plus
00:12:58 ◼ ► get an extra $50 off with the promo code ATP exclusive for our listeners. That's L E E S A.com promo code
00:13:04 ◼ ► ATP for 20% off mattresses. Plus an extra $50 off support our show and let them know that we sent you
00:13:11 ◼ ► after checkout Lisa.com promo code ATP. Thank you so much to Lisa for sponsoring the show.
00:13:17 ◼ ► Some teardowns have been released recently. Uh, the iPhone 17 E has an iFixit teardown. We'll put a
00:13:26 ◼ ► link in the show notes and it appears that a lot of the parts are the same as we saw in the 16.
00:13:31 ◼ ► Yeah. And interestingly, one of the things they pointed out is that, um, say you've got a 16 E
00:13:40 ◼ ► And it mostly works like, so there's a few points, like it doesn't, so MagSafe will attach to it and
00:13:47 ◼ ► charge it, but you don't get the little like animation, you know, the little circle filling
00:13:51 ◼ ► thing or whatever it is because like, there's a little, it's, it's a little bit of a Franken phone,
00:13:54 ◼ ► right? It's not, not a Franco phone. So to be clear, so, so the 16 E did support Qi charging,
00:14:01 ◼ ► just not MagSafe. Right. But that means, but the, the animation that you get for MagSafe is the,
00:14:06 ◼ ► like the green ring that appears or whatever, but it will charge it. So anyway, many parts are,
00:14:11 ◼ ► I think basically every part is the same except for the, like the, the logic board or whatever. And
00:14:17 ◼ ► they, they, they made a phone out of a mixture of a whole bunch of parts. They were very excited
00:14:21 ◼ ► about the part interchangeability and the fact that they didn't get hassled by the software for like
00:14:25 ◼ ► parts pairing and stuff like that. But, uh, yeah, 17 E is just a 16 E with a different logic board and a
00:14:35 ◼ ► first of all, Gruber had a post with regard to the on camera and also Mike, uh, uh, on screen
00:14:41 ◼ ► indicators and, uh, Gruber linked to Apple's platform security guide, which states the MacBook
00:14:47 ◼ ► Neo combined system software and dedicated Silicon elements within the 18 pro to provide additional
00:14:53 ◼ ► security for the camera feed. The architecture is designed to prevent any untrusted software,
00:15:03 ◼ ► And the context here is that the MacBook Neo doesn't have a little green led next to its
00:15:08 ◼ ► front facing camera. Like all the other MacBooks do instead, they have, um, an icon in the menu
00:15:14 ◼ ► bar, like the green little, like FaceTime, the icon, and also like a green dot in the corner
00:15:20 ◼ ► of the screen. And that dot is basically a stand in for the light. And last time we mentioned it,
00:15:25 ◼ ► I'm like, I'm sure Apple has done something to try to make that more secure, but it's obviously
00:15:29 ◼ ► more difficult when you're trying to secure software versus trying to secure it in hardware,
00:15:33 ◼ ► where in theory, the led, um, if the camera's on the led is on business, like electrically hardwired
00:15:40 ◼ ► connected to it. And you'd have to stop that from happening. You'd have to, uh, get physical access
00:15:45 ◼ ► to the, uh, laptop and cut a, you know, trace somewhere to prevent, uh, you know, that from
00:15:50 ◼ ► working. And even that might be difficult. Although there was a bug with that. Um, I couldn't find this
00:15:55 ◼ ► link, but the first time Apple did this, they tried to say, and the light will always be on as
00:16:00 ◼ ► long as the camera's on. And they messed up the implementation, but that was a while ago. The
00:16:03 ◼ ► current implementation is pretty solid, but that's all in hardware. So how, what do they do to try to
00:16:06 ◼ ► make the software more secure? So this first bit from Gruber is there from Apple security document
00:16:11 ◼ ► saying, even if someone like, you know, puts a root kit on your machine, they have super user
00:16:16 ◼ ► privileges. They have root kernel level access to your Mac. Uh, still they can't stop that green
00:16:23 ◼ ► dot from appearing in the corner. Indeed. So Gruber got talking with friend of the show,
00:16:27 ◼ ► Guy Rambeau and Guy wrote to Gruber, the software-based camera indicator light in the MacBook Neo
00:16:31 ◼ ► runs in the secure X-Clave part of the chip. So what is almost as secure as the hardware indicator
00:16:36 ◼ ► light. It runs in a privileged environment separate from the kernel and blitz the light directly into the
00:16:42 ◼ ► screen hardware. All of that applies to the mic indicator as well, which is a bonus compared to the
00:16:46 ◼ ► camera only hardware indicator. And then Guy also provided a little footnote. X-Clave's run on a
00:16:52 ◼ ► completely isolated real-time operating system that communicates with the kernel and user space
00:16:55 ◼ ► using a very limited API surface, not to be confused with the secure enclave, which is a
00:17:01 ◼ ► totally different thing. Yeah. So to actually stop the light from working, they, they need more than
00:17:06 ◼ ► just access the kernel level access. They need to hack the X-Clave, which is a lot harder to do
00:17:09 ◼ ► because it is very limited. It is a whole separate thing running a whole separate operating system.
00:17:13 ◼ ► And it talks to the main operating system, but it doesn't go through the main operating system.
00:17:18 ◼ ► It seems like to get those dots onto the screen, it just does rise them directly into the video
00:17:24 ◼ ► Yeah. Yep. And then also Gruber linked to random Augustine's post about the Apple X-Clave's,
00:17:30 ◼ ► which you can read over on medium. If you can hold your nose to long enough to read something on
00:17:38 ◼ ► Oh God, it's the worst. CPU benchmarks. Apparently we got something a little bit wrong. John,
00:17:43 ◼ ► can you tell us about that please? Yeah. The iPhone 16 Pro Max with the A18 Pro, which is what I was
00:17:47 ◼ ► using for CPU benchmarks because the Neo had not been released to anybody yet, has 46% higher single
00:17:53 ◼ ► core in Geekbench, not 30%. I just plain did the math wrong. So it was 30, 34, 28 versus 23, 47. And
00:18:00 ◼ ► I think those are the numbers from the earlier episode, but I just didn't do the math right. So 46%
00:18:09 ◼ ► Then with regard to SSD benchmarks, Vito Treino writes, your MacBook Neo SSD benchmark figures in
00:18:15 ◼ ► the last episode came from the Verge's benchmarks, which only measured sequential speeds. While those
00:18:19 ◼ ► are important for large file transfers, random speeds are a better reflection of using the computer,
00:18:23 ◼ ► you know, OS boot, logging in, launching apps, et cetera. Sequential speeds may be more visible to
00:18:28 ◼ ► the user in finder progress bars, but random speeds are arguably more important to the user experience,
00:18:38 ◼ ► This seems to me to be a far more important metric for the target market of the Neo. I would agree with
00:18:42 ◼ ► that. Well, so before we go on, so obviously, um, then the Neo has an SSD and not a spinning disc back
00:18:49 ◼ ► when spinning discs existed, uh, random access versus sequential access was a key way to measure
00:18:56 ◼ ► performance because, uh, as Vito noted, um, you're doing random access when you're doing most stuff.
00:19:03 ◼ ► You're mostly not just copying one giant file from location A to location B, although even that
00:19:07 ◼ ► could be random depending on fragmentation on a spinning disc or whatever, but spinning discs had
00:19:11 ◼ ► to move actual disc heads on an arm to get to the track where the data was, wait for the arm to settle,
00:19:18 ◼ ► wait for the, this, the sector that you want to spin underneath the heads of the track and then do
00:19:23 ◼ ► that all over again, back and forth and back and forth, making all those lovely noises that we remember
00:19:28 ◼ ► And so random seeks on a spinning disc were murder because you spend most of your time waiting for
00:19:34 ◼ ► physical items to travel, to be aligned and settled. And then a brief reading of some magnetic
00:19:40 ◼ ► information. And then you start the whole process over again. Most of your time was burned on overhead
00:19:44 ◼ ► SSDs. On the other hand, do not have any moving parts in that way. They don't have arms that move.
00:19:50 ◼ ► They don't have discs that spin. They never have to wait for an arm to move to a different section of
00:19:55 ◼ ► a disc and they never have to wait for a disc to rotate several more degrees and they never have
00:19:59 ◼ ► to wait for the things to settle. And so you would think, well, isn't random access on an SSD
00:20:04 ◼ ► basically a constant time operation? Like it doesn't vary. It doesn't care if you're reading
00:20:08 ◼ ► address zero or address 4 million. It's, it's all just chips. Well, there are things that can affect
00:20:15 ◼ ► random access because the chips have to be read in certain size chunks from certain regions at a time
00:20:19 ◼ ► and so on and so forth. But so that's why you still do random tests on SSDs. But the difference
00:20:24 ◼ ► between random and sequential is not nearly as pronounced as it used to be. And what most people
00:20:30 ◼ ► feel like they're waiting around, when do you feel like you're waiting around for a disc?
00:20:33 ◼ ► It's when you're copying a big file and you see a big progress bar. Like if you're copying some huge
00:20:37 ◼ ► movie from one disc to another or whatever, if you're not limited by your internet download speed,
00:20:41 ◼ ► or you're not limited by the other disc, um, especially now that with APFS that you get the,
00:20:47 ◼ ► uh, you know, the clones, like when you duplicate a gigantic file on APS, it's like instant, right?
00:20:51 ◼ ► Because it doesn't actually copy the data. So that is entirely eliminated, but copying to and from
00:20:56 ◼ ► multiple volumes or to and from multiple, you know, physical disc mechanisms. That's when people say,
00:21:02 ◼ ► oh, shouldn't this be going faster? It's two SSDs. And that's where you'll see the difference. So I agree
00:21:08 ◼ ► that random and sequential are not are two separate things, but I really think that sequence, the reason
00:21:14 ◼ ► people show sequential is, well, first of all, it's the number that's going up. So it's fun to show
00:21:18 ◼ ► benchmarks. Look how much faster it is. Uh, and then also I think that these days with SSDs, that's the main
00:21:24 ◼ ► time people feel like they're waiting. Like I wish my SSD was faster because I'm copying this giant video
00:21:30 ◼ ► file from this external SSD to my internal one. And I'm looking at a progress bar and I'm looking at my watch.
00:21:35 ◼ ► All right. Uh, so V Vito continues. I've only found random seek benchmarks in one review,
00:21:41 ◼ ► which is Andrew Mark David's review at 11 minutes, 17 seconds. We'll put a timestamp link in the show
00:21:46 ◼ ► notes, but the random speed seemed to be on par with what we've seen from the M1 MacBook air.
00:21:50 ◼ ► They also, from what I can tell, don't seem to be too differ much across the entire Apple Silicon
00:21:54 ◼ ► lineup. So I looked at that and I think they do differ across the Apple Silicon lineup. So we'll put a
00:22:00 ◼ ► link in the show notes to the, the benchmark app, which I had never heard of, but you can download and try
00:22:04 ◼ ► it if you want. And then I graphed the numbers for the R and D 4k QD 64 read and write and R and D 4k
00:22:13 ◼ ► QD one read. I don't know what that means. I'm assuming random 4k, but I don't know what the QD
00:22:17 ◼ ► means, but anyway, two different read and write benchmarks for, uh, three machines, the MacBook
00:22:23 ◼ ► Nioh 256, the M1 MacBook air 256 and the M5 MacBook pro 512. And especially on the R and D 4k QD 64,
00:22:32 ◼ ► uh, read and write tests, the MacBook pro is way faster. It's like twice as fast. And these were in
00:22:38 ◼ ► random seats as the Nioh. So I wouldn't say that at random, they're all about the same. I mean, granted,
00:22:43 ◼ ► when you get down to the, the, whatever, the R and D 4k QD one, right one, maybe they're a little bit
00:22:47 ◼ ► closer, but look at, look at those graphs. I'm going to say there's still a, uh, appreciable
00:22:52 ◼ ► measured different difference between, uh, the fastest and the slowest. So for example, I don't
00:22:57 ◼ ► know what these numbers are, but they come from the disc benchmarks, but the, the Nioh is 582 and the
00:23:02 ◼ ► M5 MacBook pro is 1180. That's close to double. Um, and similarly on the, on the other, like the
00:23:10 ◼ ► closest benchmark is 31 to 45, still somewhat substantial difference. So yeah. Um, I, I agree
00:23:16 ◼ ► that people should be still testing random, not just testing sequential, but I think just people,
00:23:20 ◼ ► especially in this YouTube, I've complained about this all the time because my entire childhood was
00:23:25 ◼ ► spent arguing about benchmarks and nobody argues about benchmarks anymore. We're just YouTubers just
00:23:29 ◼ ► used Geekbench and like, well, the number says what the number says and nobody. So I, I applaud
00:23:34 ◼ ► Vito to be out there saying these benchmarks are BS. You're just measuring sequential. There's much
00:23:38 ◼ ► more to the story. I agree. And there's much more to the story than random. It's like, well, random,
00:23:41 ◼ ► I don't care about your benchmark. Your benchmark has this problem. We need to test the launching of
00:23:45 ◼ ► Photoshop, but not that version of Photoshop. And yeah, uh, that's the culture I come from. So I applaud
00:23:50 ◼ ► Vito for calling it out here, but I will say that I think random, random access still differs
00:24:01 ◼ ► Yeah, I was, happened to be in the mall. Um, well, I actually, I took the trip to the mall. I was
00:24:06 ◼ ► driving my son there, um, get his haircut. And I, the reason I drove him is so I go to the Apple store.
00:24:11 ◼ ► I went to the Apple store to look at all the new stuff. Um, and I ran right to the MacBook Neos
00:24:18 ◼ ► and I don't, I don't know what I was expecting. Like I had this image in my head of the product.
00:24:22 ◼ ► Obviously I'd seen it on Apple's website and we talked about it on the show and I knew all these
00:24:25 ◼ ► things about it. Um, I just, I, I didn't, I didn't go in with any explanation of like, I'm just going to
00:24:31 ◼ ► go in and look at them and they're going to be exactly like how I thought they would be. And they
00:24:34 ◼ ► weren't, I picked it up and played with it and touch it. And I'm like, they have pulled off something
00:24:41 ◼ ► with this product that is tricky to do, which is, I mean, think, think about the laptops. What are
00:24:47 ◼ ► they? They're, they're like flat rectangles made of metal, especially when they're closed and you're
00:24:52 ◼ ► not using them. Like what is there to the flat rectangle made? How many flat rectangles made
00:24:57 ◼ ► of metal has Apple made since the unibody laptops started all those years ago? Just so many of them.
00:25:03 ◼ ► Surely they're all the same at this point. Is there any room within the flat plank of aluminum
00:25:09 ◼ ► to do anything literally? Uh, and I think there is because they've turned, I mean, I don't know if
00:25:17 ◼ ► they did this on purpose or whatever, but like one of the things that separates the Neo from its more
00:25:23 ◼ ► expensive brethren is, and we'll get to this in a little bit. Um, this, the screen, the screen part
00:25:29 ◼ ► of it is not as skinny as it is on the other models because it's more expensive to make them thin,
00:25:35 ◼ ► I guess, right? It's, it's a little bit fatter in the screen part. It's a little bit fatter overall,
00:25:40 ◼ ► uh, like a millimeter. And one of the things you can do when the screen part is a little bit fatter
00:25:46 ◼ ► than it might be on like the old MacBook air that came to like a really sharp, like the M1 MacBook air
00:25:50 ◼ ► comes to a really sharp point at the, at the part that you pick up, uh, like the lid, you know,
00:25:54 ◼ ► the, the screen lid. One of the things you can do when it's a little bit thicker is you can put a bigger
00:25:59 ◼ ► corner radius on all of the corners. And I think, and also by the way, this, the Neo is,
00:26:06 ◼ ► I forget the exact measures, maybe like a quarter inch, a half an inch, uh, less wide and deep. You
00:26:12 ◼ ► know what I mean? Like if you, if you put this on top of, uh, a M5 MacBook pro, you'd see the M5
00:26:19 ◼ ► MacBook pro sticking out around the edges. Cause this is smaller. So this is a little bit smaller
00:26:23 ◼ ► and it has a bigger corner radius on all the corners. And the result of that is picking this
00:26:30 ◼ ► thing up and just handling it as a thing that you tuck it under your arm and carry it to your,
00:26:35 ◼ ► you know, I don't know, to the library or to your class or whatever. It feels so good and so solid and
00:26:43 ◼ ► so friendly in a way that the more professional laptops do not, because the more professional laptops
00:26:49 ◼ ► are sharper, they're thinner a little bit, but they're also sharper, like literally sharper on
00:26:55 ◼ ► the edges, uh, because that's just the way they're designed. Rounding this thing over makes it feel
00:27:02 ◼ ► pleasant and solid and friendly and approachable. And I know this sounds so dumb. It's like, it's a
00:27:07 ◼ ► rectangle of aluminum. How friendly and approachable is an extra, you know, millimeter. I'm telling you,
00:27:12 ◼ ► this was my impression upon picking it up. I'm like, this thing feels great. And it feels great in the
00:27:18 ◼ ► same way. The only analogy I can have is like the, um, the iMac G4 with the little, uh, like the,
00:27:22 ◼ ► the metal arm with the floating LCD display on it. Remember that one, that arm looked and felt so good
00:27:30 ◼ ► on that machine that you were like, I can't believe that if I pay this amount of money, I get this.
00:27:35 ◼ ► And that's the impression I got from the Neo that like this thing feels like you're getting more than
00:27:41 ◼ ► you paid for. You're getting more than your money's worth. It feels solid and expensive and
00:27:47 ◼ ► nice in a way that I did not expect it to. I don't know. I don't know if I expected it to feel janky or
00:27:53 ◼ ► something, but it like, I know going on about this and you're like, so it had rounded corners and you
00:27:57 ◼ ► were wowed by that. Who cares? This, this is my impression that they really knocked it out of the
00:28:02 ◼ ► park that it feels solid. And the second part of this is the trackpad, which I, I did know going in,
00:28:08 ◼ ► I was thinking this trackpad is going to be a little bit janky. Nope. It's, it's great. Like
00:28:13 ◼ ► maybe it will get bad over time. I don't know. This is a floor model. And like the first day it came out
00:28:17 ◼ ► or the first week it came out feels so good. I pressed everywhere on that thing. It is pleasant
00:28:22 ◼ ► and easy to click everywhere on the thing. And it doesn't feel loosey goosey and wiggly and tilty.
00:28:28 ◼ ► It feels great. So I think if you got somebody, one of the, a Mac book Neo, they are going to be so
00:28:34 ◼ ► happy, especially if they've never had a Mac before and they've only had PC laptops. Oh my God, this is
00:28:38 ◼ ► so much better than I thought it was going to be in terms of fitting to finish. And I don't know why I
00:28:43 ◼ ► had these, these doubts in my mind, but I was blown away by it. And obviously it's still got eight gigs
00:28:47 ◼ ► of Ram and a bad screen, blah, blah, blah, but it's like, it's $600. So Mac book Neo, they think they
00:28:52 ◼ ► knocked it out of the park with this machine. Coincidentally, I happened to also go into an Apple
00:28:58 ◼ ► store yesterday and also for, with the goal of like, Oh, like I was literally, I was walking past it.
00:29:04 ◼ ► I'm like, Oh, I should go in and check out all this new stuff. The first thing I did was walk over
00:29:07 ◼ ► to the Mac book Neo. I must've looked very strange to the staff because I was basically like,
00:29:12 ◼ ► fondling it like a different edges, like trying to figure out like, at what point is this going to
00:29:19 ◼ ► feel cheap? And I did not find that point. Yeah. Yeah. Like it. So I was going over all the corners,
00:29:27 ◼ ► all of the, like the, the rounded edges, the sharp edges, the finished, I, I, you know, I, as I often
00:29:33 ◼ ► do in Apple stores with, you know, picking up new products, I closed it and I moved it around and I
00:29:37 ◼ ► like, what is the bottom of like, what are the feet? Are the feet worse? I love even the, even the feet,
00:29:41 ◼ ► the feet on the Mac book air are sharp little cylinders. Like they're not domes. Like they were
00:29:46 ◼ ► on the M one Mac book air, the current M, you know, M two M three M four Mac book air. The feet are kind
00:29:50 ◼ ► of like sharp edge cylinders. The feet on the Neo are rounded and friendly with flat bottoms. Amazing.
00:29:56 ◼ ► I move my hands over every inch of that thing. And I, like I would, I opened it up. I felt even like
00:30:03 ◼ ► the, the screen, like the interior screen hinge, like the, like above the keyboard. I even felt that,
00:30:08 ◼ ► like, where's the sharp edge. Where is the sign of cheap manufacturing? I could not find one.
00:30:16 ◼ ► It just feels like any other Apple laptop. Like I even, I forget, I'm sorry. I forget who it was.
00:30:22 ◼ ► It was somebody. I think I massed on somewhere. I said a few days ago, like, Oh, you can tell there's
00:30:26 ◼ ► like a different, like a, not as good of a grain pattern. I looked, I couldn't tell. I ran my hands
00:30:32 ◼ ► over the flat parts. Does it feel different? No, it doesn't. I picked it up, moved it around. Is the
00:30:37 ◼ ► weight balance off? Does it, does it feel less solid? No, it just feels and looks great. I was
00:30:47 ◼ ► shocked. I really thought there would be some kind of like noticeable lower quality level about it
00:30:53 ◼ ► compared to the Mac book pro and Mac book air. There isn't, I was not able to find one at least in the,
00:30:58 ◼ ► in the Apple store with a good few minutes of it. Yeah. And I actually, I hope they take some of
00:31:02 ◼ ► these decisions and bring them to the Mac book pro. I'm not saying they need to make it as rounded as
00:31:05 ◼ ► this. Like I do like the thin lid on the Mac book air, micro pro stuff like that. But like some of these
00:31:11 ◼ ► decisions are just, they're not, obviously they're not more costly. In fact, they save money, but
00:31:15 ◼ ► they're just better decisions. Like at various times we have complained on this show about exactly how
00:31:19 ◼ ► sharp certain edges are on Apple's laptops. And I think the Neo shows that if you're willing to round
00:31:25 ◼ ► things over a little bit more, it makes for a more pleasant to handle machine. It also helps that
00:31:29 ◼ ► this is smaller and it does look like a little baby because it's not like 11 inch Mac book air size.
00:31:34 ◼ ► It's not, you know, the Mac book, uh, adorable Mac book one size. Oh, that was very sharp as well.
00:31:39 ◼ ► But the fact that it is a little bit smaller, I think is going to make it even more attractive
00:31:43 ◼ ► to somebody who doesn't want to spend two grand on a laptop. They just want a nice laptop
00:31:48 ◼ ► and not spend too much money. And this boy is just a nice laptop without spending too much money.
00:31:53 ◼ ► Yeah. I, I was blown away and I, and of course, you know, I, I opened it up and I, I did similar
00:31:58 ◼ ► tests as John. Like I was put, I, you know, knowing how the trackpad works, I was clicking,
00:32:02 ◼ ► not only clicking the trackpad, but also I was like, I tried to click it like on the corners,
00:32:12 ◼ ► Cause it used to like, I have, I have some Mac book pros with mechanical clicking trackpads that
00:32:18 ◼ ► did not feel good. And this does not have any of those problems. Yeah. It, I was shocked. And of
00:32:24 ◼ ► course, you know, opening up apps and I even tried like the keyboard and I was like, Oh, the keyboard
00:32:27 ◼ ► feels a little bit, I thought it felt like a little bit squishier, but then I went over to a Mac book pro
00:32:33 ◼ ► to compare and that felt exactly the same thing. No, that's, that must be just in my head.
00:32:37 ◼ ► Yeah. I think it's like the same keyboard mechanism. So yeah, it's, it felt like it. Um,
00:32:41 ◼ ► on the colors, I thought they all looked pretty good. The, the yellow and the pink were more pale
00:32:48 ◼ ► than I expected. My favorite color was actually the blue. I thought the blue would be a lot closer
00:32:54 ◼ ► to the Mac book air midnight color, which is so dark. It's almost black. Yeah. It's lighter than that
00:32:57 ◼ ► though. It's way lighter than the Mac book air. Um, and it's, it's not a light blue. It's still,
00:33:02 ◼ ► it's still like a dark blue, but it's, it's more like a, like a denim jeans color, like jeans color.
00:33:16 ◼ ► I would almost certainly go with the blue. Um, but I also respect people going for the yellow
00:33:20 ◼ ► cause that's, it's a really fun color. Um, but the blue is a little more of my style, but
00:33:24 ◼ ► I was blown away both from just sheer pride in this platform of the Mac that I love so much
00:33:41 ◼ ► the other Macs, like we're bringing more people into the fold. That's a great thing for the platform.
00:33:47 ◼ ► As I said, it also made me feel so impressed by both Apple's hardware prowess and also just
00:33:55 ◼ ► how great computers are right now that everything the Mac book Neo can do all of the like high end
00:34:03 ◼ ► pro apps that like it can run. It might not be as fast as everything else, but like it can do it.
00:34:08 ◼ ► Your iPhone in your pocket can also do that. What a time to be in computers. Like, yeah,
00:34:16 ◼ ► it's not all roses. There's some problems that we need to work out. That's always going to be the
00:34:19 ◼ ► case. It always has been the case, but wow, what an amazing time we are in for hardware that not only
00:34:26 ◼ ► is it possible to make a laptop like that, that is that good for that price. And it's not like Apple's
00:34:31 ◼ ► like not taking any profit on this. You know, Apple doesn't do that. You know, they're making 20 or 30%
00:34:36 ◼ ► at least margins on this thing. And to also have all that power in our pockets all the time is an
00:34:43 ◼ ► incredible resource. Like we have amazing supercomputers available to us all the time and for not even that
00:34:51 ◼ ► much money. Like that's wonderful. And I think this product is a hit. And I think this is like when you,
00:34:57 ◼ ► when you look at what PCs do in this price range, Apple's going to kick their butts and it, they honestly
00:35:05 ◼ ► could use the, the butt kicking. So this is, this is just fantastic. I'm blown away by how good the,
00:35:10 ◼ ► the, uh, MacBook Neo was. Um, I also briefly got to handle the iPhone 17 E. It feels great in the hand.
00:35:16 ◼ ► It's just like, you know, just like the 16 E. Like you feel it and you're like, wow, that's really light.
00:35:21 ◼ ► That's awesome. Do I want it? No, but it's, but it's great for people who want it. Um, and I walk right
00:35:28 ◼ ► out the store and I didn't even realize until today, I totally forgot to even look for the studio displays.
00:35:34 ◼ ► Oh, come on. I was so blown away by the Neo. I was like, all right, you know, mission accomplished.
00:35:40 ◼ ► I'm out of here. Walk right out. I didn't, I didn't forget. I looked at the studio display XDR,
00:35:45 ◼ ► although unlike a Casey store, they had these back to back. So I couldn't see them at the same time.
00:35:50 ◼ ► Not that I needed to, but I played with all the settings on it. Um, I was looking for the thing
00:35:55 ◼ ► that lets you pick between like the reference mode and whatever. And I couldn't find it in my brief
00:35:59 ◼ ► looking there, but I honestly, I didn't know where to look. It wasn't, I didn't see it in the displays thing.
00:36:03 ◼ ► Um, they don't have a lot of, well, there's two problems. The Apple store is really bright.
00:36:07 ◼ ► So it's really tough for even 2000 nits to show, you know, cause they, the light sensor,
00:36:11 ◼ ► the ambient light sensor is going to put the monitor already at pretty high brightness.
00:36:15 ◼ ► So the best you're going to get is like two X because if the, if the monitor is at a thousand
00:36:19 ◼ ► nits and HDR is 2000, it looks less impressive than if the monitor is at like 300 nits because
00:36:25 ◼ ► you're in a dim room and then the HDR comes on at 2000. But anyway, their sample photos and the
00:36:30 ◼ ► photos app didn't really show off HDR that well. So you'd be forgiven Casey for not being able to see
00:36:34 ◼ ► what's going on. Um, I, they also didn't have it in the mode. They had it in P3, like the,
00:36:39 ◼ ► the display profile. They didn't have it in the combined P3 and Adobe RGB mode. I switched it to
00:36:45 ◼ ► that mode and then the screen blinked and then it blinked again and it had switched itself back.
00:36:50 ◼ ► I'm like, well, there's some bugs. And then I switched it back into the mode again. Eventually
00:36:53 ◼ ► I got it to stick. I couldn't see any difference, but I just, it was interesting that that wasn't
00:36:56 ◼ ► the default mode for the stuff, but otherwise it looks like a studio display, but it has better
00:37:00 ◼ ► black levels and it's brighter. Cool. It costs twice as much. Yeah. I mean, I, did you, did
00:37:06 ◼ ► you notice the refresh rate at all? Like when you were scrolling a webpage or something? I
00:37:10 ◼ ► mean, yeah, I could tell it was 120 Hertz, uh, for scrolling stuff, but I didn't like, that's
00:37:14 ◼ ► why I put it in, put it in adaptive, but I didn't know how to really test that. But yeah,
00:37:18 ◼ ► it's, it's, it's high refresh. It's a good monitor. It's a good monitor. The only, the only
00:37:21 ◼ ► thing it has going against it is it's not 32 inches and 6k. Everything else about it is
00:37:25 ◼ ► very good. No, the only thing it has going against it is that it's $3,000, whatever the
00:37:30 ◼ ► heck the price is. Well, I mean, proportionally given the difference in size and pixels,
00:37:37 ◼ ► We are sponsored this episode by Zapier. Zapier is how you actually deliver on your AI strategy,
00:37:45 ◼ ► not just talk about it. You know, these days there's AI everywhere. And honestly, the biggest
00:37:50 ◼ ► problem that most people have with AI is just figuring out how to use it and figuring out where
00:38:00 ◼ ► platforms. You can bring the power of AI to any workflow. So you can do more of what matters
00:38:05 ◼ ► and have AI help you out in all the other ways. So you can connect top AI models like chat GPT
00:38:09 ◼ ► and Claude to the tools that your team already uses. So you can add AI exactly where you need
00:38:15 ◼ ► it, whether that's AI powered workflows, autonomous agents, customer chatbots, or whatever else you
00:38:20 ◼ ► can imagine. You can orchestrate it all with Zapier. And it's easy to use. Zapier is for everyone,
00:38:26 ◼ ► whether you're a tech expert or not. So many teams have already used AI tasks with Zapier. Over 300
00:38:32 ◼ ► million tasks have been automated. And Zapier is just such an amazing platform. You know,
00:38:36 ◼ ► they've been around for a very long time in the automation space, way before AI. They're a very
00:38:41 ◼ ► mature platform. And they have always specialized in automation. Obviously, AI has huge advances in
00:38:48 ◼ ► automation possibilities. So Zapier is right there helping people actually deploy AI to their real
00:38:54 ◼ ► work across their real company with their real tools, all happening right now. This is not something
00:38:59 ◼ ► you just do in the future. This is something you can do right now with Zapier. Join the millions of
00:39:03 ◼ ► businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com
00:39:10 ◼ ► slash ATP. That's Zapier spelled Z-A-P-I-E-R dot com slash ATP. Zapier.com slash ATP. Thank you so much
00:39:21 ◼ ► All right, let's talk about MacBook Neo teardowns. First of all, Tech Renew did one where they did fast
00:39:30 ◼ ► forward a bit, but effectively they tore the whole thing down in 10 minutes. I think we talked about
00:39:36 ◼ ► Oh, okay. There you go. iFixit did a teardown. There's a video as well as a blog post about it.
00:39:42 ◼ ► They did some interesting things. They were talking about, hey, how is this, how does this weigh what
00:39:47 ◼ ► it weighs? In the good way, in the bad way, how does it weigh what it does? And so the Neo's bottom
00:39:52 ◼ ► case and keyboard is only each grams lighter than the MacBook Air's, despite being six and a half
00:39:58 ◼ ► percent smaller in a two-dimensional area, 101.3 square inches versus 95.1 square inches.
00:40:05 ◼ ► The Neo's screen and lid is 48 grams heavier than the Air's. And at 86 grams, the metal H that's
00:40:13 ◼ ► under the trackpad that assists in the way the trackpad works, that's 7% of the Neo's total weight,
00:40:24 ◼ ► Yeah. And the Neo's full trackpad assembly is almost exactly twice as heavy as the M3 MacBook Air's.
00:40:34 ◼ ► isn't that going to add weight and everything? But I guess having moving parts and like those
00:40:37 ◼ ► leaves, those steel leaf springs in there and the big heavy metal H, it's fascinating that
00:40:49 ◼ ► I can't tell. So it's eight grams lighter. The bottom casing keyboard is eight grams lighter,
00:40:54 ◼ ► 6.5% smaller. But in their video, they had like, you couldn't see, they put the stuff on a scale
00:41:00 ◼ ► with like the ones kitchen scales with a little like non-backlit LED readout or LCD readout for the
00:41:06 ◼ ► weight. I couldn't read the weight. So I don't know, is eight grams lighter at 6.5% smaller? Is
00:41:11 ◼ ► that proportional? I need to know the title, the total to do that math. But anyway, that's,
00:41:20 ◼ ► the reason the Neo weighs exactly the same as the larger MacBook Air, despite having a smaller
00:41:26 ◼ ► battery, is the trackpad weighs twice as much and the lid of the, where the screen is, weighs a little
00:41:33 ◼ ► Righto, with the trackpad, there's a screw in the center of the trackpad mechanism that lets you
00:41:39 ◼ ► adjust the force required to activate the membrane switch that triggers a click, which is pretty cool.
00:41:46 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, it's not for the user to do. It's, you know, if anyone needs to repair it or if the
00:41:49 ◼ ► trackpad ever started feeling wonky or got too loose or got too heavy or whatever, it's nice to
00:41:53 ◼ ► know that there's an adjustment screw there. They also did the usual thing of like doing whatever,
00:41:57 ◼ ► whatever scanning thing there. Is it a, is it a pet scan, cat scan? I don't know. They're doing some
00:42:01 ◼ ► kind of scan that shows the insides of the thing. It's like an x-ray, but like they colorize it and
00:42:06 ◼ ► everything. And so you can see the speakers I put in our show. You just look at the video. You'll see,
00:42:11 ◼ ► see all the images, but in our show notes here, I have, I'm showing the same speaker from two sides.
00:42:16 ◼ ► That's the same speaker from the top and from the bottom. I know in our notes, it looks like it's left
00:42:19 ◼ ► and right, but that's just the same speaker. So you can see how big the speaker actually is.
00:42:23 ◼ ► Everything else in those big black squares that are to the left and the right of the trackpad
00:42:28 ◼ ► is not decidedly not speaker. And good old I fix it opens it up. Although they did it so fast
00:42:36 ◼ ► they used like a, essentially a hot knife to cut open those black things. And yes, the speaker is
00:42:42 ◼ ► in, I don't know, let's say one quarter of it. And the rest of it is completely empty air. Um, it's
00:42:49 ◼ ► just hollow inside there. And I think I know why. Do you see these pictures here in the bottom one where
00:42:53 ◼ ► that wire is dangling? That's just like laying on top of it. That's not, there's the wire is not inside
00:42:57 ◼ ► there. That's just the wire. Like, you know, from the, you see from the top, right? Anyway, there's
00:43:01 ◼ ► nothing in there. It is empty air and it is not air that is channeled to like, like a base port to try
00:43:06 ◼ ► to like have a tuned length of tube to, nope, that's not it at all. It is just plastic, but it is not
00:43:13 ◼ ► flat plastic. It is plastic with those little, uh, diagonal ribs for cross bracing and X patterns.
00:43:21 ◼ ► Like there's, it's, it's separated into little boxes and within each box there is an X all in the box and
00:43:26 ◼ ► the X are made of ridges of plastic. And then you see the four holes, um, where screws go in.
00:43:31 ◼ ► This is what I think of these black plastic things are doing. And probably also doing the same thing
00:43:36 ◼ ► in the iPad. These black plastic things are essentially, uh, stiffness braces because that
00:43:44 ◼ ► square of plastic has nothing to do with the speaker, but is braced in this way and then screwed at four
00:43:50 ◼ ► points into the chassis to make it. So the corners of the chassis don't twist and bend. It's like for
00:43:55 ◼ ► torsional rigidity. It is a mechanical stiffener. That is my theory. And I'm sticking to it. Unless
00:44:00 ◼ ► someone from Apple's design team tells me that's not what this is for, because they're definitely
00:44:04 ◼ ► not air pockets to increase base because they wouldn't put those cross bracing in there. That's
00:44:09 ◼ ► not the, you know, what the inside of any, you know, base port ever looks like, but you do put things
00:44:13 ◼ ► like that in to stiffen things. So, uh, MacBook Neo and possibly also the iPads as well. I haven't seen
00:44:20 ◼ ► inside their black things. It has plastic stiffeners bolted to it to make it so the corners aren't floppy,
00:44:28 ◼ ► Yeah. Cause otherwise, like if you had like battery in there, battery is rigid. And so, you know, you,
00:44:34 ◼ ► you probably wouldn't need to add more stiffeners to that. But in this case, when you don't have
00:44:38 ◼ ► enough battery to fill the cavity inside the case, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So that that's,
00:44:44 ◼ ► I think that's a very good theory, especially looking at these, you're right. Like this,
00:44:50 ◼ ► I can't even tell if that is open to the air, like, cause they didn't do a good job of peeling
00:44:54 ◼ ► off all the plastic. Like this went by really fast in a few frames. So, but I, it's just totally
00:44:59 ◼ ► separate. Another thing. So, uh, we just talked about how they, you take this thing apart and the
00:45:03 ◼ ► battery isn't glued in, it's screwed in or whatever. And there's been some talk about, um,
00:45:07 ◼ ► obviously for repairability, you don't want to deal with glue and stuff like that, but also like
00:45:11 ◼ ► that perhaps, uh, this makes it less expensive to assemble. I don't know a lot about assembly,
00:45:18 ◼ ► but I'm thinking that 18 screws versus sticky stuff, the sticky stuff might be cheaper to assemble
00:45:24 ◼ ► because you just put the sticky stuff on and you slap it in there. Like a machine can do it that
00:45:28 ◼ ► much more easily than a machine can do 18 of these tiny precise screws. Um, but I don't know,
00:45:33 ◼ ► maybe machine does all of them. Maybe machine does none of it, but at any rate, 18 tiny screws.
00:45:38 ◼ ► And also this is another thing that may contribute to the weight. The battery in the Neo looks like
00:45:44 ◼ ► it's in like a metal frame with flanges and those flanges are screwed down with 18 screws.
00:45:49 ◼ ► And so the, when you have the sticky stuff, you don't need a metal frame to hold the battery.
00:45:55 ◼ ► And then because you don't need, you're not screwing anything down. The battery itself is literally
00:45:58 ◼ ► stuck to the chassis with glue or in the case of the iPhone, that electrically releasing glue thing.
00:46:04 ◼ ► So I think that metal frame adds weight, those 18 screws add weight, uh, and it is much more
00:46:11 ◼ ► repairable, but it also might be a little bit heavier and might actually be more expensive to
00:46:16 ◼ ► assemble because you got to put an 18 individual screws versus one sticky thing and slap and you're done.
00:46:24 ◼ ► all right. Tell me about these main boards. Yeah. Just to compare like what, what is the
00:46:28 ◼ ► MacBook Neo logic board compared to the MacBook air M three logic board. And I mean, the Neo logic board
00:46:33 ◼ ► looks more like an iPad logic board. It's a skinny little thing. It looks like a, an extended phone
00:46:39 ◼ ► logic board or you can, you can compare it to the, uh, the iPhone 16 pro, which has the same SOC. And yeah,
00:46:49 ◼ ► I think they're just showing two board. Is that two boards or two sides of the same board? I can't
00:46:53 ◼ ► even tell on this, uh, I fix it thing, but you can watch the video and see the size comparisons.
00:46:57 ◼ ► Suffice it to say that the logic board portion of Apple laptops has just been shrinking and shrinking
00:47:03 ◼ ► and shrinking over, over the decades. And it is now disappearing to the point where now it looks like
00:47:07 ◼ ► an iPad logic board. And I wonder if in five or 10 years, it's going to look like a phone logic board.
00:47:11 ◼ ► the unthinkable happened, uh, particularly to, to Marco, actually, uh, AirPods max two are out.
00:47:19 ◼ ► That is not the AirPods max with USB-C that came out a few months ago, whenever it was,
00:47:34 ◼ ► was asking us to do an ask ATP in the future, which I don't know if we'll do, but it's saying like,
00:47:38 ◼ ► you should list all of your periodic reminders as an after show or a member special or something.
00:47:43 ◼ ► Um, and I actually have a reminders category called far future. So I don't, so those things
00:47:48 ◼ ► don't get jumbled up. And what do I put in far future stuff like this? I went to the far future
00:47:52 ◼ ► saying, I wonder what's in there these days. And the very top item was, uh, a check if there's an
00:47:58 ◼ ► AirPods max two for the Marco bet, blah, blah, blah, like whatever. I'm like, you know what? AirPods max
00:48:08 ◼ ► one hour, three minutes and eight seconds. Marco said, after I had said something about,
00:48:18 ◼ ► Yeah. You can make a bet, add it to your calendar. I don't think there's a chance in hell the AirPods
00:48:22 ◼ ► max will get another update at least for two years. I did add it to my calendar and there it was.
00:48:27 ◼ ► And I added it to my reminders. There it was in my far future reminders. Well, guess what?
00:48:31 ◼ ► That was September 12th, 2024. Apple got it just under the line. Although I didn't actually agree
00:48:36 ◼ ► to the two year bet. I actually, uh, uh, agreed to take the bet at three years, but either way I won
00:48:41 ◼ ► and the world gets AirPods max two, uh, which are so very different from their predecessor.
00:48:49 ◼ ► Yes. They're very, very different or something. I mean, they're different in the way everybody
00:48:54 ◼ ► wanted because when the one with USB-C came out, you're like, that's it. They just added USB-C.
00:49:01 ◼ ► I mean, so it's, it's very similar in the approach to the vision pro update, which is like, all right,
00:49:10 ◼ ► here's this product that immediately upon launch, everybody was like, well, this part's good,
00:49:18 ◼ ► but these parts really suck. Here we are like, you know, many years later and Apple has released
00:49:23 ◼ ► the next version of it. And literally all of the problem people have with it are unaddressed.
00:49:30 ◼ ► Totally just left exactly the same. And it's like, all right, if you liked what we shipped before,
00:49:35 ◼ ► here's an update with essentially a spec bump, nothing else has been touched. It's like, okay.
00:49:42 ◼ ► Now the difference between the AirPods max and the vision pro is that people buy the AirPods max.
00:49:48 ◼ ► Honestly, the AirPods max, this is not a product for me, just comfort wise. They are extremely
00:49:54 ◼ ► uncomfortable for me because they are so heavy. Um, and they did nothing to change that.
00:49:58 ◼ ► They did nothing to change the clamping force. They did nothing to change the annoying,
00:50:03 ◼ ► weird case thing that they come with. None of that is, is different. They did. They didn't change
00:50:09 ◼ ► the kind of awkward control scheme on them because they insist on digital crowns and everything they
00:50:13 ◼ ► make. They probably do still sound great because the first one sounded great. That's, that part's
00:50:17 ◼ ► probably fine. It is nice that they are matching the, many of the features of the newer AirPods that,
00:50:22 ◼ ► that have come out. So that's that, that's all great. Um, but if they didn't work for you before,
00:50:28 ◼ ► they won't work for you. Now, if you love the AirPods max, and maybe you have like an older pair
00:50:34 ◼ ► where the batteries are starting to wear out and maybe you're annoyed at the lightning cable or
00:50:37 ◼ ► whatever, then this is, this is a great time to upgrade. If you still want to use them. Um,
00:50:41 ◼ ► they are also still very expensive. Uh, but I see a lot of these out in the wild now, maybe just
00:50:49 ◼ ► cause you know, people in New York have a lot of money, but like I see a, a lot of AirPods maxes out
00:50:55 ◼ ► there, especially on young people, like teenagers. I'm like, your parents bought you a $550 pair of
00:51:01 ◼ ► headphones. Damn. But, uh, but I do see them a lot. I do think people are buying them in reasonable
00:51:11 ◼ ► numbers. Not enough. You know, I'm sure it's nothing compared to like the AirPods pro or the
00:51:15 ◼ ► regular AirPods, but it does seem like it is a successful product that has a market, the price
00:51:21 ◼ ► and the physical downsides of it keep that market smaller than it could be. But Apple seems to not
00:51:29 ◼ ► care. So for the market that Apple has chosen to stick with for this product and seems to have no
00:51:35 ◼ ► interest in trying to expand that market, this is an update. It's not even a great, it's just,
00:51:40 ◼ ► this is an update. Okay. It took, it takes them from being like embarrassingly far behind the feature
00:51:46 ◼ ► lineup to roughly on par with the feature lineup and it solves nothing else, but okay. They did an
00:51:55 ◼ ► update. Yeah. So what's changed? Well, now we have the H2 in it, which means you get adaptive audio,
00:52:01 ◼ ► you get conversation awareness, you get personalized volume, you get live translation and you get voice
00:52:06 ◼ ► isolation. Additionally, you get one and a half times more effective, uh, active noise cancellation.
00:52:11 ◼ ► You get a new high, high dynamic range amplifier for even cleaner audio. Uh, you get reduced wireless
00:52:17 ◼ ► audio latency for, uh, game mode and iOS, macOS and iPadOS, but you get the same color, same price,
00:52:28 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, it's a good thing. They just, that's what everyone wanted. There's like, why doesn't it have
00:52:31 ◼ ► the H2? It's kind of like when the, uh, vision pro came out with the M2 and everything else was on the
00:52:35 ◼ ► M3. Um, so it's just a catch up thing. Uh, it should have the H2. It should have the H2 a long time ago.
00:52:44 ◼ ► We are sponsored this episode by one password. Now, if you're a small business, it's easy to
00:52:48 ◼ ► assume that you might fly under the radar security wise, but small businesses are being targeted more
00:52:53 ◼ ► and more by bad actors because cyber criminals know that lean teams often lack the resources to prevent
00:52:58 ◼ ► a breach. So teams of any size can be a target, but even the smallest of teams can foil cyber crime with
00:53:03 ◼ ► one password. One password provides simple security to help small teams manage the number one risk
00:53:08 ◼ ► exploited by bad actors, weak passwords. One password provides centralized management to make sure your
00:53:13 ◼ ► company's logins are secure. It's a simple turnkey solution that can be rolled out in hours, whether or not
00:53:19 ◼ ► you have dedicated IT staff. And it might, no matter how complex your security needs may get as your company
00:53:24 ◼ ► grows, one password will stay with you every step of the way. But of course, the earlier you start, the easier
00:53:29 ◼ ► it is to build your business on a secure foundation. Compromised passwords are the number one way bad actors
00:53:33 ◼ ► attack companies. So a password manager should be the first security purchase you make for your team.
00:53:38 ◼ ► I personally use one password, both for my own personal stuff, but also for my business logins. Now I have
00:53:44 ◼ ► multiple businesses. One of the, you know, many of them are just for me and I'm the only person. I still
00:53:47 ◼ ► use one password for that because it helps me, helps me generate all these like amazing passwords and keep
00:53:52 ◼ ► all the accounts separate. But where it really shines is with my family and with my business that I do with
00:53:57 ◼ ► other people. So we have a family share plan where my wife and I, and even my son can share passwords and
00:54:02 ◼ ► we can assign what's shared and what's not. And then for the business, for the restaurant, we share passwords
00:54:07 ◼ ► with the managers and my wife and me, all different access levels, all super easy to manage. And it's
00:54:13 ◼ ► wonderful to have everybody on the same page, to not have to like have post-it notes with passwords
00:54:17 ◼ ► written on them and for all those passwords to be really secure and centrally managed. I love using
00:54:22 ◼ ► one password for this. It is fantastic for this. So take the first step to better security by securing
00:54:29 ◼ ► your team's credentials. Find out more at onepassword.com slash ATP and start securing every login.
00:54:41 ◼ ► Overcast is shipping in beta, in beta. Overcast is shipping transcripts. Tell me what the heck is
00:54:53 ◼ ► going on here because this sounds pretty freaking great. I've been working on this for some time.
00:54:57 ◼ ► Apple Podcasts launched transcripts probably what a year and a half ago now, maybe two years ago. It's
00:55:03 ◼ ► been a while. I knew back then, oh crap, that's a really good feature and I'm going to have to do
00:55:11 ◼ ► that someday. But how am I going to do that? Apple Podcasts operates at a much larger scale than I do
00:55:24 ◼ ► Last summer, with the release of, with the beta of iOS 26, Apple launched a new speech transcription
00:55:34 ◼ ► API on iOS. They basically opened up the iOS speech model that is used for iOS's built-in transcription
00:55:47 ◼ ► you know, it's, it's that model. What this meant is that it ran on device. It was very optimized and
00:55:55 ◼ ► very fast and very lightweight. Now, I've been looking at different ways to do transcription
00:56:01 ◼ ► for a little bit before that, especially once OpenAI's whisper models had come out. That was,
00:56:07 ◼ ► that was a game changer in transcription models because the accuracy was so much higher than what
00:56:12 ◼ ► had come before. It was shocking how good whisper was. Um, but the problem with OpenAI whisper is that
00:56:19 ◼ ► it just, it's a really big model. It's really slow. And so it's great for, you know, one person using on
00:56:27 ◼ ► their computer, um, or some very specialized app uses, but like for the most part, like it's great if you
00:56:32 ◼ ► are transcribing like your own podcast that you make once a week whisper is great. Um, but if I was going
00:56:39 ◼ ► to try to offer transcripts and overcast for like all podcasts or many podcasts that wasn't going to
00:56:45 ◼ ► scale. And there are also, you know, if you're operating at a smaller scale, again, like if, if you, if you have
00:56:51 ◼ ► like a, maybe a podcast hosting company and you wanted to transcribe, you know, audio for your customers that
00:56:56 ◼ ► they upload, if you're dealing with, you know, maybe that's hundreds of uploads a week or something,
00:57:02 ◼ ► that's a very different scale that might be operating at. So there are things like transcription
00:57:07 ◼ ► provider or transcription APIs from the AI providers. So, you know, OpenAI has a transcription API.
00:57:13 ◼ ► The problem with those is that they're not really designed for podcasts. They're, they usually have
00:57:19 ◼ ► audio length limits or size limits that many podcasts would exceed and just cost wise, you would be
00:57:28 ◼ ► talking about hundreds or thousands of dollars per day, uh, at the scale that overcast would need those
00:57:35 ◼ ► to be. And overcast is not going to take on a thousands of dollars a day API cost. That would,
00:57:42 ◼ ► let's just say that would require me to raise the price of premium higher than most people would be
00:57:46 ◼ ► willing to pay. Um, what happened last summer is when Apple released their iOS 26 and all the OS 26 is
00:57:55 ◼ ► when they all had this new API in them for Apple's on device transcription model, I ran some tests.
00:58:00 ◼ ► It just blew me away how incredibly fast it was. Um, so one thing I noticed like on a regular M4,
00:58:09 ◼ ► like on a Mac on an M4, uh, I was running this on my, on my laptop and it was able, cause I wasn't
00:58:15 ◼ ► going to put, you know, Tahoe on my main Mac, but I, so I was doing all this development on my laptop
00:58:20 ◼ ► over the summer. And I noticed that, you know, it was able to transcribe. If I ran a few jobs in
00:58:24 ◼ ► parallel, I could have one M4 Mac transcribe audio at about 200 X the audio's playtime. So in other words,
00:58:40 ◼ ► goodness. And that was so much faster than anything else I'd ever tried. I noticed I'm okay. Well,
00:58:45 ◼ ► if one Mac can do like, you know, 200 X real time, well, how many podcast minutes are there? Let me see,
00:58:52 ◼ ► like, what if I just start transcribe? If I let, let me get like a couple of Mac minis and just have
00:59:00 ◼ ► them start transcribing the most popular podcasts. How many can they get through? And I, you know,
00:59:05 ◼ ► I have some information of like, I can see what the most popular podcasts are. I can see how many
00:59:10 ◼ ► episodes they release, you know, per, per month or whatever. And I can do some division and figure
00:59:14 ◼ ► out like, you know, usually I can, I can download a copy of what they serve and I can see how long it
00:59:18 ◼ ► is and start analyzing things. I'm like, okay, let's, let me try. What can a couple of Mac minis do?
00:59:24 ◼ ► I was blown away by how effective that was. You know, I'm like, okay, these, I can't just keep
00:59:32 ◼ ► burning these in my house and let me see what I could do. So put them next to the water in the
00:59:36 ◼ ► closet. It'll be fine. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Um, so I went to, uh, Mac mini, uh, vault Mac mini,
00:59:42 ◼ ► which is, um, I think the other actual name is cyber link. That's the actual name, but it's Mac mini
00:59:47 ◼ ► vault. Um, and cause what they are, I think they're the only provider where you can, you can like rent a
00:59:53 ◼ ► Mac mini from them for a hundred bucks a month. But if you buy your own and mail it to them,
00:59:59 ◼ ► then they'll host it in their data center for only 50 bucks a month. And I was like, well,
01:00:04 ◼ ► it doesn't take that many months to come out ahead if I'm just buying the base model. Um, and, and it
01:00:08 ◼ ► turns out, and I analyze, by the way, I don't know if listeners might recall, I recently have had strong
01:00:13 ◼ ► opinions about the, uh, the bang for the buck for, uh, M four family chips and what the, what the
01:00:23 ◼ ► analysis last summer. And it turned out the base model Mac mini was like way more bang for the buck
01:00:33 ◼ ► great. So I got two Mac minis and I sent them off to Mac mini vault in Wisconsin. And I even,
01:00:38 ◼ ► I leased one. Um, there's a company called green mini host in the Netherlands. I'm like,
01:00:43 ◼ ► if there's certain podcasts that are like EU region locked that I found a Mac mini host in the EU.
01:00:49 ◼ ► I think the Netherlands is in the EU. Uh, anyway, so at least in Europe and, uh, and, uh, so I'm like,
01:00:55 ◼ ► great. All right. So I had those three and this, this required me to learn a bunch of stuff. Like
01:01:01 ◼ ► I had to, first of all, you know, first of all, I'm installing the Tahoe betas and every single
01:01:06 ◼ ► time there's a new beta, the API changes a little bit or some limit is imposed or some limit is released
01:01:10 ◼ ► or some bug is fixed. So all summer I'm updating these, these Mac minis with the betas. And that's,
01:01:26 ◼ ► So I'm running the betas. I'm doing everything via remote desktop, like, you know, like VNC,
01:01:32 ◼ ► like to, to the Mac minis, like from my home computer. And meanwhile, also doing it all like
01:01:36 ◼ ► on my laptop locally and updating that every time. And then I did like this whole thing. I had to,
01:01:41 ◼ ► had to learn how to basically run Mac servers, which is something I really had not done beyond just
01:01:46 ◼ ► occasionally having a Mac mini in my house to be like a NAS or a streaming thing or whatever.
01:01:50 ◼ ► There was just a link that I was going to put in a future episode, but it seems relevant now that I,
01:01:54 ◼ ► let me see if I can find it. There was like, I think in 26.3 or something that file vaults now lets you,
01:02:04 ◼ ► unlock the file vault encrypted drive over SSH. Yeah. Like before your thing boots. That would
01:02:11 ◼ ► have been nice. I mean, presumably these hosting companies will do this for you. That's what you're
01:02:17 ◼ ► paying them for or whatever. But for people who don't have that, but yeah, apparently we'll put a
01:02:21 ◼ ► link in the show notes to the Apple support article that even before the OS boots, when it's just at the
01:02:25 ◼ ► thing where it's like, Hey, enter your password to unlock this file vault disc. So I can boot the OS.
01:02:30 ◼ ► You can apparently SSH in remotely and enter the file vault password. So it will continue with the
01:02:35 ◼ ► boot. Yeah. And I've, I've learned so many things about running Macs remotely. Like, you know, all
01:02:38 ◼ ► the different, like I have a big text document of all the things I have to do, you know, for a fresh
01:02:43 ◼ ► install, like to prepare it and everything. Um, because you know, every time there's a software
01:02:47 ◼ ► update, I got to do the whole, I got to do all this again and go, go to all of them. And, and of
01:02:51 ◼ ► course in the summertime, like during the beta period, it's every two weeks, every two weeks,
01:02:58 ◼ ► what I want to do. Um, and meanwhile, I have to also integrate this, you know, this, these
01:03:04 ◼ ► three Mac minis into overcast infrastructure. So I have to build in a job queue performance
01:03:11 ◼ ► and health monitoring, like from, from like the overcast transcription app that I'm running
01:03:15 ◼ ► on these Mac minis that integrates with my other performance and health monitoring on the
01:03:19 ◼ ► server side. And I have to, you know, build on things like, all right, well, if, if the Mac
01:03:27 ◼ ► queue entry to re queue that after a while and have some other Mac mini handle it. Like
01:03:31 ◼ ► it was, it was such a journey, but it was working. I want more coverage. I don't want to just do
01:03:37 ◼ ► like the top hundred podcasts. I want to do, you know, anything with more than X followers
01:03:42 ◼ ► to it or X subscribers to it. Great. So I got two more Mac minis in August. So, you know,
01:03:47 ◼ ► started out like really, really simple, you know, just the three, like the two that I own
01:03:56 ◼ ► now I'm up to five. And what five could do was great. You know, it was like, okay, all right now,
01:04:02 ◼ ► but you know, the cost is starting, you know, now I'm, you know, $250 a month plus the hundred,
01:04:07 ◼ ► like it's, you know, it's like, it's starting to get like, okay, this is, this is starting to get to
01:04:11 ◼ ► a decent amount of money. And I thought, okay, let's see how the five do the five. You know,
01:04:17 ◼ ► it ramps up pretty much linearly. Okay. How many more podcasts can I cover? And it was, you know,
01:04:25 ◼ ► I'm starting to cover like a somewhat reasonable percentage of popular podcasts, but then I'm like,
01:04:31 ◼ ► all right, well, I want, I also want to do like some of the back catalog. Like, can I go back like a few
01:04:35 ◼ ► months? Can I go back a few years? Like how, how much can I do since I don't really need a lot of
01:04:42 ◼ ► like help from the host, I'm just running these anywhere. I wonder if there's like a local data
01:04:50 ◼ ► center that I can co-locate. Like if I can, if I can get like, you know, people, people make these,
01:04:54 ◼ ► these brackets that hold six Mac minis into like a three U space on a rack. And I'm like, if I can get,
01:05:01 ◼ ► let me, let me see, like, what would it cost to host a three U rack of Mac minis in a data center?
01:05:06 ◼ ► If I can get that for a few hundred bucks a month, then I might, you know, I might be able to come out
01:05:11 ◼ ► ahead of what it's going to cost me. If I'm going to, if I'm going to, I was thinking, you know, maybe
01:05:16 ◼ ► I'll have like 10 or 12 of these, like that could like, that could do a lot. If I can, what I was doing
01:05:22 ◼ ► with three and then with fives, like if I can get like 12, like, Hmm, this, this could really be
01:05:28 ◼ ► something. And so I bought a few more and I'm like, as I'm, as I'm doing this, I'm like, let me see,
01:05:38 ◼ ► Before you send whatever you're going to send, I would just like to say that I am looking forward
01:05:52 ◼ ► All right. So you've sent two photographs that I will describe. One of them is two Mac minis with
01:05:56 ◼ ► little stickies on them that say, what does that scribe one into? And then a second photograph
01:06:02 ◼ ► that has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven Mac minis stood kind of upright, if you will,
01:06:12 ◼ ► No, that's a switch on the left and that's an old iPad on the right. Just as just basically
01:06:15 ◼ ► because you know, when you run them, they get hot and I didn't want to melt my rug. Uh, and
01:06:25 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, when you just have one, it's not that bad, but when you have seven, you know,
01:06:28 ◼ ► it starts to add up. Um, so this was like, all right, now I have a few more and it's going well.
01:06:35 ◼ ► And I'm like, okay, I ordered, I'm like, as I'm like looking at different data centers,
01:06:43 ◼ ► for racking me somewhere. So I got a rack enclosure to see like what it is. And so here's this next
01:06:48 ◼ ► photo here. This is six of them in a rack enclosure made for Mac minis. It's a very simple,
01:06:56 ◼ ► Yeah. It seems like it's a shelf with brackets to mount it on the rack, you know, and very little
01:07:13 ◼ ► I mean, it was really getting ridiculous. Like, cause there's, I've now at this point bought
01:07:17 ◼ ► seven Mac minis and like, it's, you know, it's starting to get, you know, I'm like, do I keep
01:07:23 ◼ ► Everyone thought it was a, it was open claw that was causing the run on the Mac minis. It's
01:07:28 ◼ ► For the record, I'm looking at this rack mount and I don't know if there's, if, if there's a
01:07:33 ◼ ► reason behind this or if this is really the, the, the right iteration numbers, but I see
01:07:43 ◼ ► So at that point, one through six were in the data center or no one through five were in the
01:07:48 ◼ ► data centers. Six was that extra one off to the side of the previous photo. That was just
01:07:53 ◼ ► one that I just had, that was like my beach Mac mini. Like, so that was just, I, I, I conscripted
01:08:06 ◼ ► But anyway, what, what is your power bill for the month or months that these were all in
01:08:15 ◼ ► It's probably less than your monitor. So the, the combined power usage of six Mac minis
01:08:26 ◼ ► They're not doing much GPU work and they're all just the base model M4. So the, the top
01:08:31 ◼ ► of the power envelope is not that high. Um, so it's, yeah, it's like, I think it's like
01:08:35 ◼ ► about 50 ish Watts or 40 ish Watts each. It's yeah. It's like 250 for the whole, for that
01:08:45 ◼ ► that anyway. So I started talking to data centers and it was very hard to find any data center
01:08:50 ◼ ► that would even take like, you know, just one guy, because it turns out what I've learned
01:08:55 ◼ ► is that most data centers, their businesses, like big companies or the government, you know,
01:08:59 ◼ ► so it's like, they don't have like not a lot of data centers willing to talk to one guy.
01:09:02 ◼ ► And I found one locally that was, it's on Long Island and it was, it was willing, you know,
01:09:08 ◼ ► they were willing to talk to me and I was like, all right, so, you know, I'm looking to,
01:09:14 ◼ ► know, three U plus whatever I would need for like a, you know, network year or router or
01:09:18 ◼ ► whatever. So like three, maybe three or four U of rack space, you know, 300 Watts of continuous
01:09:24 ◼ ► power usage and whatever you can give me on the internet side. What, what would that cost?
01:09:27 ◼ ► And I learned basically that was too small for this data center to, for any data center to
01:09:33 ◼ ► care about that. Like I was, I was, I've never done anything with data center before. So I
01:09:37 ◼ ► had no idea. What is it like? I was picturing like, you just rent, you know, space by the rack
01:09:43 ◼ ► unit, like by the, by the U basically. And I thought I could just ask for like, for you and
01:09:48 ◼ ► like, Oh, how much will that be? And like, it turns out it's not worth them dealing with that.
01:09:52 ◼ ► The amount of space that we have on long Island is ample. Um, but power and bandwidth are the
01:09:59 ◼ ► expensive parts. And so I, they're like, okay, well we can give you like, maybe we can give
01:10:04 ◼ ► you half a cabinet, but we mostly just do full cabinets. And I was like, like, like what? Like
01:10:09 ◼ ► the full, the whole thing, the whole tall rack, like the, you know, 48 or whatever rack use that's
01:10:19 ◼ ► you need another 15 Mac minis then. Well, I'm like, I'm like, this is like, I don't know how much
01:10:25 ◼ ► this is going to, this is going to be a lot to afford. So I'm like, all right, well that's,
01:10:29 ◼ ► that's way above what I, what I can do right now. So I'm like, all right, let me, let me figure
01:10:33 ◼ ► something else out. Um, and so for most of the fall, and I just ran that rack there, that,
01:10:41 ◼ ► that enclosure of the six Mac minis. I had like the, the six in the data center and then I ran these
01:10:46 ◼ ► seven just in my house. In the water closet. It's calling to you. You know, it is the ultimate,
01:10:51 ◼ ► the ultimate, forget about the, the, you know, entire server cabinet. You've already got one.
01:10:56 ◼ ► It's got water bottles on the bottom and you just shove this thing in. You close the door.
01:11:00 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, the good thing, since they're quiet and since they work as a nice little heater also,
01:11:04 ◼ ► um, although not much, I mean, a 250 watt space heater is a very small space heater, but I just
01:11:09 ◼ ► had them on top of that file cabinet you see on the right there in that picture. I just had them
01:11:12 ◼ ► sitting on top of that for all fall, like all the whole, it was just sitting there, um, just running.
01:11:16 ◼ ► And especially cause like, you know, as I was coming back on the mainland for the school year,
01:11:20 ◼ ► like, well, I have this perfectly good internet connection over here. It's not going to be used
01:11:23 ◼ ► very much all winter. Um, so might as well use it. And so I'm like, all right, if I put
01:11:27 ◼ ► six of them here, maybe I can put another six of them in the restaurant. Cause the restaurant
01:11:31 ◼ ► also has an internet connection that is idle all winter long. Like, Hmm, like this, I start,
01:11:37 ◼ ► I started like scaling it up in my mind. I'm like, all right, if I can, if I can make this
01:11:42 ◼ ► work, like I can put them all over the place. Like in, I have, I have two houses in a restaurant
01:11:54 ◼ ► one day. Casey, there'll be some Mac minis under there and it will scribe 27, scribe 28.
01:11:58 ◼ ► Like what the hell? Oh my word. Um, so anyway, so in, I, I had, you know, there have been in,
01:12:06 ◼ ► in the fall around black Friday and there've been a couple of times Mac minis went on significant
01:12:11 ◼ ► sales and I was like, well, if I can get them for like, I did the math and I'm like, if I can
01:12:22 ◼ ► or less, I would look at it. And sometimes you get them for like 450. That's getting pretty
01:12:29 ◼ ► like, that's getting pretty good. So there were a couple of times, uh, where I'm like, I splurged
01:12:41 ◼ ► And so I would get six more. And that happened a couple of times. Well, it, it soon became,
01:12:47 ◼ ► apparent that I, I was probably ready for the next level. Um, and so I called the data center
01:12:54 ◼ ► back. I'll take a cabinet. Yeah. And it turned out a cabinet was not that much once you had
01:12:59 ◼ ► like 18 Mac minis. And so I got myself a data center contract. Oh my word. Um, and I had to
01:13:09 ◼ ► learn a lot about how do you host things in a data center? I had never even been inside
01:13:16 ◼ ► one. Yeah. I've never, I had never seen one. I was picturing a very different thing than
01:13:21 ◼ ► what it was. I was picturing everything like black, dark, like, you know, loud, awful. Like
01:13:27 ◼ ► it wasn't loud. It was moderate volume, actually. It used to be louder. Let's say I got this contract
01:13:33 ◼ ► with this local data center. They were very nice, very helpful. Cause of course, everyone
01:13:36 ◼ ► who works in a data center is a nerd like us. So, you know, everyone's, everyone's very helpful.
01:13:40 ◼ ► And I think they were very happy to see a customer who was not just like a boring, you know, bank
01:13:44 ◼ ► or something. Um, so anyway, things escalated a little bit. Did they provide networking equipment
01:13:50 ◼ ► or did you provide that? I provided that. So I'll get to that in a moment. Um, but I will just
01:13:55 ◼ ► show you the final state that I have reached. Oh my God. This is what? 36 Mac minis. Um,
01:14:03 ◼ ► and I still have the six that are in the, that are in the beach house and the few that are in
01:14:07 ◼ ► the coat, the, uh, Mac mini vault. I now have 48 Mac minis. Oh my word. You have 48 Mac minis.
01:14:14 ◼ ► Did you even look at like AWS Graviton arm, you know, uh, like how much did you price out a cloud,
01:14:21 ◼ ► uh, base thing for this or no? Not really. Like I was looking at like APIs from the AI providers and
01:14:28 ◼ ► stuff, but like actually do like, so what I like about this setup is the recurring cost is almost
01:14:36 ◼ ► nothing. When I build overcast, I build it for the long haul because I've been around the block. I know
01:14:41 ◼ ► like anything I sign up for, that's going to be like $3,000 a month that really adds up. But this entire
01:14:49 ◼ ► thing is like $1,000 a month and I have a lot of headroom. I had to pay up front for the Mac minis
01:14:56 ◼ ► obviously, but they're not that expensive. And I was able to get most of them on sale whenever they
01:15:02 ◼ ► were like, so like I, I didn't pay that much for this amount of capacity. And each one of these has
01:15:08 ◼ ► 16 gigs of Ram, an amazingly capable processor. Now it has professional, you know, full-time networking
01:15:14 ◼ ► in a data center, power redundancy and everything. So actually when I compare the processing power I
01:15:19 ◼ ► have at my, at my disposal here versus what I'm paying Akamai for since they bought Linode, like
01:15:25 ◼ ► this is, this destroys anything else I've seen in terms of capability per dollar. Um, this is way better.
01:15:32 ◼ ► So I had to learn everything about this. So as you see there, as you mentioned, I have my ubiquity
01:15:40 ◼ ► light up cables because of course I got a ubiquity light up switch and ubiquity router, um, because I
01:15:46 ◼ ► know how to run those. I, and like, I already have in my ubiquity site manager, I already have multiple
01:15:50 ◼ ► sites. I have been at the house of the restaurant. Like, so I'm like, I, I already manage multiple
01:15:54 ◼ ► ubiquity sites. I know how to do it. Their equipment is rock solid. I had to learn a few other things that
01:16:02 ◼ ► So number one, I had no idea that power in data centers is 208 volts. Oh, I, right. You didn't
01:16:12 ◼ ► know either. Right. So, you know, us, you know, we have the 110 or the 220 or whatever, whatever,
01:16:17 ◼ ► 208, whatever it is, like it's the 220. It's the, it's the, the, the high voltage. Fortunately,
01:16:21 ◼ ► like all modern computer equipment has universal power supplies that it can take in anything from
01:16:27 ◼ ► like a hundred to 240 or whatever. Like the, like it has a wide range of the power supply levels,
01:16:31 ◼ ► but everything else you have to deal with. Like, so another thing I learned is that power at a data
01:16:37 ◼ ► center is usually provided with two different inputs. And I, it's, they, they were great. They took me on
01:16:42 ◼ ► a whole tour of the data center and I saw like the, the entire infrastructure of the place. There's two
01:16:48 ◼ ► of everything, two generators. There's two power regulation sides. There's two HVAC sides. Like there's
01:16:55 ◼ ► two of everything for redundancy and it's, it's a very nice data center. Um, and so everything has
01:17:01 ◼ ► to be able to fail over. And when you are connecting to their power, the back of the rack has a whole
01:17:09 ◼ ► bunch of plugs. Oh, and by the way, they're not just like the U S you know, NEMA 15, whatever plug,
01:17:17 ◼ ► like what you see on the back of a computer, like the, I think it's the C 13 or the C 14. They're that,
01:17:23 ◼ ► that is what data center plugs are. Here, I'll send this picture. You can see, um, this is the
01:17:28 ◼ ► back of the rack. Yeah. That's what I wanted to see to see how well you did on cable routing.
01:17:31 ◼ ► Yeah. So the, the colorful plugs you see on the back of the rack, there's a left bank and a right
01:17:35 ◼ ► bank, and that's two different power inputs. And so at first I was like, okay, well, I'll just plug
01:17:41 ◼ ► into one of them. Cause you know, if these, the, like these are not serving traffic, they're work
01:17:45 ◼ ► consumers. So if some go offline for a while, it's not a big deal. Like the queue will just build up.
01:17:54 ◼ ► I told the guy who was giving me this program, I go, that's because all my stuff only has one
01:17:57 ◼ ► input. I don't have redundant power supplies, any of this stuff. And he's like, well, once a year,
01:18:02 ◼ ► we like take down an entire side for, you know, a few hours to test things. And so you don't really
01:18:08 ◼ ► want to be plugged into that side during that time. And then, you know, we do the other side. So I'm
01:18:15 ◼ ► They buy server hardware where they can plug both cables into redundant power supplies.
01:18:19 ◼ ► Well, that too. Or it turns out there's a device called an ATS, an automatic transfer switch. And so
01:18:24 ◼ ► you can plug in the ATS into both sides and then it, it offers you a single set of outlets that is,
01:18:30 ◼ ► that is redundantly powered basically. So you can plug in all your single ended stuff into the ATS.
01:18:34 ◼ ► And since all of my stuff is single ended, that's what I did. So I had, I had to learn that.
01:18:39 ◼ ► Like there's so much about this that I just had no idea. Like this is how servers were like physically
01:18:45 ◼ ► run. Yeah. I didn't know. You're really not taking advantage of this rack. Those Mac and minis are
01:18:49 ◼ ► just barrel. They're like the size of the face plate on the old server. And the whole rest of the rack has
01:18:54 ◼ ► just empty space. Yeah. Well, it's a lot of space. Like, yeah. Cause servers are long. Remember even how
01:18:59 ◼ ► long the X serve was, which is probably the only rack map server you may have been familiar with. They're
01:19:03 ◼ ► really long. Yeah. I mean, there's nothing stopping me if I wanted to like, I could use both sides of the
01:19:07 ◼ ► rack. Like I could, I could just put a second set of them on the back rack mount holes.
01:19:13 ◼ ► You want that, you want the hot side going into the hot aisle. You don't want to be pushing hot
01:19:16 ◼ ► air into the middle of your rack. So yes, technically you are correct. Um, in practice,
01:19:21 ◼ ► like as I walk through the, the aisles of the, of the data center, there's no heat coming from your
01:19:25 ◼ ► rack minis. No, there, there's some, but like in practice, like I'm like, I walk, I walk past,
01:19:29 ◼ ► you know, as I'm walking down the, the ostensibly cold aisle, some people have installed their
01:19:34 ◼ ► servers backwards and are blowing hot air into the cold aisle. So like it doesn't seem like it's that,
01:19:41 ◼ ► Mac minis are just not producing that much heat. Um, you'll see like the big black things I have
01:19:47 ◼ ► kind of like at top and midway. Those are fans. Um, there's a, there are rack mount fans that suck
01:19:51 ◼ ► air in from the bottom and blow it out the back because the Mac minis are just, you know, having
01:19:55 ◼ ► the, having the hot air just go straight up. Yeah. The Mac minis are not blowing air out the back
01:19:58 ◼ ► of them, unfortunately. Right. They're just kind of, you know, it's wafting upwards from them.
01:20:02 ◼ ► And so these fans suck it in and blow it out the back, but even the, like, I don't think it's that
01:20:06 ◼ ► necessary at this scale, obviously, or honestly, but anyway, so I had to learn about 220 volt. I had
01:20:13 ◼ ► to learn about ATSs. You know, they, they provide the internet via what they called a DIA. And I had
01:20:21 ◼ ► to, of course, I'm instantly going to like chat GPT and Gemini. What the heck is a DIA? How do I,
01:20:25 ◼ ► how do I connect whatever that is to whatever I have? What should I have? What equipment do I need?
01:20:30 ◼ ► What settings do I use? They give you like a yellow fiber wire and they're like, here you go.
01:20:35 ◼ ► I ran it to your cage. Okay. Now what do I do? And I had to like buy like a little fiber transceiver,
01:20:43 ◼ ► but it had to be exactly the right kind to go into the SFP port on the ubiquity, whatever router I got.
01:20:48 ◼ ► Um, the, I think it's the, one of the, the dream machine pro max ultra. I don't know. Uh,
01:20:54 ◼ ► one of, one of the high end rack mount ones. Um, like I had to learn all this stuff. Like,
01:21:00 ◼ ► and this is, you know, for people who work in data centers, I'm sure this is trivial to you because
01:21:03 ◼ ► you've been doing it forever, but like when you've never seen it before, that's all brand new. So I had
01:21:09 ◼ ► to do a lot of just learning. And again, thank God for like the AI tools and YouTube tutorials here and
01:21:16 ◼ ► there for certain things. I was able to figure it all out eventually. And again, the data center people
01:21:19 ◼ ► were very helpful with the parts that they could help with. Um, so it was a really great learning
01:21:26 ◼ ► experience. It was very fun doing it. I don't get a lot of physical projects and like to be able to like
01:21:34 ◼ ► wire up a whole bunch of computers and, you know, run all these network cables bundled together and,
01:21:39 ◼ ► you know, all like have all, have everything all organized. I even like, I, I recently set it up
01:21:44 ◼ ► so that like, if one of the Mac minis crashes in a way that I can't reboot it remotely, I can now log
01:21:50 ◼ ► into the power thing and remotely just kick off an entire bank of them and like, have it, like have
01:21:56 ◼ ► it power cycle an entire, you know, set of six. Um, so I built a manual kicking machine. Um, and it's
01:22:02 ◼ ► reference signals. It's just, it's a lot of fun. I'm so happy I did this. And what this has enabled
01:22:08 ◼ ► is overcast is now transcribing every podcast that has more than one listener, every single one,
01:22:19 ◼ ► every podcast. Well, there are language restrictions. Um, because I'm using Apple's API or Apple's, um,
01:22:26 ◼ ► you know, models for this, their models only support English, French, German, Japanese,
01:22:33 ◼ ► Italian, Portuguese, and there's one more. Oh no, that's it. That's six. Yeah. If I actually look at
01:22:40 ◼ ► what overcast top languages are, um, the one I really want is Dutch. They don't support Dutch yet.
01:22:46 ◼ ► And that, that is one of overcast top languages in terms of like podcasts being produced that people
01:22:50 ◼ ► are listening to. Um, but otherwise like that covers most of what most people are listening to
01:22:56 ◼ ► among those podcasts that, that I can support with this API based on the language. I am able to
01:23:02 ◼ ► transcribe every episode that comes out, you know, easily catching up every, every podcast that has
01:23:07 ◼ ► more than one listener, um, that is public. And then I was like, you know, what I want to do the
01:23:13 ◼ ► back catalog. And so I started kind of raising the numbers of like, all right, let me go back again,
01:23:19 ◼ ► start out, go back a month, go back to, and then, you know, the, the, you know, jobs in the queue would
01:23:24 ◼ ► spike up and then they would slowly churn through them and slowly work through. And I'm like, okay,
01:23:28 ◼ ► that's, that's good. That's getting there. Um, and then I was like, why the number, uh, I'm just not
01:23:37 ◼ ► keeping up. Like what's, there was like a couple of weeks where like, I'm just, I was not able to keep
01:23:41 ◼ ► up. I'm like, what is going on here? I, I bought 48 Mac minis. Why can I not keep up? By the way,
01:23:53 ◼ ► Oh, gracious. This is why I have seen it so many times. Welcome liquid glass. I would love to never
01:24:02 ◼ ► see that screen again. Anyway, so I was like, what is going on? And I, I looked at, I built a whole
01:24:08 ◼ ► logging feature to see it for every, so every server could log every action that was taken on, on a
01:24:12 ◼ ► transcript. It's like, what is going on here? And I found after a little while, there was a bug that
01:24:19 ◼ ► was causing a lot of the transcript jobs to not be deleted afterwards. So they would recur after a few
01:24:28 ◼ ► hours. Oh no. So I fixed the bug and within a couple hours, the queue went to zero. And I was like,
01:24:42 ◼ ► So then I thought, I wonder what it would take to transcribe private podcasts too, because that's
01:24:51 ◼ ► something that Apple podcast doesn't do. Wouldn't that be cool if I could do them too? And so I built
01:24:57 ◼ ► that. It turns out I'm able to support almost all private podcasts too. So now Overcast is transcribing
01:25:04 ◼ ► every public podcast with more than one listener. Almost every private podcast, like above a certain,
01:25:10 ◼ ► I forget where I, I think I set that threshold at something like 10 or something like, so if you
01:25:13 ◼ ► have a membership that has at least 10 people, something like that, um, then, you know, in
01:25:16 ◼ ► Overcast, then that'll be transcribed as well. And all of this is running on these 48 Mac minis.
01:25:23 ◼ ► Do you really need 48 at this point? I'm not trying to snark. I'm genuinely asking you,
01:25:29 ◼ ► like, what do you think is your steady state need if in order to handle the load that you have
01:25:34 ◼ ► before I fixed the bug that was causing them to repeat themselves? Um, I, I thought I could never
01:25:40 ◼ ► get enough. Now when I've reached a steady state, I do drop below a hundred percent use, but what I've
01:25:48 ◼ ► been doing is just going back more and doing more back catalog work. And whenever my queue would hit
01:25:53 ◼ ► zero, I would just like lower the threshold. It's like, all right, now, now go back five years. Now go
01:25:59 ◼ ► back seven years. Now go back 10 years. And every time I would do that, the number of jobs would spike
01:26:03 ◼ ► up and then they would slowly churn through them and, and, and they, they prioritize new releases and
01:26:08 ◼ ► they prioritize popular podcasts. So there's not much cost in having the queue be full of a bunch of
01:26:12 ◼ ► work to do. Eventually I would, I would catch up with at the new level because all those back catalogs
01:26:17 ◼ ► will have been transcribed. And then I just, you know, lower, lower the limits again. The next,
01:26:22 ◼ ► the next thing to do is lower it to podcasts that have one listener. Cause right now I'm at like,
01:26:27 ◼ ► if you have two or more listeners, again, more than one listener, that's one thing. But if,
01:26:30 ◼ ► if I go to one listener, then that like, I think that like doubles the number of podcasts or something
01:26:35 ◼ ► that I have to do. So that that's its own decent size jump. But once I'm done with a lot of the
01:26:40 ◼ ► back catalog work, I think I will be probably ready for that at this level. Now I also, I realized like
01:26:48 ◼ ► I will have a surplus of computational power here before too long. Um, so what do I do with that?
01:26:54 ◼ ► And well, I can start moving work to them. First of all, like things like imagery sizing that I have
01:27:01 ◼ ► right now, my main Linux servers at, at, uh, Akamai there's, you know, they're doing a lot of that kind
01:27:06 ◼ ► of work. I can move that to these. Why not? They're super fast. They have all this great stuff. I even
01:27:11 ◼ ► actually tried earlier in the winter, you know, how a lot of podcast apps will use the dominant color
01:27:18 ◼ ► in artwork to tint the interface in some way. I tried running that on these, like where like one
01:27:25 ◼ ► of the jobs they would do like, so one thing they do is language detection. As I look into more like
01:27:32 ◼ ► smart transcript features, I can do things in the future that I haven't done this yet, but I can do
01:27:36 ◼ ► things like, you know, automatic chapter detection or topic detection or summarization, things like
01:27:41 ◼ ► that. Well, now I have all this computational power I can do that with. And it's not going to be,
01:27:46 ◼ ► it's not going to be the same as if I was running like, you know, uh, chat GPT's flagship model or
01:27:51 ◼ ► Claude's flagship model. It's not that kind of hardware, but it, it is basically a whole bunch
01:27:56 ◼ ► of computational power that will be almost free to operate over time. And so there's a huge incentive
01:28:02 ◼ ► for me to move work to them or to find work they can do that would help the product. So I'm not worried
01:28:06 ◼ ► about that. I think I will have plenty of work for them to do over time. And also I had to solve
01:28:12 ◼ ► the issue with dynamic ad insertion. I need transcripts to reach a certain minimum level
01:28:19 ◼ ► of functionality for me. One of those is like, all right, I definitely want them to be time synced.
01:28:24 ◼ ► You know, I don't, I don't just want a static transcript that just dumps all the text of one
01:28:30 ◼ ► version of this, but then the version that you have that has different ads in it doesn't line up.
01:28:34 ◼ ► Everything has to line up. And I thought, well, how do I do that? I spent a lot of the summer just
01:28:40 ◼ ► trying, developing and testing different algorithms to basically make signatures of the audio to analyze
01:28:48 ◼ ► the audio to say, all right, where, you know, what kind of waveforms are there or what kind of
01:28:54 ◼ ► frequency pairings or frequency patterns or like, like I tried all these different algorithms, like
01:28:58 ◼ ► somehow characterize what this audio is. So that way, when the server transcribes the version that
01:29:05 ◼ ► it gets, and then you on your phone download your download of, of that podcast, but yours has
01:29:11 ◼ ► different ads spliced into it. So the, you know, it might not line up or it might have things inserted
01:29:16 ◼ ► or removed. I want my transcript generated from the server to be able to be lined up with what your
01:29:21 ◼ ► phone got from, from its different download of the same podcast. So how do I do that? What actually
01:29:27 ◼ ► is like a unique way to identify different parts of the audio? Honestly, I got to say AI was very
01:29:32 ◼ ► helpful in this. Um, AI did not write the algorithms for me, but it did tell me what kind, like it,
01:29:39 ◼ ► you know, I, I was asking AI models last summer, like how do different companies solve this problem?
01:29:43 ◼ ► Like what, what do different apps use for this? What kind of approaches are there? Um, and it was like,
01:29:48 ◼ ► oh, here's what, you know, uh, Shazam uses for its fingerprinting. Uh, here, here's how Spotify does
01:29:53 ◼ ► there. Here's like, they tried to take some guesses on how YouTube content ID works. Like there's all
01:29:57 ◼ ► these different things like, okay, this actually very helpful. Um, I was able to over the course
01:30:03 ◼ ► of a few months, get a signature algorithm that worked, that was able to read the same file.
01:30:08 ◼ ► And I could like, you know, I was doing tests. I would like, you know, download something from
01:30:12 ◼ ► here, then download something through the Netherlands Mac mini that I was renting. And like, all right,
01:30:16 ◼ ► we have different ads now. Um, compare these, like, can the algorithm find the parts that are
01:30:21 ◼ ► the same and line them up correctly? Um, can it detect which parts were inserted or removed so I can
01:30:26 ◼ ► then adjust the transcript in those areas? Um, and it took months, but I finally got there and
01:30:33 ◼ ► between the transcript algorithm and the signature algorithm, all of those things were just barely
01:30:42 ◼ ► fast enough to plausibly run on the iPhone. And they all use APIs that were built into the iPhone.
01:30:50 ◼ ► So I'm like, wouldn't it be great if I was able to offer on device transcription for any,
01:30:57 ◼ ► for any podcast episodes that I didn't do myself server side. And so from that point, I was developing
01:31:04 ◼ ► the entire pipeline as something that also compiled and ran on iOS. And I'm happy to say I was also able
01:31:13 ◼ ► to ship that so that in, in the beta today, like any podcast that I'd haven't transcribed,
01:31:19 ◼ ► you can just hit transcribe on your iPhone and it'll, it'll do it. It might take like, you know,
01:31:23 ◼ ► a good, you know, three to five minutes depending on how long it is. Um, and it uses the new background,
01:31:27 ◼ ► the background, um, activity API that introduced an iOS 26 for final cut exports. It uses that one
01:31:33 ◼ ► where like you can do like the long running processing task. If you start it from the phone
01:31:40 ◼ ► So if you have iOS 26, you can transcribe on device too. And critically, you're making the same
01:31:47 ◼ ► transcript. Like it isn't like the ones you make on your phone are worse than my server ones. They're
01:31:51 ◼ ► the same. It's the same models between the Mac and iPhone. It's the same models with the same quality
01:31:55 ◼ ► and running, you know, all the same process. Um, so that I think is another great feature of this.
01:32:01 ◼ ► Um, but the, I gotta say the signatures took the longest by far. Um, and I had to learn all sorts
01:32:07 ◼ ► of stuff too, about like long running Mac processes, you know, obviously memory leaks, weren't going to
01:32:13 ◼ ► be tolerable, but that was, that was easy to get around or to avoid rather. But things like, how do I
01:32:19 ◼ ► make, like, what do I do if my process crashes? And the answer is launch D like you, you basically have
01:32:24 ◼ ► like a launch D, you know, thing that you, you create that says like, just automatically always make
01:32:31 ◼ ► doing the, the image color detection that I was saying earlier, like detect the dominant
01:32:36 ◼ ► color in this image, there was a part of that code that kept like seg faulting and a really
01:32:42 ◼ ► deep part of the accelerate framework. And I could not figure out why it seemed like it's
01:32:46 ◼ ► actually part of, part of Apple sample code. And I couldn't, it was so deep in the stack.
01:32:50 ◼ ► It was like, I think it's just a bug in like the, in the OS about this call that I'm calling.
01:32:56 ◼ ► There was no way to avoid this crash. So I learned XPC and I made it its own little XPC
01:33:02 ◼ ► child process so that when the image detection would crash, it wouldn't crash the whole transcription
01:33:07 ◼ ► client. Uh, like I had to learn, I had to learn things like, you know, Apple remote desktop,
01:33:13 ◼ ► which is how I meant right now. This is how I'm managing all the servers is I literally have,
01:33:17 ◼ ► I have like a setup script, but then, and I can SSH into all of them. So like when I update
01:33:27 ◼ ► But if I have to like change Mac settings or things like that, I have to like log into the
01:33:33 ◼ ► screen of the Mac with remote desktop and do it that way. I'm sure that Mac, like it admins
01:33:40 ◼ ► know of way better tools to do this. I would love to hear about those because this is ridiculous.
01:33:47 ◼ ► Um, and I don't want to log into 48 max to do like OS updates down the road. Um, so I would love to
01:33:52 ◼ ► hear about those, but just lots of learning about like how to run fleets of Macs and Apple does not
01:33:58 ◼ ► make that easy. They seem like they don't really spend a lot of time considering that, but it has
01:34:05 ◼ ► been running just fine. It is working. One trick I learned, um, for a long time there's been in,
01:34:11 ◼ ► in like what used to be called Mac OS server and is now just built in. Um, one of the things in the
01:34:16 ◼ ► sharing panel is called content caching, content caching, basically like max detect if there's a
01:34:21 ◼ ► content caching server on the network. And if there's like a software update that comes through
01:34:25 ◼ ► the content cache Mac will download it. And then when every other Mac in your house does that software
01:34:33 ◼ ► update, it'll just pull that copy over your local network. Instead of, you know, if you have five
01:34:37 ◼ ► Macs, instead of each one downloading Mac OS, you know, 26.2.1, five times, you'll download it once
01:34:44 ◼ ► to the content cache server and then all of your other Macs will download it directly from that one.
01:34:48 ◼ ► Well, that matters a lot when you have 48 Macs on a network. So, you know, I designated a few of them
01:34:54 ◼ ► to be content caches and, you know, just little stuff like that. Like it, it's been a really great
01:34:59 ◼ ► overall experience. It's been a massive undertaking. Just like the amount of work this has been on so many
01:35:06 ◼ ► levels, the signature algorithm, the transcript algorithm, like building out the whole queue processing
01:35:13 ◼ ► system for external servers that aren't in my, my main Linux server network, the health monitoring, the remote
01:35:19 ◼ ► desktop, like all there's so much here. And, you know, then serving the transcripts, using them in the app,
01:35:25 ◼ ► lining them up. Like when you do get a different signature, like how do you line up that signature with the one that
01:35:29 ◼ ► the transcript has? There is so much work behind this. But where I've gotten is I got to learn a bunch of
01:35:37 ◼ ► cool server stuff. I got to do some really tricky programming problems, which that's always fun for a
01:35:43 ◼ ► programmer. If we're honest, we love, we love tricky problems, even when they're frustrating and take months
01:35:48 ◼ ► to figure out. But we do love when we do, when we finally do figure them out. And now I have a very
01:35:54 ◼ ► capable computational cluster that I can throw a bunch of work at and it gets it done very cheaply.
01:36:02 ◼ ► And I believe I am the only podcast app to do private podcasts, at least server side. I also believe
01:36:12 ◼ ► I'm the only one where you can like do it on device if they don't have it. I'm certainly the only one
01:36:17 ◼ ► besides Apple that's going to do it for free. But but that's I I'm so I think I think this is all
01:36:23 ◼ ► worth it. And the feature is great and will only get greater over time. Right now, it's again, it's
01:36:30 ◼ ► very basic right now. It's you know, you can you can view the transcript and you can tap or it automatically
01:36:34 ◼ ► scrolls with the audio. It highlights what's being said. You can tap anywhere in it. You can scroll
01:36:39 ◼ ► around, tap anywhere in it to seek to that point. There's a lot of kind of obvious features that
01:36:45 ◼ ► like, well, once you have transcripts, you will obviously also want X things like transcript
01:36:50 ◼ ► search. That's an obvious like number one, like, yeah, you should be able to search transcripts.
01:36:54 ◼ ► I'll get there. Chapterization summaries of sections. There's a lot of that kind of thing. Like, yeah,
01:37:00 ◼ ► that I should do that clip sharing where you can share a clip like, yeah, that that should be
01:37:06 ◼ ► transcript based and the output to include the transcript. Yes, I agree. Like there is so much
01:37:11 ◼ ► that now follows from this. But this has taken me almost a year and I wanted to get this like I got
01:37:17 ◼ ► to ship something. I got to get this out there. And even this like there were a couple of days last week where
01:37:24 ◼ ► I broke the build on my own phone. I broke its ability to use transcripts. So for a couple of days after I had
01:37:30 ◼ ► been using them for a while for a couple of days, I couldn't use them. And I hated it. Like I noticed
01:37:36 ◼ ► immediately because what you know what I do is like I swipe over to the transcript view when like whenever
01:37:41 ◼ ► I'm listening to a big show that has stupid DAI ads, like I'll hear of great another ad for the Apple
01:37:46 ◼ ► card. Awesome. Oh, another ad for pure leaf iced tea. Okay. And I can I can go over the transcript and I can
01:37:53 ◼ ► skim skim skim and just tap right after because it's very obvious where the ad ends. That's great.
01:37:57 ◼ ► Like features like that, you get used to that or even just like a what did they say? If you listen
01:38:03 ◼ ► to a podcast and a bus drives by and you miss a couple of words, you don't have to seek back and
01:38:08 ◼ ► repeat the whole 20 to 30 seconds. You can just swipe, swipe, swipe and see. Oh, that's what they
01:38:12 ◼ ► said. Okay. Like stuff like that. It's really great for that kind of thing. It's also really great for
01:38:16 ◼ ► like, you know, if there's like if there's a podcast that like, oh, I know somewhere in here,
01:38:25 ◼ ► Or if it's like, oh, I got to listen to this episode before tonight, but I don't have that much
01:38:31 ◼ ► time. But there's information in it that I would like to know generally what they talked about.
01:38:36 ◼ ► That's all you can. You can skim the text of what they are talking about faster than you could hear
01:38:41 ◼ ► it. So you if there's like if they're talking about baseball, you can skip it. You know,
01:38:45 ◼ ► so there's like there's all sorts of little benefits like that, you know, much of the benefits
01:38:51 ◼ ► of chapters in podcasts that do it, but just applied to all podcasts. It's it's a great experience. And
01:38:59 ◼ ► it is very clear to me, having developed this and now using it, it is extremely clear to me
01:39:06 ◼ ► that this feature is table stakes, that all podcast apps need transcripts. And once you are used
01:39:15 ◼ ► navigating a podcast with transcripts, using seek forward and seek back buttons feels like you're
01:39:22 ◼ ► a dinosaur. So it is very obvious to me that podcast listening and podcast navigation require this for
01:39:33 ◼ ► any app that wants to be like a serious podcast experience, you know, to be a good listening
01:39:38 ◼ ► experience. You need robust transcript features now, and that will only get more so over time as
01:39:45 ◼ ► we kind of evolve our UIs and our playback experiences to use them more and to offer more,
01:39:51 ◼ ► you know, offer more utility that's powered by transcripts. So I think this is, you know,
01:39:56 ◼ ► I don't I don't always arrive to the party on time with this kind of thing. But I'm I'm here now and
01:40:04 ◼ ► I'm very glad to be here. And it was a long road to get here. It was a ton of work and a ridiculous
01:40:10 ◼ ► amount of, you know, I don't know. It was an astonishing amount of work and expense to to a
01:40:22 ◼ ► not small degree. Um, one of the things I keep wondering as you talk about this to the degree you
01:40:28 ◼ ► are willing and capable of sharing, how are you storing the transcripts? Because, you know, the obvious
01:40:34 ◼ ► question as well, you know, the obvious answer is, oh, it's just a bunch of text. Well, no, it's not because
01:40:40 ◼ ► then you have timestamps and well, but I mean, where is he storing it? Well, that too. Yeah. The cloud,
01:40:46 ◼ ► obviously, of course, of course. Yeah. But like where, where are two cloudflare are two. Okay. And what is the data
01:40:53 ◼ ► type? What? I know some of this is special sauce. You don't want to get too specific. But to the degree you're willing
01:40:59 ◼ ► to share, like what, what is being stored for each of these transcripts? Well, you know, me, of course,
01:41:05 ◼ ► it's a custom format. Of course. I was going to say it would normally be JSON, but knowing Marco is not
01:41:10 ◼ ► going to be JSON. There is JSON under there somewhere. Um, but of course I'm like, well, if I customize it,
01:41:16 ◼ ► I can compress it to be a lot smaller than that. And so, yeah, there's, there's compression, there's
01:41:21 ◼ ► shorthand, there's like, you know, Delta encoding. The total storage space for all the transcripts of all
01:41:26 ◼ ► the podcasts in the world in text form, gzipped can't possibly be that big. No, well, I wasn't
01:41:32 ◼ ► always storing them on R3. I started out storing them in a database and like, that was stupid. R2 or
01:41:36 ◼ ► not R3. But yes, sorry. Yeah. I think you're, I think your problem is going to be that the minimum
01:41:40 ◼ ► block size of R2 is probably bigger than all your transcript files. So it might actually behoove you
01:41:45 ◼ ► to combine them into multiple files if you cared about storage, which you don't. Well, but keep in
01:41:49 ◼ ► mind also that like these transcripts. So right now in, in the UI and overcast, it is displaying,
01:41:55 ◼ ► you know, each kind of like line of text, so to speak. It's, you know, roughly like one to two
01:42:00 ◼ ► sentences, maybe it's, you know, it's displaying them like a series of short paragraphs when it is
01:42:06 ◼ ► highlighting whatever is being spoken. It highlights the entire paragraph at once, but I actually have
01:42:11 ◼ ► word level timing. Oh, gracious. That was my next question. The, the actual data I have is much more
01:42:18 ◼ ► precise than what's showing. I have word level timing and word level confidence. So I'm actually storing a
01:42:23 ◼ ► good amount of data for each transfer. Like I, I knew like if the API is going to give me this
01:42:27 ◼ ► information, I'm going to store it. And you know, I don't, I might not necessarily use it for anything.
01:42:33 ◼ ► Maybe I, maybe I won't use it now, but maybe down the road I will. Like for instance, if you're doing
01:42:38 ◼ ► clip sharing, you know, if you look at what, like there's, there's other apps out there that will
01:42:42 ◼ ► export videos that have like live captions of what's being said. That tends to look a lot better
01:42:48 ◼ ► if you highlight word by word. Um, or if, if you're doing something worth exporting a video or a
01:42:53 ◼ ► picture and say like the, the block, the current block of text is just too long to fit like in the,
01:42:59 ◼ ► in the frame, uh, you'd want to be able to shorten it. And so you would need, you know, sub frame
01:43:05 ◼ ► precision for that. So I'm like, if, if the API has given me word level timing, I'm going to store
01:43:11 ◼ ► it. I don't store everything. Like there's some of it, it will give you like alternate, uh,
01:43:15 ◼ ► transcription options. If it's like, if it's not too confident what was said, it'll see like, well,
01:43:20 ◼ ► I think it's 60% sure it's this, but 40% sure it might be this. I did experiment with those at first,
01:43:26 ◼ ► but I found that the, the alternatives that it was suggesting, they were such low confidence.
01:43:32 ◼ ► Most of the time it wasn't worth storing. So I mostly did not store those on that front,
01:43:36 ◼ ► by the way, that's another one of my questions. So you've, you've got all these text transcripts
01:43:40 ◼ ► now. And as you noted, you're using models optimized for the fact that they can run on the phone and
01:43:44 ◼ ► they're inexpensive to run on the server and so on and so forth. And they're not going to be
01:43:48 ◼ ► up to the standards of the gigantic models that, you know, that you could run in the cloud or
01:43:53 ◼ ► whatever. Right. Um, but once you have the text, like, cause I was looking, I was testing this
01:43:59 ◼ ► feature earlier today. And I looked at the, uh, part of the previous episode where someone sang a line
01:44:05 ◼ ► about, uh, someone walking the length of the city. Um, and the transcription was, they say he walks the
01:44:12 ◼ ► lake L-A-K-E of the city because length and lake sound similar. But what I was wondering is, could you do
01:44:21 ◼ ► a post-processing pass with some L-M thing where you feed it the text? Because I think any kind of
01:44:30 ◼ ► good model would say the lake, the lake of the city doesn't make as much sense as walking the length of
01:44:35 ◼ ► the city. Like it could figure out from context clues in the English language sentence structure
01:44:39 ◼ ► that lake is the wrong word choice there. And especially if you have stored alternatives,
01:44:43 ◼ ► it doesn't have to hear the audio. It's not correcting the transcription saying, oh, I'm going to use it more
01:44:47 ◼ ► props. Obviously then you're just doing transcription twice, but I do wonder if doing like essentially
01:44:53 ◼ ► text grammar correction or best guess correction with like a system prompt that says, um, you know,
01:45:00 ◼ ► like if you had like a summary description of the podcast from the description and the fee,
01:45:03 ◼ ► this is a technology podcast. I don't know if that would help with length of the city, but anyway,
01:45:06 ◼ ► just a world knowledge model would pick out those lyrics and correct them and put in length.
01:45:12 ◼ ► I do wonder again for maybe for the top 100 most popular podcasts in the most recent episodes
01:45:17 ◼ ► that doing a second pass and saying, this is my transcribed thing by my little models. And then
01:45:23 ◼ ► chucking the text to another model and saying, fix this up and make it. So it doesn't say lake of the
01:45:28 ◼ ► city. That is something I've thought about. Um, and, and, and look, the accuracy of the on device model
01:45:34 ◼ ► is fine, but not amazing. You've got, you had to do the thing that everybody does, which is you put a
01:45:38 ◼ ► big warning at the top and say, you know, this is auto generated. There might be errors.
01:45:42 ◼ ► I said, there are probably errors because they are, there are probably errors. Um, you know,
01:45:46 ◼ ► cause, and you know, in my testing, it is good enough to know what's going on. It's good enough
01:45:53 ◼ ► to, to have a, have an idea of what's being said to get most of it and to be, to figure out a lot of
01:45:59 ◼ ► that stuff. It is not perfect enough to be like a document that you're going to show somebody or
01:46:08 ◼ ► Right. Exactly. Like it again, like it's, it's the iPhone dictation model, I think, or, you know,
01:46:13 ◼ ► roughly it is not, it's not like a world knowledge model. That's going to be like, Oh, I know the
01:46:17 ◼ ► name of that because that's the name of a country and the capital of that country is, but no, it's
01:46:21 ◼ ► Right. Like whisper is better at that. Parakeet seems in most people's testing, um, parakeet seems
01:46:27 ◼ ► like it is a little bit better at that. So that's why I'm going to look at that soon. But, um,
01:46:31 ◼ ► it's not like massively better because that, that is mostly just down to like model size and
01:46:36 ◼ ► Are you, are you resigned to redoing all of your transcripts on M sevens with the more powerful
01:46:41 ◼ ► I can't. So there is a versioning system in the transcript data. So yeah, no, I'm just saying
01:46:46 ◼ ► like, are you, are you already setting up to say like, I know I'm doing all this work, but at some
01:46:50 ◼ ► point in the future, I'm going to have to redo it all, like all the whole back catalog again, because
01:46:55 ◼ ► the models will have gotten that much better. And because the M seven will be that much more
01:46:58 ◼ ► powerful. I mean, yeah. So like I expect over time, this will get better, but like, so going
01:47:03 ◼ ► back to like, you know, if I like, you know, using like a big model somewhere to clean up the
01:47:08 ◼ ► transcripts that is on my list to investigate, I think the costs would be prohibitive to do it for
01:47:15 ◼ ► everything. But as you said, like if you, if I just do it the same way, like do have like a,
01:47:22 ◼ ► Yeah. I do wonder like, cause cause it's not transcribing audio, it's just text. I wonder if
01:47:27 ◼ ► it would just be trivial for it, you know? Cause like how much text is there? Honestly, it's a
01:47:30 ◼ ► tight, such a tight, it's like, forget about it. Like the text would fit in one thousandth of the
01:47:35 ◼ ► context window of these giant things these days. It's just, it's so much easier than transcribing
01:47:39 ◼ ► audio, you know? Yeah. So like what I'm going to look at next, uh, well, maybe not exactly next,
01:47:44 ◼ ► but what I'm going to, what I'm going to look at soon now that I have the transcripts, what smart
01:47:49 ◼ ► things can I do with them? And that, again, that would be things like finding like topic changes and
01:47:53 ◼ ► trying to make like a table of contents, you know, make, make chapters that aren't that, you know, if,
01:47:57 ◼ ► if, if podcasts don't have them themselves, um, you know, summarization of chapters maybe. So I
01:48:03 ◼ ► could say, okay, at this part, they're talking about volleyball, you know, like that's the kind of
01:48:06 ◼ ► thing I want to be able to offer. And my, my plan in my mind, which I have not tested anything yet,
01:48:13 ◼ ► but my plan has been to evaluate, like, that's when I go to the big API company or the big AI
01:48:20 ◼ ► companies and use their APIs. So, so I, I would use the open AI or the Gemini or the clawed API to say
01:48:26 ◼ ► like, all right, here's this block of text, find me where the topics are, clean up any errors that you
01:48:32 ◼ ► see that, that are probably unlikely to be what the person actually said, you know, stuff like that.
01:48:35 ◼ ► That is the next big step in making transcripts better. I'm not ready to do that yet. Like I had
01:48:41 ◼ ► to get this part out first, but can you use private cloud compute or is that only allowed to do like
01:48:46 ◼ ► by users from shortcuts? Like I'm wondering if you could. Yeah. So I could theoretically write a
01:48:51 ◼ ► shortcut and shell it out to private cloud compute, but I think I would get throttled really quickly.
01:48:56 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There is a limit on that. Now, I mean, I'm, I'm thinking about like on device,
01:49:00 ◼ ► like, cause you mentioned obviously like transcript search and yeah, you know, you full text search of
01:49:04 ◼ ► transcripts, blah, blah, blah. You know, you can do that all on device. Again, it's not,
01:49:07 ◼ ► it's not that much text. You're searching through one podcast worth of stuff, probably even if you do
01:49:11 ◼ ► all podcasts, whatever. But I also think there's a place for you to be able to do essentially LLM powered
01:49:17 ◼ ► search where you just chuck the whole transcript into the context window and let the person ask a
01:49:21 ◼ ► question and it finds the part. You know what I mean? So for, for one episode, that's easy. Yeah.
01:49:27 ◼ ► Doing it on device, doing that on the iPhone, the context window is only 4,000 tokens. So it's,
01:49:34 ◼ ► Oh yeah. All right. Well, that's why I was asking about private cloud compute. If you could just
01:49:39 ◼ ► chuck the whole thing up to a cloud model, it was, I feel like it would fit in the context window of a
01:49:43 ◼ ► It would absolutely fit. Like if I wanted to offer that, like with a big cloud model through an API,
01:49:50 ◼ ► Ah, that's cool. That's gross. I would just, I would find a way to do it cheaply. Like that's,
01:49:54 ◼ ► I would see like, what can I do for nothing or for near nothing? A lot of this, I mean,
01:49:58 ◼ ► first of all, like AP, like API costs for high end models are only going down over time. And it's
01:50:05 ◼ ► only, only going to continue. And what I'm asking for is not that complex. Like this, this wouldn't
01:50:11 ◼ ► require like a really high end, like thinking and logic reasoning model. Like it wouldn't require
01:50:16 ◼ ► Yeah. You could run this, like you could run this on your Mac minis with some like open weights,
01:50:21 ◼ ► like llama model thing. Cause you're really just doing fuzzier full text search essentially,
01:50:27 ◼ ► you know, and I'm not saying you should do this first. You should just do plain full text first
01:50:30 ◼ ► search first. Cause no, no AI, no anything, just full text search when people type in words and
01:50:35 ◼ ► you match and blah, blah, blah. But because it is just text, any kind of remotely reasonable,
01:50:42 ◼ ► small LLM powered thing that you can fit the transcript into the context window and then just
01:50:47 ◼ ► ask questions about it and get a, get a timestamp out of it. That would be amazing because as
01:50:52 ◼ ► someone who spends a surprising amount of time searching for transcripts, like when I tried to
01:50:56 ◼ ► find the, the, the quote that I just read about the AirPods pro max thing, I foolishly didn't put that
01:51:01 ◼ ► information in the reminder. So I'm like, Oh, sometime in the past, we talked about AirPods max and Marco
01:51:07 ◼ ► said something and I said something and I had to go find that. Um, just a little bit, just a little
01:51:19 ◼ ► are the transcripts going to get AirPods max? Is it going to get AirPods? No, that's a, I guess,
01:51:24 ◼ ► air and pods are two words and you have to think about sound alikes and stuff. And so I think any,
01:51:28 ◼ ► any little bit you can do to help pass the, the sort of very simple, uh, full text, you know,
01:51:38 ◼ ► Yeah. And I think like, that's, that's something to look at like, you know, in, in time as all these
01:51:44 ◼ ► things get cheap and I can run more of them locally. Like, you know, one limitation is that all these
01:51:50 ◼ ► Mac minis are just the, again, they're the base model. They're the 16 gig of Ram base model. So
01:51:55 ◼ ► there's only so much I can do on device when you start talking about bigger models. That being said,
01:52:01 ◼ ► there's nothing stopping me from say, adding a couple of high Ram Mac studios to this. And then,
01:52:11 ◼ ► What do you think Apple's using for its transcripts? Are they using their M2 ultra base servers?
01:52:14 ◼ ► Probably. Yeah. Cause like, yeah, whatever Apple podcast is doing. Yeah. Or they, they could,
01:52:18 ◼ ► they might've also done the same calculation and figured it's actually cheaper. You just do a whole
01:52:22 ◼ ► bunch of base Mac minis. Cause it, you know, it is like when you look at like number of, you know,
01:52:27 ◼ ► transcription minutes per minute that you can get on the base model Mac mini versus if you get like
01:52:33 ◼ ► the highest end M4 max, or I guess it's an M4 pro in the Mac mini. So the highest M4 pro it's not
01:52:41 ◼ ► twice. It's, or I think it's like, it's about twice as much at the most, but it's like four times the
01:52:47 ◼ ► cost. So it's not worth it. I have to imagine that they're using AWS servers to do their transcriptions
01:52:54 ◼ ► with probably with Parakeet models, but I don't know. Someone from Apple write in and tell us,
01:52:57 ◼ ► are you actually using Macs to do podcast transcription or is this all farmed out to, uh,
01:53:01 ◼ ► AWS? I mean, with Apple, it could go either way. Cause they have, they have different deals than you
01:53:06 ◼ ► would get with AWS in terms of pricing. Yeah, of course. Going through any, like doing all of this,
01:53:11 ◼ ► like any answer that begins with, why don't you just like, why don't you just use AWS? Why don't
01:53:15 ◼ ► you just use opening eye, whatever it is? Well, I just asked if you had priced it out. I think
01:53:18 ◼ ► what you ended up doing. Yeah. And the answer is thousands of dollars a day is what that costs.
01:53:27 ◼ ► than you learned for this project. True. Yes. Um, and I, one thing I also really like about the way I've,
01:53:33 ◼ ► I've built this, I can run all the same code that I've already written. Like, so first of all,
01:53:39 ◼ ► there's an advantage of Apple's APIs are really good for a lot of this stuff. So for example,
01:53:45 ◼ ► the music detection I'm doing, that's using Apple's built-in audio classifier. It can do stuff
01:53:51 ◼ ► like detect, like when dogs are barking, like, you know, I'm not using that part of it, but I could,
01:53:55 ◼ ► that's all just really easy. It's using platforms and languages, tools, and all of these things that
01:54:02 ◼ ► I'm already familiar with. I already, I'm using, I'm already deploying, I'm already like in it.
01:54:06 ◼ ► In this case, running these transcripts is using overcast code. The same code is running on the servers
01:54:12 ◼ ► and in the app. I only write that code once. I'm able to use Swift instead of like PHP or whatever
01:54:17 ◼ ► else I would use on the server. There's all sorts of benefits to having this just be one code base.
01:54:22 ◼ ► And like, as I am, as I'm, as I'm, you know, getting older in my career and as, as the world
01:54:29 ◼ ► is getting more and more, like there's more and more in the tech business, no one can keep track of all
01:54:35 ◼ ► of it. There's high value in specializing. And so in my case, like if I can write really good
01:54:41 ◼ ► Swift code, or if I, I mean, to the extent that we're still writing code in a few years, who knows,
01:54:47 ◼ ► but like if, if I can write really good Swift code and I'm really familiar with Apple's platforms and
01:54:51 ◼ ► Apple's APIs and Apple's like infrastructure and how to, how to run all that stuff, I can be, it's easier
01:54:57 ◼ ► for me to become an expert in that and to keep that up to date rather than like, I'm already falling
01:55:03 ◼ ► way behind on my like Linux server side knowledge, just because I don't do that much of it anymore.
01:55:09 ◼ ► I obviously, I still run a lot of servers for Overcast, but like they're not changing that much.
01:55:13 ◼ ► I'm not getting a bunch of new ones all the time. I'm not keeping up with like all the, the most
01:55:18 ◼ ► modern like toolkits and things that everyone's using these days. Like, so specialization is,
01:55:24 ◼ ► is I think is high value to me. The fact that I can just run, like I can do all this cool stuff
01:55:36 ◼ ► server can run on the phone. That's amazing. And then down the road, if I'm still running
01:55:40 ◼ ► Overcast in 10 more years, at that point, the phones will be so fast. I won't need these Mac
01:55:46 ◼ ► minis anymore. Like I, my guess is I will probably never replace these by the time there would be
01:55:52 ◼ ► like a major upgrade in performance that would be worth replacing M4s. I don't even know if I'll need
01:55:58 ◼ ► these anymore because the phones will be so fast. They might be able to do everything on device. And I'm
01:56:06 ◼ ► Then you'll need a coordinate server so that it knows, um, you know, this person A has already
01:56:12 ◼ ► started transcribing the latest, uh, episode of the daily. So everybody else just hold off and wait
01:56:17 ◼ ► for that. Don't bother burning your batteries. Maybe let two people do it just as a backup or three.
01:56:21 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, right now I already have that infrastructure in place. Like right now the,
01:56:26 ◼ ► the code is already there for the iPhone app to be a transcript worker. I'm just not activating that
01:56:34 ◼ ► because there's not much that an iPhone can do in like the, like there, there, there's a type of
01:56:39 ◼ ► background process. Uh, there's a type of background refresh task. Um, not the one that was introduced
01:56:45 ◼ ► in iOS 26, where you can like do the final code export with a live activity, not that there's a
01:56:49 ◼ ► previous one called a background processing task. And you can, you can request the system, wake up your
01:56:56 ◼ ► app in the background and give you a block of like high CPU time when it is charging. So that way you can
01:57:03 ◼ ► burn some battery power and it's not like you're not like doing a disservice to the user cause it's
01:57:08 ◼ ► charging. So usually that'll, that'll run like if when your phone is charging overnight. So I could
01:57:12 ◼ ► use that time, uh, on like everyone's phones to do some work. I'm not because that kind of feels a
01:57:20 ◼ ► little wrong cause that, that kind of feels like I'm stealing resources from people. Um, and the amount
01:57:25 ◼ ► of work you can get done on an iPhone in that time slice, they give you like three minutes or something.
01:57:30 ◼ ► It's not enough to even transcribe one episode of most things. So I'm, I'm doing all this work
01:57:35 ◼ ► myself, but in five or 10 years, when the phones are a lot faster, some of that math changes. Maybe I can
01:57:42 ◼ ► just do all of the work during people's overnight charging. If I wake up everyone's phone for one
01:57:47 ◼ ► minute and they can, they can all do all the work. Like maybe, I don't know, maybe people can opt
01:57:52 ◼ ► into it. I have no idea, but keeping all the code in Swift in the iOS code base, or at least
01:57:59 ◼ ► compatible with the iOS code base, even if I never do that scheme, that it still allows me to do things
01:58:04 ◼ ► like you can on demand hit the transcribe button and transcribe a podcast I didn't get to yet, or that I
01:58:10 ◼ ► won't get to. Um, so there's all sorts of benefits to doing it this way. So anyway, that's it.
01:58:15 ◼ ► I'm looking forward to you reinventing BitTorrent when you go the route of having all these phones
01:58:24 ◼ ► I wasn't thinking of using them as like a, as a, as a, uh, uh, transcription farm, but rather instead
01:58:29 ◼ ► like on demand, you know, because obviously the phone is already downloading an episode because you
01:58:34 ◼ ► subscribe to a particular podcast, the RSS feed updates, the new episode downloads, you know, all that
01:58:39 ◼ ► stuff happens on people's phones and it's happening because they, you know, it's not like, oh, someone's
01:58:43 ◼ ► using my phone to download podcasts. No, it's cause you subscribe to it. Like you control that. The
01:58:47 ◼ ► user subscribes to a podcast and they want it to download the latest episode when it comes out so
01:58:51 ◼ ► that when they open overcast and hit play, the episode is hopefully already there. That's already
01:58:55 ◼ ► happening. I feel like part of that process could be, oh, and in addition to me downloading the
01:59:00 ◼ ► episode, I'll also transcribe it for you. Um, or cue it up to transcribe that as soon as the
01:59:06 ◼ ► overcast is in the foreground or whatever. And I was saying in that type of scenario, you don't want
01:59:10 ◼ ► 70,000 people transcribing the new episode of the daily, right? When it comes out, because there's
01:59:17 ◼ ► a waste for all those phones to be doing the same work, but rather you just pick, well, these 10,
01:59:20 ◼ ► everyone who wants to do it talks to a coordinate server and says, Hey, I'm about to transcribe this
01:59:25 ◼ ► episode. Are there any other phones out there already transcribing? Because if there is, I'll just
01:59:29 ◼ ► wait until they're done because they'll transcribe, they'll upload the text and I'll download the text.
01:59:33 ◼ ► And you know, that type of sort of energy saving type of thing. But yeah, that's definitely down the
01:59:35 ◼ ► road when you have the computing power to do that. Basically with the consent that it currently
01:59:42 ◼ ► downloads, you know what I mean? Like it's downloading because they subscribed. I think
01:59:45 ◼ ► people will be fine saying, and also when you download an episode for me, transcribe it too.
01:59:49 ◼ ► And they don't care how it happens. They just don't want it to hurt their battery. They just want it to
01:59:53 ◼ ► magically be there. And it's not really possible to do that now. But like you said, in a few years,
01:59:57 ◼ ► I feel like if you did that, that would, people would accept that perfectly. They would accept it the
02:00:04 ◼ ► Right. Exactly. And like, there's already like, right now I'm already, I'm already doing what I can
02:00:09 ◼ ► to share work where appropriate. So like, for instance, the signature, the audio signature that
02:00:15 ◼ ► like analyzes the audio and tries to line up with DAI, that is the same. If the copy of the file you have
02:00:23 ◼ ► it's a little bit heavy. It runs at like 600 X or so real time. So, you know, it might take a couple
02:00:29 ◼ ► of minutes or it might take a minute for, for a podcast episode or something. Um, and that does
02:00:34 ◼ ► run on the phone and it has, cause it has to, cause like the phone knows what it downloaded. I don't
02:00:38 ◼ ► know what the phone download. Do you, do you do a, uh, a content hash before you even bother on the
02:00:43 ◼ ► signature just to see if it's literally the same file or do you not bother? Yes. So first I do like
02:00:48 ◼ ► basically an empty five. Do you get the deprecation warnings from the stupid empty five library yelling
02:00:52 ◼ ► at you that it's a broken algorithm and you don't care? It isn't. It, I think it's, it's one of the
02:00:55 ◼ ► Shaw families, but it's one of the fast Shaw ones. Okay. I'm still, I'm still using an empty five and
02:01:00 ◼ ► Xcode. Yeah. And I know there's a way to change it that you can use a different API to get at the
02:01:03 ◼ ► same thing, but the different API is slightly slower. And I'm like, screw you. I'm just going to use
02:01:07 ◼ ► this API forever. Anyway, go on. Yeah. Anyway. So yeah, I first do like a file hash just to see.
02:01:11 ◼ ► And then I, and I go to the server and I say, do you have the signature for this file hash? Right. So
02:01:16 ◼ ► everyone who downloads ATP, since we don't use dynamic ad insertion, only one person is ever going to
02:01:22 ◼ ► generate that signature. And it's probably going to be the transcript servers that do it. Um,
02:01:26 ◼ ► cause they're also embedding the signature that they get in the transcripts. So for podcasts that
02:01:31 ◼ ► don't use DAI, the phones don't have to do this work at all. You need to add a button to the
02:01:36 ◼ ► ATP CMS that I can click that, uh, that forces immediate transcription of the latest ATP episode.
02:01:40 ◼ ► We don't need to, it's a, it's a popular podcast on overcast. So it'll be, it'll be prioritized.
02:01:45 ◼ ► Uh, I know you have the, the ping feeds API that people use. I'm just asking for the equivalent of
02:01:50 ◼ ► that for transcription. Yeah. Well, no, it's not going to happen. Not a public one just for us.
02:01:56 ◼ ► No, I don't, I don't need to. All right. We'll see. Yeah. Or you can download the episode
02:02:05 ◼ ► yeah, it's like it, it checks that it hashes the file first and in the fast way, ask the server,
02:02:09 ◼ ► Hey, do we know what the signature of this hash is yet? For most podcasts, most of the time they'll
02:02:14 ◼ ► have that. The only reason you would have to transcribe, you would have to use the signature
02:02:17 ◼ ► yourself or generate yourself is if the version of the file that you got has different ads than
02:02:25 ◼ ► anybody else has gotten, then your phone will generate the signature for that hash and submit
02:02:30 ◼ ► it to the servers. So we are, so I am doing work sharing as much as possible there. So like the,
02:02:34 ◼ ► this, the work for the signatures isn't being duplicated. The work for the transcripts isn't,
02:02:38 ◼ ► isn't being duplicated. Um, but you know, it's still, it has to happen sometime, but yeah,
02:02:44 ◼ ► So if I get a copy of 99 PI that has, that's got local Richmond ads and nobody else has seen these
02:02:53 ◼ ► ads yet, how are you, how are you trans, uh, how are you making the transcript from that? Like,
02:03:02 ◼ ► Oh God, no, no. I mean, that would, that would be impossible. So in that context, what would happen
02:03:08 ◼ ► is your phone would download the transcript that Overcast already has for that episode.
02:03:14 ◼ ► The transcript would be, as you mentioned, for like a different set of ads that was injected in the,
02:03:19 ◼ ► in the copy that my servers got. And your phone would generate its signature for the file it has.
02:03:24 ◼ ► And then it would look at its signature and the transcript signature, and it would like find the
02:03:28 ◼ ► common ranges between them. Like where is, so basically like whatever is not different between
02:03:33 ◼ ► the two copies, it finds those aligns the server side transcript to those on your local copy.
02:03:39 ◼ ► And then any ranges in your local copy that were not on the server copy, it just doesn't transcribe
02:03:45 ◼ ► those. So you'll see gaps in the transcript with like an ellipsis there, which I believe is the same
02:03:49 ◼ ► thing that Apple podcast does on their transcript. Uh, anyway, so your phone is, is doing the bare minimum
02:03:54 ◼ ► work it needs to do to figure out what audio was it served. And then how to, how does it line up the
02:04:08 ◼ ► We're sponsored by true leaf iced tea or whatever it is. The same ads over and over again.
02:04:14 ◼ ► I'm so, I'm just so glad I don't listen to shows that have the dynamic ad and search on that.
02:04:17 ◼ ► Cause it's just, I hear everyone talking about it and it's, I mean, I guess I've heard a few of them
02:04:20 ◼ ► and it's not great, but yeah. Yeah. I, I signed up for the Verge's paid thing, which has ad free
02:04:25 ◼ ► podcasts finally. Thank God. But they still have the ad bumper. So it's weird. I mean, I know we have
02:04:30 ◼ ► the ad bumpers too, but I feel like it's incorporated in a way that you wouldn't know. It just sounds like
02:04:34 ◼ ► a set, a segment break, but their thing totally sounds like places where ads should go. I'm also
02:04:39 ◼ ► a Verge subscriber. Yeah. Yeah. Like I, I have like the paid search engine podcast one and their ad
02:04:44 ◼ ► bumper is like 45 seconds long. It's huge musical science. I have to like skip forward past it every
02:04:51 ◼ ► time. Um, but like I've, I've been, even though I have the Verge membership, I've been still keeping
02:04:56 ◼ ► the Verge cast public feed so I could test how my transcripts handled DAI. And I've heard the same
02:05:04 ◼ ► ads so many times between that. And like, I like Trevor Noah is probably the biggest, like the most
02:05:08 ◼ ► popular podcast I've probably listened to, I think. Um, and that of course is full of DAI. Like all,
02:05:12 ◼ ► all the big shows are full of DAI. Um, and I'm kind of looking forward to having this finally be
02:05:18 ◼ ► out there and having the signature stuff be, I think done so I can stop listening to all these ads and
02:05:24 ◼ ► just go back to the membership versions. One, one final quick feature request for the olds in the
02:05:29 ◼ ► audience. Uh, you need to make that text bigger or at least an option to make a text bigger on the
02:05:33 ◼ ► transcripts and also make the margins fatter. It is following the body text size that you set.
02:05:41 ◼ ► There needs to be a separate setting for that. I mean, I think just, I, I'm thinking of like
02:05:45 ◼ ► the lyrics and Apple music, how huge they are. I'd be happy if they were that big, but I understand
02:05:50 ◼ ► music lyrics tend to be shorter than podcasts. So maybe there's some limits there, but my old eyes
02:05:55 ◼ ► say, why is this text so small? And also maybe do bolds for the current section instead of regular
02:05:59 ◼ ► for the current section and faded gray for the other ones. Anyway, those are my two quick feature
02:06:09 ◼ ► Yeah. And, and bold, bold the current word since you have that info, you know, the whole deal.
02:06:12 ◼ ► Well, the, I wasn't, the reason I didn't do bold is that bold causes the text to change width and
02:06:22 ◼ ► Um, actually I don't, I don't know if that, I mean, obviously there's monospace numerals, but I,
02:06:27 ◼ ► I do wonder if there's a variant that, uh, does not change metrics when you bold it, but I don't
02:06:33 ◼ ► Well, then I will check then, then just change the color of the current word. Cause you've got the
02:06:37 ◼ ► info. That was like, that'll, that'll really help like the read along type thing of seeing the word,
02:06:41 ◼ ► like the little blue word or whatever color you make up, up, up, up, up, up. That'll be great.
02:06:45 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, and like, and what Apple does with their transcripts, um, is they, like the whole
02:06:50 ◼ ► thing, it's almost like the, um, the genie effect or the, um, what's the zoom effect on the dock
02:06:54 ◼ ► when you hover over things in the scale? I thought it was genie. Genie is when the minimized window
02:06:59 ◼ ► comes out in a little. Oh, sorry. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Sorry. Magnification is what you're thinking
02:07:03 ◼ ► of on the dock when the icons get bigger. Like we, yeah, when you scroll your cursor over the dock
02:07:07 ◼ ► icons and the one you're on grows up in size and the other ones shrink around it. Yeah. They do that
02:07:12 ◼ ► with their transcript text. So the current line of the transcript is bigger and bolder and the rest
02:07:18 ◼ ► kind of like fade into smallness and into the sides. Yeah. That's not great. It does solve some
02:07:23 ◼ ► problems. I think creates others. Um, but you know, so I will play with the UI. Um, there's, there's a
02:07:29 ◼ ► lot, a lot of iteration to be had here. Um, but gotta start somewhere. No, this looks incredible. You
02:07:36 ◼ ► should be very proud. I know this was a lot of work. Um, I can't believe you're announcing it when it's
02:07:41 ◼ ► beta though, because now everyone's like, when is this going to be released? Yeah, that's true.
02:07:44 ◼ ► Well, the good thing is like, I, so I, I mean, honestly, it's a big enough deal. I considered
02:07:48 ◼ ► skipping the beta and just going directly to the public. Not a good idea. Yeah. I realized that was
02:07:52 ◼ ► not. I know you're anxious to get it out, but do the beta. But I, I don't, honestly, I don't expect
02:07:57 ◼ ► this to be in beta for very long. Um, cause my goal here is not to revamp the whole feature with beta
02:08:03 ◼ ► feedback. My goal here is make sure it works to the level, like to the 1.0 level and then
02:08:08 ◼ ► get it to everybody. Um, so we will, we will see. All right. You said it would be half an
02:08:14 ◼ ► hour. It was 70, 82 minutes. That's it. Pretty, pretty, pretty accurate. If you add the Marco
02:08:20 ◼ ► multiplication factor. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I, I thought I was going to have this done
02:08:24 ◼ ► by the fall. So, you know, there, thanks to our sponsors this week, one password, Zapier and Lisa,
02:08:31 ◼ ► and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the
02:08:36 ◼ ► many perks of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic this week in overtime. We're going to
02:08:41 ◼ ► be talking about goals and features and the future of liquid glass in Apple's 27 series OSes coming out
02:08:48 ◼ ► this summer and fall. Uh, that'll be, that'll be fun. I'm looking forward to that. There've been a
02:08:54 ◼ ► atp.fm slash join to join us, to hear that. Thank you so much, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.
02:09:10 ◼ ► Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't
02:09:18 ◼ ► let him let him. Cause it was accidental. Accidental. It was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the
02:09:26 ◼ ► show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's
02:09:39 ◼ ► Casey Liss. M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-R-M-T. Marco Arment. S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-S-Y-R-A-Q-U-S. It's accidental.
02:09:52 ◼ ► Accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long.
02:10:11 ◼ ► we record and is officially news, I believe today. The BMW i3 reveal has happened. This
02:10:39 ◼ ► Neue Klasse or something like that. I'm sorry, Germans. That is basically, let's make an EV
02:10:45 ◼ ► from the ground up rather than taking the petrol cars, the gasoline cars and retrofitting an EV
02:10:51 ◼ ► into them. Even though, I mean, again, I'm an apologist for the i4 because I thought it was
02:10:57 ◼ ► incredible. But this is from the ground up. Let's make an EV. And so reading from a couple of
02:11:03 ◼ ► sites starting with the Verge, Sebastian Kroes, BMW's head of interior design for the Neue Klasse
02:11:08 ◼ ► cars, told me that the iX3 was designed with an emphasis on verticality to make it look taller.
02:11:14 ◼ ► The i3, on the other hand, has an emphasis on a horizontality. I don't think I'm pronouncing
02:11:19 ◼ ► either of those words right. I don't think they're words either, but I'm doing the best I can.
02:11:22 ◼ ► If you're a German designer, it is. Yeah, this is design ease. Yeah. Most directly seen in the
02:11:28 ◼ ► series of lights that span virtually the sedan's entire nose. The company hasn't quoted a formal
02:11:34 ◼ ► capacity for the i3, but I'd expect it to fall somewhere around the 109 kilowatt hour usable
02:11:39 ◼ ► battery capacity of the iX3 SUV. Enough for what BMW says is 440 miles on a charge. And 400 kilowatt
02:11:51 ◼ ► Neither of the two motors in this car uses permanent magnets, which has a few advantages.
02:11:56 ◼ ► First, you'll find no rare earths here. Secondly, the i3 can disable its motors and coast without
02:12:02 ◼ ► needing a disconnect system, unlike the Mercedes, which apparently does. From Mars Technica, weight
02:12:07 ◼ ► distribution is close to 50-50 with a low center of gravity thanks to the battery pack. And torque
02:12:11 ◼ ► delivery is rear biased out of corners and under regenerative braking, the rear axle regens more
02:12:16 ◼ ► than the front at first to stabilize the car. So technology wise, this looks really, really good.
02:12:23 ◼ ► Like this looks incredibly impressive. Visually, I'm not as convinced. So to my eyes, the profile is
02:12:34 ◼ ► excellent. The front is a vast improvement from the pig nose of the i4. You know, when I, when I told you,
02:12:41 ◼ ► I loved the i4, I said that while just ignoring the fact that the kidneys took up the entire front
02:12:48 ◼ ► of the car. This is better. It's a little weird, but it's better. I don't think I like the back at
02:12:55 ◼ ► all. And the interior, I am not here for the vertical braces on the steering wheel. You're just going to
02:13:01 ◼ ► have to see to understand. And I'm not here for the trapezoidal center screen thing. However, on the
02:13:08 ◼ ► whole, this looks really good. Well, you mentioned this being the, this being spoiled yesterday or
02:13:12 ◼ ► whatever. Well, the way BMW has rolled this out has been, I mean, you know, obviously they had the
02:13:18 ◼ ► original like concept cars, the Neue class of whatever, however many years ago, those came out.
02:13:23 ◼ ► And then obviously the i3 is out and you can buy and is the first car on this platform. Although
02:13:29 ◼ ► it's not a sedan, obviously, but this car, this exact car, the i3, um, they've been doing the thing
02:13:35 ◼ ► for, I think maybe a year, at least six months or so where, um, they've been allowing journalists to
02:13:41 ◼ ► see and show the car quote unquote disguised. And if you're in the car world, you know, the normal way
02:13:47 ◼ ► you disguise cars is you put a bunch of things on the car that use like black and white, like dazzle
02:13:53 ◼ ► camouflage, but just all sorts of weird swirly black and white patterns to make it. So you can't get a
02:13:58 ◼ ► read for what shape the car really is. Often there'll be kind of like a bra over the front and rear. So you
02:14:04 ◼ ► can't see what the front grill looks like. And sometimes they put other panels on it of like
02:14:08 ◼ ► cardboard or wood or whatever to just hide the shape of the car. But this car, the i3 has been
02:14:14 ◼ ► shown to journalists with essentially a wrap on it. Meaning like if you put a red wrap on your car,
02:14:19 ◼ ► people think your car is painted red, just a complete, just a wrap. And, but instead of the
02:14:24 ◼ ► wrap being red, the wrap is dazzle candle. So it's like, how much of this car are you hiding when you
02:14:30 ◼ ► just essentially put a wrap on it where you can see the whole car and yet it's maybe a little bit
02:14:34 ◼ ► harder to see what shape it is, but there's the car. There's nothing disguising it except
02:14:38 ◼ ► an ugly paint job essentially. But still I was holding out hope that when I saw the finished
02:14:43 ◼ ► version of it, it would not be as homely as the camouflaged cars they've been showing to the
02:14:49 ◼ ► press. I mean, they would let them drive them in the snow and do all this stuff, but that's the car.
02:14:53 ◼ ► And anyway, uh, there's not much that can be done to save this. I was hoping that they could
02:14:58 ◼ ► de-emphasize those giant, uh, you know, headlights on the front, uh, with styling that was not apparent
02:15:04 ◼ ► with the wrap on it, but nope, they're there. They're big. I don't like them. And also in general,
02:15:13 ◼ ► especially compared to the existing I four. I think the existing I four, like, do they make a coupe of
02:15:20 ◼ ► this? Whatever, whatever I four I've seen on the road, I've taken pictures of it before the current I four
02:15:24 ◼ ► body shape and back looks so good. And so just pretty and athletic and nice. And then you get to
02:15:33 ◼ ► the front and it's got big beaver teeth. I understand that. I'm not a fan of the front, but if you never
02:15:37 ◼ ► see the front and you just see it from the side and the back, it looks amazing. This car looks tall and
02:15:42 ◼ ► squat from the side. This car has ugly taillights and an ugly rear. And this car's front, I think is not
02:15:48 ◼ ► actually an improvement over the buck teeth. It's just ugly in a different way. You are so wrong, sir.
02:15:53 ◼ ► As for Casey's steering wheel that he doesn't like, I think I posted this on our little Slack
02:15:56 ◼ ► channel. I think if you get the M sport steering wheel, those spokes are hard. I put a picture of
02:16:01 ◼ ► it into our Slack. Those spokes are horizontal, not vertical, which helps it a little bit. But I am
02:16:05 ◼ ► also dubious about the comfort of the steering wheel because of the way that they've, it's not like a tube
02:16:11 ◼ ► around it. They've really done these big cutouts and like these strange sort of, you have to look to
02:16:15 ◼ ► see it. It's, it's a strange steering wheel. I'll give them credit for making the squircle a little bit
02:16:19 ◼ ► more Urkel-y than squircle. I mean, it's not, it's not a circle because you can't put circles on the,
02:16:25 ◼ ► on car wheels anymore because it's against the law, but it's not as bad as like, say the Corvette wheel,
02:16:30 ◼ ► which is just really weird hexagon thing. Um, I do like that they've updated their architecture.
02:16:35 ◼ ► This is basically the same thing, same architecture as the iX3. So it's good. Uh, I think they went to
02:16:40 ◼ ► 800 volt with this. So I'm sure it'll be a great car, but just the styling problems happening over
02:16:47 ◼ ► there in Germany continue to be dire. I mean, not all in Germany is I feel like Porsche styling has
02:16:52 ◼ ► still been pretty good. And I'm mostly on board with it and Mercedes styling and BMW styling. They've
02:16:57 ◼ ► been, they've been in a rut for what, two or three decades now. Uh, I don't think it's near as bad.
02:17:04 ◼ ► Certainly this doesn't look near as bad to me as it does to you. And I don't think it's been two
02:17:09 ◼ ► decades. It's probably been one ish. Oh, no. You, you starts with the bangle, but that's the nineties,
02:17:14 ◼ ► right? Or is that 2000? No, that was early to mid 2000s, I believe. And even, I don't know. And it
02:17:19 ◼ ► wasn't all of the cars. It was some of the cars. I don't know. Like the three series has mostly been
02:17:24 ◼ ► good with like the, the, the 90 that I had was good. The F10 was most, or no, that's the, the five
02:17:30 ◼ ► series is an F30 is what I'm thinking of. F30 was all right. And then it got ugly after that.
02:17:34 ◼ ► We just didn't know what was going to happen. So you look back in the F30 and you're like, wow,
02:17:38 ◼ ► that was nice. Yeah. That's fair. And it's got dump store handle. It's got basically Tesla door
02:17:42 ◼ ► handles in 2026, 2027 model year. You're going to do Tesla. They're not exactly the same because
02:17:47 ◼ ► there is a mechanical pull on them, I believe, but I think they might still have to redo them for
02:17:51 ◼ ► China. You know, we did that story about China banning, uh, electronic door handles. I think they
02:17:55 ◼ ► might still have to redo them for China just because the electronic mechanism makes it come out
02:17:59 ◼ ► like the model S handles. So it doesn't matter that there's a mechanical pull. If you can't
02:18:03 ◼ ► actually get your fingers behind the thing, cause they made it like, why, why, as you noted, Casey,
02:18:07 ◼ ► the I four has flush door handles that you just put your fingers under and pull. And I don't even
02:18:12 ◼ ► know if those are mechanical. Those might be metal. Uh, what do you call it? Uh, electronic switches.
02:18:16 ◼ ► But the point is they could be mechanical because you don't need anything to happen. You just walk up
02:18:20 ◼ ► to the car, stick your fingers underneath the handle and pull. Like it's, I sent you the video of like
02:18:31 ◼ ► a hundred percent mechanical. You just put your fingers underneath it and you pull and the door
02:18:34 ◼ ► opens, but no, not on the BMW i3. They have to electronically come out like it's 2012 and you're
02:18:41 ◼ ► a model S. So dumb. With the exception of the door handles, I think both the iX3 and the new i3
02:18:49 ◼ ► look probably like incredible cars. Like, yeah, I agree. Yeah. I think these are going to be hits.
02:18:55 ◼ ► I think they're good cars. I just don't like the styling and I don't like the shape of the steering
02:18:59 ◼ ► wheel. I also don't like the trapezoid screen, but I do like the, the, the, uh, the like distant
02:19:03 ◼ ► dashboard, that stripe thing. I think that's actually a good idea. Lots of other cars have done that. I
02:19:08 ◼ ► mean, Toyota Prius famously started this trend, I think of like putting things farther away than you
02:19:12 ◼ ► think they would be. And I think it does work. Um, yeah, and it might be a little tight in the backseat.
02:19:18 ◼ ► I'll have to wait till I see some tall YouTubers get into this thing, but, um, it's nice that they
02:19:22 ◼ ► updated their platform. I think they have a bright future because they're, they're there. As you've
02:19:25 ◼ ► noted with the i4, their previous platform, which was hacked into their gas car platform was already
02:19:30 ◼ ► pretty good. And presumably they've learned things since then. So I think this, this car will be a
02:19:35 ◼ ► great car as long as you can, you know, stay inside it. So you don't have to see the outside.
02:19:41 ◼ ► Honestly, I, the, the i3 looks incredible to me overall. Like I don't share how much you hate it.
02:19:48 ◼ ► I think it looks great and I would be very happy to drive that car around. I think the, like, as,
02:19:55 ◼ ► as I think of like, you know, what will my next car be? Like my, my current lease is, you know,
02:19:59 ◼ ► it has about a year and a half on it. I think I'm going to look very hard at the i3 and the iX3.
02:20:04 ◼ ► The i3, it still doesn't have a hatchback, right? Isn't it? It's still like a regular trunk.
02:20:13 ◼ ► Probably not going to be in this country. Yeah. Probably not here, but, but it will exist
02:20:20 ◼ ► the, the iX3 looks just smaller and sleeker enough compared to my iX that it might be nice.
02:20:29 ◼ ► Um, but it still has like the utility of the, the big liftback trunk, which I, I do like and use all
02:20:37 ◼ ► the time. I think even, even though I would love to have like one of these regular sedan i3s to drive
02:20:43 ◼ ► around most of the time, I think I would really hate not having a liftback trunk now. Cause I got so
02:20:49 ◼ ► like ever since the Model S, like I'm so spoiled by having the, a big trunk opening. It's so useful.
02:20:55 ◼ ► It's so good. I don't think I can really have a car without it anymore. And I'm, I'm hoping that
02:21:01 ◼ ► like whatever the next gen of the i4, maybe we start to see what that starts to look like. Um,
02:21:06 ◼ ► cause that could be a good future car for me as well. But I think this thing looks great.
02:21:09 ◼ ► Yeah. I don't know why more people don't copy what, uh, Tesla did with the S just like the liftback
02:21:14 ◼ ► on a sedan is such a good idea. Everyone should be doing it. I think, uh, who does it? Um,
02:21:18 ◼ ► Audi does it. Audi, Audi does it. Um, but Porsche has, well, they have the weird, the ugly, uh,
02:21:24 ◼ ► Taycan with the wagon. I mean, the i4 was, the i4 was a liftback, you know, cause it's an i4 grand
02:21:30 ◼ ► coupe. I think they mostly do it cause a NVH, like it's harder to like isolate the cabin and people want