Building a Custom Saunter App

Oh, I'm a little sick. You too. Yeah, you too. Yeah. So what happened was uh, you know, last week uh as as I'm getting ready to do the Great Saunter, like the day before. Oh, I don't love this. Yeah, little day before I I wake up and you know and I'd been I'd had a little bit of a you know , congestion for a few days. But it's also you know, my car was also turning yellow last week 'cause it's pollen season. Um and cause right now at this moment, for this particular six month period, I don't own an ostensibly yellow car. Uh but it it happens sometimes. But uh it can happen to you, Marco. Right, but this is not one of those times. Um so I figured, oh, it's just allergies. And then you know every day the congestion gets a little bit worse. I'm like, ooh, it's it's allergies. And then um the day before the saunter, I got a sore throat. Now, at this point, I was still telling myself, wow, the allergies are really bad right now. It's if to be so bad it caused a sore throat. Um tot I mean, obviously totally in denial, right? Because I was not going to be sick and miss the saunter after you know training for it for like you know eight or nine months or whatever. It's been like I'm not gonna miss it. So uh I I willed myself into thinking I was not sick. However, um, as became pretty clear, you know, a day later, two days later, like, oh yeah, no, this is I'm definitely sick. This is not allergies. It's really just a cold. So it is the season. Tis the season. So it's funny you say that because um sitting here doing some work in the evening time, which is unusual for me. Uh, but my boss is a jerk, so here we are. Um, so I was doing work in the evening time and I was sitting here and I was like, huh. Hmm. Hmm. I don't think that's good. And I'm feeling like just the beginnings of like the the the the zygote of a sore throat. You know what I mean? Like just the the idiest littlest bit of sore throat. And I'm like, oh yep, that's probably coming for me. Maybe tomorrow, certainly over the weekend, 'cause the kids both had like colds and light sore throats. Um, Declan in particular is extremely susceptible to strep. And as far as we could tell it wasn't that. But um yeah, it sounds like I'm coming down with cold as well. I I guess Marco and you and I shouldn't have smooching over the last few days. That's really what ruined everything. Yeah, you got it from me for through last week's show, I guess. Well with that in mind, let's just get started and uh start with some follow-up with regard to backblaze and cloud backups. Barry Rubenstein writes: one of the best backup decisions I recently made was switching from Time Machine to Carbon Copy Cloner Plus Backblaze. It works seamlessly in the background, provides a ton of options to cust omize. Uh Carbon Copy Cloner backs up all the major cloud file file providers using including, excuse me, Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, etc. It temporarily downloads only new or changed files locally for backup and then quote unquote evic ts those local copies. I back these up to a dedicated volume on my external backup drive and then have backblaze back up that drive. Here's the support document on how it works, which we'll link in the show notes. Yeah, this is a highlighting a backup strategy that I tend not to think about, but a lot of people find valuable. I'm always like uh just backup the whole, you know, the whole volume, like everything. Don't don't pick and choose directories. But a lot of people know like they have a habit where they're like, look, the only files I care about are here or in these two locations. And if that's the case with you, you can uh use lots of other solutions that are much more targeted. So this one is basically like carbon copy cloner, which carbon copy cloner does the whole drive to be clear, but uh if you only care about these specific directories, you could target copy those with arc or carbon copy cloner or whatever to another place and you know again given that's its claim that it's going to ask for them to be downloaded from the cloud service, back them up, and then evict them, assuming that all that works and is successful, what you end up with is a target drive that just contain the files you want to back up and they're just plain files. They came from cloud files maybe in the source, but in their destination, they're just plain files. And then you point backblaze that backblaze at that drive and it cloud backs up that drive. And again, all the files are plain files. There's no cloud anything. Uh and as long as that drive is connect directly connected to your computer, Bbacklaze will back it up. So uh that is sounds like a solution that works well for Barry. Yeah, I was thinking more about this whole situation, and I I realized like you know, when we were first getting into Dropbox and then all the services that kind of followed in his footsteps. It was not cloud storage. It was sync. Like that was functionally what we were doing. We were taking a directory that was on our drives and we were syncing it between our computers. The idea of cloud only files or like on-demand files didn't come until I think years into this product being a thing. And of course that introduces lots of complexity. Like the file might not be there, you might not be able to get it there, etc. That's when the whole like file provider thing started becoming more necessary, that whole API, all the complexity behind that, all the problems behind that. Certainly I can see like today's world having Backblaze try to deal with what is really cloud storage now and not just synced local storage. That is a lot more complicated. I don't think Backblaze handled it particularly well in terms of messaging or warning or things like that, but I do kind of sympathize with the position they're in with the complexity of this. But I do think like what we are asking these tools to do now is is no longer just take this folder on my computer and sync it. That is how many of us choose to use it. Like, you know, I have mine set up to always keep everything downloaded. Like I never want a cloud only file on any of my computers. But I'm also only storing, I don't know, I think 20 gigs in my Dropbox. Like it's not a huge amount of data. So I can kind of see why, you know, obviously this is not the common case for a lot of people. But I think another solution that might be relevant here is back when I was using that third party program, Maestrol, which is a third-party Dropbox open source client, I haven't tested this, but I bet Maestrol would be backed up by Backblaze because I think it only supports downloaded files. And it's just basically a scr- like a a background process that's running pulling the Dropbox API for changes and downloading those files to a directory on your Mac directly where it where it appears to be. So I bet there are things like that or like accessing Dropbox through other like third party tools that can access it, that if you want Dropbox to be backed up by Backblaze, maybe a third party tool like that could be a route that would work. And speaking of ARC, Daniel Luce writes: here's how Arc handles cloud files along with the default setting. And the screenshot is not spectacular, but it appears to read: when a data-less or cloud-only file is encountered, and then there's a drop down, and there are three options. Report an error, ignore, or materialize. So Daniel continues: if a file gets evicted after successful backup and never changes, ARC won't force it to be materialized back, nor will it error out. Materialization or failure only occurs if Arc does not think it already has a backup of its current contents. Again, Arc is is also uh claiming to do the same thing as Carbon Copy Cloner, which is like, hey, we can we can pull down the file if you want, if we need to back it up. Um and I think that's the route that backblaze is probably gonna end up going down after this whole fiasco. They're just behind the times with it and communicated it poorly. Yeah, yep. Uh all right, let's talk about neoing all the other things . So last week's overtime, we talked about hey, should Apple do more MacBook Neo style products? And John, I presume this is you wanted to ask us some more questions about that. We had a bunch of different people suggesting obviously in the in the overtime we talked about uh a lot of different neo ideas and discussed decided if the products were neoable or not. Uh but is there's some things we didn't discuss and these were suggested, there's a couple that were suggested by a lot of people. One is the vision Pro. I don't think we talked about that, but obviously in the past we have talked about that, albeit not in the context of the Neo, which didn't exist at the time. And the idea there is basically, uh, I bet a lot of people want a Vision Pro because it's it's neat and cool, but they can't pay that much money for it or don't want to pay that much money for it, just like the MacBooks. And the Neo came along. It's like, hey, you wanted one of those really nice Apple laptops, but you didn't pay a lot. Now you can get one. Could they do that with the Vision Pro? And I feel like the answer is a resounding no , right now. They just can't. I mean they can't even they can't even air the Vision Pro. Like they can't like the Neo is so many steps down. Yeah, that was my reply to the toot. The person who too did this, I've replied back to them. They they're still working on trying to air the Vision Pro. They're trying to make anything that is less expensive. Oh, you made the same joke. Yeah, I mean the the Vision Pro is so far from accessibility and mass market pricing. Like, you know, there's there's been big markets for many, for many years for laptops that were $900 to $1200. That's why the MapBook Air has been so successful. It didn't go straight from the seven thousand dollar Mac Pro desktop to nothing. We've had mid-priced laptops as a big healthy category for a long time. The Vision Pro is still in the $7,000 Mac Pro territory and with just nothing nothing below it. Yeah. And the the key thing about the NEO is you may be saying, well, there's all sorts of uh VR Air headsets that are cost way less money. But the key thing with the NEO is the magic of providing essentially the experience that everybody wanted. I want a nice Apple laptop, like the ones that I see that cost too much money. Can I get that experience but pay less money? And with the Vision Pro, you can make a cheaper headset, but it won't give you the Vision Pro experience. And that's the magic of the Neo. Not just, hey, you made a cheaper product in this category, but you made a cheaper product in this category that the people who buy it feel like they're getting they're getting away with something, like that they're getting what they previously couldn't for less money. And you know, if if and one apple comes out with cheaper, uh various cheaper glasses type products or whatever, we'll know if they match the Vision Pro in quality just because you know the screens have to become cheaper, um, it has to be able to do all the things that vision Pro can do, but you know, weigh less or whatever like all and cost less money and all that other stuff. So I think they'll get there eventually, but the the technological progress on the underlying technology of the Vision Pro in particular has been really slow. Like it seems like nobody has Vision Pro quality screens at a massively lower price than Apple. And obviously Apple overprices it a little bit with their very fancy industrial design and all sorts of other stuff and the cameras on the outside. And we, you know, see past episodes, we've talked at length about how to make a cheaper Vision Pro, but NEO is not just like, oh, it's instead of a MacBook Pro, it's MacBook Air, as we just said. It's like, no, now you're competing with the lowest price competitors. And there's just not that many really low price compet company. It would be likeing with those X Real glasses, they're like a few hundred bucks or whatever. But that's not that's like so far from the Vision Pro experience. Um so yeah, we're still waiting on tech for that one. I would say though the difference is is even more dire. The NEO was giving people an experience they already wanted at a lower price point. The Vision Pro is giving people an experience that most people are not actually wanting. And also at a very high price. Oh, that's such a good way of looking at it. I'm so mad at you. I don't know. Like I know it's a much smaller market, but that's my idea of like neoing a product. It's not because it's not like the Neo suddenly made people who weren't interested in laptops interested in laptops. It's like you said, they already wanted a nice Apple laptop. They just like, I'm not paying a thousand bucks for a laptop, so they got a Windows one. This is for people who are like, I really want a really nice VR headset. Now granted, that's a tiny group of people, but for those people, and they're just like, oh, I would love a Vision Pro, but for $3,500, forget it. It's like, well, what if I told you you could get something that you will think is just as good as a Vision Pro for $800. They would leap at it. That narrative makes a lot more sense if what we see from people who do have the Vision Pro is that they're using it all the time and loving it and getting lots of things done in it. And that's not the narrative we're seeing. So I I think the reality is worse. That's that's the like I think the The Vision Pro has m has many challenges. Price is a big one, but it has many more fundamental challenges that I don't think have great chances of being solved. Uh the next one uh uh that we didn't talk about that was suggested by a lot of people was the iMac, which is an interesting case because I mean we did talk about the Mac mini in overtime, um, and that one makes a lot of sense from a bunch of different angles, but the the problem with the iMac is like once you swap out the SoC for like an A something SOC, um it's really difficult to push that price down because the screen is just just dominates the dominates the price and everything else about it. And you can't like the IMAX screen is fine, but it's there's not a appreciably cheaper screen just waiting to be switched to. Like what are you going to do to downgrade the screen? That's it's basically the bottom of the barrel already again. Again, not saying that it's bad, but it's not HDR. It's not high refresh. It's not, you know, it doesn't have a lot of pixels. It's not super bright. It is, it's already a neo-level screen. It's just pretty big. Um, you could I guess make the case out of plastic or something, but honestly, how much money that would that save? Could you could you do a little bit of different stamping instead of machining to take a little bit off? Um it's it's similar to the Mac Mini case, except that in the case of the Mac Mini, we have we came at it in the overtime to for people who aren't members. We came at it from two different directions. One is looking at the Apple TV, which is already kind of like a mini neo, and the other is taking the MacBook Neo and cop chopping off all the parts until it's a Mac mini and seeing what you end up price-wise. And there, I don't know how much you can chop off of the iMac, especially since I think the current iMac should have an adjustable stand already and it doesn't. So maybe we put that on and then we take it off again. But anyway, those were two common suggestions for Vision Pro and iMAC. We'll see. Uh obviously the Vision Pro, as Marco has uh stated many times, has other problems. Uh I'm not really waiting for a Neo anytime soon. And the IMAC seems kind of unbudgeable, but uh we may talk about, we will talk about, I think, the IMac uh later in the show from the other angle. So just on the on the iMac uh on a Neo IMAC, or I Mac Neo rather. The monitor, yes, the mon like this you know the screen is an expensive component. It might even be the most expensive component, even though screen tech has gotten really good and it's not a very particularly high end or large panel. Um I bet even today, like, you know, how much do you think the iMac screen panel actually costs. Now a 24-inch like 4K monitor is around two to three hundred dollars retail, like and that's a complete monitor with the whole case and everything and ports and everything around it. So like I don't think we're talking about more than probably a two hundred dollar part on Apple standards. Like it's still the most expensive part. I can't imagine the case costing more than that. Yes, but the IMAX starts at thirteen hundred dollars. And you know, so they they tend to have, you know, call it call it a thirty or forty percent profit margin. Um you figure there's probably about one to two hundred dollars more stuff in there than uh than a decent monitor would have. So do the the keyboard and mouse or trackpad, which the Mac mini doesn't come with obviously That's fair. But I I think you're looking at I I think they could make an IMAC you know, right now it's thirteen hundred dollars. I bet they could make a comparable one for say seven or eight hundred dollars. Well would would you get rid of the aluminum on the case and go to plastic? I I don't think they necessarily need to. I mean look at what they did with the Neo. I think that's the next the next biggest place where the money is has got to be the case, right? In the case because the there's just so much more aluminum in the iMac, right? Uh and it does have the stupid stand, even though it's not technically adjustable, it just tilts, you know, it's not height adjustable. But I think the aluminum case is number two on the price list. Well, but with the NEO, what they sho wed is that they could still make an aluminum case. They just had to make it differently. Yeah, but there's so much less aluminum in the NEO than the iMac. I I bet they could get the iMac down to seven or eight hundred dollars as a Neo version if they wanted to. Now that being said, I don't think the iMac is a high volume enough product for them to care that much, and it's not because of its price. Like I don't think like we knew there were there's a million, there's a billion people wanting to buy a cheaper Apple laptop because everyone wants a laptop for almost everything and a cheaper Apple laptop is the best of all worlds for most people. I don't think that many people are dying to have a de an all-in-one desktop and saying, you know what, for my all-in-one desktop, I would get the iMac, but it's just too expensive. I just don't think that's that big of a market. I think most people who buy IMAX are doing it for like aesthetic reasons in an office. They don't care. And most people, most consumers who are price sensitive probably aren't looking at a desktop. They're probably looking at what's the cheapest laptop I can get, because that can be my only computer. Yeah. Two separate questions is like um could you make a new version of this product or and does it make sense to? And uh the I think most people were asking like, could is it possible to make one of these? But I think just that the iMac, like a lesser case of the ma uh the Vision Pro, it's like to what end? Um, are you gonna massively increas demedand for the iMac by doing this, probably not. Yeah. All right, let's talk about Mythos. William Moran writes, I am very senior in tech at one of the firms that has access to Mythos in Nightwing. Uh what is significant about it compared to previous LLMs like Sonic four point six or Opus four point six is not the ability to find bugs, is the ability to chain them together into actual practical compromises. Some of the chains are ten or more vulnerability steps long. To recap the context on this mythos was the um LLM that's uh so amazing at finding security flaws that Anthropic didn't release it to the general public yet because it would be too dangerous. They just wanted a select set of uh security researchers to have access to it so they could shore up their software. And of course it uh probably leaked due to uh Anthropic's own security flaws and everyone has access to it. But anyway, uh that's one person chiming in on what makes Mythos special. Then uh with regard to uh the preview and some new stuff from Chat GPT, Kyle Orland at RS Technical writes new research from the UK's AI Security Institute, or AI SI, suggests that OpenAI's GPT five point five, which launched publicly last week, reached qu,ote, a similar level of performance on our cyber evaluations, quote, as Mythos Preview, which the group evaluated last month. On the highest level, expert tests, GPT 5.5 passed an average of s of 71.4%, slightly higher than the sixty eight point six percent achieved by Mythos preview, although this was within the margin of error. GPT five point five also matched Mythos preview and its progress on an I AI SI test range set up to simulate a thirty two step data extraction attack. Uh five point five succeeded in three out of ten attempts on TLO compared to two of ten for Mythos Preview. No previous model had ever succeeded at the test even once. The new results for five point five suggests that when it comes to cybersecurity risk, Mythos preview was likely not, quote, a breakthrough specific to one model, quote, but rather quote, a byproduct of more general improvements in long horizon autonomy, reasoning, and coding AISI rights . Yeah. So William was saying that uh what makes uh Mythos special is that it can chain together vulnerabilities and this test was a thirty-two step chain that no model had ever passed, but now Mythos passes it and so does GPT five point five. So it's not that mythos is particularly special, like this review says, it's just that this is the new state of the art in these models. And guess what? Anthropic's latest model and OpenAI's latest model both are way better at this than past models. Additionally, Daniel Sten Stenberg, I I can read, I swear. Daniel Stenberg writes with regard to curl, uh I complained and I complained about the high frequency junk submissions to the curl bug bounty that grew really intense during twenty twenty five and early 2026, to the degree that we shut it down completely in February 1st of this year. Since March 2026, the nature of the security report submissions have changed. The slop situation is not a problem anymore. So does that mean that they're getting better quality AI based submissions? That is that is my understanding. Yeah here's my here's my summary of this blog post, which you can read in full 'cause it'll be linked in the notes. Uh they're getting more security and bug reports than ever driven by AI , but now they're much higher quality than they were last year. So basically it's like they were being overwhelmed by garbage reports. It was like this is wrong and this is wrong and this is wrong. And you'd waste your time looking at it and be like, no, it's not wrong. These stupid AI reports are coming in. They're just flagging stuff that's not actually bugged and it's wasting all of our time. Even if they find some, because they're overwhelming us with this, you know, garbage input. It's terrible. But you know, apparently since March of this year, suddenly now they're getting tons of submissions , and the quality is really high. They're finding legit books. And so Daniel was one early on on the curl pro curl is a library that does HTTP requests essentially. That's simplifying it greatly. Um it is the library. Like it's what everyone uses It's used in tons of software. It's obviously security flaws there are really pivotal because if you if you have find a security flaw there, it affects so much software. Because like every software that does HTTP request probably uses this library. Um, and he's you know finding bugs is valuable to him as the maintain maintainer of this project, but the slop reports were terrible. But now they're finding legit bugs and giving high-quality reports. Unfortunately, there's also more of them, but fortunately, hey, they're finding even more legit bugs. Uh I think the theory is, again, you can read the blog post. I think the theory is that eventually the the this will sort of die down more because like there's not an infinite number of bugs in code. Like there's there's some number of bugs per line of code. And what you know, when you found not that you're finding all the bugs, but eventually it's becomes much harder to find bugs when you've found all the quote unquote obvious ones. But we'll see these uh you know, as evidenced by both mythos and and GPT-5. 5, these tools continue to rapidly advance. So it may be a while before uh we feel like we've got all the low-hanging fruit and all the libraries that we're using. Kind of tangentially related. Uh Stevie Bonifield writes at the verge, nearly every Linux distribution released since 2017 is currently vulnerable to a security bug called copyfail that allows any user to give themselves administrator privileges. The exploit uses a Python script that works across all of the vulnerable Linux distributions, requiring a no per requiring no per distro offsets, no version checks, no recompilation, according to Theory, the security firm that uncovered it. Copy fail was identified by Theory's researchers with assistance from their XInt Code AI tool. Yes, I don't know what XIT is based on, but anyway, people are just pointing these tools at just existing code bases and finding just really embarrassing, really like obvious in hindsight really dangerous security flaws. Like this is not this is like nearly every Linux distribution since 2017. No special tools required. Just run this Python script and give yourself root. That's pretty bad. I mean obviously you still need to be able to execute code on the thing. It's not a remote exploit, blah blah blah. But stuff like that, you would think, well, surely none of those bugs probably exist. Or if they do exist, they're probably on only one distro or something. It's like, woof. Yeah. So uh, you know, people, these tools exist and people are using them and they're finding problems , and then you know, fingers crossed, hopefully we're all fixing them. All right. Then with regard to AI ruining everything from a hardware perspective instead of software, Joe Rosignal at Mac Rumors writes Apple has stopped offering the 256 gig storage option for the Mac Mini worldwide. The Mac Mini now starts at $800 with the M4 chip, 16 gigs of RAM and a half terabyte of storage. Whereas it previously started at $600 with the M4 chip, 16 gigs of RAM, both the same, and 256 gigs of storage. Yeah, this is uh my my overcast Mac minis continue to appreciate in aftermarket value. Mac minis have never gone down in value, Marco. I did a quick uh eBay search earlier today for the the sold items uh for my configuration, which was the former base of sixteen two fifty six regular M4, uh, which I paid an average of around $5 50 each for uh they're currently selling in used condition for around $700. I didn't save this link, but uh synca was it uh Paul Hadad of TapBots posted some eBay listings for Mac Studios with the big RAM configurations that Apple no longer sells. And some of them are going for 35 grand. Oh, yes, because you can't get it. You just can't like supply and demand. Hey, do you want a Mac Studio with five tells five 12 gigs of RAM. They used to exist. You used to be able to buy them for what we thought was a huge price, but now you can't get them at any price. So check out eBay, $35,000. It can be yours. And and you can kind of understand, because like suppose you're a business and you need that for something. Suppose you know you're like you know maybe a post production house, you need more workstations or you know what like the the kind of business that actually needs high end computers and like bills out client fees that can pay that kind of price. A lot of those businesses exist. A lot of people need that for their business. And so i it actually is potentially worth it for you to get one for thirty-five thousand dollars that, you know, if if your other alternative is not getting it. I mean honestly who would actually buy that? I would imagine it would be some AI company with a huge and existing investment and to them this is peanuts and you gotta spend that VC money somehow. But yeah, if that's well, I mean these f to be fair, the I believe these were listings and not completed sales, so I'm not sure what they're actually going to sell for, but the the the bottom line is the supply and demand curve on uh Macs that Apple no longer sells, that you used Apple used to sell with a lot of RAM is looking rough these days. Yeah, listings don't matter, but uh you got you gotta scroll down and check that box that says sold items, not just completed items, sold items. And that will tell you the prices they sell for. I do have some saved eBay searches for really weird stuff like the uh the bent piece of metal that holds the hard drives in my uh my Mac Pro remember me complaining about that all those years ago. I had for a while I had an uh an eBay search. I still do have it set up, but I set up an eBay search to to get that bent piece of metal for less money. And I just I've left it running because I'm like, surely at some point, this stupid bent piece of metal for this obsolete computer, like it's gonna come down in price. It's not gonna be four hundred dollars anymore. And I can tell you, as of like this afternoon, they're still going for hundreds of dollars. Well, I there's again, there's probably not that many buyers of that. But I I do think though, like this it like the situation we are in now with component shortages, there is not a clear end in sight. Like I I think this is gonna be very disruptive. It already has been, but it's gonna continue to be very disruptive that I think many products are going to be delayed, many products are going to be unavailable, uh, many low end products are gonna just not be worth making. You know, like w I think one of the things that kind of strained um NVIDIA's uh gaming business is that as the rise of AI started up, um you know, first, you know, I know Bitcoin miners ruined GPUs for gamers first, but like it it became not necessarily that worth it for NVIDIA to serve the gaming market that much because they were having all these giant orders for their giant chips for their other stuff. Um and I think that that kind of thing, we're going to see that in the entire industry now. Because in the entire industry, the entire components and hardware business, it's worth it for them to serve the very high-priced AI customers right now and the very high priced data center customers right now. And all of us on the consumer side, we're gonna get squeezed in a in a bunch of different unpleasant ways. Um title. We're gonna face dynamics we haven't seen before. Like actual shortages of of computing equipment mostly haven't happened in our entire lives. Aaron Powell Well the RAM market always has those things where they misestimate demand and RAM suddenly goes up and down. RAM used to fluctuate a lot more than it has recently. Aaron Powell It did, but it was it you know oftentimes that was out of you know s like some awful earthquake would hit Taiwan or something and and you know that would that would crush ramp prices for a little while. But like I don't think that wasn't that wasn't really this big of a swing or for this long of a time or this broad of an effect. In this case, what we are facing industry-wide here is significant shortages of lots of components for probably at least 18 months. Like that's wild and pretty unprecedented. So I think that's going to create some some strange and difficult dynamics that, you know, if we're not really planning for them, they might catch us by surprise. I think for instance, if you think you're gonna need a computer this year, buy it right now. Like do not wait. Like right now. You can still get like if you if you want say say you want a new Mac . If you want a MacBook Pro, you're in luck. The MacBook Pros, they just got their M5 update, and you can go today and order any configuration of MacBook Pro all the way up to the max one twenty eight gig RAM, the max chips you can get any configuration of Mapbook Pro delivered in about two weeks. Nothing else you can get right now . Um and you know the air probably too, but like you you know, n no desktop it's it's gonna be rough and I think this is only going to get worse. If you need a computer anytime soon. Get it now while you still can, because in three or six months, you might be facing delays of three to twelve months to get that computer. And it and it this is also obviously very important for businesses. Businesses are going through the same calculus of like, well, if you know, if we need to like get a new laptop or whatever for everybody we hire, maybe we should buy a few in advance. You know, like that, like think about how the the problems this creates for businesses too. It's it's massive. So we are going to have to be very aware of this dynamic as as consumers. You know we we are kind of last priority for a lot of these products and there will there are shortages already, and they're going to get worse. And so, you know, on the on the silver lining front , maybe having a direct large financial incentive to eke more power out of the computers that we already have might result in other good good effects in the industry. Maybe we'll have things become a little bit more efficient. Uh maybe we'll have people, you know, care more about things like repairability. Um we'll see. They, you know, th those kind of effects might happen as a result of this. But uh in the meantime, we're all gonna be crunched, and I think we need to be prepared for that. Which is one of the strangest uh excuses I've ever given anybody to buy a MacBook Pro, but here we are . You are the king of good excuses. Uh one this reminds me a lot of when you couldn't get a car or new car anyway because of the the chip shortage. There's a chip shortage you f you fellas. It and you know you couldn't get a new car not easily and not quickly during you know the height of COVID. And I feel like this is that, but much worse and much more universally applicable. Yeah, totally. Tim Hardwick and Mac Rumors writes Apple's considering dropping the cheapest MacBook Neo configuration as one possible response to the rising cost of building the popular laptop, according to Tim Culpan, a former Bloomberg reporter. Shipping estimates on Apple's website currently set at two to three weeks across the lineup, falling stronger than expected demand, and the company is said to have instructed suppliers to increas produedction capacity to ten million units , roughly double the original forecast of five to six million. I mean good news for the neo. It's selling really well. Yep. Um but this could be a problem. Like I mean a mat like you can see why Apple would really not want to say anything negative or cause any negative press about the MacBook NEO right now. Because it's a hit, it's it's a runaway hit, like they're it's doing great. Um and for the NEO to either have to, you know, cut its cheaper price option, which is one rumor that I saw blow by, um, or to to have you know just extended wait times for it, those aren't great looks. And you know, not not Apple's fault, like they they they have a hit on their hands, you know, which is uh otherwise great news, but I bet Apple would bend over backwards to avoid having to say or do anything negative about the NEO right now. Tim Colpin adds in his own posts: the renewed commitment to meeting demand means Apple must also ask TMCA TSMC for a hotlot of A18 Pro chips. The initial production run was at least two years ago. John, what's a hotlot? Is it when they're stolen? I don't know. He italicized it in his thing too. So maybe it's a term of art in the industry, or maybe it's just Tim Culpen being spicy. But yeah, you gotta go back to TSMC and say, can we get more of these? Um yeah, I I also agree that one of the worst things that Apple could do to the Neo right now is cut the low end model because that's like that's the whole point of the product. Don't do that. But yeah, I mean as Marco said a lot of the situation out there is that like it suppliers are telling people manufacturers, we don't have any more of these things to sell you until X number of months in the future. So what do you do in that? It's not like it's like, oh, how much like it's even if you had infinite money, like we they're all bought. Like there's no more. You have to wait for more to be built. And we've the ones we have, we have already sold. Uh, or the ones that are coming are already been bought and prompt, you know. So that's that's supply and demand. Makes prices go up. It's not great. Um, I think Apple will hold the line on this one because this is definitely the type of thing that Apple can absorb. Uh, but it's uh it's not fun for anybody. Apple's capital expenditures. Uh let's talk Apple Car and what other companies are spending on AI. So capital expenditure is , or capital expense, is the money an organization spends to buy, maintain, or improve its fixed assets, such as buildings, vehicles, equipment, or land. It is considered a capital expenditure when the asset is newly purchased or when money is used toward extending the useful life of an existing asset such as repairing a roof. Capital expenditures contrast with operating expenses or opex which are ongoing expenses that expenses that are inherent to the operation of the asset. OPEX includes items like electricity or clean ing. The difference between opex and capex or capital expenditure may not be immediately obvious for some expenses. For instance, repaving the parking lot may be thought of as an inherent as inherent to the operation of a shopping mall. Similarly, the cost of software for a business, either software development or software as a service licensing might fall into either OpEx or CapEx. That is, it is it merely business as usual or is it something new, an investment with multi year return? The dividing line for items like these is that the exp is that the expense is considered Aaron Powell So during my uh career uh having a regular jobby job for 25 years, whether or not the work that I was doing, software development where consider ited's CapEx or OpEx has changed uh it several times in ways that has affected me at my job because this this is just from the Wikipedia page, you think what is CapEx and what is OpEx? And as I think the Wikipedia page makes clear, it's not always cut and dry. Like you can argue both ways. And the real answer is like, what do our lawyers slash financial people tell us we either have to do or we should do to optimize whatever the hell it is the CFO optimizes, tax burden or whatever, right? So it's various times it has been like, you don't you're a software developer, you don't have to worry, you're pretty little head about this. This is all taken care of for you. You know, other times it's like log everything you do, because we're we've decided that we've we're gonna count all software development of any kind as cap ex, and we need to have a catalog of it for tax reasons because we've decided this is the way we're doing it, and sometimes it's been in between. Oh, well, this group does when when these people write code, it's CapEx, but when these people write code, it's OpEx. Again, like the uh, you know, is repaving the parking lot, CapEx or OpEx. It's like, well, is this just an ongoing expense like electricity or cleaning, or is this like a new thing where like you know, you're making the parking lot fancier to like I d I don't even know. I don't I don't I'm not interested in what goes into this, but I'm saying that it's not always cut and dry. But if what if you pave it really poorly and you have to do it every year. Right. But like the reason this comes up is I think this was a couple of shows back. Um we were talking about um I think it was probably in the like Tim Cook Turnus like turnover episode. Um like what is Apple, you know, what does Apple spend money on? And in the Tim Cook era, they wasted all this money on the car. And one of the points I made was like, yeah, Apple burned a lot of time and money and people and goodwill on the car. But now, nowadays, looking at the current landscape where Apple's, you know, peers in the technology market, they're spending so much money on AI stuff that everything Apple has ever spent on the car in the past decade is dwarfed by what people are doing with AI right now, and that's all talking about CapEx. And so the people who are financial nerds who are into this, uh, like this blog post we're about to read here, I think it's from MG Siegler, um, or eventually we'll get to it. Um they've been looking at Apple and saying, hey, Apple , why are all your competitors massively increasing their capex on AI stuff, data centers, chips, RAM , $100 million salaries for fancy AI people or whatever. Whereas when we look at your CapEx , it's you're not doing that. And you're out of step with your industry. Are you falling behind and blah blah? We often have the is Apple falling behind discussion in the realm of like consumer facing why does Siri suck? Uh why are Apple's hardware products being delayed because Siri sucks? Um, how can they not deliver the the stuffs that they announced in WWC 2024? That type of thing. But then the financial people are like, Apple, why aren't you doing the things your competitors are doing? And so they're getting it from both sides here. So I did pull out some info about Apple's CapEx to put hard numbers to the thing that I just vaguely alluded to in the earlier episode. So Marcus Mendez writes at 95 Mac as part of its fiscal quarter two of 2026 results, Apple reported 11.4 billion in RD expenses, up 34% from Q2 2025, making it the highest quarterly figure in the company's history. So 11.5 billion is as as high it's ever been. Tim Cook says we are clearly investing more. You can see that in the OpEx numbers. And if you click down on those a step deeper, you and look at the RD areas separate from SGNA, which is selling general and administrative, you'll find that RD is even accelerating much higher than the company is. So we're clearly investing and we're investing in products and services. Yeah, so this is talking about opex and uh SGNA is another one of those terms that comes up in your eyes glaze over about expenses of link to the Wikipedia page on that as well. But these are the numbers they're talking about and they're saying they're up 34% from Q2 2025 to 11 billion. And there's a chart in the 95 Mac article which shows like 2022 to current and you can see it's been slowly going up . And then 2026 has a bit more of a bump. But then we get to MG Siegler's post about CapEx. Right. So MG Siegler writes, in 2021, Apple spent 11.1 billion on CapEx. In 2022, that number fell slightly to 10.7 billion. In 2023, it was back up to 11 billion. By 2024, it was down a bit to 9.4 billion. 2025 saw a jump to 12.7 billion. In 2026, with half the fiscal year in the books, Apple's on track to spend nine to ten billion on Capex. One could imagine a banker in Wall Street conjuring Matthew McConaughey and dazed and confused. That's what I love about Apple man. Their big tech peers go crazy on CapEx, but they stay in the same range. The dichotomy is so wild that it now gets written about every single quarter, but the t dichotomy also keeps growing every single quarter as big tech keeps ramping capex and Apple stays the same. This chart, which is in his blog post, which is in the show notes, says it all. So this chart shows 2020 through 2026 capex of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. And Apple is the first blip. They're dark blue in the little bar chart things. And if you look at the dark blue bump as TZ just read the text, little dark blue blue bump in 20, 2020, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, it's like the same. It doesn't move much. It goes up and down a little bit, but stays about the same. The other lines in the chart, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook go bonkers starting in like 2024, 2025, and 2026 to the point where the uh what is it, the Amazon line is at what is that, 200 billion in 2026. Uh Facebook is at about 150. Uh Google and Microsoft are both about like 180 or so. And Apple is, as we said before, nine or ten . Like they're they're just so incredibly out of step. And speaking of the car project, looking on this graph, the car project ended in 2024. That is not visible in this graph. The end of the car project. Now no Apple's no longer wasting billions of dollars on the car. Surely their line will change in an appreciable way. Maybe it does if it was just Apple being shown here, but in the scope, like this was my point. In the scope of what everyone else is spending on AI stuff and CapEx, money that they're laying out for things that are not just like ongoing expenses, but like we need to, you know, buy tons of GPUs, build new data centers, like new stuff or whatever, whatever rules they're using to consider it cap ex . Apple is not doing what everybody else is doing. And there's, you know, we we've had debates about this from again from the product perspective. Are they falling behind for what reasons are they falling behind or whatever? But on the financial side, this is the other side of it, which is like is Apple invest ing versus is Apple smarter than everybody else and everyone else is going to waste all this money and when the bubble pops they're all going to be left holding the bag and they're just burning through cash and Apple's going to be sitting on the sideline going, we didn't do any of that. We saved our money. We'll see how this turns out . But the as as uh MGT L says the dichotomy is clear. Like looking at this graph, one of these things is not like the other and it's Apple. We we know that over you know histor hically Apple is pretty stingy with how and where it spends money. So that could be an effect here. But and I would say like combining like referring to the car project here as as like, oh it didn't matter. They blew all that time with the car . I think misses the point of why the car I think was so damaging to the company. It wasn't about money. Apple has plenty of money and has for a long time. It was about talent drain and opportunity cost. The car pulled No, like they also hired people, but that was a significant talent drain. Um and while some of it probably resulted in some things they could use after the car project was was killed, uh most of it probably wasn't. So it was that was the bigger opportunity cost. Apple is limited way more by like talent and bandwidth, so to speak, than they are by money. Um but I think if you can fault them for um you know, not having enough cap ex or, you know, whatever develop r you know, R and D costs. I think it's it's not necessarily that, oh, they wasted money on the on the car and then, you know, wow, look, AI dwarfs it. Like, no, it's it's more like AI is like a huge deal. Apple is nowhere in it. And they also separately had a car project that drained a lot of talent and was a big distraction for a long time. Yeah. My main my main point is not to say that Apple didn't waste money in the car project, it's to say that everyone else is potentially wasting so much more money on AI. Or maybe it's not a waste. Like what I'm what I'm trying to say is that like again, if this graph was just Apple, you'd talk about the car project and and you'd talk about the money wasted, the time wasted, the opportunity costs, all this other stuff you know. Obviously it wasn't successful product, although I still say it was successful in that they thankfully didn't ship something that they that would they would be embarrassed by or whatever. But like it was misguided, it was mismanaged, it was rebooted too many times. Johnny I've insisted at not have a steering wheel. They wanted a dragon. They didn't. Like a the whole nine yards, right? Uh, and it was a waste of money and everything, but Apple is notoriously stingy. So even though the over 10 years they spent billions of dollars, still generally drop in the bucket. But what this chart shows is what the rest of Apple's peers are doing right now. And essentially how it either looks like they all know something Apple doesn't, or it shows that they are panicking and Apple isn't. We'll find out which one of those things is true, because I don't think they can both be true, right? Like they're spending so much money, just astronomical sums. I mean they have the money. Like these are very rich, wealthy companies. It's not like they're bankrupting them selves by spending this money, but like they're not just outspending Apple by a little bit. Like AI is different than any other, like if you go back to any other trend or boom that Apple didn't follow, like everyone's investing in netbooks. These bars were not like this when netbooks were were popular, right? Or like whatever the thing is. Even even if you went back and looked at it, like this is always funny when we talk about this number, like uh in the s the the smartphone revolution, how much money was uh you know Microsoft spending on the mobile devices versus how much money was Apple spending. And the bars would have looked pretty similar. I think like the estimate I always see in those very stories about like how much money did Apple invest before they could ship the first iPhone. It was like 150 million or something to get the first iPhone out the door, which at the time, you know, Ian, you're taking people off Teams or whatever, but like how much additional money did you have to to drop in before you ship the first iPhone? $150 million dollars to get that business star ted was a really good deal. That was $150 million , extremely well spent. And I bet during that same time period, Microsoft probably spent more on mobile than Apple did. They just didn't they just made worse choices and didn't get the same end result. But then like again, those lines wouldn't show up on this graph at all. Because these these are in billions, right? This would be the thickness of the x-axis. I just it just astronomical how much money is being spent. And by the way, all those hardware shortages, you can see that in these lines too. Who's buying all the hardware? So the I can't get RAM. These bars. This right here. This is where it's all going. 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So head to factor meals dot com slash ATP fifty off use code ATP fifty off to get fifty percent off and free daily greens per box with new subscription only while supplies last until 927, 2026. See website for more details. Once again, thanks to Factor for sponsoring our show. We talked about uh MacBook Neoing all the things, but John you want to go to a different direction this week. What are we talking about? Do the pun. Do it, Casey. Do it for me. The A the age of ultra on Apple products. Thank you. I worked hard on that one. I'm here to serve, John . I mean, I'm making dated references. The kids remember those movies. It was a long time ago. No, they're so good though. But it really this is really is what this is about. We did talk about newing, but and what this topic is specifically sticking the word ultra on Apple products, which is different than I mean we weren't talking about sticking the word neo, we're talking about newing in terms of we have the MacBook Neo, which is a real product, and it's the first one to have that suffix, and kind of do it to their products. But there are existing Apple products with ultra stuck on the end of it. Uh this the question here is, and these this is based on a whole bunch of rumors, the rumors are swirling and people love to see a pattern. Apple's gonna stick the world ultra on the end of a bunch of products, maybe progress that we've already talked about, but suddenly when you stick ultra and all the end of them, is this the age of ultra on Apple products ? All right, so we're starting with the uh iPhone Ultra and John's favorite YouTuber Max Tech shows off some I guess they were like aluminum or some sort of metal models that looked very accurate. And if you're to believe the video, and I have no reason not to, uh the same leaker that came up with these specs or printed or whatever made these metal objects. D itid a year ago for the iPhone 17. They've done this for the past several models. You can get these essentially down to the fractional millimeter accurate models of the iPhone months before they come out. So I have no reason to doubt these. But if you want to see the foldable phone in someone in physical form this is it but the the the reason this is part of this section is hey you know the foldable phone we've been talking about one of the names that's been remembered for it has been iPhone ultra it's a pretty obvious choice since since the very first time that the foldable phone was rumored years ago, iPhone Ultra was thrown out there along with iPhone Fold, iPhone Duo, whatever. Um but in the light of this new Apple's gonna stick Ultra on all their products, it's really cementing iPhone Ultra as the favorite name for this particular phone. And it is an interesting start to the Ultra family of products that is rumored here because I mean 've the reason I put a link to the thing with the showing the models of it is when I see that little you know aluminum model in the hands of a person and they're you know manipulating it and folding it and using it, it looks to me like and I've seen other people say this as well , this is kind of the spiritual successor to the iPhone mini. And you're gonna put ultra on this product? Now, in one respect, ultra will apply because rumors are that it will be ultra expensive. Because hey, screen's the most expensive part, and this has two screens, one of which is twice as big as you would expect. Uh and it's obviously m expensive and fancy to make the folding screen and you gotta make the sides thin and all you know, it's gonna the rumor is it's gonna be more expensive. If you look at all the folding phones in the industry, they tend to be very expensive models. So ultra makes sense. But when I look at the actual phone, I'm like, oh, look, it's a phone for people who miss the iPhone mini because it's so small, it's so short when it's I mean, it's thick, it's fat, it's chunky when you have it folded up. But one of the points that's made in the video is like, look how easy I can reach everywhere on the screen with my thumb when it's folded up. It's like the fat nano of iPhones. I mean, if you want to look at it that way, or the iPhone mini. So right away I feel like this is a weird product to be called Ultra because when I was in it was iPhone Ultra was that term was being applied to phones many years ago, even before the foldable phone was a rumor. And people were like, Apple's going to come out with another phone that's even more expensive than the iPhone Pro Max, and they're going to call it the iPhone Ultra. And here's the ways that it's going to be better. And there was like sort of a combination of the iPhone Air rumors with maybe the the nascent iPhone folding phone rumors or whatever. But that made sense to me. It's like can you make a high-end phone that's higher end than the Pro or Pro Max and you call it Ultra and you spend more money for it. But the folding phone, other than the fact that it's going to be the most expensive iPhone ever. Ultra seems like a weird choice for the name, but uh it rumor has it that's what they're gonna go with. Yeah, I don't I I it doesn't quite fit the foldable for me if the rumors are correct about you know the size and everything. Um I do think that this is less a successor to the iPhone mini than you think. Uh because first of all, like I I took up that 3D printer model that I that I have that everybody made from you know a couple months back. And like I can't reach the corner at all. Um I can reach about three quarters of the way to you know diagonal end to end. Um so I still have a big sweep up there that I cannot reach um because it's wide. Do you have a mini to compare with? Um Yes. Also for what it's worth, Max Tech had said that the initial read on the Ultra was that it would be much taller than people are saying it is now. I think the model you had was Yeah, I don't know if it like the the the model the ones that he's got are the ones that they make when they're like when they like the case manufacturers use these like that. I'm pretty sure they're accurate. I'm not sure if the 3D print was close, but it might be. Yeah. So the mini compared to this model , the mini is a little bit taller, but a lot narrower. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I guess it's it depends on the size of your hands and thumbs. Like I don't know how big the maxtech guy's hands are. I mean I I don't think I have giant hands by any means, but I 'm they're not like tiny trump hands. But anyway, um calling this an ultra is is a little bit of an odd move because first of all, it is going to be very different than the others. Like it's not going to be better in all ways, it's going to be worse in a few ways. When you look at previous uses of the name Ultra, you know, the MCIP Ultras and the Apple Watch Ultra, those are like we took what was good about the thing before and just increased everything as much as we could. Like we gave you everything. That's not what the foldable is doing. The foldable is increasing some things a lot, like the unfolded screen size is gonna be dramatically increased, but then the folded up screen size is gonna be shrunk and weird. Right. They're going to probably take away cameras. It's going to be questionable on things like how the battery life situation is going to work out, what other kind of limitations or side steps it's going to have and other features. Will it have things like magnetic charging? Who knows? Will it work with cases? Who knows? Uh you know, will it will it have all the other you know, will it have like the heat management features of the Pro line? Probably not, because I don't know how it would fit in there. Like there's all sorts of I think it's also going to be , you know, it's gonna be many in some ways sometimes, but one way it's not gonna be many is how it feels in your hand because it's going to be not only wide, but I would also guess heavy. Because this is a lot of mechanical parts, a lot of mechanical complexity. I think it's going to be dense. And it's not going to feel mini at all, though it will feel ultra. And thicker, obviously. Yeah, obviously very thick. Yeah. So like so I I think it's going to be a bit of a sidestep, but what Ultra tends to mean in Apple's usage so far is we gave you the best and the most of everything. And that's not what this is. This is kind of a sidestep. So I don't think they're going to use that name for this. I think they're going to use a different name. Well, I I I I agree with you about uh what Ultra has historically meant, but I don't agree with you with the logical leap, therefore uh that's not what Apple's gonna do because Apple does not care about logic or or or past patterns. They just name things whatever the hell they want, and we're like, but wait, that doesn't make any sense. Your your past two things were like this and now this thing is like this. And Apple just goes, eh? And they shrug and we get it. So but anyway, these these are just rumors. So the iPhone Ultra and Stephen Hackett, what he put his money down on iPhone Ultra. I I think he thinks that he was early. He's like, I'm putting this is going to be called the iPhone Ultra, but he was like, you know, probably a year after the first time that was name was connected with the phone, but he's very convinced apparently. Uh I don't think he has any inside info, but there you have it. iPhone Ultra, potentially one of the Ultras. And and to be fair to the iPhone Ultra, this has been the leading contender for the name. People have basically been calling it the iPhone Ultra when they didn't just call it the folding iPhone. Duo has not caught on among the rumors and iPhone fold. No one seems to really believe that's gonna be a thing. So if they don't call it Ultra, I'm not sure what they're gonna call it, but that's that's our first Ultra product. All right, moving on. MacBook Ultra, otherwise known as the M6 based OLED MacBook Pro with a touch screen and dynamic out dynamic island, and maybe Marco Arment, maybe cellular. We'll see. So this is the MacBook Pro we've been talking about. They're like, oh, are remember when it was like and and they're gonna have the M six MacBook Pros of this year too? That's the rumor. I would say I think we talked about this last episode, like based on the component shortages, the having the M six based MacBook Pros come out in calendar year twenty twenty six seems vanishingly uh likely at this point. So too bad for that. But this this product's been remembered for a long time. We're like, oh, you can get the M five ones if you're comfortable with the OMA design again be,fore the component shortages gave you another reason to, but like, hey, if you just want something that's tried and true and tested and you know what they're like, the M5 MacBook Pros are great, you can get one, they're available right now. Um, the next one is going to be fancier in so many ways, gonna have the old ed screen, right? It's gonna be m6 based, it's gonna be a new design for the case, which we haven't had in a long time. Supposedly, also thinner. It's gonna have dynamic island, then a touch screen, and maybe cellular. Like, wow, I should wait for the uh the m6 based one. Uh but all of those rumors were kind of like, you know, we have the M5 based MacBook Pro, and every once in a while the Apple redesigns its things. The Mac Money gets a new case and becomes smaller. The the current MacBook Pro design was a redesign of the previous one. Like it just makes sense. But the current rumor is, oh no, they're not just going to roll out this thing, this M6 OLED based blah blah blah touchscreen dynamic ion MacBook Pro as the successor to the M5 ones? No. They're going to call it the MacBook Ultra. As in, this is not the MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro has an M5 you see and a non-OLED screen and no touch screen and no dynamic island and no cellul ar. Uh, but this is a new class of MacBook, presumably for more money. That's I feel like this is the only consistent theme of Ultra so far for more money. And we'll keep selling the MacBook Pro with the M5 in it, I guess, in the old case, but if you want a MacBook Ultra, which is somewhat disappointing to me because I just assume it's like this is the next best greatest MacBook Pro. It's it's no less a MacBook Pro than the any of its predecessors. Yes, they occasionally go through these, you know, redesign revision things, but we don't change the product line to say, okay, well, now this is a whole different product. No, it's just the next late, it's next the evolution in the MacBook Pro. Why do you have to call it Ultra? And when I see the name Ultra Rumor for this, I think, well, they either want to or have to charge massively more money for it, or they love the idea of having an even higher priced, higher margin model in the MacBook Pro line. So they can keep selling the MacBook Pro for the people who can't tolerate how massively we're going to gouge them for this new one. And by the way, this new one will be way nicer than the old one in a lot of ways. Newly redesigned thing, much better screen, touch screen, uh the dynamic I own cellular, like these are all features that just didn't exist before on the line. So I see that if you're gonna make this split, now's the time to do it, but it pains me a little bit to see them trying, if they assuming again assuming this is even true, um, trying to split the line in a way that I think is not justified by what I see as simply uh making the MacBook Pro catch up to modern specs in all regards. See, I think this the the MacBook Ultra idea makes a lot more sense than the iPhone Ultra being the foldable. Like this, to me, it's like you want to you want to give everybody the most. And again, look at the Apple Watch Ultra for a for like you know a precedent here. The Apple Watch Ultra didn't need to be the thinnest, sleekest Apple Watch model. It was the one that was like w if people want absurd battery life, much higher durability, much brighter screen, much more depth rating, you know, all the different things the ultra gives you. You know, things like the siren and the speaker and the a the extra button and like all this stuff. The ultra was like, we are going to prioritize giving you the most that you could possibly want out of this device. And we are that that allows us to make something that is thick and blocky and has expensive metals in it and stuff like that. And and that will that will help it achieve that goal because this product doesn't need to be the thin, sleek mass market thing for the more mass market targeted price. So when you take that attitude and consider how could you make a MacBook Pro Ultra with that style? So you can you can brainstorm things like, yes, it would have the higher end component, the OLED screen. It, you know, maybe it has you know a a higher end tier of chips available. I don't necessarily Oh that's the other thing about it. Does that mean the MacBook Pro is never gonna get the M6? Or will it just get it at like on a staggered pace? Like right now, the MacBook Air has like a staggered CPU, you know from from the the Pro line. Maybe there is another subdivision of chip. I don't know if the I don't know if it's abor ted thermal envelope to include like the actual Utral chip? Thats seem unlikely. Yeah, that's the only thing I think would justify the Ultra Ultra name is if they actually did have uh an M6 class chip that is has unprecedented, like that is just bigger and hotter than has ever. But I don't think it's going to be the case because again the r,um or is that the Mac the rumored MacBook Ultra will be thinner than the existing M5 MacBook Pros. Maybe they're achieving that through things like a more expensive metal. Maybe they maybe it'll be titanium. I don't know. Um it's it's been done before, not recently, but it's but and not without its problems. Uh but you know, we we have a different world now. Is it gonna be that fancy metal that we talked about in the earlier episode? Yeah, right. Like I don't know how it would work out cost wise, but uh but certainly like you can imagine, okay, a MacBook Pro that has the best possible screen they can chip, the fastest chip they can ship, maybe it has higher resource limits on RAM and storage also. What if it's only available in 16 inch and that gives them a few more options of of the configuration options they can out they can offer. You know, what if it is titanium? What if it is the you know better battery life than all the other ones because it's a little bit bigger, a little bit heavier, but but but it's ultra, it's allowed to be.' Thsere a lot of freedom that's offered by the concept of making something of have of having an ultra line. Um and I think the Apple Watch Ultra, I think has been a big success in in a lot of those ways. So hopefully there is something to that besides just a higher price. Yeah, I think if the Ultra actually was like the watch, where it was actually bigger, thicker, and had higher specs in all regards, I would accept it. But the thing that burns me up about this though is that I feel like the MacBook Pros are overdue to have OLED. Touch screen is not a high-end feature. It's on $300 laptops, right? The dynamic island is not so amazing that you need to have be the high price thing. And I don't think they're gonna put a bigger, faster, hotter chip in it. I think it's just gonna have the same chips. It just it just kind of annoys me to like essentially uh fence off what used to be like we used to when the new macbo pros came out they got the the the the pro and the max version of the the plain the pro and the max version of the latest m chips. And that's just what we accepted. And now it's like, okay, well, now there's this stagger thing. Only the ultras get the latest version of the Pro and the Mac chips. You gotta wait for the other ones to trickle down. And by the way, this is an excuse for us to re- uh to to keep tech from trickling down. Like basically the Apple trickle down thing is we have to have a somewhat they try to have a somewhat sensible line where the higher end ones have options, lower end ones don't, which is why the non-pro phones took so long to get promotion, because it was just a differentiator for the pro phones. What this would mean is that don't hold your breath for the MacBook Air to get an OLED screen because that's like a 2029 project. I forgot what the rumors were for that, but it's like that's got to trickle all it's not even going to go in the MacBook Pro. It's only going to be in the Ultra. It's Pro st ill don't get it. Then eventually it has to trickle down to the MacBook Pro and then you go, fine. It's not gonna be exclusive to the Ultra in this third generation of the Ultra product. Now the MacBook Pros will get it. And then you gotta wait another three years for to say, fine, the MacBook Air can have an OLED screen. And that's how Apple essentially gets embarrassingly behind on technology that is found in commodity products, where the OLED screen, the price of OLED screen is one of the few components that is not going through the roof right now. Although I'm sure everything is increasing a little bit because of carry-on effects. But like screen prices do go down, screen quality does get better, but Apple just holds the line and says, No, OLED is a is an ultra feature only and it has to stay that way for years. And it just that annoys me. So I'm I'm not happy about this rumor if it turns out to be true. I mean I'm happy about it if I get my cellular MacBook Pro. That's all I'm saying. Yeah that's the other thing. You think like oh we want cellular so much guess what your only choice for cellular which is like again a thing that you can get on like a base level iPad, right? Your only choice is the three starting at $3,000 MacBook Ultra or something. That that feels gross too. You know, it's funny when I bought my current computer that I'm using to speak to speak to you right now, which is an M 3 Max MacBook Pro with an with uh M3 Max in it and sixty four gigs RAM any terabytes of storage. I thought oh it'll last me a year or two, which has been typical for me for the last several years. And now I think three years in, uh, I'm expecting that I'm gonna hold on to this until the uh MacBook Ultra, or whatever they call it, is something less than your Mac Pro in terms of expense, because it's gonna be a doozy, particularly if R AM and SSDs are still incredibly expensive. Next on our list, AirPods Ultra, or otherwise known as AirPods Pro with cameras to feed visual intelligence to Siri. And there was some news about this just earlier today, in fact. Mark Erman writes The earbuds which rely on cameras to see the space surrounding a user and provide information are in advanced testing. The cameras essentially act as eyes for the Siri digital assistant and aren't designed to take photos or video. These components located in both the right and left earbuds allow the device to capture visual information in low resolution. Other than longer stems to accommodate the cameras, the product will resemble the AirPods Pro 3. The idea is to let users ask questions about an item they may be looking at. For instance, they could be facing food ingredients and ask what they should cook for dinner. The device could give the wearer a reminder based on something the camera sees, or it might use external visuals to provide more advanced turn-by-turn directions. The AI could cite specific landmark ahead when telling users when they should turn. The new AirPods aren't designed to support hand gesture controls. They do have a small LED light in the earbuds that will turn on when visual data is being fed into the cloud. Apple was planned, had planned for the earbuds to go on sale as early as the first half of this year, but the launch was postponed after delays to a revamped version of Siri. Everyone take a shot. Uh while the hardware is nearly ready. Conerncs about the AI elements could further hold back a launch if Apple isn't pleased with the quality of the visual intelligence features. Surprise, surprise. So this is a weird one. They're applying ultras to the airpods with cameras in them, which is again a long rumored product. Uh do you stick Utral on these? Well , it's surely differentiated from the AirPods Pro. This is not just like the next logical revision of the AirPods Pro to stick cameras on them. I don't think that follows. Like we've had AirPods Pro, AirPods Pro 2, 2.5, 3 cameras were not really on anyone's list of things that that everyone else is doing on their their airbud their earbuds that surely Apple will have to do. But this is apparently their plan. So if they want to stick Ultra on this one, I give them a pass because I mean they're not AirPods Pro and sticking a camera on something that didn't have one, it sounds pretty ultra. Whether or not this will be a good product or work or ever ship because they can't get their Syriac together, we'll see. But I, you know, I could see and obviously it's probably gonna be more expensive too, because you're adding cameras to things that didn't have them and there's not a lot of stuff on AirPods to begin with. So the addition of a camera is a significant addition to the parts that you need to make an AirPod. Uh but if you're trying to make a family of products with ultra suffix, this is and it's the same question I said before. If they don't call these ultra, what do you call them? Yeah, I guess because they already have Pro AirPods camera, or it could just be well, it could be AirPods Vision, but it uh remember when they did the iPod photo, they just put stuck photo right in the name. Mm-hmm. I mean uh uh you could just make uh this is what the what we were just talking about uh with regard to the MacBook Pro versus MacBook Pro Ultra, but it could just be the new AirPods Pro. You know, they just get more pro-y. Yeah, I mean they would have they would just make it to four, I guess. Like when they're up to three. They use the the numbers in marketing, right? AirPods Pro three, right? Yeah. I mean fascinating. Yeah, I don't know. I mean this this is not a product I'm particularly excited about. Um, but we'll see. Maybe maybe it'll change their mind. But uh honestly, I I still am not good with the AirPods Pro 3. I still use my twos uh the vast majority of the time uh because I still find the three is uncomfortable. Sorry. Even with the tips, you went through the whole different tip things? Yeah, I went to the comply tips and they're they're less uncomfortable, but they're still uncomfortable uh really after a long time and I still use the twos the vast majority of the time. Yeah, it does. But um yeah, I think that you know we we went through the proification of their product line over the years and now everything has a pro, and so if they wanted to go higher than that, ultra is the word they tend to use. So I yeah, I think that's very likely to be used here. Uh just to briefly kind of echo what Marco said, I don't feel like I need cameras in my AirPods. However, this is one of those things where I would be very unsurprised to see, oh, Apple came up with something really clever and I must have this in my life. It's not the hardware though on these . It's like any other AI type thing. It's like you need the sensors there to provide input, but it lives or dies entirely based on the much smarter thing living either on your phone or in the cloud or both that does something with those because as this rumor says, the cameras aren't going to be like good camera. I mean it's airpod. What do you think you can fit in there? It's that's not going to be, it's going to be a low resolution camera from which you, the user, will probably never see any output. You will never see what these cameras are seeing. It's probably some just garbage thing, but it's input to what you hope is some kind of smart thing that can say, like, now, now we can see what's around you, and maybe we can do useful stuff with that. Like I said, directions turn left with the next tree or whatever, like when you're walking around. Like if the thing at the other end of this is smart and useful, it's not the cameras that are doing it. It's the smart and useful thing. And it's just like just it just needs access to some cameras and these are already in your ears and they have a pretty good view, depending on your haircut. So yeah, there are challenges here, but like as the end of this says, uh there are concerns about the AI elements that could further hold back a launch if Apple isn't pleased with the quality of visual intelligence features. Yeah. Uh apparently they haven't been pleased with any of any of the AI features because they haven't shipped them and they continue not to be pleased and so I'm not optimistic Casey that uh that Apple is gonna bring you around on these or I'm not even that optimistic they're gonna ship anytime soon because so many things have been delayed and it's especially for something like this, where it's like the only purpose of these cameras is to feed some smart thing that's gonna do stuff with them. It's not gonna take pictures, it's not gonna take video. You're not gonna see the output of these pictures, according to this rumor. Its whole purpose is to hook up to that smart thing. And if the smart thing's not smart enough, don't ship this product. Wait. And it sounds like from this rumor, like the people who did the hardware is twiddling their thumbs, like, yeah, we we delivered the hardware on the schedule that you said you wanted it. And now it's just sitting there waiting for the software people to get their act together for years. Yep. All right, next on our list, iPad Ultra, otherwise known as the 20-inch foldable OLED iPad, which has been uh reportedly shelved. Yeah, we talked about this on meta several shows ago. We had the rumors about people didn't whether it was gonna be Mac or whether it was gonna run Mac OS or iPad OS or whatever. And then there was a rumor a while ago that I think we also reported on. Oh, yeah, they've decided not to do this one. Basically, this is like imagine a foldable phone but massive and presumably running iPad OS. It's like an iPad that I you know you can fold out the screen is really big and I guess you could make it in like an L shape and it could have a an on-screen keyboard to be kind of like a laptop. Like it was this rumor was always just going all over the place. But yeah, the rumor is that they've decided for now not to do this one. But had they done it, it might have been called iPad Ultra. And then this is another one where I think the ultra name fits because it's like massively expensive iPad that's way bigger that can bend in half, which is the thing. iPads can't do. Uh that one definitely. Well, they can. Marco did it once. Yeah. I did not do it. Excuse me. There was a butt in the household that did it, but it was not Marco 's butt. That's correct. Uh yeah . All right. Apple Watch Ultra Four. Uh what do we think about this, John? It's already got the name Ultra and this rumor is the worst because they're like, maybe there's an IWatch uh presumably there will be an Apple Watch Ultra four event like they they they''re up to threere gonna make another one they're probably not gonna be redesigned but like maybe the rumors are so bad about like maybe it will have newer updated house sensors maybe it will have a redesign case maybe it'll have touch ID and the side button , and maybe it'll have a new S12 SoC. But none of these, none of these, these maybes about the Apple Ultra. Like like the fact that there will be an Apple Watch Ultra 4, I would put money on. But the fact that nobody can come up with anything that they're willing to say, yeah, it'll probably have this feature, and it's just like what could they do for an apple? They could do all these things, but it doesn't seem like any of them are even rumored, just seems like people are guessing based on like, well, if they do make one with a four, it probably has to have this stuff so this is only in here as a courtesy because it's already got the name ultra and it is as far as I know the only product obviously the the chip but that's not a product like that's an ingredient in a product apple Watch Ultra it was out there with thetra Ul name out ahead of everybody else, being all Ultra. And uh they keep making 'em and uh they've been getting better a little tiny bit, but uh nothing dramatic. And that was the first Ultra, right? The Apple Watch Ultra? No. So I double checked the the M one Ultra came out first. Yeah, the chip. Oh sorry. Yeah. M1 Ultra beat the Apple Watch Ultra by like six months. Yeah, I was thinking product, product, not chip, but that is a fair point, nevertheless. Uh John is still in the bargaining phase with regard to his uh Mac Pro. Not bargaining. I'm just I'm just I'm just saying. Ultra question mark and John himself has put an upside down smiley in our internal show notes. Because honestly, you know , what kind of Mac would you put a name on obviously talk about the MacBook Pro Ultra, right? But like what about a Mac, which means desktop Mac because the laptop ones are called MacBooks of various kinds? What would a Mac Ultra be? Yeah, I think we know the answer to that question. Apple does not want to make it. But I'm just saying, Apple. If you're gonna put Ultra on all your products, I hope someone in some pitch meeting says, Hey, what if we made a Mac Ultra and then someone someone wearing one of my shirts just glares at them. Said his name was Stampy. You loved him. That's a Simpsons reference, Casey. Nope. I actually got that one. Mac Ultra. You can rename it. Someday. The case for a true Mac Ultra successor. I don't know. Mac Ultra. Just gonna leave that out there. Let's move on. I mean I I think I think there there is room for a Mac Ultra, but I don't think it's ever going to be the form that you want it to be. Well like I said, I'm not married to the form. As I made the pitch in the past several episodes, more transistors, bigger, hotter, more heat dissipation in exchange for more computation. That's that's there's a lot of flexibility within that framework. A lot. Yeah. similar way that like when we had the iMac Pro , it was you know externally it looked like a 27 inch retina iMac, even though internally it was very different and you know had much higher end components, totally different cooling, etc. But it was it was like a pro form of a product line they already had. I think if they're ever gonna do a Mac Ultra, uh it would it would be basically a pro f a pro edition, like a higher higher end edition of the Mac Studio or something that looks very similar to the Mac Studio. Yeah, but they'd call it the Mac Ultra. They wouldn't call the Mac Studio. Right. And they probably wouldn't call it the Mac Pro because that name is now tarnished forever. Yeah. I mean look look it seems like they're moving towards ultras their high end name and leaving kind of pro as the middle. Kind of what they did with the uh actually with like the um super cores and the medium cores and stuff like that. You know, by all means feel uh I I have quibbles about which particular products they put into these slots, but if they want to change their naming and make Ultra the new top, pro the new middle, and then I guess a four level one, which is like Neo Air Pro Ultra, and then somewhere in there is the non-suffix one somewhere in between. Like it's that anyway, I'm fine with them going through that, but yeah, whatever they make, if they were to make a Mac, the whole idea is a Mac that can do more than the hot current high SN Mac Studio because it has more transistors, uses more power, like a desktop Mac, right? It you know, it's plugged into the wall. You don't have to worry about battery life on the thing. You're only using 300 watts now. Take some of those excess watts and turn them into computation. Because hey, we have this, you know, there's plenty of things people want to use computation for, even more so now than there has ever been . Please use that. Please, you know, and and if you can fit it in the same Mac Studio case and call it the Mac Ultra with using the special metal or some fancy heat sink, fine. But if you have to make a bigger case, uh a taller max whatever, yeah, I I'm I'm not tied to the form factor. Again, the trash can was not, you know, if if they had been able to scale that, it would have been great. Like I like the idea of a chimney thing. There's lots of directions you can go, but like Mac Ultra, like I I view speaking of like maybe in a morning period, I feel like there is a I don't know, a latent period or something. There is there's necessarily going to be a multi-year gap before Apple even looks in the direction of anything resembling a Mac Ultra simply because they just finally got the, you know, the will to can what was everyone was knew was a dead product, the Mac Pro. So you gotta wait many, many ye ars for them to revisit this. If they ever revisit it, it's not even clear that they'll ever revisit it. But I do think the odds of them revisiting this in many years is increased if they actually do this rumored sort of ultra uh you know what's essentially a marketing rollout of like, hey, we're we're defining a new tier of product that was pioneered by the uh the Apple Watch Ultra, which is our existing products with Ultra on the end, which are more expensive, fancier, better, more blah blah blah things. If they do that, it's inevitable that in five years someone is gonna go up to the whiteboard and write Mac Ultra question mark with an upside down smiley face. Like that's gotta happen, but not not now. It's too soon. Uh IMAC Ultra. I I am not in the market for this, but I love this idea. Uh reading from Mac world. Uh Roman Loyola writes, of all the desktop Macs, the iMac is the most likely candidate for an Utral version. Would it be the fastest, most powerful Mac available? No, but Apple isn't necessarily defining Ultra that way. Ultra applies to the product in a particular line that goes above and beyond a typical feature set in some way. Like an iPhone that folds or a MacBook with an OLED touchscreen. An iMac Ultra could have a 6K 32 inch display and a pro or Macs chip to set it apart from the standard model. I don't think they would sell any of these, and I still think they would do it. They should do it because it would be awesome. So if it's not time to look at the Mac Ultra because it's too soon. I think it's about time to look at the iMac. It's been a long time since the iMac Pro, and uh, you know, again, Roman putting his stake in the ground of what he thinks Ultra should mean, and I would caution again, that just because you your definition makes sense. Doesn't mean Apple will do it. In fact, maybe the opposite, the more sense it makes, the less likely Apple is to do it. But anyway, that is a valid definition of ultra based on history and logic to say we're not, you know, the the whatever ultra is not the best whatever Apple sells, it's just the best whatever within that line. So the iMac Ultra would be a bigger, more powerful iMac that has a bigger screen and a faster CPU and dissipates more heat and blah blah blah blah. We've already done this. It was called the iMac Pro, it was great. Um it was incredible. Yeah. And Apple decided a long time ago now they're not interested in pursuing that. But I feel like the time enough time has passed for them to at least consider, hey, if this ultra thing is going great. If it turns out that essentially we're able to drive wealthy people up market and get more money from them, like that this boils down to from a products perspective, is like, yes, we're making cooler, better products, and I'm not setting that aside because I like those products, but also as you go higher end, isn't it nice that you get nicer margins too? You know, like you get you much lower volume, but you do get higher margins. So like that's the that's the play here. Like all for all their product lines, they want to have a good spread. They don't, you know, they want to go down low with the Neos and make surere they' selling as much volume as they possibly can. And they'll also go up high to some degree to try to get to see how much money there is to extract from the market, right? They've always done that. So yeah, again, I don't I don't see because desktop maps are so or Macs are so unpopular, relatively speaking, this doesn't seem likely. Uh I know there are people who would love this product, uh, but I don't know if there's enough of them for them to develop it, especially since the only product in the iMac line currently is the iMac. And it is extremely unfriendly to Ultraing in its current form, which is so thin you can't even put an Ethernet port on it, right? So I, you know, it unlike is the iMac Pro had the advantage they could take the existing case and make it a darker color and stick better internals in it and it was done. You can't do that with the uh with the current IMAC case. They would have to make a new case and then that basically kills the project because you're like no, it's you know, or a 32-inch screen, like you've just killed the project because we're not making a separate case, separate bigger case with better cooling just for this product that's no one's gonna buy, that's not even gonna be the fastest Mac because the Mac Studio will still be faster. 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Uh yeah, I would generally say get at least as big if not 2x uh the size of your drive but in this case i would do one of two things i would either get a four terabyte drive and no bigger uh ssd that is or just get a spinning disk, it's fine. For time machineine, it's f. Not not really that fine. I wouldn't recommend that. But here's been my philosophy for time machine backup drives. It's always been my philosophy, and it's just served me well for multiple reasons, one of which is sad. Um , get a time machine drive that's the same size as a driver backing up. And now you're thinking that's not gonna work. What about like because there's overhead for the backups themselves and everything? And I want to have multiple versions of multiple backups, not just one backup, yada yada. But here's the thing. First of all, you shouldn't actually be filling the drive you're backing up to like the brim. It should have less your four terabyte drive should have less than four terabytes in it. Like not, you know, a a reasonable amount less. Because Mac OS flips out when there's no free disk space. Okay? Bad things happen. Do not fill it as much as you possibly can. Which means that you're not backing up four terabytes of data. And also, Time Machine doesn't back up every file that's on that drive. It skips over stuff. You know, like the read-only system volume and crap like that. I forget what it skips over these days. I I don't know if it's doing the whole system volume or not, but like but it's not getting everything. So my point is that your four terabyte backup drive should hand ily hold a complete backup of the data that's actually on your four terabyte disk that you're backing up plus a couple days, weeks, months of churn depending on how often you change files . And also my practice has been to get the biggest drive that I can afford as my main drive, which means that I can probably barely afford to get a drive that's the same size. The reason you don't get 2x or 4x the size, say wouldn't that be great? I could have years and years of backups because I've got my first backup and then just all these iterative diffs for the subsequent backups. I could have huge backup history. The reason you don't do a 2x or 4x is because time machine will corrupt itself long before you were able to play a 4X the size drive thing. Because time machine is reliable for spans of a year or two, but eventually it will say, Oh no, your time machine backup, like I it's corrupt in some way. There's no real error. Your only recourse is to erase the drive and start over. That happens to me every few years. So I think before you're able to fill, certainly a four X size drive of the one you're back ing up, time machine will be corrupted. As for spinning disks, these days, especially with APFS on the spinning disk, it's just too slow. It like setting aside the noise and and everything of it, it's just it's brutally slow because APFS is not optimized for spinning disks in any way whatsoever. And Time Machine does lots of little IOs and it's just I do not recommend it. We're I know it's cheaper to get the storage. Use that storage to hold your massive video files. Backing up uh you know, blue fifty gig Blu-ray reps that are in single MKV files, great for spinning disks. Backing up the tiny little files that make up a file m time machine backup of your active main system drive , not a good use of this. So my recommendation: get a drive that's the same size as the one you're backing up, or maybe a little bit bigger. Getting something even 2x as big is probably asp too aspirational with with respect to the historic reliability of time machine. Yeah I would also say definitely get the one that is the matching size. That's how I've operated my time machine disks for over a decade and it's been f totally fine. I've never had a problem with it. Um and as for spinning disc versus uh SSD , man, those prices hurt. Um I don't I don't I don't feel for the the choice you have to make on this. Go back in time and buy the SSD when it was two hundred bucks. Yeah, like like John is right that spinning disks are really slow by today's standards. That being said, Time Machine is one place where as long as you could tolerate the um the the noise put you know potential of where it is, um that's a s that's a place where I would say it doesn't matter that much for the speed. Exactly. But it but it it does though because you think it doesn't matter because you're like, I don't care how long the backup takes. I'm not waiting on it or anything. Here's the problem. It will take so long that if you tell it like it's scheduled like backup every hour, forget about that. A single backup is going to take many hours and you will get to the point where a single backup takes more than 12 or 24 hours. So now you're not getting good backups because oh I modified that file an hour ago, let me get it from time machine, sorry. It's still running the backup that it started at noon yesterday because the spin I know this from because I used to come on I you I'm telling you I used to have spinning disks inside directly attached inside my Mac Pro that I was using as my time machine volumes. That's how I know this is the c ase. It's so bad with APFS and Time Machine on spinning disks, like that bad, where I'm backing up a four-terabyte SSD to like whatever it was, an eight terabyte spinning disk. It was just brutally slow, such that first of all, it was never not doing a time machine backup, which was bad, right? Because it's just you know, and it's not like it's swamping my main drive with I.O. because it's so stupid slow, but it's just it's always doing it. And the the interval of my backups, like how how many different versions of this file that I've been working on for the past two days can I get out of the backups? Massively spaced out because it just took so darn long. It is the close to the worst case scenario for spinning disks. Like I said, spinning disks are great. Use them to store giant med ia files. Don't use them for time machine. If you can possibly help it. Now it could also be that I am stressing these drives more. Again, I will say the uh the two underscore separated words that everybody knows. Node underscore mod ules . How many files can you create? How quickly and how quickly can they churn and change over the course of doing development of a week of work? Node underscore modules directory will really abuse your time machine backups. It's easy to end up creating and modifying and deleting literally millions of files on a daily basis that will brutalize your time machine drive if you limit yourself to excluding certain drives, uh folders or whatever, maybe you can help, but you know, I'm still saying like it's I know the cost feels bad, but uh I don't know. Try try for yourself. Again, maybe I have a pathological case, but I had I've had many years of experience in this 2019 Mac Pro backing up to time machine into the spinning disk, and I do not recommend it. That's just because it's a piece of crap Intel computer. That's why it was a fast internal bus. It was fast, good, fast uh drive, 7200 RPM, high quality, you know, it's just spinning disks plus tiny files plus APFS equals sadness. Thanks to our sponsors of this episode, Factor and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm /slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week we're gonna be talking about Adobe's, um, let's say they have recently forgotten to make good software UIs, especially. Um, so we're gonna be talking about that. And over time, you can join to listen hp.fm/slash join. Thank you, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week . Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Accidental. Oh it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research , Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental. Accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.f And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S -E-Y-L I-S-S, So that's K-C-List, M-A-R-C-O A-R-M -N-T-Marco Armin S-I-R -A-C USA C rec usa it's accident al accident al they didn't need to accident al accident al tech so long Marco you are in the office in your home , did you walk into the office or did you get did you roll in your wheelchair into the office? He sauntered in. So uh I've I've mentioned in uh past shows that I was training to do a very long walk called the Great Saunter. This is a once-a-year walk organized by the group called Shorewalkers around the perimeter of Manhattan. It is one day. You walk about thirty two to thirty three miles uh around the perimeter all you know from like seven in the morning until, you know, seven to nine ish PM, depending on how how quickly you walk it. Um this is I've never done any kind of like extreme w if you could call it that extreme athletic event before any really any athletic event longer than a five K run. I've never done you know anything bigger than that. This was uh you know a pretty big uh effort for for me and the group I was with. Um and and I'm really I'm really proud of all of us for doing it. Um here here's the recap. So first of all, if if we can go on a brief aside, just just for a minute, bikes and pedestrians should never share the same paths. I know this is gonna annoy all the bikists out there. Um , I know, but but I I think I think I have an angle that they will appreciate. Cars can't coexist with bikes gracefully because of the inherent differences in their size, their speed, their physical needs. Well, neither can pedestrians. Now it's not as bad as it is with cars, because drivers of cars often kill cyclists, and I don't think it's super common for cyclists to kill pedestrians. I'm sure it has happened, but it's probably not very common, whereas I know that cars pose a much greater danger to cyclists. So I I know that. I'm not comparing that the level of danger. But between cyclists and pedestrians, these two modes of transportation do not share the same path well . I've been training for this walk for about seven or eight months, something like that. I have had cyclists scream at me, threaten me, come within inches of hitting me at very high speeds, uh, intentionally at least once, all while I was in either a shared lane or on the pedestrian side of a split lane. So my view of cyclists having now done a lot of long walks on shared paths uh is now I think similar to the view that cyclists have of car drivers. Not every cyclist is a problem, just like not every car driver is a problem to cyclist, but there's enough bad cyclists that they pose a menace to pedestrians when they're in shared paths. They are entitled, reckless, and inconsiderate of pedestrians and they have no concern for pedestrian safety or the fact that we tend to have the right of way. Again, this is not all cyclists, but there's enough that are like that that it's a problem. Interestingly, when you f f posted your first Instagram picture about this and it showed the big like crowd of people walking and then to the right there were like two cyclists. I think I commented to my wife, I'm like, Boy, I bet these cyclists love this day of the year when their bike path is invaded by a gigantic crowd of people walking along it. But it's not because there's a dividing line. But I look, I want bikes out of my walking paths, just as much as they want me out of their bike lanes. But But there's oftentimes a shared path, especially in a city like New York. Bikes and pedestrians do not coexist well on an eight or ten foot wide path. And it is best for everyone's safety and happiness for motor vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians to each have dedicated spaces that are not shared with the others. And sorry to all the good cyclists out there, but the bad ones of you are a menace to pedestrians. Again, not to the not to the same degree of life-threatening that cars are to you, but definitely physically threatening to a point where I hate to say it because I never cared about cyclists before, but I really don't like them now. Um and I have very good reason not to. And that's that's on the on the bad ones. I know that, but uh it is best for all of us to have our own spaces. I am advocating for bikes, cars, and pedestrians to all have separate spaces and wherever possible. Anyway. That's a that's an amazing future because currently cars have a place . Sometimes pedestrians have a place. And that's basically the state of the US. Every once in a while, pedestrians and bikes have a shared space, which is what you're currently complaining about. But the utopia of cars, pedestrians, and bicycles have each having their own separate place. Boy, what a fantasy. Not in this country in most places. Yeah, it's it's tough in it's tough in this country. But other countries have done it. It is possible to do. Yeah, no. Yeah. So anyway, c consider this advocacy for everyone to have their own lanes. Anyway, all right. So going into this, um a few weeks back, I did two walks in consecutive weekends that were each about twenty-two miles. Um the first one was in Manhattan and it was on pavement and it was fine, and afterwards I, felt tired, but everything physically was fine. The second one was upstate and it was faster paced. In the middle of that walk, I got like significant pain um in my left rear end uh and it it progressed as the walk went on um into significant problems with my left ankle and this was a few weeks before the Great Saunter. Was this on pavement to upstate? No, it was on a gravel path. So it was like a packed gravel, um a beautiful it's is the the Ashokan Rail Trail. It's a beautiful path. Um I've been I've been to Ashokan. Yeah, it's and and that path is like twenty feet wide, so it being shared with bikes is fine. And there's also just not that many people or bikes on it. It's just a it's a very wide, fairly sparsely populated path. Um it's a it's a great path to hike. But I took it, it was on gravel and took it too fast. And that combination really inflamed my my left side and especially the for the following couple of weeks, my left ankle. So I went to physical therapist and got some advice and got some stretches and stuff like that, but what it basically boiled down to is for me to get through the Great Saunter, I had to take extra care for my ankles, especially the left one. And so what I did, based on everyone's advice and a couple of tests, I had these little like heel cups that you put in the shoe that are like little squishy wedges so that it cushions the heel. The problem is it slopes the foot more forward as a result, which I knew going into it, this is going to make it more likely that the front of my toes might hit the front the front of my shoes and get blisters. But bl isters heal a lot faster than tendons. And so I thought and based on every you know everyone agreed, like all the the physical therapists and the doctor, everybody agreed, like okay, yeah, this is this is what you need to do to get through it. Anyway, going into it, the ankle was hurting, but I but I made it through. The ankle never got past medium uh hurting, but boy did I get blisters. And that really made the last 10 miles very challenging. I did have a really hard time getting through the last 10 miles. It was just the hardest like mental pain endurance activity I've ever had to do because it was literally 10 miles of every step hurting very painful ly because of significant blisters. Um so I got through it and there were a few nice things along the way that I wanted to mention. First of all, the day before I, made a saunter map app. Well, rather I should say Claude Code made a saunter map app based on about four prompts that I gave it. Um I the the the Great Saunter published a a an online map and a GPX file. And you could use the web app, but I'm like, you know, I would like to have this as a native iPhone app for lots of reasons. I think I could make it work a little bit better. Um and also be able to do things like estimate my finish time. Because you know, we were targeting like we want to finish by about nine PM, gotta keep a certain pace throughout the day or you know, manage the breaks, etcetera. And I wanted to know things like am I on track to to meet that time and where is the next bathrooms and refreshments? Like how far like are we three miles from the next bathroom? Like maybe that will affect the choices I make, you know, things like that. So I just had cloud I pointed Cloud Code at the web page that hosted their public map. And I said, you know, basically like make an iPhone app that that has this map in it, that puts my location on the map wherever I am, estimates the distance to the end and how long that will take at the given pace, and you, you know, make a drop down to pick the pace and show the points of interest as little descriptions that pop up and tell me where the next bathroom and the next refreshment stops are. It just did it. I refined it over the course of like three or four prompts over maybe a half hour, I never looked at the code. I never edited the code. I submitted it to the app store . And this was the afternoon before the event. So I'm like, all right, a first time submission of an app of a vibe coded app that requires location access, what are the odds this is going to get approved in the next eighteen hours? Right. You didn't you didn't need it to be approved, right? You can just put it on your phone, right? I could put it on my phone, but like, you know, TIF wanted on hers, and I'm like all right, well I could plug your phone in and add it to my developer account and stuff. But I'm like, let me see. It would be a lot easier, especially if anybody else asks to if they can have it it'd be a lot easier if I could just get it on the app store. So let me try . And I submitted it and later that day it was approved. First try. I had to like make a p a privacy policy. I had to answer all the questions about whether it's designed for kids and how much data it collects. None. No. You know, like all the like the answer was very simple. It was this collects no data. As far as you know. Yeah, as far as I know. Fair. But it was remarkable. It was and the app worked great the entire day. And I'm happy. And I I emailed the um the song tour organizers just to say, hey, I put this up. In case you you know want to tell anybody, feel free. If you want me to take it down, I'll take it down, no problem. You know, whatever you want. And they were very happy. But so but you know it was too late to actually tell anybody about it. Um however, some how the app got nine installations. So nice. Which for for a one-day event that no one knew about the app be and it was only existing like you know like 12 hours before the event started. That's pretty good. I th I'm pretty happy. I mean you're walking along with them. You got nothing but time on your hands. You just chat them up, say hey I'm using this app. You should try it. That's how I got one of the installations. Yeah they can install while they walk. It's fine. As long as they don't wander into the Oh my god. So anyway, um so that was a fun like five coding story. Here's an app that like you know the day before I'm I'm like on the train on the way there. This was never going to be worth me taking time to spend, you know, three or four days making this app. Especially and there were some parts of it, like, you know, the the source is a GPX file, which is basically a series of points on the map and lines between them. And it's like, okay, well, I want you to tell me where I am along that map. But like what if I'm not on one of the lines? Or what if I'm between two points? There's a certain amount of math you have to do to figure out like, okay, well, what is the point on the route closest to where the person is actually standing? And I I know I could look up how to do that math. We're not talking about like really difficult calculus here. Like that's you know, we're talking about like trigonometry and stuff it it's not that complicated, but I didn't have to. And if I was making this map myself, I would have had I would have spent three days on it at least. And so it would never have not only would it not have gotten done on time , but it's also something I shouldn't have spent three days doing. You know, it just wouldn't have wouldn't been a good use of my time. And I didn't have to. I just submitted it and, you know, Claude wrote it. I tweaked a couple of things. I it took me longer to make screenshots than it did to to make the I even made an icon. I didn't ask you this before and I'm kind of afraid of the answer, but who made the icon? Oh I made the icon. It's rough. Oh I was afraid that was the answer because it looks not great. The icon is two SF symbols spaced out. Ask Claude to make it next time, please . It's the icon's bad. Um but again like I'm like I uh the I that icon took me a like half hour. I'm like, this is not a good use of my time. I was gonna say you're you didn't want to spend time, but I bet you spent more time putting two SF symbols on a opaque background and some arrangement. Just man. Yeah, it's it's a rough icon. And even but even like you know, stuff like the screenshots. Um, you know, of course and iTunes can I I hardly ever do screenshots. I know there's tools, you know, to automate things, you know, fast lane or whatever. Like I'm sure there's there's a million things, but like I don't use those things for my own BS. And so I but I hate doing screenshots because inevitably, like whatever device or simulator I take the screenshots on, I go to upload them to iTunes Connect. These are not the right resolution. And it's and it gives these have to be this, this, this, this, or this resolution. Now, it doesn't tell you in iTunes Connect, well, what devices are those? So I was in a rush. So you know what I did? I took a screenshot of that error message and I pasted it into Gemini and I said, what devices are these? And it told me, oh, this is what you want to do is use the iPhone 13 Pro simulator or whatever it was. I'm like, perfect. Like it saved me some time. I didn't think I was going to say, why do you need to know what device it is? But it's because you're actually taking screenshots on the device in the simulator? Yeah, like I'm taking screenshots in the using the simulator. I'm taking screenshots. Because with the simulator, I was able to simulate my location. So I I was using the simulator to take screenshots, but then then iTunes Connect or App Store Connect is like, no, these are the wrong resolution for the, you know, the six point five inch screen size or whatever. And like, well, what does what device is that? As far as I can tell though, in App Store Connect, they're not asking you to upload screenshots. They're asking you to upload images. I think you can upload basically I see a lot of variety in like what people upload. Oh, that's true. Like they yes, just but you can do just a picture of a smiley face and the text that says please give me money. Like they don't like whatever as long as it's the right resolution, I think it will go through. That is true. Um and that's why people will do things like, you know, zoom out and show like the frames of the device and make big marketing messages that span across the screenshot grid and like it's this whole thing. Um anyway , I got all that stuff done. It was great. I think it was a really fun experiment for me of like if I like literally don't have time to look at the code or it's so not worth doing, could I make a an app that is minimally useful and functional? And the answer is for a simple task like this, yes. Obviously that's not going to work for all app types, but I was very pleased that it worked for this one. And it did exactly what I wanted it to do. It was very helpful while we were actually on the saunter. It worked perfectly. I was very happy to have it, and it helped eight other people. Or at least eight other people tried it. I don't know if it helped them, but they they at least downloaded it. Another fun thing to mention , um at the beginning, so I I had mentioned on this show uh months ago one of the reasons that I wanted to do the Great Saunter and one of the like one of the things that drove us choosing to do it was when we lost our dog Hops last summer. Um I wanted to kind of honor him by having like a big walk. Because I was the dog walker. We took a lot of walks together. I I walked thousands of miles with hops. Um and so kind of honoring him uh by doing this this giant walk. At the beginning of the saunter, when everybody was like, you know, picking up like their you know hats and stuff like that and maps and everything like that where everyone gathers at the beginning. A fan of the show just came up to me and said, Hey man, let's do it for hops. And you know, a little fist bump. Oh. And I thought that was the most kind, awesome, touching thing. And I to to you out there, I'm sorry I didn't ask your name. I didn't say I was like I was kind of just so blown away by it. Also it was seven in the morning. But and I was about to embark on this ridiculous thing, so my mind was was quite elsewhere. Um but that really meant a lot to me. And so so thank you for doing that. Um that was really awesome. And and the people I was with, I told them about it, and they were they were also like, wow, that's really cool. You should have put a picture of Hops into the app. He could have even been the app icon. Yeah, well, that would have taken a lot longer. Especially a liquid glass version. You know, adapting your dog to liquid glass is not that easy. Um anyway, so thank you to that fan. That was that was really cool. Sorry, I was weird. Um I was very very blown away and and a little bit tired and distracted. Um finally, for the uh technology side of things on on the watches, um the stats it was 33.7 miles total for the for our walk. Uh it took almost exactly 14 hours, 74,000 steps for the day . Um and pedometer plus plus on the Apple Watch Ultra worked fantastically. Um the uh the battery life at the end uh on an Ultra 3 in low power mode uh was still 33% . So that was still that wasn't his expedition mode. That was the watch in just regular low power mode. So what that means is that the always on screen was turned off, basically. Like that's what low power mode does mainly on the Apple Watch. Um so always on screen was off , but the GPS was full blast, the heart rate was full blast, like all of that, and I never paused the workout the whole day. So it was running the entire 14-hour span and at the end it was 33%. So that's pretty great. Um the Sunto watch that I have also did great. Um I believe it ended the day with somewhere in the 40s. I didn't quite uh remember the number, but it was somewhere in the 40% uh range. Um both watches did great and tech all the tech prep I did was worth it. It was all fantastic. Like you know, like Tiff was trying to install a pedometer on her watch, but she didn't actually start until like that morning and trying to get an Apple watch to do to install neww softare when it's not on Wi-Fi is challenging to say the least. So it was difficult to have all that tech uh work for other people who hadn't like done it already, but because I had done all these practice walks, I wasn't really trying anything for the first time on this walk. Um it all it all made it um very smooth running for me. So I can strongly recommend pedometer Plus Plus for these amazing you know long hikes or even short walks, it's still great for that. Um I'm also very happy with the Sunto . Uh the race S is the one I have again. Uh it's the it's their kind of their smaller one, but it was even it had ultra-level battery life, even a little bit better than ultra-level battery life. So it was overall a success. We made it. I did it. I'm proud. It hurt like crazy at the end and it was really hard, but we got through and I'm very happy about it. Would you do it again? I think so. Um if it was always going to be like that at the end, no . But I know from doing the 22 mile good training walk that I had zero blisters during that one and it was fine. So I know that I can walk twenty two miles on pavement with you know, these shoes, these socks, this these pants. Like I I know what I know a way that it wor ks that ended up ended up working way better than what I had with the heel wedge uh modifications. So I think if I can just keep my ankle in good enough shape during training I can avoid that I can avoid needing those heel w edges and then have a much better outcome with the shoes. So I think it is possible to do this better. So next year I am certainly interested in trying. I don't know I mean the only downside with with training for something like this is that walking is just really slow. It takes a very long time. Like if you want to walk 22 miles in a day, that's going to be most of what you do that day. It's a very time-consuming training process. You're ba basically it's like, you know, oh ever y Sunday you're taking a giant walk somewhere. Um so it it is it is a big commitment to train for it. Now you can also just kind of YOLO it and not train at all. Um I don't recommend that path. That's that's not something I would suggest . Um but uh people do it. You can yell at if you're a young person. It's the magic of being young. Yeah, if you're young and if you don't mind things like maybe losing toenails afterwards, um go ahead. Uh but I I wouldn't necessarily recommend that path. The the training the training method uh tends to have significantly better outcomes. But it does take longer. I do get that. Did you sit at all during the day? Oh yeah. We took breaks. Like I think if you if you walk it straight at our pace, which w our our average pace was around like when we were moving uh was like you know twenty one minutes per mile ish. So, you know, if you don't stop you can, do it like I don't know, an hour and a half faster or something. Uh but but we you know we s we stop to like you know ten minutes here and there. Even simple things like you know, there are certain spans where there are not that many bathrooms and so when you finally get to one, there's a big line . Um so like there was one where we had to wait in a bathroom line for 15 minutes. So that was like, well, this is our break, I guess. You know. But uh but you know, there's like a lunch break in the middle. They do a nice job, they have like snacks and stuff like along the route, so it's really cool. Um but yeah there there there is is some stopping but it's not you're stopping for like five or ten minutes at a time. You're not stopping for long spans. And roughly how many people completed this just from what you know? Um there were thirty five hundred registrants and about twenty two hundred finished. So it was like about a sixty two percent finish rate. So that's that's pretty good I think. Um for something that's that that ridiculously long, that's pretty good. I put a link in the uh chat room to the Barclay Marathon's Wikipedia page. There's a documentary, an older documentary about that that I think you can find on YouTube, and there's a bunch of newer videos on YouTube about the newer iterations of that race, uh,be may Marco will have a uh newfound appreciation for it if he ever checks it out, especially based on his upstate walking experience. Yeah, and it's to be clear, like there's a whole world of extreme athletic events, uh I am not consider ing doing any of them. Like that's I don't really have any interest in doing, you know, marathons, ultra marathons, Iron Man things, like most of that stuff. The reason why I was interested in this is I really like walking. I hate running. Like I'll do it, but I hate it. Every minute of a run, I can't wait for it to be over. Biking is fine uh until you have to go up a hill. Then I hate it. You know, like there's there's parts of most exercises that even if I could train myself into the requirements to do them, I just don't like them. Walking, I really like. So that's one of the reasons this appealed to me so much. Whereas the others I just I don't care enough about the exercise to actually train for them enough to do it. Good news. You can walk the Barclay Marathons. Check out the uh the documentary. I'll put the link to that in the the chat room as well if you haven't seen it. It's enjoyable to watch, even if you're just sitting on your couch. But yeah, running is not required. Okay. I mean it also this looks like a trail thing. I also c I also should clarify, like I really like walking on pavement, it's really nice. I'm not a big hiker. Like I I know hiking is just walking uh like but up things and in the woods, but I like walking on flat pavement a lot better than that. It is eye-opening. Great .