I Didn’t Want to Melt My Rug

It's been a busy, busy few, few weeks. [MUSIC] >> All right, well, we'll talk about that later. And speaking of, we have a lot to cover, so we're just going to plow right into follow up. And I will start, I don't know, Marco, if you choose to dub in, we are the champions. Can we use that outside of the context of the Mac Pro? I think we can. But you're welcome, World, because we have apparently caused Apple just us. Nobody else has caused Apple to ship a more sane workout app in watch OS 26.4. I haven't actually tried this myself, but allegedly in the new version of watch OS, you can actually press on a workout type to start that workout. You don't have to wait for the stupid animation, for the stupid play button to show up. You can actually just hit the giant green thing that says, like traditional strength training or whatever, or outdoor run or what have you. Allegedly that is now fixed. You're welcome, World. >> Yeah, that's very promising. Also, a couple of quick notes, when I was last ranting about the workout app, I did, I mentioned that I wish they had some smarter, smarter settings around like reminding you to unpause workouts when you start moving again. This actually is a built-in feature. They do have reminders automatically to remind you to pause a workout if you stop moving for a while and to unpause it. And in fact, there's even a feature where we'll try to automatically pause an unpause when you start, if you stop in a run and then you resume again, it will actually try to remind you what I found though is that those are, first of all, very annoying. Like, if you're actually on a run, I have used those and I have found them to be just so aggressive of just like, if you stop for a second, like if you stop at an intersection, tap tap, you want to pause your workout? No, I'm just, I'm going to be here for eight seconds, like no. So I don't like those for that, but then also I have found that in walking workouts, they tend to be a lot less accurate. And I don't know if they're just looking for bigger changes in speed. So I have not found the current implementation of those to be very good. It also doesn't address things like ability to undo a bad GPS point or undo a missed save. There is, however, at least a setting that I turned on, the end workout button, there's an option to have it prompt you before it officially ends with a confirmation step. What helps accidental endings become less likely, but it still needs a lot of just kind of polish. What we like about Apple, what got us all to Apple in the first place was lots of little smart design and lots of little delights throughout much of their user interface and many of their features of their software and hardware. And the Apple Watch seems to have like none of that. It just seemed like the Apple Watch was designed in a very rigid way to have exactly these features, nothing else. And again, part of that was for hardware constraint reasons that were very good reasons, but so many of those kind of little nice delights of like, "Oh, that was smart." And I needed that, thank you. Those things seem to be mostly missing on WatchOS. And so the workout app is one example of anywhere. There's a lot of room for that. And I wish they would add more of it. But they have is a nice start, but considering we're like, what, 11 years into the Apple Watch platform, something like that, it could be a lot better. So I hope it continues to get better. But this is a good start. All right. Let's enter Formula One Corner for hopefully just a couple of minutes. Do Formula One tracks have corners or are they all like rounded? They sure do have corners. Although I think you can come up with a better name for this instead of calling it Formula One Apex. I don't know. I don't know enough Formula One terms to come up with something good. We'll workshop it. But anyways. First of all, I wanted to very briefly spoil last this past Sunday's China Grand Prix and say that this really so far is a very interesting season to start watching Formula One. To briefly recap, there's all new rules, all new regulations, the cars are totally different. And my favorite team, McLaren, they have two drivers as every team does. And neither of their drivers made it to the starting line, this last race, which sank. But I'm going to claim that that left the space for a very interesting podium. So the winner of the race is a 19 year old who races for Mercedes. His teammate was a belief second. And then Formula Mercedes superstar now at Ferrari, who has not done anything good in the last season or two. Lewis Hamilton, arguably the greatest of all time. Potentially, I think by wins he is the greatest of all time, was also on the podium. And it made for a really adorable moment where you have these two actual current Mercedes drivers and a Formula Mercedes driver. And the race engineer for the winner, which is basically the dude on the other end of the radio, was formerly Lewis Hamilton's race engineer. And so it was a really, really lovely podium even though my particular team didn't even make it. And so again, really good time to pick up Formula One if you're at all interested. But I will stop trying to sell it. I'll stop being a shell at this point. With regard to follow up, we have a little bit of information about cameras. John and I got ourselves wrapped around the axle with regard to cameras when we talked about it last week. Matt Rigby writes, "In the TV broadcast, I'd say that on board cameras are perhaps 15% of the coverage at most. And they mostly use the track mounted cameras like any other sport, which is exactly true. I should have made that more plain when we were talking about it." But again, you can choose, if you'd like, to view other cameras. A count that goes by the name, the racing line. If an on board camera fails during a race, then no action is taken. The only time an on board camera failure has had a direct impact on a race was the 1995 Italian Grand Prix. Ferrari was leading first and second when Jean Alessie's, I go out the right, camera detached from the lead car and hit Gerard Berger in the second car, breaking the suspension. Whoops, it upsies. Alessie's leading car broke down lap later with an unrelated wheel bearing failure. Ferrari throwing away race wins as a constant, nephonic history can confirm. Also the racing line pointed us to a really great, about 10 minute YouTube overview of all the cameras in the car, of which I think there's seven or eight or something like that. The video said it's very, very interesting, very cool stuff. Additionally, something I should have talked about when we were discussing cameras and what not. Eric Fox reminded me that one thing you didn't mention was that the other two might find interesting, as in Marco and John, for follow up is how the driver feeds also give you access to their radio communications with their respective teams. Of course, the best radio messages read the whineest get put on the main broadcast, which is true. I don't think I've mentioned that at all. That's a really great point from Eric. That can be very fascinating. Normally it's not that interesting, but it can be fascinating. And finally with regard to F1, Brendan Web writes, I'm not sure why Apple hides the Sky Sports Replays on the main navigation. But you can search for Sky Sports China or whatever race you're looking for and they magically appear. So I should have said a little context. I had said in the last episode that as far as I could tell, at least in replays, there's no way to get the Sky Sports feed, which is mostly about the commentators. I like the Sky Sports commentators. I find them to be egregiously UK-biased, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell in Landon Norris can never put any foot wrong anywhere for any time. And that's, I mean, hi, I'm American. I know that goes. But it gets to be a little much from time to time. Anyways, a lot of people prefer it because that's what F1 used to, or excuse me, that's what ESPN used to broadcast. Well, apparently instead of just using it as like a different audio track, which I think is all it really is, Apple treats it as an entirely different broadcast. But I think the only way I've been able to find it is exactly what Brendan says. You have to actually search for Sky Sports whatever in order to find it, which again, is just bananas to me. I really think that Apple does have a lot of potential here for F1 coverage and being the American partner for F1 coverage. But golly, it's been slow out of the gate. But what are you going to do? All right. Let's talk Rosetta. Colin McKellar writes with regard to processor emulation and how long it lasts. I did some Wikipedia diving and put together this post about how long Apple's processor emulation lasts on the Mac. This looks like a three mile long post, but it's actually a bunch of charts and stuff. It's pretty good stuff. And John, I think you've extracted some stuff which we'll talk about in a second. No, that's Colin continuing here. Yeah. So Colin continues and writes, "In short, 68K emulation was supported on PowerPC for as long as classic Mac OS existed, including when it lived on as the classic environment in Mac OS X. For PC emulation, the original Rosetta was around for five and a half years after Mac's transition to Intel. According to Apple's present plans, Rosetta 2 will last about 18 months longer than Rosetta 1." Then I pulled out some more interesting info from this post, which is how long each architecture was the current architecture for the Mac. So 68K was the architecture for the Mac for 10 years and seven months. For PC for 11 years and eight months, an Intel for 14 years and four months. And so far, Apple Silicon has just been five years and four months. So Intel, the Mac has been Intel longer than any other processor. And maybe that's why I feel like even though they're according to these stats, it's going to be 18 months longer than Rosetta 1. It just feels shorter because Intel has been around so long. Maybe it's just because of the prevalence of Intel software. Like going to Intel opened up this whole new world of stuff that became easier to compile for Darwin, essentially. But yeah, it's, you know, my recollection of 68K to PowerPC is basically what they said. It basically never went away. It didn't go away until classic Mac OS 1. Even then, it was classic, classic environment inside Mac OS 10. But PowerPC to Intel, PowerPC didn't stick around that long at all. The other thing was Intel was so much faster than PowerPC. And I guess that's also true of Apple Silicon with Intel. So anyway, it really is just a feel thing. It just feels like it's a little bit too soon because circumstances are different, but it will in fact be 18 months longer than one of their transitions, but shorter than the other. Then related to Tom Obarsky writes, unread it, I saw that a user received a pop-up warning. of upcoming deprecation from a fresh install of Final Cut Pro non-subscription on a brand new MacBook Neo. That's not mouse. And so we'll put a link to the Reddit post, but the little notification reads, "Support ending for Intel-based apps." This version of Final Cut Pro will not open in a future release of Mac OS. Learn how to update to an Apple Silicon version. - That's a terrible message because I'm assuming it's not Final Cut Pro is not the problem. Anyway, you can keep reading. - Yeah, so Tom continues, there's some speculation as to whether this is because the A18 Pro is not seen as an M chip, and therefore is assumed it must be Intel, or whether a component within an FX library could still be flagged as Intel, and thus would invalidate the whole install. Weird edge case to say the least. If I were to guess, hi, this is Casey. If I were to guess, I would say that it's probably a library or something like that, but I mean, I don't think that the A18 not being seen as an M chip is definitely wrong. It's plausible for sure. - I don't think that's very plausible. I mean, there's a bunch of ways to look up the architecture and the answer is it armor, is it not arm? And A18 Pro is very clearly arm. If you were to look it up on a phone that ran it, I think you would be answered would come back as arm. So I think it's got to be a library or a plug or something and speaking of that, I don't have the notes, but Apple just bought whatever that Final Cut Pro plug-in. - Oh, yeah, yeah. - I do wonder if they're the best way to make sure that any Intel-only plug-ins are no longer Intel-only. Yeah, it's by the company, then make sure they're all Apple-cellic and before the deadline. We are sponsored this week by Lisa. So a few months ago, I was looking to get a new mattress from Michaela because we bought something unremarkable off of Amazon and despite being well reviewed, it's a pile of trash. And it felt terrible about it and at this time that I was looking about for a good mattress from Michaela, Lisa reached out and said, "Hey, would you like a mattress "so you can talk about it on the ad read?" And I said, "Yes, please." And I got Michaela a natural hybrid mattress and then immediately regretted my choices because I wanted a natural hybrid mattress after sleeping on it for a night or two. It is genuinely very, very good. And so what makes it good? Well, Lisa has a whole lineup of beautifully crafted mattresses tailored to how you sleep. Each mattress is designed with specific sleep positions and feel preferences in mind. Their mattresses are meticulously designed and assembled here in the United States for exceptional quality plus they back it all up with free shipping, easy returns and a 120-night sleep trial. Lisa isn't just about sleep either. It's also about the impact. They donate thousands of mattresses each year to those in need while also partnering with organizations like CleanHub to help remove harmful plastic waste from our oceans and who doesn't like that. So like I said, we got Michaela a natural hybrid mattress. This features some moisture wicking organic cotton that apparently is from New Zealand on the top of it which keeps you cool but also warm all at the same time and it gets that sweat away from you. It is genuinely very, very good and I'm pretty darn sure Lisa mattress is in my future. So if you like me or thinking about buying a Lisa mattress go to leesa.com for 20% off mattresses plus get an extra $50 off with the promo code ATP exclusive for our listeners that's leesay.com promo code ATP for 20% off mattresses plus an extra $50 off support our show and let them know that we send you after checkout leesa.com promo code ATP. Thank you so much to Lisa for sponsoring the show. (upbeat music) - Some tear downs have been released recently. The iPhone 17 E has an iFix at tear down. We'll put a link in the show notes and it appears that a lot of the parts are the same as we saw in the 16. - Yeah, interestingly one of the things they pointed out is that say you've got a 16 E and you wish it had MagSafe. You can just put the 17 E back on there with MagSafe. (laughing) It mostly works. So there's a few point like it doesn't. So MagSafe will attach to it and charge it but you don't get the little like animation, you know the little circle filling thing or whatever is because like there's a little bit of a franken phone, right? It's not a Franco phone. So to be clear, so the 16 E did support Qi charging just not MagSafe. - Right, but that means the animation that you get for MagSafe is like the green ring that appears or whatever but it will charge it. So anyway, many parts are, I think basically every part is the same except for the like the logic board or whatever and they made a phone out of a mixture of a whole bunch of parts. They were very excited about the part interchangeability and the fact that they didn't get hassled by the software for like parts pairing and stuff like that. But yeah, 17 E is just a 16 E with a different logic board and a different SOC and a magnet on the back. - All right, let's talk about MacBook Neo. First of all, Groober had a post with regard to the on camera and also Mike on screen indicators and Groober linked to Apple's platform security guide, which states, "The MacBook Neo combines system software and dedicated silicon elements within the A18 Pro to provide additional security for the camera feed. The architecture is designed to prevent any untrusted software even with root or kernel privileges in Mac OS, from engaging the camera without also visibly lighting the on-screen camera indicator light." - And the context here is that the MacBook Neo doesn't have a little green LED next to its front facing camera like all the other MacBooks do. Instead they have an icon in the menu bar like the green little FaceTime E icon and also like a green dot in the corner of the screen. And that dot is basically a stand in for the light. And last time I mentioned I'm like, I'm sure Apple has done something to try to make that more secure, but it's obviously more difficult when you're trying to secure software versus trying to secure it in hardware where in theory the LED, if the camera's on the LEDs on, business like electrically hard wire connected to it and you'd have to stop that from happening, you'd have to get physical access to the laptop and cut a trace somewhere to prevent that from working. And even that might be difficult. Although there was a bug with that, I couldn't find this link, but the first time Apple did this, they tried to say, and the light will always be on as long as the camera's on and they messed up the implementation, but that was a while ago. The current implementation is pretty solid, but that's all in hardware. So what do they do to try to make the software more secure? So this first bit from Groober is there from Apple security document saying, even if someone puts a root kid on your machine, they have super user privileges, they have root kernel level access to your Mac. Still, they can't stop that green dot from appearing in the corner. - Indeed, so Groober got talking with friend of the show, Guillermo and Guille wrote to Groober, the software-based camera indicator light in the MacBook Neo runs in the secure X-Clave part of the chip. So what is almost as secure is the hardware indicator light. It runs in a privileged environment separate from the kernel and blitz the light directly into the screen hardware. All of that applies to the mic indicator as well, which is a bonus compared to the camera only hardware indicator. And then Guille also provided a little footnote. X-Claves run on a completely isolated real-time operating system that communicates with the kernel in user space using a very limited API surface. Not to be confused with the secure on-clave, which is a totally different thing. - Yeah, so to actually stop the light from working, they need more than just access, the kernel level access, they need to hack the X-Clave, which is a lot harder to do because it is very limited. It is a whole separate thing running a whole separate operating system and it talks to the main operating system, but it doesn't go through the main operating system. It seems like to get those dots onto the screen. It just does rise them directly into the video hardware all school styles. So that's pretty cool. - Yep, and then also Groober linked to random Augustine's post about the Apple X-Claves, which you can read over on Medium if you can hold your nose long enough to read something on Medium. - All right, hey, do you want to log into Medium? - Oh, God, that's the worst. CPU benchmarks. Apparently we got something a little bit wrong. John, can you tell us about that please? - Yeah, the iPhone 16 Pro Max with the A8 Pro, which is what I was using for CPU benchmarks because the Neo had not been released to anybody yet, has 46% higher single core in Geekbench, not 30%. I just planted the math wrong. So it was 3428 versus 2347. And I think those are the numbers from the earlier episode, but I just didn't do the math right. So 46% faster in single core, but not 30, thanks to Phil Pseumer for the correction. - Then with regard to SSD benchmarks, Vito, Trano writes, your MacBook, Neo, SSD, benchmark figures in the last episode came from the Verges benchmarks, which only measured sequential speeds. While those are important for large file transfers, random speeds are a better reflection of using the computer, OS boot, login, launching apps, et cetera. Sequential speeds may be more visible to the user in finder progress bars, but random speeds are arguably more important to the user experience, contributing to the feeling of snappiness and ultimately the longevity of the machine. This seems to me to be a far more important metric for the target market of the Neo. I would agree with that. - Well, so before we go on, so obviously the Neo has an SSD and not a spinning disk. Back when spinning disks existed, random access versus sequential access was a key way to measure performance because as Vito noted, you're doing random access when you're doing most stuff. And mostly not just copying one giant file from location A to location B, even that could be random, depending on fragmentation on a spinning disk or whatever. But spinning disks had to move actual disc heads on an arm to get to the track where the data was, wait for the arm to settle, wait for the sector that you want to spin underneath the heads of the track and then do that all over again, back and forth and back and forth, making all those lovely noises that we remember from the spinning disk days. And so random seeks on a spinning disk or murder because you spend most of your time waiting for physical items to travel, to be aligned and settled, and then a brief reading of some magnetic information and then you start the whole process over again, most of your time was burned on overhead. SSDs, on the other hand, do not have any moving parts in that way. They don't have arms that move, they don't have disks that spin, they never have to wait for an arm to move to a different section of a disk and they never have to wait for a disk to rotate several more degrees and they never have to wait for the things to settle. settle. And so you would think, well, isn't random access on an SSD, basically a constant time operation, like it doesn't vary. It doesn't care if you're reading address zero or address four million. It's, it's all just chips. Well, there are things that can affect random access because the chips have to be read in certain size chunks from certain regions at a time and so on and so forth. But so that's why you still do random tests on SSDs. But the difference between random and sequential is not nearly as pronounced as it used to be. And what most people feel like they're waiting around, when do you feel like you're waiting around for a disk, it's when you're copying a big file and you say a big progress bar. Like you're copying some huge movie from one disk to another or whatever. If you're not limited by your internet download speed or you're not limited by the other disk, especially now that with APFS that you get the, you know, the clones, like when you duplicate a gigantic file in APS, it's like instant, right? Because it doesn't actually copy the data. So that is entirely eliminated. But copying two and from multiple volumes or two and from multiple, you know, physical disk mechanisms. That's when people say, well, shouldn't this be going faster? It's two SSDs and that's where you'll see the difference. So I agree that random and sequential are not too separate things, but I really think that sequ, the reason people show sequential is well, first of all, it's the number that's going up. So it's fun to show benchmarks. Look how much faster it is. And then also I think that these days with SSDs, that's the main time people feel like they're waiting. Like I wish my SSD was faster because I'm copying this giant video file from this external SSD to my internal one and I'm looking at a progress bar and I'm looking at my watch. All right. So Vito continues. I've only found random seek benchmarks in one review, which is Andrew Mark David's review at 11 minutes, 17 seconds. We'll put out a timestamp link to show notes. But the random speed seemed to be on par with what we've seen from the M1 MacBook Air. They also, from what I can tell, don't seem to be too differ much across the entire Apple Silicon lineup. So I look at that and I think they do differ across the Apple Silicon lineup. So we'll link the channels to the benchmark app, which I had never heard of, but you can download and try it if you want. And then I graphed the numbers for the R&D 4K QD 64 read and write and R&D 4K QD 1 read. I don't know what that means. I'm assuming random 4K, but I don't know what the QD means, but anyway, two different read and write benchmarks for three machines. The MacBook Neo 256, the M1 MacBook Air 256, and the M5 MacBook Pro 512. And especially on the R&D 4K QD 64 read and write tests, the MacBook Pro is way faster. It's like twice as fast and they ran random seeks is the Neo. So I wouldn't say that the random they're all about the same. I made it granted when you get down to the whatever the R&D 4K QD 1 write one, maybe they're a little bit closer, but look at those graphs. I'm going to say they're still a appreciable measured difference between the fastest and the slowest. So for example, I don't know these numbers are, but they come from the disc benchmarks, but the the Neo is 582 and the M5 MacBook Pro is 1,180. That's close to double. And similarly on the on the like the closest benchmark is 31 to 45. Still somewhat substantial difference. So yeah, I agree that people should be still testing random, not just testing sequential, but I think just people, especially in this YouTube, I can play about this all the time because my entire childhood was spent arguing about benchmarks. Nobody argues about benchmarks anymore. Just YouTubers just use geek bench and I'll like, well, the number says what the number says. And nobody. So I applaud Vito to be out there saying these benchmarks are, yes, you're just measuring sequential. There's much more to the story. I agree. And there's much more to the story than random. It's like, well, random. I don't care about your benchmark. Your benchmark has this problem. We need to test the launching of Photoshop, but not that version of Photoshop. And yeah, that's the culture I come from. So I applaud Vito for calling it out here, but I will say that I think random random act as still differs between the less expensive and more expensive SSD MacBook Pros or MacBooks. All right, John, you went on a field trip. Yeah, I was happened to be in the mall. Well, I actually, I took the trip to the mall. I was driving my son there to get his haircut. And I, the reason I drove him is so I go to the Apple store. I went to the Apple store to look at all the new stuff. And I'm run right to the MacBook Nios. And I don't know what I was expecting. Like, I had this image in my head of the product. Obviously, I'd seen it on Apple's website and we talked about it on the show and I knew all these things about it. I just, I didn't, I didn't go in with any expectations. Like, I'm just going to go in and look at them and they're going to be exactly like how I thought they would be. And they weren't. I picked that up and played with it and touched it and I'm like, they have pulled off something with this product that is tricky to do, which is I think think about the laptops. What are they? They're, they're like flat rectangles made of metal, especially when they're closed and you're not using them. Like, what is there to the flat rectangle made? How many flat rectangles made of metal has Apple made since the unibody laptops started all those years ago? Just so many of them. Surely they're all the same at this point. Is there any room within the flat plank of aluminum to do anything literally? And I think there is because they've turned, I mean, I don't know if they did this on purpose or whatever, but like one of the things that separates the Neo from its more expensive brethren is, and we'll get to this in a little bit. The screen, the screen part is not as skinny as it is on the other models because it's more expensive to make them thin, I guess, right? It's a little bit fatter in the screen part. It's a little bit fatter overall, like a millimeter. And one of the things you can do when the screen part is a little bit fatter than it might be on like the old MacBook Air that came to like a really sharp, like the M1 MacBook Air comes to a really sharp point at the at the part that you pick up, like the lid, you know, the screen lid. One of the things you can do when it's a little bit thicker is you can put a bigger corner radius on all of the corners. And I think, and also, by the way, this the Neo is, I forget the exact measurements, maybe like a quarter inch, a half an inch less wide and deep, you know what I mean? Like if you put this on top of a M5 MacBook Pro, you'd see the M5 MacBook Pro sticking out around the edges because this is smaller. So this is a little bit smaller, and it has a bigger corner radius on all the corners. And the result of that is picking this thing up and just handling it as a thing that you tuck it under your arm and carry it to your, you know, I don't know, to the library or to your class or whatever. It feels so good and so solid and so friendly in a way that the more professional laptops do not because the more professional laptops are sharper. They're thinner a little bit, but they're also sharper, like literally sharper on the edges because that's just the way they're designed. Rounding this thing over makes it feel pleasant and solid and friendly and approachable. And I know this sounds so dumb. It's like it's a rectangle of aluminum. How friendly and approachable is an extra, you know, millimeter, I'm telling you, this was my impression upon picking it up. I'm like, this thing feels great. And it feels great in the same way. The only analogy I can have is like the I'm Mac G4 with the little, like the metal arm with the floating LCD display on it. Remember that one? That arm looked and felt so good on that machine that you were like, I can't believe that if I pay this amount of money, I get this. And that's the impression I got from the Neo that like, this thing feels like you're getting more than you paid for. You're getting more than your money's worth. It feels solid and expensive and nice in a way that I did not expect it to. I don't know if I expected to feel janky or something, but it like, I don't go on about this. You know, like so it had rounded corners and you were out by that. Who cares? This is my impression that they really knocked it out of the park that it feels solid. And the second part of this is the trackpad, which I did know going in, I was thinking this trackpad's going to be a little bit janky. Nope. It's great. Like maybe you'll get bad over time. I don't know. This is a floor model. I'm like the first day it came out or the first week it came out feels so good. I pressed everywhere on that thing. It is pleasant and easy to click everywhere on the thing and it doesn't feel Lucy Goosey and Wiggly and Tilty. It feels great. So I think if you got somebody, one of the MacBook Neo, they are going to be so happy, especially if they've never had a Mac before and they've only had PC laptops. Oh my god, this is so much better than I thought it was going to be in terms of fitting to finish. And I don't know why I had these doubts in my mind, but I was blown away by it. Obviously it's still today. It's a Ram and a bad screen bubble, but it's like, it's $600. So MacBook Neo, they think they knocked it out of the park with this machine. Coincidentally, I happened to also go into an Apple store yesterday. Also, with the goal of like, oh, I was walking past it. I'm like, oh, I should go in and check out all those new stuff. The first thing I did was walk over to the MacBook Neo. I must have looked very strange to the staff because I was basically like fondling it like a different edge is like trying to figure out like at what point is this going to feel cheap? And I did not find that point. Like, so I was going over all the corners, all of the like the rounded edges, the sharp edges, the finished. As I often do in Apple stores with picking up new products, I closed it and I moved it around. I'm like, what is the bottom of it? What are the feet? Are the feet worse? I love the even the feet. The feet on the MacBook Air are sharp little cylinders. They're not domes like they were in the M1 MacBook Air. They current M2, M3, M4 MacBook Air. The feet are kind of like sharp edge cylinders. The feet on the Neo are rounded and friendly with flat bottoms. Amazing. I move my hands over every inch of that thing. And I would open it up. I felt even like the interior screen hinge, like above the keyboard, I even felt that, like where is the sharp edge? Where is the sign of cheap manufacturing? I could not find one. It just feels like any other Apple laptop. Like I even, I'm sorry, I forgot who it was. I think I'm asked it on somewhere a set a few days ago. Like, oh, you can tell there's like a different, like a not as good of a grain pattern. I looked, I couldn't tell. I ran my hands over the flat parts. Does it feel different? No, it doesn't. I picked it up, moved it around. It is the weight balance off. Does it feel less solid? No. It just feels and looks great. I was shocked. I really thought there would be some kind of like noticeable, lower quality level about it compared to the MacBook Pro, the MacBook Air. There isn't. I was not able to find one at least in the Apple Store with a few minutes of it. Yeah. I actually, I hope they take some of these decisions and bring them to the MacBook Pro. I'm not saying they need to make it as rounded as this. Like I do like the thin lid on the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, stuff like that. But like some of these decisions are just, they're not, obviously they're not more costly. In fact, they save money. But they're just better decisions. Like at various times we have complained on this show about exactly how sharp certain edges are in Apple's laptops. And I think the Neo shows that if you're willing to round things over a little bit more, it makes for a more pleasant to handle. It also helps that this is smaller. And it does look like a little baby because it's not like a 11 inch MacBook Air size. It's not, you know, the MacBook, adorable MacBook One size. Oh, that was very sharp as well. But the fact that it is a little bit smaller, I think is going to make it even more attractive to somebody who doesn't want to spend too grand on a laptop. They just want a nice laptop and not spend too much money. And this boy is just a nice laptop without spending too much money. Yeah, I was blown away. And of course, you know, I opened it up and I did similar tests as John, like I was knowing how the trackpad works. I was clicking, not only clicking the trackpad, but also I was like, I tried to click it like on the corners, on the edges, like does it feel bad if you click like diagonally from a corner? No. 'Cause it used to, like I have some MacBook Pros with mechanical clicking track pads that did not feel good. And this does not have any of those problems. Yeah, I was shocked. And of course, you know, opening up apps and I even tried like the keyboard. And I was like, oh, the keyboard feels a little bit, I thought it felt like a little bit squishier, but then I went over to a MacBook Pro to compare and that felt exactly the same thing. No, that must be just in my head. I think it's like the same keyboard mechanism. So that's right. Yeah, it felt like it. On the colors, I thought they all looked pretty good. The yellow and the pink were more pale than I expected. My favorite color was actually the blue. I thought the blue would be a lot closer to the MacBook Air Midnight color, which is so dark, it's almost black. Yeah, it's lighter than that though. It's way lighter than the MacBook Air. And it's not a light blue. It's still like a dark blue, but it's more like a denim jeans color. Yeah, like jeans color, yeah. Yeah, and I really, I thought the blue Neo was a really nice looking computer. And if I were to need one of these, which I don't, but if I were to need one of these, I would almost certainly go with the blue. But I also respect people going for the yellow, 'cause it's a really fun color. But the blue is a little more my style. But I was blown away both from just sheer pride in this platform of the Mac that I love so much that so many more people are going to be joining us. Like this, it's gonna be like, finally, all the people who weren't able to afford the other Macs, like we're bringing more people into the fold. That's a great thing for the platform, as I said. It also made me feel so impressed by both Apple's hardware prowess and also just how great computers are right now that everything the MacBook Neo can do, all of the high-end pro apps that it can run. It might not be as fast as everything else, but it can do it. Your iPhone in your pocket can also do that. What a time to be in computers. Yeah, it's not all roses. There's some prop is that we need to work out. That's always gonna be the case. It always has been the case. But wow, what an amazing time we are in for hardware that not only is it possible to make a laptop like that, that is that good for that price. And it's not like Apple's not taking any profit on this. You know Apple doesn't do that. You know they're making 20 or 30% at least margins on this thing. And to also have all that power in our pockets all the time is an incredible resource. We have amazing supercomputers available to us all the time. And for not even that much money, that's wonderful. And I think this product is a hit. And I think this is like when you look at what PCs do in this price range, Apple's gonna kick their butts. And they honestly could use the butt kicking. So this is just fantastic. I'm blown away by how good the MacBook Neo was. I also briefly got to handle the iPhone 17i. It feels great in the hand. It's just like the 16i. Like you feel it and you're like, wow, that's really light. That's awesome. Do I want it? No, but it's great for people who want it. And I walk right out the store and I didn't even realize until today, I totally forgot to even look for the studio displays. - Oh come on. - I was so blown away by the Neo. I was like, all right, mission accomplished. I'm outta here. I walked right out. - I didn't forget. I looked at the studio display XDR, although unlike a casey store, they had these back-to-back. So I couldn't see them at the same time. - That's what I did. - Not that I needed to, but I played with all the settings on it. I was looking for the thing that let you pick between like the reference mode and whatever. And I couldn't find it in my brief looking there. But I honestly didn't know where to look. It wasn't, I didn't see it in that display's thing. They don't have a lot of, well, there's two problems. The Apple Store is really bright. So it's really tough for even 2000 nits to show, because the light sensor, the ambient light sensor is going to put the monitor already at pretty high brightness. So the best you're gonna get is like two X, because if the monitor is at 1000 nits and HDR is 2000, it looks less impressive than if the monitor is at like 300 nits because you're in a dim room. And then the HDR comes on at 2000. But anyway, their sample photos in the photos app didn't really show off HDR that well. So you'd be forgiven, Casey, for not being able to see. - Oh, good, thank you. - What's going on? I, they also didn't have it in the mode. I had it in P3, like the display profile. They didn't have it in the combined P3 and Adobe RGB mode. I switched it to that mode and then the screen blinked and then it blinked again and it had switched itself back. I'm like, well, there's some bugs. And then I switched it back into the mode again. Eventually I got it to stick. I couldn't see any difference, but it was interesting that that wasn't the default mode for the stuff. But otherwise, it looks like a studio display but it has better black levels and it's brighter. Cool. - It cost twice as much. - Yeah. I mean, did you notice the refresh rate at all, like when you were scrolling a webpage or something? - I mean, yeah, I could tell it was 120 Hertz for scrolling stuff, but I didn't, that's why I put it in adaptive, but I didn't know how to really test that. But yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's high refresh. It's a good monitor, it's a good monitor. The only thing it has going against it is it's not 32 inches and 6K. Everything else about it is very good. - No, the only thing it has going against it is that it's $3,000, whatever the heck the price is. - No, I mean, proportionally given the difference in size and pixels, that's not actually that bad compared to the pro display exterior. - We are Sponsored Zepisode by Zapier. Zapier is how you actually deliver on your AI strategy, not just talk about it. And these days there's AI everywhere. And honestly, the biggest problem that most people have with AI is just figuring out how to use it and figuring out where to integrate it into their workflow. So Zapier has this amazing AI orchestration platform. So you can bring the power of AI to any workflow. So you can do more of what matters and have AI help you out in all the other ways. So you can connect top AI models like ChatGPT and Cloud to the tools that your team already uses. So you can add AI exactly where you need it, whether that's AI-powered workflows, autonomous agents, customer chat bots, or whatever else you can imagine. You can orchestrate it all with Zapier. And it's easy to use. Zapier is for everyone, whether you're a tech expert or not. So many teams have already used AI tasks with Zapier over 300 million tasks have been automated. And Zapier is just such an amazing platform. They've been around for a very long time in the automation space. Way before AI, they're a very mature platform. And they have always specialized in automation. Obviously AI has huge advances in automation possibilities. So Zapier is right there helping people actually deploy AI to their real work across their real company with their real tools, all happening right now. This is not something you can just do in the future. This is something you can do right now with Zapier. Join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com/ATP. That's Zapier spelled Z-A-P-I-E-R. dot com slash ATP. Zapier.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to Zapier for sponsoring our show. [MUSIC PLAYING] All right, let's talk about MacBook Neo tear downs. First of all, tech renewed did one where they did fast forward a bit. Effectively, they tore the whole thing down 10 minutes. I think we talked about this briefly last week. It was six minutes they had a department. Oh, OK, there you go. I fix it, did it tear down. There's a video as well as a blog post about it. They did some interesting things. They were talking about, hey, how is this-- how does this weigh what it weighs? In the good way, in the bad way, how does it weigh what it does? And so the Neo's bottom case in keyboard is only each grams lighter than the MacBook Airs, despite being 6.5% smaller in. two-dimensional area, 101.3 square inches versus 95.1 square inches. The Neo screen and lid is 48 grams heavier than the airs. And at 86 grams, the metal each that's under the track pad that assists in like the way the track pad works, that's 7% of the Neo's total weight, which is bananas. I mean, wait, wait, well spent because that track pad feels good. Yeah. Yeah. And the Neo's full track pad assembly is almost twice, almost exactly twice as heavy as the M3 MacBook Airs. And I would not have guessed that because you would think like, oh, the Taptic engine isn't that going to add weight in everything, but I guess having moving parts and like those, those leaves, the steel leaf springs in there and the big heavy metal age, it's fascinating that where is the weight? It's in the screen lid and the track pad. And the metal's heavy. I can't tell. So it's 8 grams lighter, the bottom casing keyboard is 8 grams lighter of 6.5 percent smaller. But in their video, they had like, you couldn't see, they put stuff on a scale with like the most kitchen scales with a little like non-backlit LED readout or LCD readout for the weight. I couldn't read the weight. So I don't know is 8 grams lighter at 6.5 percent smaller? Is that proportional? I need to know the title, the total to do that math. But anyway, that's, they didn't dive too far into it. But I would say that most of the weight difference, the reason the Neo weighs exactly the same as the larger MacBook Air, despite having a smaller battery is the track bed waist, quite isn't as much and the lid of the, where the screen is weighs a little more as well. Right. Oh, with the track pad, there's a screw in the center of the track pad mechanism that lets you adjust the force required to activate the membrane switch that triggers a click, which is pretty cool. So you can, I presume, I mean, it is not for the user to do. It's right. But anyone needs to repair it or if the track bed ever started feeling wonky or got too loose or got to heavy, whatever. So I see no, there's an adjustment screw there. They also did the usual thing of like doing whatever, whatever scanning thing there is that is that a pet scan cat scan? I don't know. They're doing some kind of scan that shows the insides of the thing. It's like an x-ray, but like they colorize it and everything. And so you, you can see the speakers. I put it on our show. You just look at the video. You'll see all the images, but in our show notes here, I have, I'm showing the same speaker from two sides. That's the same speaker from the top and from the bottom. I know, I know, it's looks like it's left and right. That's just the same speaker. So you can see how big the speaker actually is. Everything else in those big black squares that are to the left on the right of the track bed is not decidedly not speaker. And good ol' I fix it, opened it up, although they did it so fast and a sped up thing that I had to frame by frame to get these screenshots. But they used like essentially a hot knife to cut open those black things. And yes, the speaker is in, I don't know, let's say one quarter of it. And the rest of it is completely empty air. It's just hollow inside there. And I think I know why. Do you see these pictures there? And the bottom one where that wire is dangling, that's just like laying on top of that. That's not, that wire is not inside there. That's just the wire like, you know, from the, you see from the top right. Anyway, there's nothing in there. It is empty air and it is not air that is channeled to like like a base port to try to like have a tuned length of tube to a note. That's not it at all. It is just plastic, but it is not flat plastic. It is plastic with those little diagonal ribs for crossbracing and X patterns like this. It's separated into little boxes. And within each box, there is an X on the box and the X are made of ridges of plastic. And then you see the four holes where screws go in. This is what I think these black plastic things are doing. And probably also doing the same thing in the iPad. These black plastic things are essentially stiffness braces because that square of plastic has nothing to do with the speaker, but is braced in this way and then screwed at four points into the chassis to make it so the corners of the chassis don't twist and bend. It's like for torsional rigidity. Yep. It is a mechanical stiffener. That is my theory. And I'm sticking to it unless someone from Apple's design team tells me that's not what this is for because they're definitely not air pockets to increase base because they wouldn't put those crossbracing in there. That's not being about the inside of any base port ever looks like. But you do put things like that into stiffen things. So MacBook Neo and possibly also the iPads as well that I haven't seen inside their black things has plastic stiffeners bolted to it to make it so the corners aren't floppy, which is maybe why it feels so expensive. Yeah. Because other like if you had like battery in there, battery is rigid. And so you know, you probably wouldn't need to add more stiffeners to that. But in this case, when you don't have enough battery to fill the cavity inside the case, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So that that's I think it's a very good theory, especially looking at these. You're right like this. You wouldn't design a ported speaker enclosure with that pattern in it. I can't even tell if that is open to the air like as they didn't do a good job of peeling off all the plastic like this went by really fast in a few frames. So but it's just totally separate. Another thing. So we just talked about how they could take this thing apart and the battery is in glued in. It's screwed in or whatever. And there's been some talk about obviously for repairability, you don't want to deal with glue and stuff like that. But also like that perhaps this makes it less expensive to assemble. I don't know a lot about assembly, but I'm thinking that 18 screws versus sticky stuff, the sticky stuff might be cheaper to assemble because you just put the sticky stuff on and you slap it in there like a machine could do it that much more easily than a machine could do 18 of these tiny precise screws. But I don't know maybe machine does all of them maybe machine does none of it about any right 18 tiny screws and also this is another thing to make contribute to the weight the battery in the Neo looks like it's in like a metal frame with flanges and those flanges are screwed down with 18 screws. And so when you have the sticky stuff, you don't need a metal frame to hold the battery and then because you don't need to screw anything down the battery itself is literally stuck to the chassis with glue or in the case of the iPhone that electrically releasing glue thing. So I think that metal frame adds weight, those 18 screws add weight and it is much more repairable, but it also might be a little bit heavier and might actually be more expensive to assemble because you got to put an 18 individual screws versus one sticky thing and slap and you're done. All right, tell me about these main boards. Yeah, just to compare like what what is the MacBook Neo Logic board compared to the MacBook Air M3 logic board and I mean the Neo Logic board looks more like an iPad logic board is skinny little thing it looks like an extended phone logic board or you can compare it to the the iPhone 16 Pro which has the same SOC and yeah, you can see it's the same SOC but the iPhone is just massively miniaturized. I can't I think they're just showing two board is that two boards are two sides of the same board. I can't even tell in this I fix the thing but you can watch the video and see the size comparisons. So I said to say that the logic board portion of Apple laptops has just been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking over over the decades and it is now disappearing to the point where now it looks like an iPad logic board and I wonder if in five or ten years it's going to look like a phone logic board. The unthinkable happened particularly to to Marco actually AirPods Max 2 are out that is not the AirPods Max with usbc that came out a few months ago whenever it was. This is an honest goodness AirPods Max 2 and John you get to do a victory lap. Yeah, I was just a happenstance that I saw this because some listeners said I was asking us to do an ask ATP in the future which I don't know if we'll do but it's saying like you should list all of your periodic reminders as an after show or a member special or something and I actually have a reminders category called far future. So I don't so those things don't get jumbled up and what do I put in far future stuff like this. I went to the far future saying wonder what's in there these days and the very top item was check if there's an AirPods Max 2 for the Marco bet blah blah blah like whatever. I'm like you know what? AirPods Max 2 did come out today so I gathered all the info in ATP episode 604 at one hour three minutes and eight seconds. Marco said after I had said something about the AirPods Max and revision. So John I think you're being optimistic. You can make a bet. Add it to your calendar. I don't think there's a chance to help AirPods Max will get another update at least for two years. I did add it to my calendar. There it was. It's in my reminders. There it was in my far future reminders. Well guess what that was September 12th 2024. Apple got it just under the line. Although I didn't actually agree to the two year bet. I actually agreed to take the bet at three years but either way I won and the world gets AirPods Max 2 which are so very different from the predecessor. Yes they're very very different or something. I mean they're different in the way everybody wanted because when the one with USB C came out you're like that's it. They just added USB C. Where is the revision? I want to know what they show. Well guess what? I mean so it's it's very similar in the approach to the vision pro update which is like all right. Here's this product that immediately upon launch everybody was like well this part's good but these parts really suck. Here we are like you know many years later and Apple has released the next version of it and literally all of the problem people have with it are unaddressed. Totally just left exactly the same and it's like all right. If you liked what we shipped before here's an update with essentially a spec bump nothing else has been touched. It's like okay. Now the difference between the AirPods Max and the Vision Pro is that people buy the AirPods Max. Honestly the AirPods Max this is not a product for me just comfort wise they are extremely uncomfortable for me because they are so heavy and they did nothing to change that. They did nothing to change. change the clamping force, they did nothing to change the annoying, weird case thing that they come with. None of that is different. They didn't change the kind of awkward control scheme on them because they insist on digital crowns and everything they make. They probably do still sound great because the first one sounded great. That part's probably fine. It is nice that they are matching the many of the features of the newer AirPods that have come out. That's all great. But if they didn't work for you before, they won't work for you now. If you love the AirPods Max and maybe you have an older pair where the battery is starting to wear out and maybe you're annoyed at the lightning cable or whatever, then this is a great time to upgrade if you still want to use them. They are also still very expensive, but I see a lot of these out in the wild. Maybe just because people in New York have a lot of money, but I see a lot of AirPods Max is out there, especially on young people like teenagers. Your parents bought you a $550 pair of headphones. Damn. But I do see them a lot. I do think people are by them in reasonable numbers. Not enough. I'm sure it's nothing compared to the AirPods Pro or the regular AirPods, but it does seem like it is a successful product that has a market. The price and the physical downsides of it keep that market smaller than it could be. But Apple seems to not care. So for the market that Apple has chosen to stick with for this product and seems to have no interest in trying to expand that market, this is an update. It's not even a great, it's just this is an update. Okay. It takes them from being like embarrassingly far behind the feature lineup to roughly on par with the feature lineup and it solves nothing else. But okay, they did an update. Yeah. So what changed? Well, now we have the H2 in it, which means you get adaptive audio, you get conversation awareness, you get personalized volume, you get live translation, and you get voice isolation. Additionally, you get one and a half times more effective active noise cancellation. You get a new high dynamic range amplifier for even cleaner audio. You get reduced wireless audio latency for game mode and iOS, macOS, and iPadOS, but you get the same color, same price, same case, same not folding headband thing, basically all the same stuff. Yeah, that's a good thing. That's what everyone wanted. Why doesn't have the H2? It's kind of like when the vision broke in with the M2 and everything else was on the M3. So it's a catch up thing. It should have the H2. It should have the H2 a long time ago. Now it does and it's got all the features. We are sponsored this episode by OnePassword. Now if you're a small business, it's easy to assume that you might fly over the radar security wise, but small businesses are being targeted more and more by bad actors because cybercriminals know that lean teams often lack the resources to prevent a breach. So teams of any size can be a target, but even the smallest of teams can foil cybercrime with one password. One password provides simple security to help small teams manage the number one risk exploited by bad actors, weak passwords. One password provides centralized management to make sure your company's logins are secure. It's a simple turnkey solution that can be rolled out in hours whether or not you have dedicated IT staff. And no matter how complex your security needs may get as your company grows, one password will stay with you every step of the way. But of course the earlier you start, the easier it is to build your business on a secure foundation. Compromised passwords are the number one way bad actress attack companies. So if password manager should be the first security purchase you make for your team. I personally use one password both for my own personal stuff, but also for my business logins. Now I have multiple businesses. Many of them are just for me and I'm the only person. I still use one password for that because it helps me generate all these like amazing passwords and keep all the accounts separate. But where it really shines is with my family and with my business that I do with other people. So we have a family share plan where my wife and I and even my son can share passwords and we can assign what's shared and what's not. And then for the business for the restaurant we share passwords with the managers and my wife and me all at different access levels all super easy to manage and it's wonderful to have everybody on the same page. Do not have to like have posted notes of password on them and for all those passwords to be really secure and centrally managed. I love using one password for this. It is fantastic for this. So take the first step to better security by securing your team's credentials. Find out more at onepassword.com/atp and start securing every login. That's onepassword.com/atp. Thanks to one password for sponsoring our show. Overcast is shipping in beta in beta overcast is shipping transcripts. Tell me what the heck is going on here because this sounds pretty freaking great. I've been working on this for some time. Apple Podcast longs transcripts, probably about a year and a half ago now and maybe two years ago. It's been a while. I knew back then, oh crap, that's a really good feature and I'm going to have to do that someday. But how am I going to do that? Apple Podcast operates at a much larger scale than I do with much more resources and I just had no idea how I could possibly ever match that. This summer with the beta of iOS 26. Apple launched a new Speak Transcription API on iOS. They basically opened up the iOS Speak model that is used for iOS built-in transcription of things like when you speak to Siri, it's that model. When you transcribe notes, it's that model. What this meant is that it ran on device, it was very optimized and very fast and very lightweight. Now I've been looking at different ways to do transcription for a little bit before that, especially once OpenAI's whisper models had come out. That was a game changer in transcription models because the accuracy was so much higher than what had come before. It was shocking how good whisper was. But the problem with OpenAI whisper is that it's a really big model. It's really slow. It's great for one person using on their computer or some very specialized app uses. For the most part, it's great if you are transcribing your own podcast that you make once a week. Whisper is great. If I was going to try to offer transcripts and overcast for all podcasts or many podcasts, that wasn't going to scale. There are also, if you're operating at a smaller scale, again, if you had maybe a podcast hosting company and you wanted to transcribe audio for your customers that they upload, if you're dealing with maybe that's hundreds of uploads a week or something, that's a very different scale than I'd be operating at. There are things like transcription APIs from the AI providers. OpenAI has a transcription API. The problem with those is that they're not really designed for podcasts. They usually have audio length limits or size limits that many podcasts would exceed. Just cost-wise, you would be talking about hundreds or thousands of dollars per day at the scale that overcast would need those to be. Overcast is not going to take on a thousands of dollars a day API cost. Let's just say that would require me to raise the price of premium higher than most people if you would like to pay. What happened last summer is when Apple released their iOS 26 and all the OS 26s, when they all had this new API in them for Apple's on-device transcription model, I ran some tests. It just blew me away how incredibly fast it was. One thing I noticed on a regular M4, on a Mac, on an M4, I was running this on my laptop and it was able, because I wasn't going to put Tahoe on my main Mac. I was doing this development on my laptop over the summer. I noticed that it was able to transcribe. If I ran a few jobs in parallel, I could have one M4 Mac transcribe audio at about 200x the audio's play time. One of the words about 200 minutes transcribed for every real time minute that has passed. Goodness. It was so much faster than anything else I'd ever tried. I noticed I'm okay. Well, if one Mac can do 200x real time, how many podcasts minutes are there? Let me see. What if I just start transcribe? Let me get a couple of Mac minis and just have them start transcribing the most popular podcasts. How many can they get through? I have some information of I can see what the most popular podcasts are. I can see how many episodes they release per month or whatever and I can do some division and figure out, usually I can download a copy of what they serve and I can see how long it is and start analyzing things. Okay. Let me try. What can a couple of Mac minis do? I was blown away by how effective that was. I'm like, okay. I can't just keep burning these in my house and let me see what I could do. Put them next to the water in the closet. It'll be fine. Exactly. I went to Mac mini Vault. Mac mini, it looks just, I think they're actually a cyber link. That's the actual community, but it's Mac mini Vault. They are, I think they're the only provider where you can rent a Mac mini from them for a hundred bucks a month. But if you buy your own and mail it to them. then they'll host it in their data center for only 50 bucks a month. And I was like, well, it doesn't take that many months to come out ahead if I'm just buying the base model. And it turns out, and I analyze, by the way, I don't know, listeners might recall, I recently have had strong opinions about the bang for the buck for M4 family chips and what the maximum bang for the buck for processing power is. This is why I did all this analysis last summer. And it turned out the base model Mac mini was like way more bang for the buck for processor performance than any other configuration or any other computer. Okay, great. So I got two Mac minis and I sent them off to Mac mini vault in Wisconsin. And I even I least one, there's a company called Green Mini Host in the Netherlands. I'm like, if there's certain podcasts that are like EU region locked, I found a Mac Mini host in the EU. I think the Netherlands is an EU. Anyway, sorry, at least in Europe. And so I'm like, great. All right. So I had those three. And this this required me to learn a bunch of stuff. Like I had to first of all, you know, first of all, I'm installing the Tahoe betas. And every single time there's a new beta, the API changes a little bit or some limit is imposed or some limit is released or some bug is fixed. So all summer, I'm updating these these Mac minis with the betas. And that's another question I had to like first ask Mac mini host and like, can I or Mac mini vault rather like, can I run betas on your Mac minis? Like, is that is there any reason why I couldn't do that? No, there's no reason. So it's fine. So I'm running the betas. I'm doing everything via remote desktop, like, you know, like VNC, like two to the Mac minis, like from my home computer. And meanwhile, also doing it all, like on my laptop locally and updating that every time. And then like this whole thing, I had to had to learn how to basically run Mac servers, which is something I really had not done beyond just occasionally having a Mac mini in my house to be like a NAS or a streaming thing or whatever. It was just a link that I was going to put in a future episode, but it seems relevant now that I, let me see if I can find it. There was like, I think in 26.3 or something that file vault, now lets you, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, unlock the file vault encrypted drive over SSH. Yeah. Like before your thing boots. That would have been nice. I'm presumably these hosting companies will do this for you. That's what you're paying them for or whatever, but for people who don't have that. But yeah, apparently we'll put a link in the show to the Apple support article that even before the OS boots, when it's just at the thing where it's like, hey, enter your password to unlock this file vault disk so we can boot the OS, you can apparently SSH in remotely and enter the file vault password. So it will continue with the boot. Yeah, and I've learned so many things about running Macs remotely. Like, you know, all the different, like I have a big text document of all the things I have to do, you know, for a fresh install, like to prepare it and everything. Because every time there's a software update, I got to do the whole, I got to do all this again, go to all of them and of course, in the summertime, like during the beta period, it's every two weeks. Every two weeks, I'm going and updating all of these, running the tests, like making sure I can still do what I want to do. And meanwhile, I have to also integrate this, you know, these three Mac minis into overcast infrastructure. So I have to build in a job queue, performance and health monitoring, like from like the overcast transcription app that are running on these Mac minis that integrates with my other performance and health monitoring on the server side. And I have to, you know, build them things like, all right, well, if if the Mac mini takes a job and then crashes, then I have to have some kind of like repeat job queue entry to re queue that after a while and have some other Mac mini handle it. Like, it was, it was such a journey, but it was working. I want more coverage. I don't want to just do like the top 100 podcasts. I want to do, you know, anything with more than X followers to it or X subscribers to it. Great. So I got two more Mac minis in August. So, you know, start it out like really, really simple, you know, just the three, like the two that I own and the one I least in the Netherlands. And then now I'm up, now I'm up to two more now up to five. And what five could do was great. You know, it was like, okay, all right now. But, you know, the cost is starting, you know, now, you know, 250 dollars a month plus the hundred like it's, you know, it's like it's starting to get like, okay, this is this is starting to get to a decent amount of money. And I thought, okay, let's see how the five do the five. They, you know, it ramps up pretty much linearly. Okay, well, how many more podcasts can I cover? And it was, you know, I'm starting to cover like a somewhat reasonable percentage of popular podcasts. But then I'm like, all right, well, I also want to do like some of the back catalog like, can I go back like a few months? Can I go back a few years? Like, how, how much can I do? Since I don't really need a lot of like, help from the host, I'm just running these anywhere. I wonder if there's like a local data center that I can co-locate. Like if I can, if I can get like, you know, people, people make these, these brackets that hold six Mac minis into like a three-u space on a rack. And I'm like, if I can get, let me, let me see like, what would it cost to host a three-u rack Mac minis in a data center? If I can get that for a few hundred bucks a month, then I might, you know, I might be able to come out ahead of what it's going to cost me. If I'm going to, I was thinking, you know, maybe I'll have like 10 or 12 of these. Like that could, like, that could do a lot. If I can, what I was doing with three and then with five, like, if I can get like 12, like, hmm, this could really be something. And so I bought a few more. And I'm like, as I'm, as I'm doing this, I'm like, let me see like here, I'll pace you in the slack. This is, this is where this went. Before you send whatever you're going to send, I would just like to say that I am looking forward to the day that I get a shipment from you padded in Mac minis. Mac minis is packing material when you put the M5 Mac minis come out. All right. So you've sent two photographs that I will describe. One of them is two Mac minis with little stickies on them that say, what does that scribe one into? And then a second photograph that has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven Mac minis stood kind of upright, if you will, with a post it per Mac mini connected to, I guess that's a UPS of some sort. No, that's a switch on the left. And that's an old iPad on the right, just as it should basically, because you know, when you run them, they get hot. And I didn't want to melt my rug. And so this was my, my thermal management solution, the one on the right is on the rug though. Yeah, well, when you just have one, it's not that bad, but when you have seven, you know, it starts to add up. So this is like, all right. Now I have a few more. And it's going well. And I'm like, okay, I ordered, I'm like, as I'm like looking at different data centers, like I want to know like, you know, what are my situations for, you know, for racking these somewhere. So I got a racking closure to see like what it is. And so here's this next photo here. This is six of them in a racking closure made for Mac minis. It's a very simple, you know, just metal bracket. Yeah, it seems like it's a shelf with brackets to mount it on the rack, you know, it very little else. There's not too much here. Yeah, exactly. And so then, so I started talking to data centers and wait, I'm sorry, there are so many Mac minis. You can build a little fort out of them. It was really getting ridiculous. Like because there's, I've now at this point bought seven Mac minis and like, it's, you know, it's starting to get, you know, I'm like, do I keep the boxes? Like, what do I do? Well, everyone thought it was open claw that was causing them to run on the Mac minis. It's really just margo. Yeah. And for the record, I'm looking at this rack mount. And I don't know if there's, if there's a reason behind this or if this is really the, the, the right iteration numbers, but I see scribe seven eight nine 10 11 and 12. Well, yeah, because they said there were already some already in the data centers. Oh, my word. So at that point, one through six were in the data center. No, one through five from the data centers. Six was that extra one off to the side of the previous photo. That was just one that I just had that was like my beach Mac mini. Like, that was just I, I, I conscripted it into service for, for this purpose. You just start looking at eBay for M4 Mac minis. Maybe I'll be, I'll be supplying them soon. But anyway, what is your power bill for the month or months that these were all in the house? Holy crap. I think all those together are less than my Mac pro. Oh, by far. That's probably true. It's probably less than your monitor. So the, the combined power usage of six Mac minis doing transcription is something like 250 watts. Well, that's really not bad at all. They're not doing much GPU work. And they're all just the base model M4. So the top of the power envelope is not that high. So it's, yeah, it's like, I think it's like about 50-ish watts or 40-ish watts each. It's, yeah, it's like 250 for the whole for that whole thing. So I was curious to I measured it. So that's that's how I know that. Anyway, so I start talking to data centers. And it was very hard to find any data center that would even take like, you know, just one guy because it turns out what I've learned is that most data centers, their businesses like big companies or the government. You know, so it's like they don't have like not a lot of data centers. We only talked to one guy. And I found one locally that was it's on Long Island. And it was it was willing, you know, they were willing to talk to me. And I was like, all right. So you know, I'm looking to, I'm looking to get like I'm like, I what I need would be at minimum like, you know, 3U plus whatever I would need for like a, you know, network year or router, whatever. So like three, maybe three or four you of RAC space, you know, 300 watts of continuous power usage and whatever you can give me on the internet side. What would that cost? And I learned basically that was too small for this data center, for any data center to care about that like I was I was I've never done anything with data center before. So I had no idea what is it like I was picturing like you just rent, you know, space by the RAC unit like by the by the U basically. And I thought I could just ask for like for you and like, how much will that be? And like it turns out it's not worth them dealing with that. The amount of space that we have on Long Island is ample. But power and bandwidth are the expensive ports. And so they're like, okay, well, we can give you like, maybe we can give you half a cabinet, but we mostly just do full cabinets. And it's like, like, what, like the whole thing, the whole tall rack, like the, you know, 48, whatever rack you use, that's in, like, that's, oh God, okay. And I'm like, well, how much is that, you know? - You need another 15 Mac minis then. (laughs) - Well, I'm like, I'm like, this is, like, I don't know how much this is gonna, this is gonna be a lot to afford. So I'm like, all right, well, that's way above what I can do right now. So I'm like, all right, let me figure something else out. And so for the most of the fall, and I just ran that rack, that enclosure of the six Mac minis, I had like the six in the data center, and then I ran these seven just in my house. - In the water closet, it's calling to, you know, it is. The ultimate, forget about the, you know, entire server cabinet, you've already got one. It's got water bottles on the bottom, and you just shove this thing in, you close the door. - Well, the good thing, since they're quiet, and since they work as a nice little heater also, well, not much, I mean, a 250 watt space heater was a very small space heater, but I just had them on top of that file cabinet, you see on the right there in that picture, I just had them sitting on top of that for all fall, like all the whole, it was just sitting there. Just running, and especially because like, you know, as I was coming back on the mainland for the school year, like, well, I have this perfectly good internet connection over here, it's not gonna be used very much all winter. So might as well use it. And so I'm like, all right, if I put six of them here, maybe I can put another six of them in the restaurant, 'cause the restaurant also has an internet connection that is idle all winter long, like, hmm, like this, I started like scaling it up in my mind. I'm like, all right, if I can make this work, like I can put them all over the place, like I have two houses in a restaurant, and maybe I can like send some to Casey or something, like, I have two turntables in a microphone. - Right, it's gonna pick up your couch, Christians one day Casey, there'll be some Mac Minis under there, and it will describe 27, 28, like a cow. (laughing) - Oh my word. - So anyways, so in, I had, you know, there have been in the fall around Black Friday, and there were a couple times Mac Minis went on significant sales, and I was like, well, if I can get them for, like I did the math, I'm like, if I can get them for like $500 or less, like their retail price is 600, but if it was like $500 or less, I would look at it, and sometimes you could get them for like $450, I'm like, mm, that's getting pretty, like that's getting pretty good. So there were a couple of times where I'm like, I splurged, and I'm like, you know what, if I get six more, I can do a lot more transcripts. - Oh my word. - And so I would get six more, and that happened a couple of times. - Well, it soon became apparent that I, I was probably ready for the next level, and so I called the data center back. - I'll take a cabinet. - Yeah, and it turned out a cabinet was not that much once you had like 18 Mac Minis, and so I got myself a data center contract. - Oh my word. - And I had to learn a lot about how do you host things in a data center? I had never even been inside one. - Yeah, I've never. - I had never seen one. I was picturing a very different thing than what it was. I was picturing everything like black, dark, like, you know, loud, awful. Like it wasn't loud. It was moderate volume actually. - I used to be louder. Let's say I got this contract with this local data center. They were very nice, very helpful, 'cause of course everyone who works in a data center was nerd like us. So, you know, everyone's very helpful, and I think they were very happy to see a customer who was not just like a boring, you know, bank or something. So anyway, things escalated a little bit. Did they provide networking equipment or did you provide that? - I provided that. So I'll get to that in a moment. But I will just show you the final state that I have reached. - Oh my God. This is what, 36 Mac Minis. (laughing) - And I still have the six that are in the Beach House and the few that are in the, quote, the Mac Minis Vault. I now have 48 Mac Minis. - Oh my word. - You have 48 Mac Minis. - Did you even look at like AWS Graviton arm, you know, like how much of it? Did you price out a cloud-based thing for this or not? - Not really. Like I was looking at APIs from the Aperriders and stuff, but like actually do, like so, what I like about this setup is the recurring cost is almost nothing. When I build overcast, I build it for the long haul because I've been around the block. I know like anything I've set up for that's gonna be like $3,000 a month, that really adds up. But this entire thing is like $1,000 a month. And I have a lot of headroom. I had to pay up front for the Mac Minis obviously, but they're not that expensive. And I was able to get most of them on sale whenever they were, so like I didn't pay that much for this amount of capacity. And each one of these has 16 gigs of RAM, an amazingly capable processor. Now it has professional, you know, full-time networking in a data center, power redundancy and everything. So actually when I compare the processing power, I have it at my disposal here, versus what I'm paying Akamai for since they bought Leno, like this destroys anything else I've seen in terms of capability per dollar. This is way better. So I had to learn everything about this. So as you see there, as you mentioned, I have my ubiquity light up cables, because of course I got ubiquity light up switch and ubiquity router. Because I know how to run those. I already have in my ubiquity site manager, I already have multiple sites. I have the house at the restaurant. So like I already manage multiple ubiquity sites. I know how to do it. Their equipment is rock solid. I had to learn a few other things that were pretty surprising. So number one, I had no idea that power in data centers is 208 volts. Oh, right, you didn't know either, right? No. You know, we have the one 10 or the 220 or whatever, whatever 208, whatever it is, like it's the 220. It's the high voltage. Fortunately, like all modern computer equipment has universal power supplies that it can take in anything from like 100 to 240 or whatever. Like it has a wide range of the power supply levels. But everything else you have to deal with, like so another thing I learned is that power at a data center is usually provided with two different inputs. And they were getting, they took me on a whole tour of data center and I saw like the entire infrastructure of the place, there's two of everything. Two generators, there's two power regulation sides, there's two HVAC sides, like there's two of everything for redundancy. It's very nice data center. And so everything has to be able to fail over and when you are connecting to their power, the back of the rack has a whole bunch of plugs. Oh, and by the way, they're not just like the US, you know, NEMA 15, whatever plug. Like what you see on the back of a computer, like the C13 or the C14, they're that. That is what data center plugs are. You know, send this picture, you can see. This is the back of the rack. Yeah, that's what I wanted to see to see how well you do it on a cable routing. Yeah, so the colorful plugs you see on the back of the rack, there's a left bank and a right bank and that's two different power inputs. And so at first I was like, okay, well, I'll just plug into one of them because you know, if these are not serving traffic, they're work consumers. So if some go offline for a while, it's not a big deal. Like the queue will just build up and then when they come back online, they'll just start working through the queue. I told the guy who's giving me the phone, oh my god, that's because all my stuff only has one input. I don't have every time it power supplies any of this stuff. And he's like, well, once a year we like take down an entire side for a few hours to test things. And so you don't really want to be plugged into that side during that time. You know, we do the other side, so I'm like, okay, well, what do people, how do people solve this problem? - If I server hardware, they can plug both cables into redundant power supplies. - Well, that to or it turns out there's a device called an ATS, an automatic transfer switch. And so you can plug in the ATS into both sides and then it offers you a single set of outlets that is readundantly powered basically. So you can plug in all your single ended stuff into the ATS and since all of my stuff is single ended, that's what I did. So I had to learn that. There's so much about this that I just had no idea. Like this is how servers were like physically run. - Yeah, I didn't know. - You're really not taking advantage of this rack. Those macamamines are just barrel, they're like the size of the face plate on the old server. - And the whole rest of the rack has just empty space. - Yeah. Well, it's a lot of space. Like, yeah, 'cause servers are long. Remember how long the X server was, which is probably the only rack mat server you may have been familiar with? They're really long. - Yeah, I mean, there's nothing stop me. If I wanted to like, I could use both sides of the rack. Like, I could just put a second set of them on the back mat rack mount holes. - Do you want the hot side going into the hot aisle? You don't wanna be pushing hot air into the middle of your rack. - So yes, technically you are correct. In practice, as I walk through the aisles of the data center, there's no heat coming from your rack, man. - No, there's some, but in practice, I walk past, as I'm walking down the ostensibly cold aisle, some people have installed their servers backwards and are blowing hot air into the cold aisle. So it doesn't seem like it's that strictly necessary at this scale. And yes, the Mac minis are just not producing that much heat. You'll see the big black things I have at top and midway, those are fans. There are rack mat fans that suck air in from the bottom and blow it out the back. 'Cause the Mac minis are just having the hot air just go straight up. - Yeah, the Mac minis are not blowing air out the back of them, unfortunately. - Right. They're just kind of, you know, it's wafting upwards from them. And so these fans suck it in and blow it out the back. But even the, like, I don't think it's that necessary at this scale, obviously, or honestly. But anyway, so I had to learn about 220 volt. I had to learn about ATSs. You know, they, they provide the internet via what they call the DIA. Like, and I had to, of course, I'm instantly going to like, chat GPT in Gemini. What the heck is a DIA? How do I, how do I connect whatever that is to whatever I have? What should I have? What equipment do I need? What settings do I use? They give you like a yellow fiber wire and they're like, here you go. I ran it to your cage. Okay. Now what do I do? And I had to like, buy like a little fiber transfer, but it had to be exactly the right kind to go into the SFP port on the ubiquity, whatever router I got. I think it's the, one of the dream machine pro max ultra. I don't know. But one of the buy-in rack mount ones. Like, I had to learn all this stuff. Like, and this is all, you know, for people who work in data centers, I'm sure this is trivial to you because you've been doing it forever. But like, when you've never seen it before, that's all brand new. So I had to do a lot of just learning. And again, thank God for like the AI tools and YouTube tutorials here and there for certain things. I was able to figure it all out eventually. And again, data center people are very helpful with the parts that they could help with. So it was a really great learning experience. It was very fun doing it. I don't get a lot of physical projects. And like to be able to like wire up a whole bunch of computers and, you know, run all these network cables bundled together and, you know, all like have all have everything I'll organize. I even like, I recently set it up so that like if one of the Mac mini's crashes in a way that I can't reboot it remotely, I can now log into the power thing and remotely just kick off an entire bank of them and like have it like have it power cycle an entire, you know, set of six. So I built a manual kicking machine and it's referencing. It's just it's a lot of fun. I'm so happy I did this. And what this has enabled is overcast is now transcribing every podcast that has more than one listener. Every single one every podcast. Well, there are language restrictions. Because I'm using Apple's API or Apple's, you know, models for this. Their models only support English, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese and there's one more. Oh no, that's it. That's six. Yeah. If I actually look at what overcast top languages are, the one I really want is Dutch. They don't support Dutch yet. And that is one of overcast top languages in terms of like podcasts being produced. The people I was going to. But otherwise like that covers most of what most people are listening to among those podcasts that that I can support with this API based on the language. I am able to transcribe every episode that comes out, you know, easily catching up every every podcast that has more than one listener that is public. And then I was like, you know, what I want to do the back catalog. And so I started kind of raising the numbers of like, all right, let me go back again, start out, go back a month. Go back to the jobs in the queue would spike up and then they would slowly churn through them and slowly work through it. Okay, that's good. That's getting there. And then I was like, why the number that I'm just not keeping up. Like what's there was like a couple of weeks where like I'm just I was not able to keep up. What is going on here? I bought 48 Mac minis. Why can I not keep up by the way? And I said a few episodes ago that I've seen the Tahoe welcome tour a few times. Oh gracious. This is why I have seen it so many times. Welcome liquid glass. I would love to never see that screen again. Anyway, so I was like, what is going on? And I looked at I built a whole logging feature to see it for every so every server could log every action that was taken on a transcript. It's like what is going on here and I found after a little while there was a bug that was causing a lot of the transcript jobs to not be deleted afterwards. So they would recur after a few hours. Oh no. So I fixed the bug and within a couple hours the queue went to zero and I was like, oh, I have more capacity than I thought I had. Oh no. So then I thought I wonder what it would take to transcribe private podcasts to because that's something that Apple podcast doesn't do. Wouldn't that be cool if I could do them to and so I built that it turns out I'm able to support almost all private podcast to. So now overcast transcribing every public podcast with more than one listener. Almost every private podcast like above a certain I forget where I think I said that threshold something like 10 or something like so if you have a membership that at least 10 people something like that. Then you know, I know for a cast then that will be transcribed as well. And all of this is running on these 48 Mac minis. Do you really need 48 at this point? I'm not trying to snark. I'm genuinely asking you like what do you think is your steady state need if in order to handle the load that you have. Before I fixed the bug that was causing them to repeat themselves, I thought I could never get enough. Now when I've reached a steady state, I do drop below 100% use. But what I've been doing is just going back more and doing more back catalog work. Whenever my queue would hit zero, I would just like lower threshold. I was like, all right, now go back five years. Now go back seven years. Now go back 10 years and every time I do that, the number of jobs would spike up and then they would slowly churn through them. And they prioritize new releases and they prioritize popular podcasts. So there's not much cost in having the queue be full of a bunch of work to do. Eventually I would catch up at the new level because all those back catalogs will have been transcribed. And then I just lower the limits again. The next thing to do is lower it to podcasts that have one listener. Because right now I'm at like if you have two or more listeners, you get more than one listener, that's one thing. But if I go to one listener, then that like, I think that like doubles the number of podcasts or something that I have to do. So that's its own decent size jump. But once I'm done with a lot of the back catalog work, I think I will be probably ready for that at this level. Now I also, I realize like I will have a surplus of computational power here before too long. So what do I do with that? And well, I can start moving work to them first of all. Things like imagery sizing that I have right now, my main Linux servers at Akamai, they're doing a lot of that kind of work. I can move that to these. Why not? They're super fast. They have all this great stuff. I even actually tried earlier in the winter, you know how a lot of podcast apps will use the dominant color in artwork to tint the interface in some way. I tried running that on these like where like one of the jobs they would do like so one thing they do is language detection. Because I look into more like smart transcript features, I can do things in the future that I haven't done this yet, but I can do things like automatic chapter detection or topic detection or summarization things like that. Well now I have all this computational power I can do that with and it's not going to be the same as if I was running like you know, chat GPs flagship model or clouds flagship model. It's not that kind of hardware, but it is basically a whole bunch of computational power that will be almost free to operate over time. And so there's a huge center for me to move work to them or to find work they can do that would help the product. So I'm not worried about that. I think I will have plenty of work for them to do over time. And also I had to solve the issue with dynamic head insertion. I need transcripts to reach a certain minimum level of functionality for me. One of those is like all right, I definitely want them to be time synced. I don't just want a static transcript that just dumps all the text of one version of this, but then the version that you have that has different ads in it doesn't line up. Everything has to line up. And I thought well, how do I do that? I spent a lot of the summer just trying developing and testing different algorithms to basically make signatures of the audio to analyze the audio to say all right, where you know what kind of waveforms are there or what kind of frequency pairings or frequency patterns are like they like I tried all these different algorithms like somehow characterize what this audio is. So that way when the server transcribes the version that it gets. And then you on your phone download your download of that podcast, but yours has different ads spliced into it. So the you know, it might not line up or might have things inserted or removed. I want my transcript generated from the server to be able to be lined up with what your phone got from from its different download of the same podcast. So how do I do that? What actually is like a unique way to identify different parts of the audio. Honestly, I got to say, I was very helpful in this. AI did not write the algorithms for me, but it did tell me what kind like it, you know, I was asking AI models last summer like how do different companies solve this problem? Like what are different apps used for this? What kind of approaches are there? And I was like, oh, here's what Shazam uses for its fingerprinting. Here's how Spotify does there. Here's like they try to take some guesses on how YouTube concept ID works. Like there's all these different things like, okay, this actually very helpful. So I was able to, over the course of a few months, get a signature algorithm that worked that was able to read the same file and I could like, you know, I was doing tests, I would like, you know, download something from here, then download something through the Netherlands Mac mini that I was renting and like, all right, we have different ads now. Compare these. Can the algorithm find the parts that are the same and line them up correctly? Can detect which parts were insured or removed so I can then adjust the transcript in those areas and it took months, but I finally got there. And between the transcript algorithm and the signature algorithm, all of those things were just barely fast enough to plausibly run on the iPhone and they all used APIs that were built into the iPhone. So I'm like, wouldn't it be great if I was able to offer on device transcription for any podcast episodes that I didn't do myself server side. And so from that point I was developing the entire pipeline as something that also compiled and ran on iOS. And I'm happy to say I was also able to ship that so that in the beta today, like any podcast that I haven't transcribed, you can just hit transcribe on your iPhone and it'll do it. It might take like, you know, a good, you know, three to five minutes depending on how long it is. And it uses the new background, the background activity API that introduced iOS 26 for Final Cut exports. It uses that one where like you can do like the long running processing task if you start it from the phone or from the app in the foreground and then it puts the progress in the live activity. So if you have iOS 26, you can transcribe on device too. And critically, you're making the same transcript. Like it isn't like the ones you make on your phone are worse than my server ones. They're the same. It's the same models between the Mac and iPhone. It's the same models with the same quality and running, you know, all the same process. So that I think is another great feature of this. But the, I gotta say, the signatures took the longest by far. And I had to learn all sorts of stuff too about like long running Mac processes. You know, obviously memory leaks weren't going to be tolerable, but that was easy to get around or to avoid rather. But things like, how do I make like what do I do if my process crashes and the answer is long G like you basically have like a long G thing that you you create that says like just automatically always make sure this app is running. And if the crashes just open it up again. When I was doing the image color detection, I was saying earlier like detect the dominant color in this image. There was a part of that code that kept like, seg faulting and a really deep part of the accelerate framework. I could not figure out why it seemed like it's actually a part of part of Apple sample code. And I couldn't, it was so deep in the stack. It was like, I think it's just a bug in like the in the OS about this call that I'm calling. There was no way to avoid this crash. So I learned XPC and I made it its own little XPC child process so that when the image detection would crash, it wouldn't crash the whole transcription client. Like I had to learn I had to learn things like, you know, Apple remote desktop, which is how I man right now this is how I'm managing all the servers is I literally have I have like a set up script, but then I can SSH into all of them. So like when I update the transcription app, I use a script to just SSH copy it all over and relaunch it. But if I have to like change Mac settings or things like that, I have to like log into the screen of the Mac with remote desktop and do it that way. I'm sure that Mac is like IT admins, no way better tools to do this. I would love to hear about those because this is ridiculous. And I don't want to log into 48 Macs to do like OS updates down the road. So I would love to hear about those. But just lots of learning about like how to run fleets of Macs and Apple does not make that easy. If they seem like they don't really spend a lot of time considering that, but it has been running just fine. It is working. One trick I learned for a long time, there's been in like what used to be called Mac OS server and is now just built in one of the things in the sharing panel is called content caching. Content caching basically like max detect if there's a content caching server on the network. And if there's like a software update that comes through, the content cache Mac will download it. And then when every other Mac in your house does that software update, it'll just pull that copy over your local network. Instead of, if you have five Macs, instead of each one downloading Mac OS 26.2.1, five times, you'll download it once the content cache server and then all of your other Macs will download it directly from that one. Well that matters a lot when you have 48 Macs on a network. So I designated a few of them to be content caches. A little stuff like that, it's been a really great overall experience. It's been a massive undertaking. Just like the amount of work this has been on so many levels, the signature algorithm, the transcript algorithm, building out the whole queue processing system for external servers that aren't in my main Linux server network, the health monitoring, the remote desktop, there's so much here. Then serving the transcripts, using them in the app, lining them up, when you do get a different signature, how do you line up that signature with the one that the transcript has, there's so much work behind this. But where I've gotten is I got to learn a bunch of cool server stuff. I got to do some really tricky programming problems, which that's always fun for a programmer. If we're honest, we love tricky problems, even when they're frustrating and take months to figure out. We do love when we finally do figure them out. Now I have a very capable computational cluster that I can throw a bunch of work at and it gets it done very cheaply. I believe I am the only podcast app to do private podcasts, at least server side. I also believe I'm the only one where you can do it on device if they don't have it. I'm certainly the only one besides Apple that's going to do it for free. But that's I'm so I think I think it's all worth it. The feature is great and will only get greater over time. Right now it's very basic right now. You can view the transcript and you can tap it automatically, scrolls with the audio. It highlights what's being said. You can tap anywhere in it. You can scroll around tap anywhere in it to seek to that point. There's a lot of obvious features that once you have transcripts, you will obviously also want X. Things like transcript search. That's an obvious number one. You should be able to search transcripts. I'll get there. Chapterization, summaries of sections. There's a lot of that kind of thing. I should do that. Clip sharing where you can share a clip. That should be transcript based and the output to include the transcript. Yes, I agree. There's so much that now follows from this, but this has taken me almost a year and I wanted to get this. I got to ship something. I got to get this out there. Even this, there were a couple of days last week where I broke the build on my own phone. I broke its ability to use transcripts. For a couple of days after I had been using them for a while, for a couple of days I couldn't use them and I hated it. I noticed immediately because what I do is I swipe over to the transcript view. Whenever I'm listening to a big show that has stupid DAI ads, I'll hear another ad for the Apple card. Awesome. Another ad for pure leaf iced tea. I can go over the transcript and I can skim, skim, skim and tap right after because it's very obvious where the ad ends. That's great. Features like that, you get used to that. Or even just like a, what did they say? If you're listening to a podcast and a bus drives by and you miss a couple of words. You don't have to seek back and repeat the whole 20 to 30 seconds. You can just swipe, swipe, swipe and see, oh that's what they said. Stuff like that, it's really great for that kind of thing. It's also really great for like, if there's a podcast that like, oh, I know somewhere in here they mentioned something like this. You can quickly skim around and find it. Or if it's like, oh, I got to listen to this episode before tonight, but I don't have that much time. But there's information in it that I would like to know generally what they talked about. It's all, you can skim the text of what they are talking about faster than you could hear it. So if they're talking about baseball, you can skip it. So there's like, there's all sorts of little benefits like that. You know, much of the benefits of chapters and podcasts that do it, but just applied to all podcasts. It's a great experience. And it is very clear to me having developed this and now using it. It is extremely clear to me that this feature is table stakes that all podcast apps need transcripts. And once you are used to navigating a podcast with transcripts, using seek forward and seek back buttons feels like you're a dinosaur. So it is very obvious to me that podcast listening and podcast navigation require this for any app that wants to be like a serious podcast experience. So to be a good listening experience, you need robust transcript features now. And that will only get more so over time as we kind of evolve our UIs and our playback experiences to use them more and to offer more, you know, offer more utility that's powered by transcripts. So I think this is, you know, I don't, I don't always arrive to the party on time. with this kind of thing. But I'm here now, and I'm very glad to be here. And it was a long road to get here. It was a ton of work and a ridiculous amount of unboxing Mac minis. But I'm really glad that I'm finally here. - This does sound really incredible, and it sounds like it was an astonishing amount of work and expense to a not small degree. One of the things I keep wondering as you talk about this, to the degree you are willing and capable of sharing, how are you storing the transcripts? Because the obvious answer is, - My first question as well. - The obvious answer is, oh, it's just a bunch of text. Well, no, it's not, because then you have timestamps and well-- - But I mean, where is he storing it? - Well, that's two. The cloud, obviously. - Of course, of course. - Yeah, but like where we're? - R2, cloud 3 or R2. - Okay. - And what is the data type? What, I know some of this is a special sauce. You don't want to get too specific, but to the degree you're willing to share, like what is being stored for each of these transcripts? - Well, you know me. Of course, it's a custom format. - Of course. - It's gonna say, it would normally be JSON, but Nung Marco is not gonna be JSON. - There is JSON under there somewhere, but of course, I'm like, well, if I customize it, I can compress it to be a lot smaller than that. And so, yeah, there's compression, there's shorthand, there's like Delta encoding. - The total storage space for all the transcripts of all the podcasts in the world in text form, GZept can't possibly be that big. - No, well, I wasn't always stored on them on R3. I started out stored them in a database and like that was stupid. - R2 or not R3. - But yes, sorry, R2, yeah. - I think your problem's gonna be that the minimum block size of R2 is probably bigger than all your transcript files. So I wouldn't mind actually be who of you to combine them into multiple files if you cared about storage, which you don't. Well, but keep in mind also that, like these transcripts, so right now in the UI and overcast, it is displaying each kind of like line of text, so to speak, it's roughly like one to two sentences maybe. It's just like, just playing them like a series of short paragraphs. When it is highlighting whatever is being spoken, it highlights the entire paragraph at once. But I actually have word level timing. - Oh, gracious. - That was my next question. - The actual data I have is much more precise than what I'm showing. I have word level timing and word level confidence. So I'm actually storing a good amount of data for each transcript. I knew if the API is gonna give me this information, I'm gonna store it. And I might not necessarily use it for anything. Maybe I won't use it now, but maybe down the road I will. Like for instance, if you're doing clip sharing, if you look at what, there's other apps out there that will export videos that have like live captions of what's being said, that tends to look a lot better if you highlight word by word. Or if you're doing something worth exporting in a video or a picture and say like the current block of text is just too long to fit in the frame. You'd want to be able to shorten it. And so you would need sub frame precision for that. So I'm like, if the API is giving me word level timing, I'm gonna store it. I don't store everything like there's some of it. It will give you like alternate transcription options. If it's not too confident what was said, it'll say like, well, I think it's 60% sure it's this, but 40% sure it might be this. I did experiment with those at first, but I found that the alternatives that it was suggesting, they were such low confidence most of the time, it wasn't worth storing. So I mostly did not store those. - On that front, by the way, that's another one of my questions. So you've got all these text transcripts now. And as you noted, you're using models optimized for the fact that they can run on the phone and they're inexpensive to run on the server and so on and so forth. They're not gonna be up to the standards of the gigantic models that you could run, the cloud or whatever, right? But once you have the text, like 'cause I was looking, I was testing this feature earlier today and I looked at the part of the previous episode where someone sang a line about someone walking the length of the city. And the transcription was, they say he walks the lake, L-A-K-E of the city because length and lake sound similar. But what I was wondering is, could you do a post-processing past with some L-M thing where you feed at the text because I think any kind of good model would see, the lake of the city doesn't make as much sense as walking the length of the city. Like it could figure out from context clues in the English language sentence structure that lake is the wrong word choice there. And especially if you have stored alternatives, it doesn't have to hear the audio. It's not correct in the transcription saying, I'm gonna use it more properly. It's obviously then you're just doing transcription twice. But I do wonder if doing essentially text grammar correction or best guess correction with like a system prop that says, you know, you had like a summary description of the podcast from the description in the feed. This is a technology podcast. I don't know if that would help with the length of the city. But anyway, just a world knowledge model would pick out those lyrics and correct them and put in length. I do wonder again for maybe for the top 100 most popular podcast in the most recent episodes that doing a second pass and saying, this is my transcribed thing by my little models and then chucking the text to another model and saying, fix this up and make it so it doesn't say lake of the city. That is something I've thought about. And look, the accuracy of the on device model is fine, but not amazing. You had to do the thing that everybody does which is you put a big warning at the top and say, you know, this is auto generated. There might be errors. I said there are probably errors because they are, there are probably errors. Yes. And in my testing, it is good enough to know what's going on. It's good enough to have an idea of what's being said to get most of it and to figure out a lot of that stuff. It is not perfect enough to be like a document that you're going to show somebody. Or especially with proper nouns and stuff like that where it's going to struggle. Right, exactly. Again, it's the iPhone dictation model, I think, roughly. It is not like a world knowledge model that's going to be like, oh, I know the name of that because that's the name of a country in the capital of that country. No, it's not doing that. Right. Like Whisperer is better at that. Parakeet seems, in most people's testing, parakeet seems like it is a little bit better at that. So that's why I'm going to look at that soon. But it's not like massively better because that is mostly just down to like model size and complexity. Are you resigned to redoing all of your transcripts on M7s with the more powerful model in a few years? I can't. So there is a versioning system in the transcript data. So-- Yeah, no, I'm just saying, are you already setting up to say, I know I'm doing all this work, but at some point in the future, I'm going to have to redo it. All the whole back catalog again, because the models will have gotten that much better. And because the M7 will be that much more powerful. I mean, yeah, so I expect over time this will get better. But to go back to like, if I-- using a big model somewhere to clean up the transcripts, that is on my list to investigate, I think the costs would be prohibitive to do it for everything. But as you said, if I just do it the same way, I have a popularity minimum. I do it for everything over this. I do wonder-- because it's not transcribing audio. It's just text. I wonder if it would just be trivial for it. Because how much text is there, honestly. It's such a-- it's like, forget about it. Like, the text would fit in 1,000th of the context window of these giant things these days. It's just-- it's so much easier than transcribing audio. Yeah. I'm going to look at next-- well, maybe not exactly next-- but what I'm going to look at soon, now that I have the transcripts, what smart things can I do with them? And that, again, that would be things like finding topic changes and trying to make a table of contents, make chapters that aren't-- if Pacas don't have themselves, summarization of chapters maybe so I could say, OK, at this part, they're talking about volleyball. That's the kind of thing I want to be able to offer. And my plan in my mind, which I have not tested anything yet, but my plan has been to evaluate-- that's when I go to the big AI companies and use their APIs. So I would use the open AI or the Gemini or the Claude API to say, all right, here's a block of text. Find me where the topics are, clean up any errors that you see that are probably unlikely to be what the person actually said, stuff like that. That is the next big step in making transcripts better. I'm not ready to do that yet. I had to get this part out first. Can you use private cloud compute? Or is that only a lot to do, by users from shortcuts? Like I'm wondering if you could. Yeah. So I could theoretically write a shortcut and shell it out to private cloud compute. But I think I would get throttled really quickly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there is a limit on that. I mean, I'm thinking about on device. Like, was you mentioned, obviously, like transcript search. And yeah, full-text search of transcripts, blah, blah, blah. You could do that on device again. It's not that much text. You're searching through one podcast for a lot of stuff. Probably you'd have you do all podcasts, whatever. But I also think there's a place for you to be able to do essentially L.M. powered search where you just chuck the whole transcript into the context window and let the person ask a question. And it finds the part, you know what I mean? So for one episode, that's easy. Yeah. Doing it on device, doing that on the iPhone, the context window is only 4,000 tokens. So it's pretty tough. Yeah. All right. Well, that's what I was asking about private account compute. If you could just chuck the whole thing up to a cloud model. And I feel like it would fit in the context window of a big cloud model. It would absolutely fit. If I wanted to offer that with a big cloud model through an API, I could offer that that way. Yeah, bring your own API key or whatever. That's great. That's gross. I would just-- I would find out, but I'd do it cheaply. That's-- I would see-- what can I do for nothing or for near nothing? A lot of this-- I mean, first of all, API calls-- costs for high-end models are only going down over time. And it's only going to continue. And what I'm asking for is not that complex. Like this wouldn't require like a really high-end like thinking a logic reasoning model. Like it wouldn't require that level. - Yeah, but you could run this, like you could run this on your Mac minis with some like open weights like Lama model thing 'cause you're really just doing fuzzy year full text search essentially, you know? And I'm not saying you should do this first. You should just do plain full text first search first 'cause no AI, no anything, just full text search when people type in words and you match and blah, blah, blah. But because it is just text, any kind of remotely reasonable, small LLM powered thing that you can fit the transcript into the context window and then just ask questions about it and get a timestamp out of it. That would be amazing because as someone who spends a surprising amount of time searching for transcripts like when I tried to find the year. To quote that I just read about the AirPods Pro Max thing, I foolishly didn't put that information in the reminder. So I'm like, oh, sometime in the past, if we talked about AirPod's Max. - Yeah, exactly. - And Marco said something and I said something and I had to go find that. Just a little bit, just a little tiny bit of fuzziness helps. It goes a long way because, and especially for like, the transcripts gonna get AirPods Max is gonna get AirPods said, no, that's I guess Air and Pod's are two words and you have to think about sound likes and stuff. And so I do think any little bit you can do to help pass the sort of very simple full text, you know, non-AI full text search will really make this feature more powerful. - Yeah, and I think like that's something to look at like in time as all these things get cheap and I can run more of them locally. Like, one limitation is that all these Mac minis are just the end of the base model. They're the 16 gig of RAM base model. So there's only so much I can do on device when you start talking about bigger models. That being said, there's nothing stopping me from, say, adding a couple of high RAM Mac studios to this and then they would take on a certain type of job. Like I could do that. - What do you think Apple is using first transcripts that they're using their M2 Ultra-based servers? - Probably, yeah, 'cause whatever Apple podcast is doing, yeah, or they could, they might have also done the same calculation and figured it's actually cheaper. Just do a whole bunch of base Mac minis. 'Cause it is. Like when you look at like number of transcription minutes per minute that you can get on the base model Mac many versus if you get like the highest end M4 max, or I guess it's an M4 pro in the Mac many. So the highest end M4 pro, it's not twice, it's, I think it's like, it's about twice as much at the most, but it's like four times the cost. So it's not worth it. - I have to imagine that they're using AWS. - Yes, they're using their transcriptions with probably with parakeet miles, but I don't know. Someone from Apple right in tell us, are you actually using Macs to do podcast transcription or is this all farmed out to AWS? - I mean with Apple, it could go either way. 'Cause they have different deals than you would get with AWS in terms of pricing. - Yeah, of course. Going through any, like doing all of this, like any answer to the begins was, why don't you just, like why don't you just use AWS? Why don't you just use opening, whatever it is like? - Well, I just asked if you had priced it out. I think what you ended up doing is for thousands of dollars a day. - That's what that costs. - Well, and you would also have to learn an entirely different set of things than you learned for this project. - True, yes. And one thing I also really like about the way I've built this, I can run all the same code that I've already written. So first of all, there's an advantage of Apple's APIs are really good for all of this stuff. So for example, the music detection I'm doing, that's using Apple's built in audio classifier. It can do stuff like detectives like when dogs are barking. Like, you know, I'm not using that part of it, but I could. That's all just really easy. It's using platforms and languages, tools, and all of these things that I'm already familiar with. They already I'm using, I'm already deploying. I'm already like in it. In this case, running these transcripts is using overcast code. The same code is running on the servers and in the app. I only write that code once. I'm able to use Swift instead of like PHP or whatever else I would use on the server. There's all sorts of benefits to having this just be one code base. And like as I am, as I'm getting older in my career and as the world is getting more and more like, there's more and more in the tech business. No one can keep track of all of it. There's high value in specializing. And so in my case, if I can write really good Swift code, or if I mean to the extent that we're still writing code in a few years, who knows. But like if I can write really good Swift code, and I'm really familiar with Apple's platforms and Apple's APIs and Apple's like infrastructure and how to run all that stuff, it's easier for me to become an expert in that and to keep that up to date rather than like, I'm already falling way behind on my Linux server side knowledge. Just because I don't do that much for anymore. I obviously I still run a lot of servers for overcast, but like, they're not changing that much. I'm not getting a bunch of new ones at the time. I'm not keeping up with like all the most modern like, tool kits and things that everyone's using these days. So specialization is, I think, is high value to me. The fact that I can just run, like, I can do all this cool stuff, using Apple's tools and using the languages I already know and everything I run on the server can run on the phone. That's amazing. And then down the road, if I'm still running overcast in 10 more years, at that point, the phones will be so fast, I won't need these Mac menus anymore. My guess is I will probably never replace these. By the time there would be like a major upgrade in performance that would be worth replacing M4s, I don't even know if I'll need these anymore. 'Cause the phones will be so fast, they might be able to do everything on device and there might be no reason to have all this work farmed out to these Mac menus. - Then you need a coordinate server so that it knows, this person A has already started transcribing the latest episode of the daily, so everybody else just hauled off and wait for that, don't bother burning your batteries. Maybe you'll have two people do it, just as a backup or three. - Yeah, I mean, right now, I already have that infrastructure in place. Like, right now, the code is already there for the iPhone app to be a transcript worker. I'm just not activating that because there's not much that an iPhone can do in like the, like there's a type of background process. There's a type of background refresh task. Not the one that was introduced in iOS 26 where you can like do the Final Cut-A-Cut with live activity, not that. There's a previous one called a background processing task and you can request the system, wake up your app in the background and give you a block of like high CPU time when it is charging. So that way you can burn some battery power and it's not like you're not like doing a disservice to the user 'cause it's charging. So usually that'll run like, when your phone is charging overnight. So I could use that time while like everyone's phones to do some work. I'm not because that kind of feels a little wrong 'cause that kind of feels like I'm stealing resources from people and the amount of work you can get done on an iPhone in that time slice, they give you like three minutes or something. It's not enough to even transcribe one episode of most things. So I'm doing all this work myself. But in five or 10 years, when the phones are a lot faster, some of that math changes. Maybe I can just do all of the work during people's overnight charging if I wake up everyone's phone for one minute and again, they can all do all the work. Like maybe, I don't know, maybe people can opt into it. I have no idea. But keeping all the code in Swift in the iOS code base or at least compatible with the iOS code base, even if I never do that scheme that it still allows me to do things like you can on demand, hit the transcribe button and transcribe a podcast I didn't get to yet or that I won't get to. So there's all sorts of benefits to doing it this way. So anyway, that's it. - I'm looking forward to you reinventing BitTorrent when you go the route of having all these phones do like a minute worth of transcription at a time. I can just see it now. - I wasn't thinking of using them as like a transcription farm but rather instead like on demand, you know, because obviously the phone is already downloading an episode because you subscribe to a particular podcast, the RSS feed updates, the new episode downloads, all that stuff happens on people's phones. And it's happening because they, you know, it's not like, oh, someone's using my phone to download podcasts. No, it's because you subscribe to it. Like you control that. The user subscribes to a podcast and they want it to download the latest episode when it comes out so that when they open overcast and hit play, the episode is hopefully already there. That's already happening. I feel like part of that process could be, oh, and in addition to me downloading the episode, I'll also transcribe it for you or queue it up to transcribe it as soon as the overcast is in the foreground or whatever. And I was saying in that type of scenario, you don't want 70,000 people transcribing the new episode of the daily, right? When it comes out because it's just a waste for all those phones through doing the same work, but rather you just pick, well, these 10, everyone who wants to do it talks to a coordinate server and says, hey, I'm about to transcribe this episode. Are there any other phones out there already transcribing because there is, I'll just wait for the, they're done because they'll transcribe, they'll upload the text and I'll download the text. You know, that type of sort of energy saving type thing, but yeah, that's definitely down the road when you have the computing power to do that, basically with the consent that it currently downloads. You know what I mean? It's downloading because they subscribed. I think people will be fine saying, and also when you download an episode from me, transcribe it too. And they don't care how it happens. They just don't want it to hurt their battery. They just want it to magically be there. And it's not really possible to do that now, but like you said, in a few years, I feel like if you did that, that would, People would accept that perfectly. They would accept it the same way they accept the fact that overcast download of the episode for them. - Right, exactly. And there's already, right now I'm already doing what I can to share work where appropriate. So like, for instance, the signature, the audio signature that like analyzes the audio and tries to line up with DAI. That is the same if the copy of the file you have is the same. It's a little bit heavy. It runs at like 600X or so real time. So it might take a couple of minutes or it might take a minute for a podcast episode or something. And that does run on the phone. And it has to, because like the phone knows what it downloaded. I don't know what the phone downloaded. - Do you do a content hash before you even bother on the signature? Just to see if it's literally the same file or do you not bother? - Yes. So first, I do like basically an empty five. - Do you get the deprecation warnings from the stupid empty five library yawning at you that it's a broken algorithm and you don't care? - It is, I think it's one of the shop families but it's one of the fast shop ones. - Okay. - I'm still using empty five. And I know there's a way to change it. You can use a different API to get it the same thing but different APIs slightly slower. And I'm like, screw you, I'm just gonna use this API forever. Anyway, go ahead. - Yeah, anyway. So yeah, I first do like a file hash just to see, and then I go to the server. And I say, do you have this signature for this file hash? - Right. - So everyone who downloads ATP since we don't use dynamic ad insertion, only one person is ever gonna generate that signature. And it's probably gonna be the transcript server. Servers that do it. 'Cause they're also embedding the signature that they get in the transcripts. So for podcasts that don't use DAI, the phones don't have to do this work at all. - You need to add a button to the ATP CMS that I can click that forces immediate transcription of the latest ATP episode. - We don't need to. It's a popular podcast on overcast, so it'll be prioritized. - I know you have the ping feeds API that people use, I was asking for the equivalent of that for transcription. - Yeah, well, no. (laughs) It's not gonna happen. - Not a public one, just for us. - No, I don't need to. All right, we'll see. - Yeah. - Or you can download the episode onto your phone and transcribe it for everybody. (laughs) But yeah, so the signature thing, yeah, it checks the, it has to the file first and in the fast way. Ask the server, "Hey, do we know what the signature of this hash is yet?" For most podcasts, most of the time, they'll have that. The only reason you would have to transcribe, you would have to use the signature yourself, or generate yourself, is if the version of the file that you got has different ads than anybody else has gotten, then your phone will generate the signature for that hash and submit it to the servers. So I am doing work sharing as much as possible there. So the work for the signatures isn't being duplicated. The work for the transcripts isn't being duplicated, but it still has to happen sometime, but yeah, usually you're not facing that on your phone. - So if I get a copy of 99.pi that's got local Richmond ads and nobody else has seen these ads yet, how are you making the transcript from that? Like are you uploading my MP3 to your server to turn on it? - Oh God no. No, I mean, that would be impossible. So in that context, what would happen is your phone would download the transcript that overcast already has for that episode. The transcript would be, as you mentioned, prefer like a different set of ads that was injected in the copy that my server's got. And your phone would generate its signature for the file it has. And then it would look at its signature and the transcript signature and it would like find the common ranges between them, like where it's so basically like whatever is not different between the two copies, it finds those, aligns the server side transcript to those on your local copy, and then any ranges in your local copy that were not on the server copy, it just doesn't transcribe those. You'll see gaps in the transcript with like an ellipsis there, which I believe is the same thing that Apple podcasts those on their transcripts. Anyway, so your phone is doing the bare minimum work it needs to do to figure out what audio was it served and then how does it line up the transcript to that audio? - Gotcha. - You do a local transcription of just the ads. - I could, I mean, why? - Responsored by True Leaf iced tea or whatever it is. - Save that over and over. - So I'm just so glad I don't listen to shows that the dynamic ad in search 'cause I hear everyone talking about it and I guess I've heard a few of them and it's not great, but yeah. - Yeah, I sign up for the Verge's paid thing which has ad-free podcasts finally, thank God. - But they still have the ad bumper, so it's weird. I mean, I know we have the ad bumpers too, but I feel like it's incorporated in a way that you wouldn't know. It just sounds like a segment break, but their thing totally sounds like places where ad should go. I'm also a Verge subscriber. - Yeah, like I have like the paid search engine podcast one and their ad bumper is like 45 seconds long. - It's huge musical size. I have to skip forward past it every time. But I've been, even though I have the Verge membership, I've been still keeping the Verge cast public feed so I could test how my transcripts handle DAI and I've heard the same ad so many times between that and Trevor Noah is probably the biggest, like the most popular podcast I've probably listened to, I think. And that of course is full of DAI. Like all the big shows are full of DAI and I'm kind of looking forward to having this finally out there and having this signature stuff be I think done so I can stop listening to all these ads and just go back to the membership versions. - One final quick feature request for the olds in the audience, you need to make that text bigger, or at least an option to make a text bigger on the transcripts and also make the margins fatter. - It is following the body text size that you set. So it scales up with dynamic text. - There needs to be a separate setting for that. I mean, I think just I'm thinking of like the lyrics and Apple music, how huge they are. I'd be happy if they were that big, but I understand music lyrics tend to be shorter than podcasts. So maybe there's some limits there, but my old eyes say, "Why is this text so small?" And also maybe do bolds for the current section instead of regular for the current section and faded gray for the other ones. Anyway, those are my two quick feature requests. - Yeah, the UI for it is very much like a 1.0 version of this UI. And bold the current words since you have that info, you know, the whole day. - Well, I wasn't, the reason I didn't do bold is that bold causes the text to change width and therefore reflow. - There's no San Francisco variant that doesn't do that. Actually, I don't know if that-- - I mean, obviously there's monospacenum rules, but I do wonder if there's a variant that does not change metrics when you bold it. - I don't think so. - Well, then you can check. Then just change the color of the current word. 'Cause you got the info, that was, that really helped like the read-along type thing of seeing the word like the little blue word or whatever color you make up. Bup, bup, bup, bup, that'll be great. - Yeah, and like, and what Apple does with their transcripts is they, like the whole thing, it's almost like the genie, or the, what's the zoom effect on the dock when you hover over things in it? - Scale. - Well those genie. - Genie is when the minimized window comes out and a little bit of a cello. - Oh, sorry, yes, yes, yes, yes, sorry. - Magnification is what you're thinking of when the icon's getting bigger. - Like, yeah, when you scroll your cursor over the dock icons and the one you're on, grows up in size and the other one shrinks around it, yeah. They do that with their transcript text. So the current line of the transcript is bigger and bolder and the rest kind of like fade into smallness and into the sides. - Yeah, that's not great. - It does solve some problems. I think creates others. But, you know, so I will play with the UI. There's a lot of iteration to be had here, but gotta start somewhere. - Oh, this looks incredible. You should be very proud. I know this was a lot of work. - I can't believe you're announcing it when it's beta though because now everyone's like, when is this gonna be released? - Yeah, that's true. - Well, the good thing is, like, I, so I mean, honestly, it's a big enough deal. I consider it skipping the beta and just going directly to the public. - Not a good idea. - Yeah, I realize that was not. - I know you're anxious to get it out. - Yeah. - But I don't, honestly, I don't expect this to be in beta for very long 'cause my goal here is not to revamp the whole feature with beta feedback. My goal here is make sure it works to the level, like to the 1.0 level and then get it to everybody. So we will see. - All right, you said it would be half an hour. It was 70, 82 minutes. - That's it. - Pretty accurate if you add the Marco multiplication factor. - Yeah, that's true. - I mean, I thought I was gonna have this done by the fall. So, you know. (laughing) - There. - Thanks to our sponsors this week. One password, Zapier and Lisa. And thanks to our members for supporting us directly. You can join us at ATV.fm/join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP over time, our weekly bonus topic. This week and over time, we're gonna be talking about goals and features and the future of liquid glass in Apple's 27 series OSs coming out this summer and fall. That'll be fun. I'm looking forward to that. There've been a couple of rumors recently on that. So we will talk about that in over time. ATV.fm/join to join us to hear that. Thank you so much everybody. We'll talk to you next week. (upbeat music) ♪ Now the show is over ♪ ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪ ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪ ♪ Or it was accidental ♪ ♪ John didn't do any research ♪ ♪ Mark, go and Casey wouldn't let him ♪ ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪ ♪ It was accidental ♪ ♪ And you can find the show notes at ATV.fm ♪ ♪ And if you're into Mastodon ♪ ♪ You can follow them ♪ ♪ At C-A-S-E-Y-L ♪ I.S.S.S. that's Casey Miss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, anti-Marco armman, S-I-R, A-C, U-S-S-S-I-R-Q-S, It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to accidental. Accidental. Check. I guess so. All right. So there is new news that broke. It was spoiled. I think yesterday's we record and is officially news. I believe today the BMW i3 reveal has happened. This is not the little. Neenie, Neenie, Neenie, Neenie car. Yeah, not this car. So the sound of banks. Yep. That's that. That's right. I will only one the range extenders on. No, actually the the the old BMW i3 was before EVs were required to make all those noises. So it actually makes no noise. No. In any case, the i3 has been announced. So this is the noia class or something like that. I'm sorry, Germans. That is basically let's make an EV from the ground up rather than taking the petrol cars, the gasoline cars and retrofitting an EV into them. Even though I mean again, I'm a apologist for the i4 because I thought it was incredible. But this is from the ground up. Let's make an EV. And so reading from a couple of sites starting with the verge of Sebastian Crows, BMW's head of interior design for the noia class cars told me that the i3 was designed with an emphasis on verticality to make it look taller. The i3 on the other hand has an emphasis on a horizontality. I don't think I'm pronouncing that as works right. I don't think there were either, but I'm doing the best I can. If you're a German designer, it is. Yeah, this is design ease. Yeah. More, most directly seen in the series of lights that span virtually the sedan's entire nose. The company hasn't quoted a formal capacity for the i3, but I'd expected to fall somewhere around the 109 kilowatt hour usable battery capacity of the ix3 SUV. And for what BMW says is 440 miles on a charge and 400 kilowatt charging should mean that adding over 200 miles of range happens in about 10 minutes. Neither of the two motors in this car uses permanent magnets, which has a few advantages. First, you'll find no rare earths here. Secondly, the i3 can disable its motors in coast without needing a disconnect system, unlike the Mercedes, which apparently does. From our technical weight distribution is close to 5050 with a low center of gravity. Thanks to the battery pack and torque delivery is rear biased out of corners and under regenerative braking, the rear axle regents more than the front at first to stabilize the car. So technology wise, this looks really, really good. Like this looks incredibly impressive. Visually, I'm not as convinced. So to my eyes, the profile is excellent. The front is a vast improvement from the pig nose of the i4. You know, when I told you I loved the i4, I said that while just ignoring the fact that the kidneys took up the entire front of the car, this is better. It's a little weird, but it's better. I don't think I like the back at all. In the interior, I am not here for the vertical braces on the steering wheel. You're just going to have to see to understand. And I'm not here for the trapezoidal center screen thing. However, on the whole, this looks really good. Well, you mentioned this being this being spoiled yesterday or whatever. Well, the way BMW has rolled this out has been, I mean, obviously they had the original, like concept cars, the noia class of whatever, however many years ago those came out. And then obviously the IX 3 is out and you can buy and is the first car on this platform, although it's not a sedan, obviously, but this car, this exact car, the I3, they've been doing the thing for, I think, maybe a year, at least six months or so, where they've been allowing journalists to see and show the car, quote, unquote, disguised. And if you're in the car world, you know the normal way you disguise cars is you put a bunch of things on the car that use like black and white, like dazzle camouflage, but it's just all sorts of weird, swirly, black and white patterns to make it so you can't get a read for what shape the car really is. Often they'll be kind of like a bra over the front and rear. So you can't see what the front grill looks like. And sometimes they put other panels on it of like cardboard or wood or whatever to just hide the shape of the car. But this car, the I3 has been shown to journalists with essentially a wrap on it, meaning like if you put a red wrap on your car, people think your car is painted red, just a complete, just a wrap. And but instead of the wrap being red, the wrap is dazzle camel. So it's like, how much of this car are you hiding when you just essentially put a wrap on it? Where you can see the whole car and yet maybe a little bit harder to see what shape it is, but there's the car. There's nothing disguising it except for an ugly paint job, essentially. But still I was holding out hope that when I saw the finished version of it, it would not be as homely as the camel-flogged cars they've been showing to the press. I mean, they would let them drive them in the snow and do all this stuff, but that's the car. And anyway, there's not much that can be done to save this. I was hoping that they could deemphasize those giant, you know, headlights on the front with styling that was not apparent with the wrap on it. But nope, they're there. They're big. I don't like them. And also in general, even though they said this car emphasized horizontality or whatever, it looks tall, especially compared to the existing I4, I think the existing I4, like, did they make a coupe of this? Whatever, whatever I for, I've seen in the room, I've taken pictures of it before. The current I4 body shape and back looks so good and so just really does. It's pretty and athletic and nice. And then you get to the front and it's got big b-retches. I understand that. I'm not a fan of the front. But if you never see the front, you just see it from the side and the back, it looks amazing. This car looks tall and squat from the side. This car has ugly tail lights and an ugly rear and this car's front, I think, is not actually an improvement over the buck teeth. It's just ugly in a different way. You are so wrong, sir. As for Casey's steering wheel, the video doesn't like. I think I posted this on our little Slack channel. I think if you get the M-sport steering wheel, those spokes are hard. I've put a picture over into our Slack. Those spokes are horizontal and that vertical, which helps it a little bit. But I am also dubious about the comfort of this steering wheel. Because of the way that they've, it's not like a tube around it. They've really done these big cutouts and like these strange sort of, you have to look to see it. It's a strange steering wheel. I'll give them credit for making the squircle a little bit more earthly than squirr. I mean, it's not a circle because you can't put circles on car wheels anymore because it's against the law. But it's not as bad as like say the car vet wheel, which is just really weird hexagon thing. I do like that they've updated their architecture. This is basically the same thing. Same architecture as the IX3. So it's good. I think they went to 800, vault with this. So I'm sure it'll be a great car, but just the styling problems happening over there in Germany continue to be dire. I mean, not all in Germany's. I feel like Porsche styling has still been pretty good. And mostly on board with the Mercedes styling and BMW styling. They've been, they've been in a rut for what? Two or three decades now. I don't think it's near as bad. Certainly this doesn't look near as bad to me as it does to you. And I don't think it's been two decades. It's probably been one ish. No, no, you start with the bangle, but that's the 90s, right? Or is that 2000? No, that was early to mid 2000s, I believe. And even, I don't know. And it wasn't all of the cars. It was some of the cars. I don't know. Like the three series has mostly been good with like the the 90 that I had was good. The F10 was most or no, that's the five series is an F30 is one I'm thinking of. A 30 was all right. And then it got ugly after that. We just didn't know what was going to happen. So you look back at me after you like, wow, that was nice. That's fair. And it's got dumb store handle. It's got basically Tesla door handles in 2026, 2027. Model year, you're going to do Tesla. They're not exactly the same because there is a mechanical pull on them, I believe. But I think they might still have to redo them for China. You know, we did that story about China banning electronic door handles. I think they might still have to redo them for China just because the electronic mechanism makes it come out like the Model S handles. So it doesn't matter that there's a mechanical pull. If you can't actually get your fingers behind the thing because they made it like why? Why? As you noted, Casey, the I4 has flush door handles that you just put your fingers under and pull. And I don't even know if those are mechanical. Most of them are metal, what do you call the electronic switches? But the point is they could be mechanical because you don't need anything to happen. You just walk up to the car, stick your fingers underneath the handle and pull. Like it's I sent you the video of like the Honda Prelude thing. Whatever that was like 1990 500 prelude flush door handles, 100% mechanical. You just put your fingers underneath it and you pull on the door opens. But no, not on the BMW i3. They have to electronically come out like it's 2012 and you're a Model S. So dumb with the exception of the door handles. I think both the IX 3 and the new I3 look probably like incredible cars. Like, yeah, I agree. Yeah, I think these are going to be hits. I think they're good cars. I just don't like the styling and I don't like the shape of the steering wheel. I also don't like the trapezoid screen. But I do like the the like distant dashboard that stripe thing. I think that's actually a good. I lots of other cars have done that. I mean, Toyota Prius famously started this trend, I think, of like putting things farther away than you think they would be. And I think it does work. Yeah. And it might be a little tight in the backseat. I have to wait to see some of the tall YouTubers get into this thing. But it's nice that they updated their platform. I think they have a bright future because they're there. As you've noted with the I4, their previous platform, which was hacked into their gas car platform was already pretty good. And presumably they've learned things since then. So I think this car will be a great car as long as you can, you know, stay inside it. So you don't have to see the outside. Honestly, I the the I3 looks incredible to me overall. Like, I don't share how much you hate it. I think it looks great. And I would be very happy to drive that car around. I think the like as I think of like, you know, but my next car be like my current lease is, you know, it has about a year and a half. on it, I think I'm going to look very hard at the I3 and the IX3. The I3, it still doesn't have a hatchback, right? Isn't it still like a regular trunk? Although they apparently showed a touring version which to us is a wagon. Probably not going to be in this country. Yeah, probably not a few. But it will exist somewhere allegedly. Yeah, they always get better models in Europe. But yeah, like I, the the IX3 looks just smaller and sleeker enough compared to my IX that it might be nice. But it still has like the utility of the the big liftback trunk. Which I do like and use all the time. I think even though I would love to have like one of these regular sedan I3s to drive around most of the time, I think I would really hate not having a liftback trunk now because I got so like ever since the model less like I'm so spoiled by having the big trunk opening. It's so useful. It's so good. I don't think I can really have a car without it anymore. And I'm hoping that like whatever the next gen of the I4, maybe we start to see what that starts to look like because that could be a good future car for me as well. But I think this thing looks great. Yeah, I don't know why more people don't copy what Tesla did with the S just like the lift back on a sedan is such a good idea. Everyone should be doing it. I think who does it? Audi does Audi. Audi does it. Portia has well they have the weird ugly Tykon with the way I think. The I4 was the I4 was a liftback because it's an I4 grand coupe. I think they mostly do it as an NVH like it's harder to like isolate the cabin and people want to like drink our on yada yada but it can be done. I just think people more people should copy it. Yeah, it's a massive advantage. It's all copy the door handles copy the lift back. Right, exactly.