00:00:00 ◼ ► It really is a miracle that we did not kill each other during the recording of the last member special and that we are here recording a new episode of our normal podcast.
00:00:11 ◼ ► I think this is the closest we've ever come to killing each other. Can you think of it a different time?
00:00:16 ◼ ► I don't know why you thought it was so contentious. I thought it was very calm and reasonable right up until the very end. But still, you've got to count the whole rest of the episode, which was very long, where everything went fine.
00:00:33 ◼ ► I think this is kind of one of those things where you meet somebody else's family. When someone from a family that doesn't argue with each other all the time meets someone from a family that does, it can be quite shocking.
00:00:44 ◼ ► And I still think, despite the fact that you two have known me for over a decade now, you don't quite understand how I operate normally. And every time there's any contentious words, you're like, "Oh no, the world is ending." And I'm like, "This is just another day."
00:01:01 ◼ ► I'm sure I have been more upset with you, Jon. Probably with regard to something car-related and you're ridiculous.
00:01:16 ◼ ► Really? I really feel like the iPod one. I mean, Marco definitely seemed more aggrieved than the iPod one. Because I think we were farther apart on those. I don't want to spoil anything about it, but I think we were actually pretty close together on this one, but you two just were united in disagreement about one level in the tier list. Single level.
00:01:34 ◼ ► I really honestly think that we need to change the rules of the tier list as a result of this episode. That's how bad the voting process was.
00:01:43 ◼ ► I think it worked out. Remember the Connectors episode, where we couldn't get anything up to the top? I think the Connectors was more problematic, but we do what we do. We've got to work within the system. I still feel like we did a good job. In the end, justice was done. To the best of our ability.
00:02:01 ◼ ► I don't know if I'd go that far. It was funny, though, so after we recorded, it was either yesterday afternoon or perhaps this morning, I was thinking about how maybe we should change the rules. And very briefly, the rules for the tier lists are, all three of us have to reach an agreement if something is going to be S tier.
00:02:19 ◼ ► And remember, it's S is the best, then A, B, C, D, F. And for something to go from A to S, the rule has been, we absolutely, all three of us, must agree. And this has caused some amount of problems in the past. I think I do mostly concur.
00:02:34 ◼ ► I think it's caused some amount of success. In fact, what I was thinking is, if we did change it, we should change it so F also requires. All three of us do. And then we just work in the middle part. Because you get to those extremes, then you really need everyone to agree.
00:02:57 ◼ ► But I was thinking yesterday or today that all of a sudden, all of Connected's absolutely preposterous rules, suddenly they're starting to make ever so slightly more sense.
00:03:07 ◼ ► You can't just end up chasing your tail and changing the rules all the time when you don't like how things go, you know?
00:03:14 ◼ ► I mean, if that was the case, I would have been arguing to change the rules after the iPhone episode. But I wasn't. I accepted. That's just the way it turned out.
00:03:20 ◼ ► Indeed. But yeah, so we should probably specify what the heck we're talking about. So yeah, we said it was another tier list members episode, but we were ranking storage medium, or storage media, if you will.
00:03:32 ◼ ► And we were ranking all sorts of storage media. So I had been the inventor of the topic, the creator of the topic, but all I said was, "Hey, we should do storage media." And then Jon took it and ran with it.
00:03:47 ◼ ► But Jon ran with it in a way that I did not expect, but I have no problems with. I thought you ran with it in a very reasonable way. Some people, based on feedback, were not in agreement that you chose the right selections. I thought your selections were great.
00:04:00 ◼ ► I mean, as I explained in the episode, you can't do all of them because there's too many. We focused heavily on a subset, and we ignored lots of other ones. The thing was two and a half hours long. We can't put any more in there, right?
00:04:17 ◼ ► So which ones would you have us drop? And I guess everyone would say, I'm not going to ruin it, but I'm sure everyone would say, "You should have dropped all that stuff in the middle." But that was a fruitful area where people on the show had strong opinions, so I thought it was important that we kept it.
00:04:29 ◼ ► No, no, no. I think you made the right choices. But there was a moment at which Marco and I were in devout, just complete agreement about one of the items, and Jon was not having it. And I don't know that I've ever been closer to quitting the show than I was at that moment.
00:04:46 ◼ ► Hey, you should take the consolation prize of the thing that you were rooting for. It's just one level different than what you wanted. It's so close.
00:05:02 ◼ ► It's in an injustice, it really is. But anyway, so, hey Jon, if you wanted to listen to this...
00:05:13 ◼ ► Yeah, if you wanted to listen to this, just absolutely out of control tier list, how would you do that, Jon?
00:05:18 ◼ ► You go to ATP.fm/join and you become a member, and then members get access to all of our member specials, both the current one and all the past member specials, of which there are like 25, 26 at this point.
00:05:30 ◼ ► Yeah, and a lot of them are tier lists because I do find that based on feedback, they seem to be the most popular, but also they seem to just really be a laser-focused way to get us to bicker with each other, which is nice as an occasional thing.
00:05:46 ◼ ► Obviously, we don't want to make that everything, but it is quite funny, and I feel like we have never been closer to the energy of the good top gear.
00:05:54 ◼ ► Well, people will take issue with that, but you know what I mean, the good top gear than when we do the tier lists.
00:06:05 ◼ ► By the way, if you wanted to just see all the specials, even if you're not a member, you can just go to ATP.fm/specials, and that just lists all the specials.
00:06:11 ◼ ► Obviously, you won't be able to see much about them except for the title if you're not a member, but you'll see where they are,
00:06:15 ◼ ► and they all have prefixes, so if you just look for ATP tier list colon something, you'll see all of our tier lists.
00:06:20 ◼ ► Yeah, we should put a count on there, because we've amassed enough that we should be proud of it.
00:06:27 ◼ ► All right, so we should do some follow-up, and Marco, hopefully you have some follow-up with regard to sleep apps, maybe?
00:06:34 ◼ ► Not really. So everyone keeps recommending the same handful of them, and I assure you, I have seen them all.
00:06:49 ◼ ► I even saw the Aura Ring, which I've never even thought about a smart ring before, but actually, the Aura Ring's app seems to do exactly what I want.
00:06:56 ◼ ► I just don't really want to buy an Aura Ring, so nothing against them. I just don't want a whole other device just for that.
00:07:02 ◼ ► I think what's more likely to happen is I'm going to stop sleep tracking, because I'm just going to eventually find that I'm not getting enough actionable data out of it.
00:07:17 ◼ ► I don't love this pursuit enough to make this app myself, and none of the apps that I've seen out there do what I want in the way I want.
00:07:28 ◼ ► Yes, even that one. Yup, you're yelling right now. Yup, that one. The one you're writing to me in the email.
00:07:33 ◼ ► I'm sending you the suggestion for Autosleep, because your complaint that you voiced in the show was that they make you make accounts, and they track you, and they do all sorts of stuff, and everybody wanted to tell you that Autosleep has no tracking, no account, no in-app purchase, custom tags with history and filtering.
00:07:46 ◼ ► And so your complaint about that one is just, despite the fact that it doesn't do all those bad things that you were complaining about, still, it doesn't work the way you want it.
00:07:53 ◼ ► It also, like, the way it uses the emoji and not really, like, customing, it's a whole, I looked at that one, I tried it, and yeah, it wasn't doing what I want.
00:08:02 ◼ ► All right, that's the only reason I put that in there, because people will not stop recommending Autosleep because they say it fulfills all your requirements, and it's clear that there's more requirements than just not being annoying.
00:08:11 ◼ ► You've seen a million apps, and you've rocked them all. All right, do you have any information about leatherbacks for your iPhone, per chance?
00:08:20 ◼ ► See, there I have better news. So I now have, right here on my desk, I have all of them. The Nomad Goods leatherback, Atom Studios, ATOM Studios leatherback, the SUTI one that I described last time in both leather, and then I also have the SUTI silicone one.
00:08:39 ◼ ► The ATOM one, I only use for, like, half a day because it's incredibly thick, so I actually, I took out some calipers and I measured all of these. For reference, like, the bullstrap regular leather case that wraps around the whole phone, that is 2.6 millimeters.
00:08:56 ◼ ► The Atom Cactus leatherback is 3.7 millimeters, so it's, like, almost, it's, like, you know, one and a half times as thick as, like, a common leather case of the phone.
00:09:10 ◼ ► It comes close, but it still doesn't. It still has these little ridges that push up that make little rings around the lenses. But it just, it makes the phone feel very thick in the hand. It almost feels like you're holding two phones stacked.
00:09:22 ◼ ► Like, I know it's not quite mathematically that, but it just, it feels very big. So, I couldn't last very long with the Atom, so I ruled that one out.
00:09:29 ◼ ► So, really, for me, the only two that I like are the Sooty leather and the Nomad Goods leather. The Sooty one looks way nicer. The Nomad one works better.
00:09:42 ◼ ► So, if you're going for looks, the Sooty one wins hands down. The texture of the leather is nice. The way that it has, like, a little, you know, black cover around the camera mesa, that looks nicer.
00:09:53 ◼ ► The edges, you know, form like a nice slope up. That looks nicer. The Nomad one, even though this is Horween leather, which is a nice leather maker here in the US, even though it's Horween leather, it just looks very flat.
00:10:06 ◼ ► Like, the Nomad one looks cheap, even though it is actually a nicer grade of leather, I think. But it kind of looks very cheap and flat. It doesn't do anything special with the camera.
00:10:15 ◼ ► It has, like, a nice, you know, it has, like, the hard plastic ridge around the camera. So, like, the Sooty one, the edges slope down into, like, a plastic gasket around the edge, which does look very clean.
00:10:27 ◼ ► And it feels nice in the hand, except that it really doesn't provide any grip around the sides. The Nomad one goes all the way to the side and then ends abruptly in, like, a flat side, almost extending the shape of the iPhone's flat sides.
00:10:42 ◼ ► And because it goes all the way to the edge, you feel the sides of that leather with your hand as you grip the phone.
00:10:49 ◼ ► And if you, like, lean the phone, if you, like, stand up the phone and, like, lean it back, if you're, for instance, like, propping the phone up on a windowsill, the bottom of the leather will touch the surface.
00:10:59 ◼ ► Whereas that's not true of the Sooty because the edges are, like, you know, kind of ramped up gradually with a little bezel.
00:11:04 ◼ ► So the Nomad one, despite not looking very fancy, actually works the best. It's also substantially thinner.
00:11:12 ◼ ► It doesn't matter that much, but the Nomad leather back is only 2.2 millimeters and the Sooty vegan leather one is 2.6, which is the same as that bull strap leather case.
00:11:24 ◼ ► So the Sooty one is about the same thickness as a regular iPhone case, a common iPhone case. The Nomad one goes from 2.6 to 2.2, so it's noticeably thinner.
00:11:34 ◼ ► So the Nomad one overall, even though I don't think it looks nearly as cool as the Sooty, it's the one I've been spending the most time with because it's the one that works the best.
00:11:42 ◼ ► I think the Nomad one looks better too, but I know that the marketing photos on case websites are not always representative.
00:11:47 ◼ ► Yeah, and keep in mind also, like, the Sooty is a fake leather. The Nomad's a real leather. So the Nomad one will probably age better in the sense, like, it'll probably develop a nice patina with, like, you know, certain leather wear patterns.
00:12:01 ◼ ► Yeah, it immediately got tackier, like, within a day of just, you know, having on my hand oils all over it. So it is getting nice and tacky. But even, you know, the way that wear will happen on this, natural or, you know, real cow leather tends to wear nicer, you know, in terms of, like, little scratches that get kind of, like, re-oiled in, you know, certain, like, you know, wrinkly patterns that develop with leather, as we all know.
00:12:27 ◼ ► So the Nomad one, while it looks bad now, I think it will age very gracefully. Whereas the Sooty one looks great from day one, I don't know how it will age, but it doesn't matter because the Nomad one should work so much better.
00:12:43 ◼ ► Oh, this is some important follow-ups. So, we discussed a few months ago, I was trying to figure out how the heck do we get HDR photos in Apple's Photos app taken by, like, big cameras. Like, how do you get your big camera to be an HDR photo in the Apple Photos app?
00:13:01 ◼ ► And we went through a couple apps that would, like, kind of set the right metadata fields, and it was kind of hacky and tricky. It kind of worked. It didn't work great, but it kind of worked.
00:13:09 ◼ ► Well, I tried again this past weekend. I loaded, you know, a photo I had just taken. I loaded it into Lightroom. And this is, like, a Lightroom classic. This is, like, the old style Lightroom before the whole sync service thing.
00:13:23 ◼ ► Before you get to this, did you do anything special when you took the picture? Can you explain the picture-taking process? Was that just, like, there's no HDR features or support in your camera? Like, explain that part to me.
00:13:35 ◼ ► The pictures I was... I was using pictures from the Fuji GFX100S, which does not have any kind of built-in HDR functionality. It was just a RAW file. I shot RAW.
00:13:49 ◼ ► And so, the way I expose pictures, almost always now, like, if I'm going to be shooting RAW and I intend to edit them, I do what I believe photographers call "expose to the right."
00:13:58 ◼ ► So the idea here is you usually will underexpose the photo in, like, the auto-exposure control on the camera by at least one EV.
00:14:08 ◼ ► If there's going to be, like, a sun or a moon or a bright light source in the shot or near the shot, it will darken everything else so that the light source doesn't blow out the sensor and become all white.
00:14:20 ◼ ► So if there's, like, you know, some sunlight somewhere, you don't want that to be all white.
00:14:24 ◼ ► Modern sensors on big cameras are very sensitive compared to old ones, and so what you can do if you're shooting RAW is, in post-processing, you can bring up the level of detail from the dark areas.
00:14:37 ◼ ► It's called "shadow detail," and you can usually bring that up a lot in editing without amping up the highlights too much and blowing out and making everything just white on the highlight side.
00:14:47 ◼ ► So what you do is you underexpose when shooting RAW so that the highlights don't blow out the sensor in the brightest parts, because you can't recover from blown-out white, like, in editing.
00:14:58 ◼ ► Like, you can't say, "All right, bring down that white and put back, like, the nice fine cloud texture that was up there." Like, you can get a little bit of that back, but not much.
00:15:06 ◼ ► So, whereas you can bring up shadow detail in editing pretty far these days with good modern sensors.
00:15:12 ◼ ► And it'll be full of noise, but Lightroom has amazing denoising. One final question about capture. Do you remember what color space you're using? Were you just using sRGB? What do you have your camera set to?
00:15:26 ◼ ► The reason I'm asking is because you're about to go into HDR stuff, and I always wonder, is there something I could be doing on my camera to help out the HDR? And one of the things I do is I have limited choices on my cameras, but one of the choices I have is whether I want sRGB or Adobe RGB.
00:15:41 ◼ ► Adobe RGB, I believe, is close to the P3 color space, but not quite the same. But anyway, it's a bigger triangle on that big RGB space than sRGB, and so I always want to give the biggest triangle to give myself the highest chance of HDR. But anyway, go on.
00:15:55 ◼ ► That's interesting. I actually have never experimented with that, so I probably am just shooting sRGB because I think that's usually default. Anyway, I had the RAW file in Lightroom.
00:16:03 ◼ ► Modern Lightroom Classic has, over in the exposure area, it has an HDR thing you can toggle. And what that does basically is expand the exposure range in the interface to give you this big section above where it was before.
00:16:20 ◼ ► And so I was able to edit the picture in HDR in Lightroom, looked great, I'm so happy with that, and then I thought, well, okay, how can I get this picture into Apple Photos and keep the HDR?
00:16:30 ◼ ► Well, first I tried the regular old JPEG 80% quality, keep as much as you can. There's even, somewhere in there, I think there's even an option to say keep HDR in JPEG, and I tried that and it didn't import with HDR into Photos app.
00:16:45 ◼ ► But then I tried JPEG XL, our new friend. And when I export Lightroom HDR in JPEG XL and import that into Apple Photos on the newest macOS Sequoia, it works. It keeps the HDR, and now I have real HDR photos shot with my big camera in Apple Photos, showing the HDR perfectly.
00:17:10 ◼ ► What is the JPEG XL? Does JPEG XL support so many things? Are you exporting a RAW with JPEG XL, lossy or lossless compression, or are you exporting a essentially not RAW JPEG?
00:17:22 ◼ ► Like, this is something I'm not clear about about JPEG XL because I haven't actually used it directly, but the spec says that it can be, I mean, Apple's, in iOS 18, it's used for RAWs, and the choices are you have is lossy compressed RAW or losslessly compressed RAW.
00:17:36 ◼ ► But of course it also does plain old compressed JPEGs with variable quality, so do you know which one of those things you exported from Lightroom?
00:17:44 ◼ ► I'm using just, like, the fancier version of JPEG compression in XL, so I set them both to quality 80, and so it is lossy, but it's similar to, however, I will say quality 80 on a JPEG, like the regular JPEG export, versus the JXL export, the JXL one is less than half the size.
00:18:09 ◼ ► And they show up as JPEGs, essentially, in Apple Photos, they don't have the RAW tag anymore, just to ensure you're not doing a lossy RAW or something?
00:18:20 ◼ ► I mean, they don't use a tag for non-JPEG, but they put the little grey RAW tag or whatever?
00:18:25 ◼ ► It has the .JXL file name in the info panel, but then in the little, like, overlay in the middle of it, it has the little JPEG badge. It does not have a RAW badge anywhere on it. So it's treating it like a fancy JPEG.
00:18:37 ◼ ► Sounds interesting. I'm going to try this, although I have, like, zero experience with Lightroom, but I'll figure it out.
00:18:41 ◼ ► Yeah, I'll send you one. It's massive, it'll slow down your computer, because you have an Intel.
00:18:45 ◼ ► Oh, super. What are you going to send me? I have plenty of pictures that I can, I have plenty of RAWs that I can just chuck in there, just to find this Magic HDR control somewhere in Lightroom Classic.
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00:20:52 ◼ ► Alright, an anonymous Apple genius writes in, "All Macs, since at least the Intel days, are capable of running without a battery connected. It's actually used as a common troubleshooting practice in the Genius Bar.
00:21:04 ◼ ► Often swollen batteries, such as what Marco experienced, will cause issues like unexpected shutdowns or slow performance, and can even cause the Mac not to boot in certain cases.
00:21:12 ◼ ► While not very frequent, we tend to see expanded batteries, or spicy pillows, most commonly when the customer has left their Mac connected to power for most of its life, similar to Marco's situation with his gaming PC.
00:21:21 ◼ ► P.S. I know I said every Mac since the Intel days, but the one exception is the 12-inch MacBook.
00:21:28 ◼ ► It is a very strangely built machine, and a complete nightmare for us technicians to work on.
00:21:33 ◼ ► If you disconnect the battery and then plug in anything higher than a 5-watt adapter to let it trickle charge, you will fry the logic board.
00:21:48 ◼ ► Like, 'cause that keyboard was so short-lived, and the repairs were so expensive, and they're all out of warranty now.
00:21:55 ◼ ► Well, you just connect an external keyboard, you know, 'cause there's plenty of ports for you to connect an external keyboard.
00:22:06 ◼ ► Well, that's right. Did you see, by the way, this is an aside, did you see the XKCD yesterday?
00:22:13 ◼ ► That was recent? I thought that was, like, probably a years ago one that just reminded people.
00:22:24 ◼ ► All right, so Apple TV+ is now available as an add-on to Prime Video, which is somewhat unexpected.
00:22:30 ◼ ► So you can be in Amazon's Prime Video client or what have you, and you can subscribe to Apple TV+ as another channel in there for the same money you would otherwise pay Apple.
00:22:42 ◼ ► Unless you have Apple One, in which case you're probably paying less for it, if you count all the other services.
00:22:46 ◼ ► So, this streaming stuff is so complicated. Last time there was another bundle, it's like, "Oh, hey, look, there's a bundle of three services that I pay for separately.
00:22:53 ◼ ► Will that save me money?" And I had to go through this complex gymnastics to figure out, "No, it will not save me money."
00:23:02 ◼ ► And this is yet another bundle that will not save me money, despite the fact that I do, in fact, have Apple TV+ and also Prime Video.
00:23:22 ◼ ► And this makes total sense. Apple is trying to get TV+ out there into the world, get more people watching it.
00:23:30 ◼ ► Apparently, it's not super well watched, which is a shame because there's a lot of good stuff there.
00:23:35 ◼ ► And when you're in that kind of business of a content service, it is in your best interest, usually, to make that service available everywhere.
00:23:42 ◼ ► That's why they have Apple Music for Android, right? Isn't that a thing that exists now?
00:23:53 ◼ ► And the reality is, even if they make less money from the Amazon deal than they would selling it directly through some other means, it is worth it for them to have that everywhere.
00:24:15 ◼ ► Did you see the rankings recently? I don't know if it was speculative or based on real numbers of the viewership or the number of subscribers to the various streaming services.
00:24:24 ◼ ► I was kind of surprised at how well Apple was doing and how poorly Peacock was doing, Peacock Plus or whatever.
00:24:38 ◼ ► With regard to, and this is tangentially related to Apple TV+, with regard to Major League Soccer, one of us, might have been John, had said...
00:24:51 ◼ ► Somebody had said, "Hey, they should make a Drive to Survive-style thing for Major League Soccer."
00:24:57 ◼ ► And Devin Dundee writes in to say, "Apple has commissioned Box2Box Films, the production company behind Drive to Survive, to document the season, this season of MLS,
00:25:11 ◼ ► Apple and Box2Box previously worked together on a pro surfing series called Make or Break."
00:25:18 ◼ ► I wonder if that's all the 3D cameras that people were reporting, thinking it's for some Vision Pro thing.
00:25:43 ◼ ► And the consensus that I gleaned from the feedback we got, there were a lot of individual perspectives.
00:25:51 ◼ ► But the one thing that seemed a pretty solid agreement is that, hey, Major League Soccer here in the States, just not the same level of play as over in Europe.
00:26:01 ◼ ► Like we said, he's a good player, but now he's over here and all his good playing buddies are back over there.
00:26:18 ◼ ► I mean, obviously these are incredible athletes and are way more athletic than I will ever be in my wildest dreams.
00:26:23 ◼ ► But compared to what's going on in Europe, that seems to be the perception whether or not it's reality.
00:26:28 ◼ ► So we have feedback with regard to the maritime report that you were talking about from a friend of the show, Jon.
00:26:35 ◼ ► Yep, Anthony Johnson wrote in to say that the maritime report I was thinking of that me and Merlin have talked about in Rectifs is called The Shipping Forecast.
00:26:54 ◼ ► And so many people were offended by my suggestion that that's the type of thing that could be taken over by AI because it's a very sort of affected kind of voice reading, just basic information about weather and so on.
00:27:08 ◼ ► And it's such a beloved institution they couldn't believe it could – even suggesting that it be taken over by a machine is offensive.
00:27:25 ◼ ► Scott Zero wrote in with regard to disabling and enabling audio modes on AirPods 4 with ANC.
00:27:31 ◼ ► So Scott writes, "You can change which ANC modes are in rotation by going to settings, your AirPods, and then selecting one of the 'press and hold AirPods' menu items for the left or right AirPod."
00:27:43 ◼ ► And you see a thing that tells you whether noise control or Siri is what that press and hold will do.
00:27:51 ◼ ► And then you can choose their check marks for the different noise control things – off transparency, adaptive, and noise cancellation.
00:27:59 ◼ ► Parker suggested it, and then I looked for it, and then I had a follow-up, and I said, "I looked for it. I couldn't find it. I guess it's not there. Maybe it's just a per-only feature."
00:28:13 ◼ ► But two, it continues to frustrate me that you can't even get to these controls unless you have the AirPods essentially connected to your phone and in your ears at the time.
00:28:21 ◼ ► And the other thing is – so this is under – you have to look at the press and hold thing, and then for the left and right AirPods.
00:28:28 ◼ ► And there are separate submenus for the left AirPod and the right AirPod, because I assume there's your specific instructions down there.
00:28:35 ◼ ► The noise control selections, whatever you do on the left is mirrored on the right, because I kind of wish that it was the opposite, that you could do them separately.
00:28:42 ◼ ► Because then you could have the left ear – like, every mode would be one click and hold away, you know what I mean?
00:28:47 ◼ ► You'd have two on the left ear and two on the right ear, so no matter what mode you're in, you'd always be one tap away.
00:28:52 ◼ ► I guess you could be two taps away. But anyway, it doesn't matter. It's a bad UI for multiple reasons, and one of them is if you go into the left ear and change some stuff,
00:29:00 ◼ ► when you go into the right ear – well, look, those changes you made in the left ear are mirrored there, but only for the noise control section.
00:29:05 ◼ ► Anyway, this is all moot, because since all the promotion of the adaptive mode I have now, as we stated last time, it is now a mode that's in my rotation.
00:29:15 ◼ ► Including – oh yeah, including, by the way, this is my fall update for my AirPods, my AirPods 4 with noise cancelling.
00:29:23 ◼ ► One of the reasons I have all four of them in my rotation is because I discovered a use for off, other than trying to save battery when I'm in bed at night at the end of the day and I don't have my things charged, right?
00:29:35 ◼ ► Turns out that if you go out to walk the dog and it's kind of chilly, and you put a hat on, the hat rubs against the microphones that are used for noise cancelling, and makes a terrible…
00:30:03 ◼ ► GPX exports. So, we were talking about, hey, how can you geotag photos taken with like a big camera, and what could you do about that? Ryan Michalowski writes, "Penomenator++," written by dear friend of the show, David Smith, "that app is my go-to for recording GPS tracks for photography.
00:30:22 ◼ ► I export its GPX and use the macOS app "houdahgeo," H-O-U-D-A-H-G-E-O, for tagging. To export GPX from Penomenator++, go to workouts, select a "workout," then swipe all the way to the bottom to export as GPS."
00:30:38 ◼ ► And I never would have found that. I had to actually ask, like, where the heck can Penomenator++' GPX export? You got to go to workouts.
00:30:47 ◼ ► Yep. All right. We have a little bit more information about global keyboard shortcuts, John.
00:30:53 ◼ ► Yep, this is from Michael Burke. He says, "The issue with global keyboard shortcuts requiring a modifier other than option shift only seems to apply to apps using Carbon's register event hotkey API, which doesn't require the user to grant any special permissions in order to work.
00:31:06 ◼ ► There is another method that can be used to track global key presses, which is part of the NSEvent framework, NSEvent.addGlobalMonitorForEvents, which I've used, by the way, but it requires the user to grant the app accessibility permissions.
00:31:18 ◼ ► Even though the Carbon API has been deprecated, it's stuck around since there's no true modern API that doesn't make you show a dialog, and a lot of popular packages for global keyboard shortcuts are based on it."
00:31:28 ◼ ► It makes me wonder if anything that's part of accessibility, I believe, is essentially not allowed in the Mac App Store, which like Moom4 isn't on the Mac App Store, but I think things are on the Mac App Store that do do the register event hotkey.
00:31:40 ◼ ► This is not exactly an instance of an issue that has come up a lot recently, but it's kind of related.
00:31:47 ◼ ► These issues that come up, which come up a lot in the context of screen sharing APIs, but there's other things in macOS like this as well, where Apple will deprecate some old API, usually some Carbon thing, but even just some older, whatever, some old API, right?
00:32:00 ◼ ► They'll deprecate it and say you should use the new API, and the problem often is, guess what, the new API doesn't do everything the old API can do, and if your app required that one thing that the old API did that the new one doesn't do, you literally can't use the new API.
00:32:14 ◼ ► So you're like, "Is my app dead now?" Like, the old API works, but it's "deprecated," so you're just now on a timer, like, "Okay, how long until this API is gone, is removed, puts up scary warnings?"
00:32:28 ◼ ► In this case, it seems like there is a modern replacement, but it requires accessibility permission. It seems extreme.
00:32:34 ◼ ► You just want your screenshotting app to be able to bind to Command+Shift+2 to take a screenshot, like a tech sniper or something.
00:32:40 ◼ ► Guess what? You have to ask for accessibility. A, you can't be in the Mac App Store because you can't ask for accessibility permission there.
00:32:46 ◼ ► B, you have to ask for accessibility permission, which is massively powerful, and you're like, "I just want people to be able to take Command+Shift+2 to take a screenshot. I have to ask for it."
00:32:54 ◼ ► And then C, you have to guide them. Go to System Preferences, go to Security and Privacy, scroll down to Accessibility, scroll to Find My App, know there's no way to search or filter.
00:33:02 ◼ ► This is a bad situation on the Mac. The way they're handling security and deprecations in macOS is really coming to a head here.
00:33:13 ◼ ► It's fine to deprecate old APIs and replace new ones, it's fine to increase security, but there's these complete cul-de-sacs of badness where it's like, "Hey, you deprecated the API that I was using, you didn't make a replacement, and you're slowly making everyone's life miserable."
00:33:30 ◼ ► Like, I can't be in the Mac App Store, my users are getting more and more dialogues, they're blaming me, there's nothing I can do about it, and the supposed replacement either doesn't exist or it exists but I have to ask for accessibility permission.
00:33:41 ◼ ► There really needs to be some sort of counsel related to macOS and say, "Look, before you deprecate an API, let's make sure the modern equivalent does what people want.
00:33:52 ◼ ► And before you require people who used to be able to do something with no permission to ask for the biggest permission there is in the entire operating system, maybe consider whether that's the best thing to do."
00:34:01 ◼ ► Frustrating, very frustrating. I mean, I myself have filed a bunch of feedbacks for modern APIs that either do things that used to be possible with old APIs or were simply never possible but seem like reasonable things to do.
00:34:12 ◼ ► And I'm like, "I just want this one little corner." You can give it a special permission, but make the permissions more granular. The option shouldn't be, "You can't do this at all," or, "You must ask for complete access to everything on their system."
00:34:26 ◼ ► All right, let's talk about passkeys. There are a bunch of benefits to passkeys, which we didn't enumerate last episode as a result of in Ask ATP, if I'm not mistaken.
00:34:37 ◼ ► Yeah, I felt like passkeys got short-stripped because we had a very specific question about passkeys and migrating to them, and we never really said, "Why the hell would anyone ever..."
00:34:45 ◼ ► Like, we were asking us, "Have you used passkeys? What are you using them for? Blah, blah." But we didn't say, "Why would anybody use passkeys? What the hell's the point?"
00:34:51 ◼ ► Like, why would anyone ever be motivated to go through any kind of process that we were describing?
00:34:56 ◼ ► And we're not going to go into the technical details of passkeys, but just sort of the Fs and Bs, as they say, the features and benefits.
00:35:03 ◼ ► So, one of the biggest and first ones is, unlike with passwords, no private info is ever sent to a website.
00:35:10 ◼ ► So if you log into a website or an app or anything else with a username and password, your username and password are sent to, in some form or another, to the service, or they're sent to the app.
00:35:23 ◼ ► You're giving your private information to code that you did not write. You're giving your private information to the application, to the webpage, to whatever, right?
00:35:31 ◼ ► And then, presumably, it does something safe with it and checks it if it's right or whatever, you know.
00:35:35 ◼ ► It doesn't even have to transmit it. It could do all the hashing locally or encrypt it locally, but whatever.
00:35:44 ◼ ► They're more like SH keys, where the private thing is never given to another piece of code.
00:35:49 ◼ ► You are given a piece of -- you are given a thing, which then you sign with your private thing, and then you chuck the other thing back, so you're only ever sending public information to another entity.
00:36:05 ◼ ► With passwords, you make the choice, even if the choice is like right-clicking and picking autofill or allowing autocomplete or whatever, you are choosing to enter your username and password somewhere.
00:36:24 ◼ ► Because if someone could put something in front of you that you think is a place where you should put the password for service X, and you put the password for service X there, but it was a phishing attack, and really that's an enemy website, you've just given, you've transmitted your private information to this bad party.
00:36:40 ◼ ► Passkeys don't work like that, because passkeys never ask you to decide when you should send your passkey to a thing.
00:36:55 ◼ ► Again, if it's a security problem, and there's some way that they can trick iOS or macOS to send a passkey to an incorrect place, that would be a security problem, but it's not your fault, because you didn't make that choice.
00:37:07 ◼ ► Phishing relies on essentially social engineering. Can I trick the user into thinking this is the place to do this?
00:37:13 ◼ ► And it happens to everybody. I recently saw a thread I'm asked on where someone said I literally do cybersecurity for a living, and at the end of one day I was really tired, and I entered a bunch of my private information into a form that I thought was legitimate because it looked just like my, you know, intranet, whatever page, and I totally got phished.
00:37:28 ◼ ► It can happen to literally anybody. There is no amount of vigilance and care and expertise that can prevent you from falling victim to phishing.
00:37:35 ◼ ► That's why we want to take the human out of the equation. Passkey says you don't ever have to make that decision. We cryptographically determine if this is the place we should send this. It will never get sent accidentally to the wrong place.
00:37:44 ◼ ► And then finally, we're talking about transferring and like what happens if my phone goes in the ocean or whatever, and we'll get to import/export in a second, which I mentioned is sort of a thing that had not yet been solved.
00:37:56 ◼ ► But just to make it clear, most of the platforms, including Apple's, that deal with passkeys at all have some form of end-to-end encrypted cloud sync.
00:38:04 ◼ ► So it's not like the passkey only exists on your phone or only exists on your Mac or whatever. It's integrated into iCloud Keychain.
00:38:10 ◼ ► Once you get a passkey, if you have iCloud Keychain enabled, it's everywhere on all your Apple stuff.
00:38:16 ◼ ► So if you create a passkey and then drop your phone on the ocean a day later, you did not lose your ability to log into your stuff.
00:38:22 ◼ ► That thing is synced through iCloud Keychain. It's available as long as you still have access to your Apple ID. That's been there from day one.
00:38:29 ◼ ► Cross-platform sharing, like, hey, that's fine if you have Apple devices, but what if I have a Windows PC? What if I have an Android phone? How does that work?
00:38:38 ◼ ► That is a little bit more difficult, although Apple does have iCloud Keychain sharing thing and browser extensions for Windows.
00:38:45 ◼ ► But it's not a great cross-platform solution, depending on what your platform is. If you're using Linux, I don't think Apple has any great integration there.
00:38:51 ◼ ► I think there's some way to get that. They're not like passwords where you can just copy and paste them from one place to the other, so there needs to be some kind of integration.
00:38:58 ◼ ► Which leads us to, and I mentioned import/export, what if you don't want to use iCloud Keychain because it's so Apple-centric or Apple/Windows-centric.
00:39:10 ◼ ► And I said that it's not like 1Password or whatever, you can just export a CSV or something. That's because that just puts all your passwords in plain text.
00:39:19 ◼ ► They wanted to come up with something that's more secure, and lo and behold, the FIDO Alliance, which is the group that is responsible for passkeys that all the big companies are members of, including Apple,
00:39:28 ◼ ► recently announced a new specification for doing import/export in a secure way. We'll put a link in the show notes to the 9to5Mac story about it.
00:39:36 ◼ ► Reading from that article, it says, "The new specification aims to promote user choice by offering a way to import and export passkeys.
00:39:42 ◼ ► The draft of the new specification establishes the Credential Exchange Protocol, or CXP, and Credential Exchange Format, or CXF format, for transferring not only passkeys but other types of credentials as well.
00:39:53 ◼ ► The new formats are encrypted, which ensures that credentials remain secure during the process.
00:39:57 ◼ ► 1Password, which work with the FIDO Alliance on the new specification, is already committed to supporting the new passkey import and export formats as soon as they become available.
00:40:04 ◼ ► Other companies such as Dashlane, Bitwarden, NordPass, and Google also worked on the draft of the new specification.
00:40:10 ◼ ► Although nothing has been said about Apple, the company is also part of the FIDO Alliance and was one of the first to introduce passkeys in 2022 with iOS 16.
00:40:17 ◼ ► When it comes to the Apple ecosystem, passkeys are synchronized with other Apple devices via iCloud.
00:40:21 ◼ ► Users can authenticate with passkeys and other devices by scanning a QR code with their phone, which is Apple's current janky method of like,
00:40:27 ◼ ► "What if I can't use my phone to authenticate because I'm trying to do it on some other system? You can make it bring up a QR code and scan it with your phone and it will do some magic," right?
00:40:35 ◼ ► But yeah, there's import/export format against some draft format, people are commenting on it, but once this becomes available,
00:40:40 ◼ ► it will essentially make your collection of passkeys and other stuff portable so that if you ever decide, "I don't want to be in the Apple ecosystem anymore,"
00:40:53 ◼ ► People are still complaining about this because they're like, "I just want it to be exported into a file that I can deal with,"
00:40:57 ◼ ► but this is sort of like, you need two things involved here, iCloud Keychain and something else that understands this.
00:41:04 ◼ ► And so you're never just dumping a bunch of files, dumping all this info to a file that you can just save and store away somewhere.
00:41:10 ◼ ► It's always like the receiving end has to initiate the thing and the sending end has to agree and there's a handshake and it securely transfers from one to the other.
00:41:17 ◼ ► There's no sort of middle way to do it, to the point where the people who are responsible for this spec are saying,
00:41:23 ◼ ► "If somebody makes a client that allows you to dump out the info and doesn't have it immediately imported into something,
00:41:31 ◼ ► but allows it to just sort of sit in a file on disk, they may disallow that from being part of this system
00:41:39 ◼ ► And this has people up in arms because they're like, "I want a plain text file on my disk that no one controls that has my stuff in it,"
00:41:47 ◼ ► or "I want to be able to print something out on a piece of paper and put it in a safe, and if I can't do that, this standard sucks."
00:41:53 ◼ ► Everyone has different requirements for what makes them feel comfortable about security,
00:41:58 ◼ ► but I think for most people who absolutely do not care about any of the things I just described,
00:42:08 ◼ ► We're just not quite there yet because they're still kind of fidgety and weird and every website does it a little bit differently,
00:42:15 ◼ ► Do you want to tell me about AI moats and open AIs? Is this 01 or 01? I always get it wrong.
00:42:21 ◼ ► It's 01. I don't know. They make it lowercase to try to not confuse it with zero, but their naming is terrible.
00:42:35 ◼ ► Like, do they have any secret sauce that other people can't copy, or are LLMs a commodity?
00:42:39 ◼ ► And 01 is their new model that supposedly does fancier reasoning to try to arrive at better answers,
00:42:51 ◼ ► Open AI's stern position on people trying to discover how 01 works by doing prompt injection,
00:43:01 ◼ ► If anyone else knew, they'd be able to compete with us, but we have the special sauce."
00:43:05 ◼ ► Anyway, I'm sure completely coincidentally, Apple AI's researchers recently published an academic paper
00:43:13 ◼ ► about things like open AI's 01 reading from The Decoder, which is not The Decoder podcast at The Verge.
00:43:29 ◼ ► calls into question the logical capabilities of today's large language models, even open AI's new reasoning model 01.
00:44:02 ◼ ► This is quoting from the paper, "The performance of all models declines when only the numerical values in the question are altered."
00:44:12 ◼ ► and if you like change the name of the kids in the word problem, it gets the answers wrong, right?
00:44:22 ◼ ► it will get the answer right with one and wrong with five or whatever, back to the thread on X.
00:44:27 ◼ ► "We can scale data, parameters, and compute, or use better training data for Phi 4, LLama 4, and GPT 5,
00:44:33 ◼ ► but we believe this will result in better pattern matchers, not necessarily better reasoners."
00:44:38 ◼ ► And there's more on the same paper from Gary Marcus, we'll link to his blog post in the show notes as well.
00:44:47 ◼ ► "Oh, of course, it's not doing reasoning, it's just, you know, speaking of spicy, Marco loves the memes with spicy.
00:44:56 ◼ ► That it's much more like compressing data and searching it, compressing textual data or whatever,
00:45:02 ◼ ► and searching it than it is like any kind of reasoning thing, that's how they work on the inside.
00:45:06 ◼ ► But you can't just assume, because that's how, you know, well, everyone knows that LLMs don't think,
00:45:15 ◼ ► In scientific endeavors, even if it's something that you think "everybody knows", okay, then prove it.
00:45:23 ◼ ► And how do you prove it? Devise a way to test for the thing that you think may or may not be true,
00:45:33 ◼ ► That's how this works, and even for things that are, like, boring, like, you know, making a paper about something that,
00:45:54 ◼ ► So I love seeing this, because it is something that people talk, that I've certainly talked about,
00:46:06 ◼ ► And you have to actually come up with a way that you think correctly tests for the thing you think you're testing for.
00:46:11 ◼ ► And I'm sure there will be follow-up papers that say, "Well, actually, this paper didn't quite get at the heart of what the problem is or whatever."
00:46:15 ◼ ► So you can look at it. It's very readable if you just look at the examples and look at the things that they did,
00:46:20 ◼ ► like giving it word problems and saying, "Okay, but if I change the boy's name from Billy to Timmy, now it gets it wrong?"
00:46:27 ◼ ► That is probably a good sign that it is not logically reasoning about this math problem, but is instead spicy auto-complete.
00:46:35 ◼ ► And because it is just pattern matching and doesn't understand the significance of any of these different things,
00:46:39 ◼ ► changing the name is like, "Well, different pattern match," and, "Oh, I got the wrong answer,"
00:46:43 ◼ ► because these things have no idea what math is, and that's just not the way they work internally.
00:46:47 ◼ ► The other danger about this, by the way, is that that's not how it works in my brain when I do the problem.
00:46:53 ◼ ► And that's always dangerous, because even though we think we know how our brains work, we are often very, very wrong,
00:47:14 ◼ ► So you can't just make assumptions like that by saying, "Well, I know LLMs don't think because they work nothing like how I think my brain works.
00:47:20 ◼ ► When I think of this problem, I don't do anything like what the LLM is doing as far as I know. Therefore, LLMs don't think."
00:47:27 ◼ ► So A+ to Apple people to doing what I think most people would consider a boring and pointless paper.
00:47:37 ◼ ► You need someone to actually test the things that everyone just assumes are true to try to show that they are or aren't.
00:47:54 ◼ ► And related to this, so that series I always link to whenever we talk about LLMs is the three blue, one brown.
00:48:02 ◼ ► They're called courses. I keep looking for playlists, but they're called courses somehow on their YouTube channel.
00:48:07 ◼ ► There's a course on neural networks, and chapters like five, six, and seven are about LLMs.
00:48:11 ◼ ► I'll put a link in the show notes to, I think, what is the most recent video in that series called "How LLMs Might Store Facts"
00:48:18 ◼ ► that tries to explore, like, given how we know LLMs work, see previous videos with just a bunch of numbers and matrices,
00:48:27 ◼ ► I think the example they give is like, "Michael Jordan plays blank. How does it come up with basketball?"
00:48:33 ◼ ► Right? Where is that information stored in this giant matrices of number? How does that even work?
00:48:38 ◼ ► Which is an interesting question, because we're like, "Well, I know how it's stored in my mind.
00:48:44 ◼ ► But now I just look at these giant arrays of numbers. Where the hell is that information in these numbers?
00:48:48 ◼ ► This video tries to explain it, and also, as you note from the title, how they might store facts.
00:48:54 ◼ ► It's actually kind of difficult to tell, because we're not particularly good at reasoning about giant piles of numbers.
00:49:04 ◼ ► All right, and then finally, for follow-up, "Google breakup may be on the table," says the Department of Justice lawyers.
00:49:15 ◼ ► lawyers for the Department of Justice have begun proposing solutions to correct the company's illegal behavior
00:49:22 ◼ ► In a new 32-page filing, they said they are considering both "behavioral and structural remedies."
00:49:27 ◼ ► That covers everything from applying a consent decree to keep an eye on the company's behavior
00:49:31 ◼ ► to forcing it to sell off parts of its business, such as Chrome, Android, or Google Play.
00:49:36 ◼ ► Then Google has a response, which we will also link in the show notes, which is exactly what you would expect it to be.
00:49:47 ◼ ► Their response is like, "Here's how the world will end if you make us split off Chrome, Android, or Google Play."
00:49:54 ◼ ► "It will be bad for business. It will be bad for you. Everyone will break out in a rash.
00:50:02 ◼ ► I mean, it's so hard for me to tell because these things take so long to wind through the system or whatever.
00:50:22 ◼ ► The environment in the U.S., and I guess worldwide, the environment for these big tech companies
00:50:30 ◼ ► The view of how much power they have and what they're doing with it is pretty negative right now.
00:50:43 ◼ ► The people who are on the other side of it are making noises about, "We might break you up."
00:50:47 ◼ ► "We might say Chrome has to be a separate company or Android has to be separate or whatever."
00:50:51 ◼ ► It's hard to even think about what that world will be like because we're so used to the status quo.
00:50:55 ◼ ► Everybody is. It's just like, "How could that ever happen? What would happen if you did that?"
00:51:02 ◼ ► but the flip side is all the good things that would happen that we've been denied for so long
00:51:08 ◼ ► because we just accept the status quo and we don't even think about what we're missing out on
00:51:14 ◼ ► but it is notoriously difficult to do anything effective or good after you win the trust case.
00:51:23 ◼ ► You can look at all the ones that have happened. There's lots of good things that have happened,
00:51:26 ◼ ► lots of also terrible things and lots of backsliding and finding us back at the same place again.
00:51:31 ◼ ► I don't know how this is going to turn out, but it's interesting to see the rumblings revolving around Google here.
00:51:38 ◼ ► It'll be amazing if Google gets broken up and Apple gets to stay together. I'm sure they would love that.
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00:54:00 ◼ ► The previous one I believe was iPad mini like fifth generation or sixth generation in parenthesis,
00:54:04 ◼ ► like with the Apple naming thing. I believe the name of this one is iPad mini parenthesis A17 Pro.
00:54:29 ◼ ► As a reminder, this is the chip they put in the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max that was made on TSMC's N3B process,
00:55:12 ◼ ► because the A17 Pros in last year's phones had six GPU cores and these A17 Pros in the iPad mini have five.
00:55:19 ◼ ► So maybe they just saved every single A17 Pro or one of the GPU cores didn't work and they saved them all up for what?
00:55:27 ◼ ► So that's, this was the biggest shock of this. Like for me, because I'm obviously, you know,
00:55:35 ◼ ► of course that first three nanometer process was dead. Of course they were abandoning those chips.
00:55:41 ◼ ► I said on the show like two or three weeks ago that we would see the A18 non-Pro chip being used all across the Apple lineup
00:55:49 ◼ ► in kind of lower end, less expensive products that somehow, that nevertheless needed Apple intelligence compatibility.
00:56:16 ◼ ► I can think of something, because if you throw them away, because I believe on both the iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro Max,
00:56:22 ◼ ► they all had six working GPU cores. So anyone that came out with one non-working GPU core, what are they going to do?
00:56:32 ◼ ► I don't know if that's enough. Like, was that sufficient to work with the iPad mini, and did they have to manufacture a bunch of new ones?
00:56:38 ◼ ► And a bunch of iPad minis actually have six working GPU cores, but they just disable one of them or something?
00:56:42 ◼ ► Like, I don't know how that works, but like, this has got to be a cost, like a shrewd cost-saving measure.
00:56:50 ◼ ► Because there's nothing about the iPad mini, as we'll see when we get to the rest of the specs, that is like,
00:56:54 ◼ ► this is such an important product, Apple really needs to give it the Pro processor from last year. No, they absolutely don't.
00:57:00 ◼ ► Like, this just has to be a cost-saving measure based on, like, you know, binned chips that they would otherwise throw away.
00:57:06 ◼ ► That's all I can think of, that's the leading theory for this. It makes some sense, but it's a total Tim Cook move.
00:57:13 ◼ ► Like, how can we economically make use of what would otherwise be a waste product? But it's really weird.
00:57:20 ◼ ► The iPad mini is weird, and not a well-loved product, not frequently updated, and as we'll see in a second,
00:57:30 ◼ ► Indeed, so continuing along, there is Apple Intelligence, which implies that there's 8GB of RAM, but we don't know that.
00:57:42 ◼ ► But they did list Apple Intelligence as a feature. I guess Apple Intelligence is now code for portable devices with 8GB of RAM or more.
00:57:50 ◼ ► Let's see, there's 10 gigabit per second USB-C, which is up from 5. There's Wi-Fi 6E, up from just plain 6.
00:57:58 ◼ ► The cellular is now eSIM only. It supports the Apple Pencil Pro and the Apple Pencil USB-C.
00:58:19 ◼ ► The 12-megapixel wide back camera supports HDR4 for natural-looking photos with increased dynamic range, says one of the websites.
00:58:30 ◼ ► That's a quote from Apple. It supports Smart HDR4 for natural-looking photos with increased dynamic range.
00:58:35 ◼ ► Increased over what? For the life of me, I was like, is there a new camera on this or not?
00:58:44 ◼ ► And, by the way, all the features you read, it's like, hey, you know all the stuff the iPhone 15 Pro had because it's part of the SoC?
00:59:00 ◼ ► And it has the word "increased" and it says Smart HDR4, but I think that's all compute stuff.
00:59:06 ◼ ► So it's not clear to me whether the camera on the iPad Mini Parenthesis A17 Pro is a different camera than the iPad Mini Parenthesis 6th Generation.
00:59:16 ◼ ► Who knows? But it does have a new true-tone flash, and that's camera-related, so that's good.
00:59:32 ◼ ► This is kind of like you walk by a can of paint and you kind of smelled it and kept walking.
00:59:43 ◼ ► It's the type of thing, like the gold, where if you see one in isolation, you have no idea what color it is.
00:59:58 ◼ ► You can pre-order it right now and it will deliver on the 23rd, which is a week from today, actually.
01:00:12 ◼ ► You know, I used to be such an iPad Mini megafan years and years and years and years ago,
01:00:29 ◼ ► It is a very neat device, and I've understood the new ones in particular, even before this one, to be really great.
01:00:42 ◼ ► Once the iPad started having really good first-party keyboards that stuck right on them and were available for them,
01:01:03 ◼ ► So for me, for my purposes, the keyboard is what did it, but a lot of people do use them.
01:01:08 ◼ ► I think the challenge the iPad Mini has always had is in trying to figure out whether it should be a higher-end device or not.
01:01:27 ◼ ► But with that exception, it seems like nothing else here is particularly pro in terms of iPad nomenclature.
01:02:04 ◼ ► We're going to talk about this in overtime, figuring out how a product mixes spoilers for overtime.
01:02:21 ◼ ► The small one can be cheaper because the screen is smaller and the screen is expensive.
01:02:27 ◼ ► So is it going to be like the Air? Is it going to be like the Pro? Something in between?
01:02:33 ◼ ► although we essentially listed everything that has changed about this device, it's not much.
01:03:04 ◼ ► It's more like an internal spec bump with a couple of external things like the pencil added to it.
01:03:35 ◼ ► You can buy this and run the feature that we think is going to be super important if we ever release it.
01:04:15 ◼ ► If you really want like a small sketching thing and you wanted to have the new Pencil and a better CPU.
01:04:21 ◼ ► And hey, you can, you know, watch it summarize your notifications and erase people from pictures with it too.
01:04:39 ◼ ► The rumor is like the 28th or like, you know, basically the end of October, 18.1 is supposed to come out.
01:04:52 ◼ ► That tells you, wow, they're really trying to bring everything up to Apple Intelligence capable specs.
01:05:06 ◼ ► But yeah, I think anything that can reasonably have Apple Intelligence compatibility is going to get upgrades.
01:05:37 ◼ ► But you know, we're going to see probably the low-end iPads getting an update sometime soon, I would expect.
01:05:41 ◼ ► The rumors are that's getting pushed off. I don't know why, but that was the last rumor.
01:05:44 ◼ ► I mean, to me, the biggest question is how the heck they're going to do it with the Watch and the HomePod.
01:05:50 ◼ ► You know, I guess the HomePod is, especially if they make like, you know, another big one.
01:05:55 ◼ ► The HomePod is a large, expensive enough product that, you know, you could probably find a way to get one of these chips in there cost-wise.
01:06:02 ◼ ► The Watch, it just doesn't, like that kind of hardware just doesn't fit in the Watch yet.
01:06:10 ◼ ► I believe so. I don't know if we ever got that confirmed, but that was the rumor that it used a Watch CPU.
01:06:22 ◼ ► There you go. But yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of updates to products that usually kind of fly under the radar.
01:06:30 ◼ ► We're going to see a lot of updates to them to just bring them up to minimum spec to run Apple Intelligence.
01:06:34 ◼ ► And that's overall, I think that's a very good thing. I think we're going to see a nice refresh throughout the whole lineup.
01:06:42 ◼ ► There is a new, about 15, 17 minutes, something like that, a short film that Apple has released exclusively on the Vision Pro.
01:06:56 ◼ ► No, I mean, look, I've decided rather than continue to insult the Vision Pro as a platform,
01:07:02 ◼ ► I'm going to enjoy it to the degree that I have time and that it can, to the degree that it's worth prioritizing in my life.
01:07:11 ◼ ► And right now, I'm doing a lot right now in my life, and so it's just not, it's not earning its time.
01:07:23 ◼ ► That never happens. I'm doing work, I'm doing family stuff. There's always something I'm doing, so this is not a product in my lineup right now.
01:07:38 ◼ ► Yeah, so this is, shoot, I already forgot the director's name, but he did some recent Western movie, I think. Oh, this is already going on to a great start.
01:07:48 ◼ ► But hey, that's all right. Basically, this is a 15-ish minute film about a World War II submarine, which, you know, something bad happens.
01:08:07 ◼ ► Thank you. Who I think had just won an Oscar or something like that for one of his films.
01:08:14 ◼ ► Yeah, there is, but I'm not looking at it right now. Nice plug, though. I appreciate that.
01:08:25 ◼ ► So a lot of the Vision Pro stuff so far has either been CGI dinosaurs, or let's tell a three to seven minute story about something, or maybe ten minutes tops.
01:08:40 ◼ ► So as an example, I don't think we've talked about it on the show, but they came out like a month ago with a four or five minute sizzle reel on the most recent Super Bowl, you know, for American football.
01:08:51 ◼ ► It's incredible. As someone who enjoys American football, this was an absolutely phenomenal like four or five minute sizzle reel, but again, like a documentary.
01:09:01 ◼ ► And to my knowledge and my recollection as I sit here now slightly sick with a cold, I don't recall any other like scripted thing that has happened on the Vision Pro and certainly not anything that they've described as a scripted short film, which is how they describe submerged.
01:09:16 ◼ ► And this is a 17 minute short film that is obviously scripted, it's acted, and it is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly cool.
01:09:26 ◼ ► And I think one of the things that I find most amusing about it is trying to understand the language of the film and how do they leverage this medium to still accomplish the same thing that any filmmaker generally needs to do.
01:09:42 ◼ ► So for example, how do they point your attention at something? And one of the ways they do this is with incredibly shallow depth of field, you know, perhaps an incredible close up of somebody's face with, you know, in very, very shallow depth of field.
01:09:55 ◼ ► So even if you try to look around, there's nothing else to really see. It's all blurry. And, and sorry, I don't know if I actually said it clearly, but this is immersive. So you get 180 degrees, you can look around and tilt your head.
01:10:07 ◼ ► And so, even though in some cases, you know, the depth of field is as you would expect, and as such, you know, the extras that you really can't focus on in a traditional movie, you can turn your head, and you can go see what that extra is doing.
01:10:22 ◼ ► You can turn your head and go see what the other extra is doing. And, you know, that's the whole idea. And I'm doing fully work on purpose, which is going to drive Marco nuts when he edits. But, but nevertheless, but the point is that, you know, even the extras have to be acting always in a way that I think is not typical for an extra because they couldn't, they might not be the extra, they might be the star just because I turned my head that way.
01:10:44 ◼ ► Similarly, all of the audio in all of the lighting, it kind of has to be on set because unless it's behind the camera, you need to be able to, you're going to be able to see it because you can look around.
01:10:58 ◼ ► You can look down, you can look up, not a lot, but you can look down, you can look up and you can look 180 degrees side to side. And so all the lighting and all the sound pickup kind of has to be there.
01:11:07 ◼ ► And in fact, in one of the scenes, I'm not going to spoil the story as much, but in one of the scenes, you're sitting, there's two people sitting around a table having a snack, basically, and you end up zoomed in on one on the star of the, of the film.
01:11:21 ◼ ► And the other person is behind you based on the way the set is, right? Because you're basically, the camera's kind of floating above the table, if you will. And you can hear dude man eating behind you, right? Because that's the way surround sound works.
01:11:36 ◼ ► And so that, you know, they could obviously have the pickup behind the camera, but for anything that's happening in front of the camera, you know, you don't want to be able to see a microphone and you don't want to be able to see the lights and whatnot.
01:11:46 ◼ ► It's incredibly, incredibly weird in a good way. And it feels like you're there. Not that you're participating in it necessarily, but in a lot of ways, it feels more real than anything I've ever done before.
01:12:00 ◼ ► A couple of examples of this. They do move the camera from time to time. They don't have the same problem that that MLS thing did where there's just constant cuts, constant, constant, constant cuts. There are cuts, but they're much better, much fewer and far between, not unlike the football one I was talking about a minute ago, the NFL one.
01:12:16 ◼ ► But there's occasions where they move the camera and once or twice they kind of like just take what would effectively be a couple of steps forward, although clearly the camera's on like rails or whatever. But there's a couple of times they're moving the camera like quite a ways, like a solid 15, 20 feet.
01:12:35 ◼ ► You know, which one is that like three meters or something like that? No, more than that. Anyway, four or five meters. And it feels slightly off-putting like John, you would absolutely hate this because your body is telling you, you just moved, but yet, or I guess your eyes are telling you, you just moved, but your body is saying, no, I'm still sitting here.
01:12:54 ◼ ► And it's not off-putting to the, to the point that it, that it was bad, but it was weird. That's one of the areas where this, where it starts to diverge from like, cause lots of people made this comparison and it's, it's somewhat apt, but not quite for everything you just said of like watching a play, because when you're in the audience of a play, you could choose to look somewhere that's not where the action's happening and plays also do things to guide your attention, like put the spotlight on these two people.
01:13:21 ◼ ► But hey, what if you want to look over there? Well, unless they have it in complete darkness, which is one of the things they do, you might be able to look at other people who were in a scene instead of just the two people who were talking and people can have different seats in the audience and they might have different perspectives.
01:13:33 ◼ ► So you got to, you can have visible microphones and visible people holding up props or visible lights and all the other stuff.
01:13:39 ◼ ► But even a play, even if you're in the very front row, isn't full 180 because you're not literally on the stage, but obviously with immersive video, I was thinking when you were talking about the two people eating the snack, like you can make artistic choices like, guess what, Casey?
01:13:52 ◼ ► You're the Oreo cookie in the middle of the table, your head, your disembodied head is literally sitting in the middle of the table and you can look to the guy to your left and the guy to your right.
01:14:01 ◼ ► That would be a weird choice, but you can do that. You can't do that with the play where your, your seat suddenly is in the middle of the actors, right?
01:14:07 ◼ ► So there's lots of choices you can make, but they're faced with the same challenges as a play of like, Hey, we don't know where people are going to be quote unquote, sitting in the audience or looking in the audience.
01:14:16 ◼ ► I guess they can place the camera where they want, but they don't know where you're going to look.