707: Haunting the Campus Like a Ghost

0:00Okay, so you have caught us in the middle of doing our annual donations to St. Jude which we'll talk more about in a moment. But this is the time when the three of us get cranky at each other because we all not outbid but outbid each other in making our donations to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. I am ready to, oh no, I'd have to continue to donate. Some of us forgot to prepare for this. Yeah, well that's some of us, some of us is me. I'm the problem, it's me. That's a fish song, right? Yes. Let's go with that. So, Apple Pay, let's do Apple Pay. Is that going to work? We're going to go forward. Actually, so that's one thing I, since I've been on Chrome, Chrome doesn't offer Apple Pay for web forms. I don't know if that's something I've missed set or just what it just does limitation. But I kind of don't miss it because shop pay, link, and Google Wallet Pay, whatever, are so much more reliable and faster to do. Like Apple Pay on the web, it always is like, what's your shipping address? I don't know, I don't have an address for you.

1:00What's your credit? Oh, wrong credit card, I don't know. It's so, Apple Pay on the web is so reliable for me. But all these other ones work flawlessly and usually faster. Yeah, that's not surprising. All right, I am ready to hit complete donation. All right, me too. Marco, are you ready to go? Hit it. All right. Done. This is where I find out of my session timed out waiting for you to joker to go through this thing. Oh, John beat Marco by exactly $70. And I get both you fools. How about that? So, Tiff and Marco, $7,077, John, just Syracuse, $7,077, and Casey and Aaron List, $7,143. And three cents. Hey, you won this year. Congratulations. You were the first to you ever won, Casey. Look at that. And that's the exact same at the last year. So, look at this. I totally forgot what I did last year, but I just wanted to do lots of sevens and apparently so did Marco, but I added one more seven. Yeah, last year that all the sevens and you guys yelled at me, so I backed it off this year. So, what do you want? Like, we're not stopping you from donating more. It is nice for Casey to get a win once.

2:01This is Casey's first victory in the St. Jude blind donation off that we have every year. Although I will also say that I think my one best victory was when I had that weird issue with the ampersand or whatever it was that I think it was the first year we did this. But at asterisk. Yes, that's wrong. Oh, yeah. I thought I'd hit an ampersand. It probably was user error. I swear, I don't think it was. And logically it was user error. Casey star error. Yeah, yep. And then there were stars for all of the donate, well, not all. Yeah, every, every, every listen, it was like ATP star. Yep. It was incredible. And so my failure was really a win for the children. Yeah, I think this is the first year you won. Don't quote me on it. Maybe I'm wrong. I think we've been doing this for a while, but yeah. Hey, so it is September and I always forget to look up if this is a national thing or an international thing. For that, I apologize, but I can tell you at least here in America and potentially worldwide, it is childhood cancer awareness month. That is the month of September every single year.

3:01And because it's the month of September, because it's childhood cancer awareness month, and because we are all deeply associated with relay fam, we are joining relay fam in slash a part of it. Anyways, we are trying to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. So St. Jude is a research hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and its business is saving the lives of children. And what's really incredible about this is that we are in our eighth year as the relay community coming together in September for St. Jude. Here's the thing when they opened, before they opened 1962, childhood cancer was considered incurable. Just tough knots. Your, your, your child's going to pass away. Sorry about that. Today, thanks in part to better therapies that St. Jude has helped develop more than 80% of us childhood cancer patients survive, which is incredible. St. Jude cares for some of the world's sickest children, regardless of their race, ethnicity, beliefs, or ability to pay. And it's because of people like you that that's possible. So for the last couple of years, I've been lucky enough to be a part of the podcast

4:05athon, which we typically did on iPhone release day. This year, we're doing it the first Friday in October, which is, I believe, the second of October from noon, ATP time until midnight, ATP time. And you can use that as an opportunity to watch me act like a dumb dumb. You can send money, St. Jude's way, but you can also do that right now. And you heard in the pre show that three of us did our annual donations. We do this because St. Jude is that important to us. And we feel that strongly about it. So between the three of us, based on John's quick arithmetic, $21,228.57 to the wonderful people at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. So as I was saying, I've been able to go for the last couple of years. I think this is going to be my third podcastathon if I'm not mistaken. And I got to tell you that you can imagine what St. Jude is like before you go, but actually being there is truly awe-inspiring. And the amount that St. Jude as an organization cares about their patients, cares about trying

5:09to cure cancer in children. It's astonishing. And everything that everyone does at St. Jude is with that unitary, I don't know if that's what I'm looking for, but that's a specific mission in mind. And I told this story on analog this week and forgive me, but I'm going to tell it again here. When I went for a influencer thing a couple of years ago in April of 2024, they took us to the pavilion, which is this building where they have the history of St. Jude and talk about their founders, Danny Thomas and his wife. And they had this like not cork board, but think of it as a cork board, and it said on it, what inspires you? And they had these blank post-it notes that had already written on it, so I guess they're not blank, you know what I mean? Already written on it says, it says, I went to St. Jude and was inspired by ellipsis. And there's all of these post-its on this board, right? And I talked about this on my blog post a couple of years ago, but on this board, I noticed a couple that were really striking to me. And it says, and it's clearly like a young adult or adult handwriting. It says, I went to St. Jude and I was inspired by the lives they saved, including mine.

6:14If that doesn't hit you in the fields, give me one more chance. I looked over and I saw another post-it and the handwriting was clearly a child's handwriting. And it says, I went to St. Jude and I was inspired by the fact that I will make it. And there's a little heart drawn under it. I saw this two years ago, I've thought about this so often since and I'm getting a little bit choked up because that's how incredible this place is. I wish I was a good enough actor to do that on cue, I'm not. St. Jude is a real deal. And yet stinks that we need St. Jude, that we haven't solved all these problems already, but we have. And it's important to note that St. Jude, their research doesn't stay in America and their influence doesn't stay in America. So you might rightfully think, hey, I'm in Europe or in Africa or something like that, why do I care? Well, it's because of St. Jude and the research they do and the treatments that they come up with that it is possible for so many people worldwide, so many sick children worldwide

7:19to get through these unbelievably bad diagnoses. And as a final note from me and then I'll give the other two a chance to talk, our dear friends, Stephen Hackett, his oldest son, Josiah, was a St. Jude patient. That's how we got involved with it. And it's six months old Josiah was diagnosed with a really, really, gnarly brain cancer. And Josiah is, I think, 17 today or something like that. And Josiah is standing on this earth because of St. Jude. I'll say that one more time. Josiah is alive because of St. Jude. And if I can throw 5, 10, 15, 20, whatever dollars their way, then I'm going to do that. And I hope you will too. Now Marko, we are coming up very quickly. We'll talk about this later on a time where a lot of us really enjoy participating in just unadulterated consumerism. If one were to feel slightly guilty about what could you do to, I don't know, maybe offset that a little bit. I have big news this year. The Marko offset is expanding.

8:21Oh, tell me more. Years ago, I developed in public on this show, The Marko Offset, which was the way that you can assuage some of your guilt about what is probably coming up in, you know, a week-ish, the iPhone event, and a fall full of new product launches. We all have phones that work for the most part. Like, most people hearing this, you have a phone and it probably works. And you probably want to replace it, especially once you see the new phone that's coming out. Like, it's going to be awesome, especially the one that folds in half probably. Like, you know, you're going to want that. It's going to cost a huge amount of money. Now, originally, I said years ago to help us wage your consumer guilt that you're about to buy products that maybe you don't necessarily need or that you could get a lower end one or you could make the one you have last another year or two before you upgrade, you can assuage your consumer guilt by simply taking all the extra money that you spend on top of your iPhone or Mac or whatever purchase above the base price and donating an equivalent

9:27amount to St. Jude in this campaign. So that would include things like storage upgrades, Apple Care, the case, you know, all that stuff that you might add on. So whatever the base price of the phone was, I said, if it's like, you know, a phone that starts at $9.99 for that product line and you get one all in with tax and Apple Care and everything, you're up to like $1,200 bucks, then take that $200 extra and donate another $200 to St. Jude because the theory was you can probably spare that little extra bit. You just tacked it on at the end there. You can probably spare that and give it to St. Jude and we encourage you to do if you could to do that. This year, the two expanded to a level two and a level three. Oh, this is something I hand to God. No, nothing about it. I'm genuinely very excited. I got a comment I mastered on a couple days ago from user John Mullins. I'm not sure John Mullins was entirely serious. I'm also not sure, not entirely sure John Mullins wasn't mad at me. But what this user suggested is that basically that I should feel guilty about my use of AI.

10:32And I know a lot of people out there would agree with that statement. And what John said was, especially with the St. Jude's campaign coming up, or $100 can make a huge difference. We did the Marco Offset as well as a Max AI Offset where people donate the same amount that they paid for AI costs this month. Oh, that's very good. That's very good. What I am now declaring is the Marco Offset has levels two and three. Level one is still the baseline. So when you buy an iPhone that maybe you don't necessarily fully need and when you get the really nice one that maybe you don't fully need and when you get the nice storage upgrade and the fancy case and all that stuff, that's still the base of the Marco Offset. And level two is that you add onto that whatever you spent on AI this month. Level three above that whatever you spent on AI this year. This is very good. I fully endorse this. The $20 a month plan for the one of the air providers. You know, you're in for, you know, 240 bucks for the year.

11:34If you're on the $100 a month plan, you're on, you're up for a little bit more maybe. So those are the three levels. Level one is what it's always been. The iPhone price delta level two is you add on your AI cost this month. If you bought any AI and level three is you add on your AI cost for the year. And that should be your suggested minimum Saint Jude donation if you can swing it. Now these are wonderful ways to assuage us of things that maybe we feel a little guilty about in some way to do something good with with some extra money. And as Casey was saying, it's an amazing organization. They do amazing work. And we talk about it every year and you might like get used to it after a while. You might think like, yeah, I've heard the pitch. Yeah, I know they cure a bunch of childhood cancer. They treat a bunch of childhood cancer and no one pays for it. Like none of their patients or their families pay a dime, including things like lodging and travel and all the care around it. And you might get tired of hearing that every year.

12:35And you might stop for a moment understanding how amazing that is. But every one of those statements like, that's a huge deal. It's a remarkable achievement. It is a huge amount of work. It's a huge amount of money. And the impact they have on not only the patients and the patients families, but the entire world of cancer research brought there on the world, as Casey was saying, it's just a massive impact. So this is not to be forgotten or taken lightly. They really do incredible work. And it's a really great place to donate money to. So please consider one of the Markle Offsets or more if you want. If you can swing it, this is a good way of swing it. Absolutely. Yeah, it's worth reiterating, like you mentioned, the knowing it's a bill. It's not like there are certain patients that pay for it and certain patients that don't like college where some people pay tuition. So we'll get scholarships. Nobody pays for it. None of the patients that ever pay a dime for anything.

13:36And how do they do that? How does an organization treat people for cancer at great expense, paying all the doctors and scientists and all the hospitals? Like how do they do that? All of their money comes from people giving it and donation drives like this. As I've said before, is this the best system for providing health there? No. But it's what we have. And if you can help, if you're going to put your money towards helping some kids to drive cancer, it's a great use of it. And I would also recommend, as I always do, to perhaps start thinking of yourself as a person who gives to charity, especially if you didn't think of yourself that way in years past, maybe you were a college student, maybe you were young, adult and broken didn't have a lot of money, but maybe you're later in life now and you do have a little of money. Once you start changing your mindset and actually start budgeting this, like, you know, this, my donation is part of my annual budget. Like there are other things that can move and change. And maybe I spend a little more on this and let a less on that. But this donation remains a fixed percentage or a fixed amount or whatever. Like I planned for this during the year and it took me a long time to come around

14:37to it. Like, oh, is it just like a magnanimous, wonderful thing I do every year? Or is it just, no, this is just part of your annual expenses? Because it's a good thing to do. And you know, once you reach a certain level of success and have a certain amount of savings in income and are comfortable enough, you should start looking outwards and say, what can I do to help other people? It doesn't have to be money. You can volunteer to other things, whatever, but one of the things you can do is give to St. Jude and young child cancer awareness month. Now is the time to do that. Try to start thinking of yourself as someone who does that as part of their normal life. It's, you'll benefit from it and the recipients of your money definitely will. Absolutely. And you know, you brought up a moment ago, what if you don't have a ton of money? Well, you can absolutely help St. Jude and other charities in other ways. You can set up your own fundraiser, like fundraiser of your own. That's kind of a child of the relay fundraiser and come up with your own little like milestones and stuff like that. And a lot of people have done this over the last couple of years with Relay and they've been very, very successful. You can also just ask a friend, you know, say, hey, you know, it would be really cool if

15:39you sent five, 10, 20 bucks to St. Jude or something like that. Find the friend who's spending $200 a month on I.I. and tell them about the hardwares at levels. Exactly. You use the guilt to your advantage. And like, and if you can't afford it, find like, but if you can give five bucks, give five bucks. Like if that's the level, you can do it every bit counts. Like this is the whole point of this pledge drive. The whole point of it being a big month is that a thousand people giving five bucks is $5,000. That's how math works. Yeah. I cannot reiterate what John said enough. Don't feel bad if it's $2, $5. That's awesome. Please do it. And also for those of you who are in the technology industry and maybe have employers that are conducive to doing this sort of thing, please check out as you donate that there's also options for employer match. This has gotten easier and easier to do during the donation process over the last year or two. So please check that out. And we will be talking about this for the remainder of the month. I won't go quite as long as it did today. But I wanted to do one quick final thing. I wanted to call out Guillaume Moran. I hope I got that close to right. Guillaume has been the leader for the last several years on the leaderboard for the largest

16:43donation. Again, $5 is great. Don't let me dissuade you. But I do want to recognize people who go above and beyond and Guillaume this year donated by themselves $12,718.28. And that is truly incredible. It makes our pitily donated inspires. Our donations seem pitily by comparison. But we still did it because it's important. So thank you to Guillaume. Thank you to all of you for even thinking about donating. And one more time, if you please stju.org slash atpstjudi.org slash atp. All right. We have something that's a little embarrassing to talk about, John. We made a bit of an oops. What happened? Do you know the reference in the show notes there before you watch the video? I certainly did not. I've seen like three episodes of Seinfeld in my entire channel. Marco, do you recognize it? I wasn't looking at the show notes all. Loseful me, Jerry. Bring any bells? No. But we'll put a link in the show notes. It's a Seinfeld reference. Trust me. Anyway, continue. Yeah.

17:44So we spoke last week about Daniel Loose's chart that they had noticed about how long it takes for different chips, different Apple chips to transcribe audio. And we all thought it was real. I personally thought, oh, I just didn't see wherever this came from. But this is clearly an honest to goodness, Apple chart. And Daniel wrote in to say, sorry, to be clear, that was fake. There's no audio transcription comparison on Apple's website. I mentioned just as an inside joke for fans of the show, not to trick you guys. I also almost made a chart comparing gaming performance on the M5 Ultra to the Mac Pro 2019 which of course CPU has another ridiculously specific comparison. That would have tipped me off. But honestly, the real tip off was the fact that it said long form audio transcription because Apple would never say long form audio transcription as audio transcription. There's no difference between long form and regular form. They just do a benchmark on how long does it take to describe X-Seconds of audio. So that should have been the giveaway. Our bad. Daniel was not trying to fool us. But he did. Yep. Whoops.

18:44Fold me, Jerry. Fold me. That's right. It's the clip. All right. And then also Apple kind of sort of fooled us all. Joe Roel's signal at Mac rumors writes, Apple's press release for the New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips last week initially stated that the computer had quote, next generation SSD architecture built on PCIe Gen 6 quote. However, Apple removed the PCIe 6 mention from the announcement shortly after it was published. Whoops, it upsies. Apple is yet to respond to our request for comment, but it seems like the company simply made a mistake. The police, as it is much more likely, that the New Mac Studio supports the PCIe 5.0 standard. What a wild mistake. I mean, we did say PCIe Gen 6 on the last episode, so we noted it. But like, is that a typo? Because the five is next to the six key. Did they plan to do PCIe 6 and then change their mind six months ago or a year ago? Like, wow. What a strange thing to get out of an oppressor list. But yeah, I mean, I think they basically just did the same thing. They say with all of them, like all the M5s, they always say. And the storage is faster than the M4.

19:44It's like, yeah, the M5 is the M5 things are faster than the M4 for reasons we went into when they first released all the M5 things. The studio, Mac Studio is surely the same, but I believe those were all PCIe 5. So it would be weird if the studio was PCIe Gen 6. When we get those into our hands, we can confirm this, but Apple made a little mistake there. It seems like. All right, John, can you remind me what is a Siri blob? If you're using golden gate on a Mac, you will know the Siri blob. Because you'll just be using your computer and your pointer will be over some text, a text field, or I think sometimes even like just static text that happens to be selectable. And all of a sudden, a tiny circular Siri blob, you know, the gray, new gray marble looking Siri, Siri orb that does a glowy thing inside it, that will appear floating next to where your pointer is. You're like, what the hell is that? And you'll move your cursor and it will disappear. And you'll see it again. You'll be just using your computer and then the blob will appear. You're like, what is that? It's like the Siri, like, click on this and it will help you write whatever you're about to write.

20:45But like, you're not even going to write, you haven't even placed the insertion point yet. It's just like, hey, is there some text near here that you might possibly be able to put your insertion point into? Here's a Siri blob. It's annoying. And last episode, we had some feedback about how to supposedly turn that off for two minutes before the show was on the air and I hadn't actually tried it. So now I have a more precise instructions on it to do it and I have some results of trying it. And then when you go into screen time and then content and privacy on that screen, there's an item called content and privacy with a toggle switch on it. You get to turn that switch on and then after you turn that switch on, scroll down on that same page, find the Siri line item, click into that and there you will see the thing that says writing assistance and you want to turn that switch off. And I tried this and it mostly banished the blobs, but I think not everywhere. Maybe like if an app was still running when I turn the switch off, like, put it this way, I'm seeing fewer blobs, but I'm not convinced that it turned it off entirely, but I have tried

21:49it. And again, we're only on beta eight. So maybe it's buggy or whatever. But I'll keep you updated in this because you may not care about the Siri blob now, but when you upgrade to Mac OS 27, you're going to care about the Siri blob. Yeah, they're everywhere. And in addition to the Siri menu item and context menus, oh, yeah, you can't get rid of that. Oh, geez, it's all over the place. Is it a little like, did you try the Siri blob fix, Mark? No, not yet. I have. Well, try it so that we can compare results because I think it has mostly banished them, but I think I've still seen one or two. You can't banish the one in the context menus. I think, so we can give Guillermo from last week, I think he looked into it and see if there was like some private API or private, not private, private, like internal Apple feature key or something to turn off. He couldn't find one. So I'm hoping somebody does or I'm hoping they backtrack on that. What we're talking about is that when you pull up a context menu and golden gate, there is like a new bar at the top of the pop up context menu for like, Hey, and you might want to do Siri stuff here. And maybe I would do it. Maybe I'd note, but I sure as hell don't want to see that on top of every single context menu that pops up. Yeah.

22:49All right. John, you are, I don't know how to introduce this. I totally believe screen. There's something I forgot to say last episode. The last episode of the max studios were introduced and I talked about what I was going to buy and what I had ended up ordering. Okay. And one thing I just simply forgot to say, which I think is important to note, is how happy I was that the max studios were introduced last week or whatever because I fully believed that they weren't going to be introduced until on October event and they weren't going to ship until December and I wouldn't have mine until 2027. And so for all my hamming and hawing and getting my tide me over, Mack and all that other stuff, I am extremely happy and relieved that they announced the new max studio in end of August beginning of September and not at a date where I wouldn't get one until January. So I just want to do express my gratitude there because that was my, that was honestly that was my overriding feeling when these things were announced. Like I cannot believe it. Like it's, it's the first good news I've had of Apple and so long. Like it's always like, oh, there's more delays and the new series not ready and ram costs

23:49more and storage horse, which is a big bad news after bad news for like the past year, especially for me because I'm waiting for a new computer. Oh, the Mac Pro's canceled. Oh, just bad, bad, bad. Finally, one thing went my way and I just wanted to acknowledge that a good thing happened that I was happy about it. And I am happy for you. Let's talk about a bad thing that might happen to me. Yes. So you had mentioned that you were planning or I guess you have bought a four terabyte SSD, which you're already bursting at the seams of your existing one and you had made a mention that, hey, maybe you'll move your photo library to an external SSD. Surely that will solve all your problems, right? Right? Got a lot of questions from people saying, can you do that? Can you put your photo library on an external disk in Apple photos? Does it allow you to do that? And so there are some answers. So first of all, from Apple, they have a document called a text board document called Move Your Photos Library to save space on your Mac. And the relevant text is make sure the directional storage device, such as the USB drive or a Thunderbolt drive, is formatted for Mac, either APFS, format or Mac OS Extended Journal

24:50format. And the published date on this is June 16th, 2026. So it's not an ancient document, okay? So they tell, and there's more to the document. They tell you, here's, make sure you do this, make sure you do that. Here's how you do it. Blah, blah, blah. So Apple seems to say that this is a support to configuration. Now Apple says a lot of things. And just because the techno says published June 16th, 2026, that could be an 8 year old techno that someone fixed a typo in in June. So I don't know. But then a lot, because lots of people like you can't do that at all, other people like I tried that and it didn't work. The most concrete thing I've seen a feedback on this so far is from Lawrence Feynman, who says, I use an external drive for my Photos Library on numerous desktop Intel Macs. It worked okay. This is no longer the case. Apple's enhanced spotlight based photo search only indexes the system photo library when stored on internal Mac storage, non-system libraries and any library on external storage are excluded from indexing. So this makes some sense to me because we talked about how like Apple intelligence wouldn't work if you booted Mac OS from an external drive. Not sensing that I understand the technical reason for it. We've speculated, but we don't actually know or I don't know anyway.

25:54But with like the not AI power, but anyway, the fancy or spotlight search where you can type in like pictures of fences in photos and it will find your pictures of fences. Supposedly, if you have your Photos Library on an external drive and it is your system photo library, you cannot use that search feature. Now, this is not a deal breaker to me because I have another computer two feet away from me that has the Photos Library on the main internal drive and I can do the search there if I really want to. I can also do the search on my phone where it also works somehow. If it really doesn't work on one of my Photos Library's external drive, I'm going to be annoyed and I'll probably file feedback to say, hey, what the hell make it work? I don't understand why this would be the case, but it is not a deal breaker. Otherwise, if it works on an external drive as Apple's document says it does, I'll be okay. By the way, I have the external drive, it's sitting on my desk right now. I plugged it in and tried it. It works fine. It's just sitting here waiting for my computer to arrive, hopefully on September 22nd. I actually have some additional info on this particular topic about Photos Library's on external drives because it just so happened by coincidence that this past week, I was

26:56finally tied... So, on my travel laptop, it has a one terabyte internal drive and because I'm an app developer, an Xcode keeps stomping all over the drive and dropping 80 gig directories everywhere and stuff like that. I ever since this beta season with Golden Gate, I keep running out of disk space. I have... I have a cloud of photos on there. My Photolibrary doesn't fit, obviously, but I just have it on Optimize Storage and it's just my travel laptop, who cares? A long time ago, I discovered that if you put your Photolibrary on a size console, it's a strange Sparks bundle file. Oh, yeah. You could do what Apple should have done years ago, which is you could give it a specific size limit because Optimize Storage does not mean you could choose a size limit. It means Apple tries to automatically determine the size limit. What this means in practice is you're constantly running out of disk space and you have no control

27:58over it. So, what I decided, the modern version of that, a little bit better than a Sparks bundle, is using an additional APFS volume because APFS allows you to split your internal drive into multiple volumes and they can be dynamically sized or you can tell one restricted to this size, which by the way, I learned that you can't do after you've created the volume. You have to delete the entire volume and everything on it and recreate the entire volume and move everything back to it if you actually want to change the size quota of it, which is ridiculous. But, anyway, speaking of changing sizes, by the way, I was doing the thing that you described earlier where you make a disk image and put your Photolibrary on it. For my, it's complicated because my wife has the real Photolibrary, so that's the one with the originals, but I have the same Photolibrary because everything is shared now. Anyway, on my personal account, I have Optimize Storage turned on because that's not the real copies of stuff, even though on the same computer, my wife's account is the all the permanent copies. Anyway, I was using a disk image and I picked a size for it.

28:59And I found out what happens if you pick a size that Photos decides, yeah, that's just not big enough for me because Photos will throw up a thing and say, yeah, I've been using this disk image, but I've just decided I'm not thinking anymore because there's not enough room. I'm like, well, you've got some stuff, man, it's Optimize Storage. I was like, no, I'm just not doing it. So I had to resize the image and I can tell you can resize a disk image unlike an APFS volume after the fact. So I expanded my disk image to be a little bit bigger. So that's the one, the one advantage, I think, of putting your Photolibrary on a confined disk image is that if an one photos throws up his hands and says, no, it's too small, I can't do anything anymore. You can't expand it to give him a breathing room because like Farger said, if you just give it unlimited space, it will fill your entire drive and you have no space for anything. Yeah. And there's all these features in Mac OS that have like, you know, a perjable disk space that try to be automatic and when you need space, we'll reclaim it for you. They don't work at all. Like I know they are awful. Every one of those features fails in multiple ways. Like the iCloud drive ones or the store your desktop and documents and iCloud drive.

30:01All that means is you will always be out of disk space and also none of the files you create will ever actually be there, including ones that you just created or we're just working with like everyone of those feets, like all those features are better off not being used or being somehow worked around the other ways. But anyway, this feature in particular of you can put your Photolibrary on another APFS volume that is size limited. So I did that. I gave it a 128 gig volume out of my terabyte because it was well into the 300s before that. I don't need that much on here. And anyway, 128Ks I can say is enough for it to sync. It is fine. It is just fine. However, this library isn't searchable in spot. I do do its location. So even another volume on your internal SSD, it won't do it even then. So John, A, this is our moment to be loud and to try to convince them otherwise. But B, John, this is your next app.

31:04I'm sorry to make that. I think that doesn't the Iris app index your Photolibrary? No, that's not what I'm saying. It's an app I paid for a while ago and I've already forgotten the name for it. But I think it's called Iris. I will look into it. It is. I will look into it. No, no, no. That's not your app. Your next app is fooling the system Photolibrary into thinking it's talking to its own volumes. And it's actually being proxied off to some other drive. That's such a U app. It's about file systems. It's about saving disk space. That's right in your wheelhouse. And photos, you love photos. I think somebody also did that. Did we talk about that when we were talking about booting MacOS from an external drive and convincing someone who did a hack to convince MacOS that your external drive is really an internal drive. And I said I didn't want to go anywhere near that. And that was even something I wrote. So that's a little bit too sketchy for me. I know there's no way you would do this, but it would be so amazing if you did. And it fits all of your attributes in so many ways.

32:07It is super nerdy. It has to do with these little level file system access things that nobody would trust anyone else but you to do correctly. You would be incredibly stressed out about it all the time and you would be incredibly careful. I don't trust myself to do that correctly. But it would have a relatively small market that would be very difficult to reach, but it would be high value to those people who it's more likely to just spend my time filing feedbacks and complaining about it on the show until it gets fixed a decade from now. Plus, think about like talk about a growth business right now. I'm sure nobody has ever seen that link. No. No, because if it's, I think it's a threshold and it doesn't seem like it finds a lot of savings, it has some tips for finding more. Which is basically what we're going to do. I'm going to do a little bit of that. I'm going to do a little bit of that. I'm going to do a little bit of that. I'm going to do a little bit of that. I'm going to do a little bit of that.

33:07I think it's a threshold and it doesn't seem like it finds a lot of savings. It has some tips for finding more. Which is basically allow it to scan more places and allow it to scan all file text. Oh, I can't scan. Volume is owned by another user. The volume slashes owned by another user. You can't scan it, but it's just telling you you're not going to be able to... Why can't I scan my Macintosh HD, John? Should I pick a different... Should I just do my home directory? Yeah. I mean, you didn't read the message. No one reads dialogue boxes. Dialogue box doesn't say you can't scan. It says, hey, I'm just letting you know the director you picked is owned by another user because it is slashes owned by root or whatever. Anything I find in there that's not owned by you, I won't be able to reclaim. I will find things that are owned by you and mostly they're in your home directory. So yeah, pick your home directory. You saved me 600 megs. Well, check your settings now. Are you looking at all file types? Do you have minimum file size set? Do you have all the switches turned on to scan photo library, scan libraries, all that stuff? I think maybe you should just drive your computer over to John's house. Just turn just, there's like two setting screens. Just flip all the switches.

34:08Flip, flip, flip. Oh, right. Yeah, looking inside packages, allow photos, allow cloud, allow library. And do the file types thing in the other screen where you say allow all file types. Allow fun. Yes, you want that. Okay. I should have put a telemetry on how many people turn that off. Yeah, you probably should have to be honest. All right. Maybe we move on or are we still going to... Yeah. Marcos Gann is going to take a while once he flips all those switches. All right. Let's see. AMX and SME. So arms, I'm sorry, this is from Shaq Ron. Apple's arm architectural license requires that any extensions they create to the ISA be submitted for standardization and that they transition to the standard one released. SME is the arm standardized version of AMX. I didn't have any way to confirm this, but I'll take Shaq Ron's word for it. And it makes sense. It explains the facts before us, but just they came out with AMX. And that eventually AMX was sunset in exchange for SME. And maybe that's part of the deal of their license that you can make up all sorts of weird extensions, but you have to work to get them standardized on the R. You got to

35:09switch the standard. And that seems like something ARM would put in their contracts because they don't want a sort of a forking and bifurcation of their instruction set as everyone adds their own custom instructions. All right. I wanted to quickly reenter Vision Pro Corner. Last this past Friday, Apple did their first Friday night baseball that had immersive video. So you could put on your Vision Pro and you could be a Yankee Stadium. And I'm not here to pass judgment on the Yankees of the Red Sox. I'm not much of a baseball person myself, but I wanted to at least experience what this was all about. I will say there's an excellent episode of Dithering about this. Can I just say how did Ben Thompson not watch this? Don't even get me started. Oh, I haven't heard that Dithering episode. He didn't even watch it. No, but he was basically like, yeah, this means I was right. I don't even need to watch it. Like, yes, you definitely need to watch it. Absolutely, dude. This is what you've been talking about for years. I don't think Ben listened to our show, but he needs to watch it. And he probably is right. Like, but of all people, that's that's like if Apple released a new Mac Pro and John's

36:10like, I don't need to buy it. Meh. Yeah. So to give a little bit more context. So there have been other immersive things. Many of them. And Marco was on the journey with me of watching most of them at least at first. And then Marco kind of gave up on it. And I've been continuing with it. And one of the things that Marco and Ben, Ben, more than Marco, but both of them seem to think very strongly, is that when you're in an immersive environment to recap, that means you can twist your head and your perspective will change, right? Well, Ben especially seemed to think that you really should not be cutting to different cameras barely ever. And I think Marco, you were closer to Ben's perspective, maybe not quite as hardliner. No, I was totally with him in that like, you know, like what Apple kept producing and releasing on the Vision Pro is like, a lot of things that had a bunch of quick cuts. And so because you were like in the environment, like you're looking at a 180 degree field of you video in 3D, so you really feel like you are there. And you just kept getting teleported around almost.

37:11And it was very disorienting and hard to follow stuff. And so what Ben was saying, and I believe I've made the same case, was like, just have a fixed camera. Like have a fixed camera in a good seat and an event, whether it's a sporting event or a concert or whatever, and just sit you there. And don't even have like an answer. Just make it, just put you in the event in 3D, hearing the audio of being there, looking from a fixed position. And that simulates the feeling of being there, which is amazing. And that's something that only something like the Vision Pro can do. Like you can't get that on a big TV screen. You can't get that on YouTube. You can only get that from the Vision Pro, which is a great way in theory to lace and groundwork that might sell some Vision Pro someday. Yeah. And so with the Yankees thing, firstly, I wanted to quickly call your attention to is that they have, in F1 speak, they have a race in 30, which is to say they have a 10 minute

38:13recap of the game. I don't personally have any interest in watching a 3L or baseball game, particularly with the Vision Pro on my face. But they do have a 10 minute version, which I very much recommend. I think that that gives you basically the gist of it. I can also say that at one point, spoilers for a baseball game from week and a half, or a half a week ago, there was a home run at about an hour and 10 minutes into the broadcast. So if you wanted to just see something exciting happen, you can see that. But what was interesting about the broadcast was that generally speaking from what I saw of it, when one team was batting, you were positioned basically right in front of their dugout. And so you have a view of one side of the field. But and I liked that a lot, but I will say when there were deep balls into outfield, maybe it's just my own eyes, but it was hard to see where they went. Now, what was nice was Apple had like a floating jumbo tron and like stats board thing kind of up above the field. So you could tune into the 2D broadcast as something was happening in the distance. Overall, I did very much like this. And I mostly agree that in this context for sports, I mostly agree with Ben and Marco

39:19that cutting less frequently is the correct approach. Now I think for different sports in different fields and different arenas, cuts make more or less sense. So when there's a, you know, pop fly into the outfield, maybe it does make sense to cut to an outfield camera and they would do that, you know, occasionally for replays. But even during the meat of the game, it would be neat to see that. I think, whereas I think in the basketball presentations, it makes a lot more sense to me to just park that camera somewhere preferably mid court and don't freaking touch it unless you're doing like a replay or something. We talked about this one when we're when I still had your vision pro here and I watched that basketball game and it's the same problem you just identified and everyone who's talked about this game has identified, which is if you have a stationary camera and you see that stationary, you see the video that stationary camera is getting in your headset. You are subject to the decreased resolution as you move towards the edges because that's just the way it is. What you would want to do with current tech is you would want to have a camera, like not

40:20just one camera with like a big fish islands on it, but like a set of cameras that covers whatever the field of view is going to be even it's 180 degrees, but covers it all at the maximum center resolution of the vision pro. And then when you turn your head in the vision pro, rather than you just looking at the fuzzy edge of the single capture from the camera, what you'd be looking at is the highest resolution center of whatever camera was facing in that direction. You know what I mean? So your experience as a user would say vision pro the same hardware, no different hardware, but what you're saying is like the video signal that is coming to you is not a single video signal that's stretched out across your field of view because when they do that when they stretch that across your field of view, when you turn your head, you're looking at the highest resolution part of those sensors, the highest resolution part of your eyes is looking at the lowest resolution part of the video. And that is the weakness for balls in the outfield. And I was always saying with the basketball game, oh yeah, the tip off at half court, you got a great view of that. But the baskets are both in the lowest resolution part of the field of view because they just have single camera. So no technology change on the viewing side, same old vision pro, same field division,

41:25but on the on the recording side, they need multiple cameras that can capture the entire field of view for resolution. And they basically do foveated streaming kind of where you like turn your head and it says, oh, you're looking over here now, we're going to give you camera for from that same tripod that has the full resolution view of the outfield. So when you look at the outfield, something you can see the ball, when you look back to the home plate in your peripheral vision, the ball is fuzzy or invisible, you know what I mean, but that's, you know, that's we don't have that yet. And I know it's there's not a lot of cost to justify it, but I'm saying like with current technology, that's what they need to do to make this experience better. And as I said, when I was talking about the basketball game and I mentioned football games, sport dependency is a thing because a lot of Ben wants this because he loves live sports. He wants experience of doing live sports and lots of people like live sports and they want that experience. But I'm not even sure most people would prefer live sports, especially for something like the NFL because you just get such better view on television than you, if you're in the nosebleed seat to the stadium. And I know it's a whole experience in the smell and the people and whatever, but you're only getting some of that in the headset. So while being like court sided in an NBA game, maybe an unparalleled way to watch a basketball

42:29game, being in the nosebleeds in an NFL game is not better than watching it on TV if you really care about what's happening in the game just because the field is so big and you're so far away from it. So there's definitely a place for this, but in my, my stance on what Ben wants is you want the experience of live sports and so do a lot of other people and they should provide that. But that's not the thing that every single person wants. So I think Apple or whoever still has to figure out, okay, well, when for the people who don't want a live exports experience, what do we give them? And for the live sports things like you should talk about this casey, how you felt about it, they had like a screen floating in the air over the outfield. Like can you imagine if you could, for example, look to the outfield and then do a pinch gesture with your hand to magically zoom in on what you want to look at and suddenly, suddenly now you have a high res view of the right fielder. Nobody else does, but you do. Like that's, you know, the technology is there to do much cooler things than what they have here. The jumbo tron can you move it around? Can you have stats on the side like the F1 app, but like there's fertile ground for doing cool things here. It's just really at the, the baby stages of all this.

43:32Yeah. And I think that there's like you said, a lot of room for improvements. I probably would have repositioned the jumbo tron. I mean, not to say that it needed to be repositioned, but just to make it a little more comfortable is it annoying that you couldn't move it though? Like what the hell? I was, I wouldn't go so far as to say annoying. It was lightly off putting. But I think what you're describing and what you make a great point is you've ever seen the, I want to say it's called like Matterport or something like that. It's these 3D like walkthroughs for like real estate where they have these like circles where you can click on that circle and it'll show you a different perspective. Like that VR, yeah. Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly right. So that's 3D. Yeah, but they need something like that for this, you know, where you can pinch to, or pinch to effectively click, if you will, on the outfield and to your point, it'll zoom you into the outfield. But now I think this was really, really good. I think they are making steps in the right direction. I can absolutely see that if these were teams I really cared about, this would have been an amazing experience. And you do kind of feel like you're there.

44:33I mean, you're for good and for better and for worse, you see all the, you see over your shoulder, like all of the sunflower shells getting spit onto the crass from the dugout. And you see the people walking in and out of the dugout and you see the lights in Yankee Stadium so much clearer than when you would, what you would over a TV broadcast. Like as someone who really enjoys life sports, this is extremely cool. And on Dithering, they made the interesting point. I think they called it like, they didn't, they had a funny name for it. That wasn't like FaceTime. It was like share time or something like that where they were saying, how cool would it be if, you know, say me and John could sit court side and say the US open or something like that and see our avatars. I forget what they call them now. But our fake people, you know, adjacent to each other. So we could hear each other and talk to each other, but we're still watching the same live event in immersive video. And that was the point they were making on Dithering and I could not agree more. It was still incredibly impressive. Again, I was watching it on replay, but this was available live, which is extremely cool. And I really hope they do more with this and try new experiments and continue with this.

45:36I know we got some news recently. We'll talk about it in probably over time. But we've gotten some news recently that a lot of stuff with Vision Pro is in a little bit of turmoil potentially. But man, I don't put the Vision Pro on often. I know I make the speech every time. I don't put the Vision Pro on often. But every time I do, I'm like, damn, this is the future. It's just heavy. And low resolution and expensive and, you know, has no software. I mean, that's something like I, I think it would be wise for Apple to keep leaning into things like this because what, you know, it's very, very clear that the market for this kind of thing in software is basically only specialized industrial and enterprise applications. And that is a market for sure. Like you can see like the history, you know, the Microsoft had the HoloLens, like there is a market for like specialty applications of this. That's not really anything Apple ever caters to in their other product lines. And I think they're not really well suited to that market. That's much more of a Microsoft market. And even Microsoft ended up canning HoloLens because it wasn't like a profit.

46:39A lot of the profit of a enough market for them. But if the Vision Pro is going to succeed in software, it's in those areas. It's not going to be general purpose computing. However, there's another way this product can succeed. Well, there's two. There's games which met a pretty much dominates. And I don't think Apple is whatever make a product that would compete with games for lots of reasons. And the other one is content. And like that's the other like if you want to get consumers to buy this, who aren't like performing specialized surgery, like through, like regular consumers to buy a VR headset, like a high end VR headset. That's going to be content plays like this. It's going to be things like live sports, concerts, theater, like you know live experiences, live spectacles and sports part of the biggest one. And yeah, as we're saying, there are some challenges. Like I think you're both right that the resolution of both the lenses and the screens and the

47:40video itself does not lend itself well to sports where you need to see fine details across wide fields of you like baseball. So that does kind of make sense. That's a bit of a problem. Basketball is better as you were saying, even though despite the fact that the basket itself is kind of an important part of the game are kind of blurry on the edges there. And there's ways you can make this a little bit better. Like for instance, sit a little further back. That's for many of these sports that's actually, it's like it's less of a laugh factor, but it's actually a better overall experience. In the same way that like you don't usually want to sit in the front row of a movie theater either. Like the actual best experience of a movie theater is not in the front row. I think there's a lot here. There's a lot of potential here, but I also think it's very obvious that we are like 10 years too early for it. That the screens are just not high resolution enough. The video feeds are just not high resolution enough.

48:42The hardware, the rest of the hardware to support it is still big and heavy and has terrible battery life and like we are just 10 years too early. And I don't know how we're going to get from here to it being good because I don't see how it's worth anybody continuing this product line. But if it gets good, it's going to be a ways off. And I think this show is that it can be good. The potential exists, but we're just not there. Speaking of sitting in the front row of movie theaters, did either of you go to see the Odyssey and I max? I haven't seen it at all. Of course I haven't seen it. Oh, by the way, real time follow up. 30 gigs, John. So I went from 600 megs to 30 gigs of reclaimed space from hyperspace. And I wonder why, first of all, that's not enough, but I appreciate it anyway. Why does your default mode suck so badly compared to the everything on mode? I've been conservative, being safe. And also the semi-psychological part of it. It's obviously the conservatism.

49:43It's just like, don't go wandering. There are people's library folders and photos folders because if you screw them up, people will be mad so be conservative to begin with. And again, I have the thing where if you don't find a lot, there's the little find more thing. The second aspect of it is people do feel kind of good about themselves when they tweak an app to make it perform better. You know what I mean? Like they go into settings and they flip a couple of switches and they make decisions about do I want to search my photos library? Do you want to do this? It makes them feel more like a power user. So it's those two things combined. They hit the nods. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, the reason I bring up the IMAX thing and the Odyssey because I do go see it eventually in the 1 4K laser IMAX projector that's in New England, which was a bit of a drive for me. But before I went to it, because I'm seeing it late, I saw it like, I don't know, like last week or whatever, the two people I know who saw it both told me it was so loud. So you know, I did when I went to the movie. I brought earplugs with me. It's the first time where earplugs in a movie theater.

50:44And let me tell you, it was really loud. And if this is stupid IMAX doesn't do like a sign seating. It's like the first movie I've gone to without a sign seating forever. So I had to get there early and like fight with people to get a seat. And so I was a little bit closer than I wanted to. But man was it loud. Like with the earplugs in I felt like it was loud. So anyway, gracious. We are Sponsored Episode by Zock Dock. I am the king of procrastination. As you can tell by most of my work, it is one of my strengths. And one of the things I procrastinate the most is making doctor's appointments because it's so cumbersome. You've got to like sign up for somebody's web portal or even worse, call them and then oftentimes they're way out and how to even find their right doctor in the first place. Zock Dock is made to solve this problem. Zock Dock lets you search and compare high quality in network doctors. They have more than 150,000 providers with an over 200 specialties across all 50 US states. This tons of reviews from real patients and detailed profiles of each doctor so that

51:48you can choose the right one for you. Then you can see their actual appointment openings and click to instantly book a visit. It's so easy. It's so much better than going directly to the most doctors websites. And the appointments they have available are really quick. So you can usually get an appointment within 24 to 72 hours. Even sometimes you can score same day appointments. So it's amazing and it's so much better than trying to find doctors in other ways. Zock Dock is also totally free for you to use. Your health matters and taking care of yourself shouldn't be complicated. Find and book the right doctor with Zock Dock. Head to Zock Dock.com slash ATP to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list finally. That's Zock Dock spelled Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash ATP. Thank you so much to Zock Dock for sponsoring our show. The Tim Cook exit interview. We already did it. We did it in episode 688 entitled A Company Man starts at about an hour and eight minutes.

52:53We've also talked about it in many episodes before. And since then we'll put a link to the show notes to the episode on our website, to the episode in overcast with the timestamp link. Go check that out if you're interested. And as I said last week, Tim Cook has not done anything in between then. And now that's worth talking about other than raising prices of a couple of the services on his way out the door. All right. And to be a people on their way out the door, Phil Schiller, former ATP guest, Phil Schiller, has apparently stepped down from his role leading the App Store and product events. Sorry, I'm reading from Mark Irman. Schiller was Apple's senior vice president of marketing until leaving that job in 2020. While he was dropping his last two major responsibilities, Schiller's remaining at the company with his Apple fellow title and told employees he'll be working on unspecified initiatives. Emma Roth at the Verge writes, Schiller initially joined Apple in 1987. Marco and I were five and became the company's head of marketing in 1997 when we were 15. He helped launch the App Store alongside Steve Jobs in 2008, but only started heading up the App Store in 2015.

53:54Over the years, Schiller has played a role in the development of many of Apple's products, including the phone, iPad and Max and has presented several of them at the company's launch events. In recent years, Schiller has started stepping away from some of these responsibilities as he relinquished his role as senior vice president marketing to great jobs we act in 2020. This is the longest goodbye ever. Really? He's just slowly working his way off campus. One job responsibility at a time, but never actually leaving. Not that I'm in a hurry for him to leave, but man, can you just keep dropping responsibilities and keep collecting your paycheck? I should have done this when I had a job, right? I think this is actually a possibly very big deal. First of all, Schiller is the oldest of old school Apple. He's so hardcore Apple. He's been there forever. I think he's one of the last executives left with the old Apple experience and philosophy

54:54and mentality. Also, he's been there forever, but there's lots of people who've been there forever. He's been there forever at the highest levels of the company, right next to Steve Jobs. He wasn't there. People have been there for a long time, but just have been in a level position. He's been right in the thick of it, practically his entire career. I like Phil for a lot of reasons. He has engaged with me and with our show over the years. Of course, that helps. It's been very meaningful for me in my career. When I first heard from Phil in response to a blog post I wrote years ago and later on, when I wrote, what the hell was that? Function of my ground. There you go. Yeah. When I wrote that, I actually had a phone call with Phil later that day and that meant a huge amount to me. Then the whole elephant in the room thing at the live talk show. Basically, Phil and I go back aways. I do feel honored at how much attention Phil has given me over the years as somebody who is so important to Apple.

55:55Maybe that colors my view of him a little bit, but I am very fond of Phil. Even though I don't agree with him on everything. I think he, there's a certain culture of California executives. California executives, first of all, tend to think I'm an A-hole. Maybe they're right. Certainly, many of our listeners might agree, especially some people on the red at some sure. There's a California attitude of being maybe indirect, insincere. You can't tell what they think of you. Phil is not that. Phil is East Coast. You can always pretty much tell what he thinks of you. I think it's pretty direct and pretty honest. That's something that, again, I don't get a lot of that from a lot of the Apple people because most of them are more West Coast culture. The West Coast culture does not really understand the East Coast culture and vice versa as well

56:55as it might seem, despite being in the same country. Because Phil is East Coast, I think I've always gotten along well with him and understood him, I think a little bit better than the other executives. Phil is an honest, straight shooter and he cares a lot about the products. Then he was head of marketing. I don't know how much involvement he has now, but when he was head of marketing, he really advocated for very good product decisions from everything I've heard. In lots of stories about input that Phil had or things Phil was pushing for, we even saw in that App Store trial, in some of the epic discovery process, the emails from Phil to the other executives, he seemed to be on the right side of a lot of issues and have his head in the right place. Overall, he's been a very good force in the company. But there have been areas that we disagree on. There's Phil has a little bit of an edge, a little bit of a sharp prickliness.

57:58As an East Coaster, I love that about him. The very first email he ever sent me, it was while I was doing Instapaper and he ended it by saying, I also want to thank you for creating Instapaper. He is a great app, well deserving of its 4.5 star rating. That's just the most amazing. First of all, it's like, wow. He said he has it on his iPhone and I fed. First of all, wow, Phil Schiller uses my app, what an honor. Second of all, it's well deserving of its 4.5 star rating. I think he just meant that nice and you just took it, but he was talking about half star. I don't think that was him being prickly. He did. He always means it nice, but there's that little tiny, this is a great compliment, but I just might have stepped on one of those little one by one flat Legos. That's Phil. He's honest. He's direct. I love that about him. He also has been all this time running the app store.

59:00I've also heard stories about his role there, his leadership there, and him being pretty much like the driving force behind or the final authority of a lot of controversial app store decisions over the years. Things like policy, what's allowed, what's not. That all goes to Phil. The toughest decisions, the real edge case rule enforcement things or the high level policies. For my understanding, that was mostly Phil. The app store under Phil has been mostly good, but a little prickly, and that makes a lot of sense. For Phil to be giving up the app store, I think that might be a really big deal. I'm not expecting tomorrow for Apple to open it wide up, wide open and say, all right, everyone do whatever you want in the app store. I don't think that is a reasonable thing to expect here. I don't think they're likely to change the commission when not legally forced by some

1:00:03jurisdiction. I don't think we're likely to see big changes like that that are going to impact their ability to make tons of money because that's the reality is they make tons of money from it. They're their growth story with the services business needs that. I don't think that's on the table. I do think that it's changed an app store leadership at this level, at the Phil level, is probably going to result in over the next, I don't know, six months to a year. I think we're going to start to see budging or bettering of things in other areas that for whatever reason Phil was like a hard liner on some of those decisions, whether it's stuff like what you're allowed to do, like rule wise, maybe set like a little bit of flexibility or we didn't have flexibility before, maybe like a rule that's kind of been vague, will start to be interpreted a different way. I think that's the level of thing that we're likely to see here. That's why I think this is a really big deal. As an app developer that makes me, you know, similar to like the CEO change, it kind of

1:01:06makes me both excited and nervous because Phil, all these years running the app store has been the devil you know. And when you change that up, it's like, well, you don't really know like who, what are we going to get with the new leadership, whoever that is, is it going to be better in ways that we care about it or is actually going to get worse? We don't actually know that yet. But that's why I think this is a really big deal because I think most people weren't aware necessarily of Phil's role in the app store and now that role is changing. So that I think could be a big deal. But ultimately setting the app store aside, if this really is Phil's ultimate final retirement from the company, which I don't, I don't, it doesn't sound like it is. He's got one more step at least because he's still, he's going to work on unspecified projects, but he's basically given up the two responsibilities that he had. So now he has zero responsibility except for unspecified. Right. And knowing Phil, I bet he's still going to be working like crazy, but I did want to take this chance while he is still probably there to honor all the work he's done there.

1:02:09Because again, I think he does so much work behind the scenes on so many products across the company that most people don't know about. A lot of what we love about Apple products, Phil hadn't put in those decisions and he pushed for a lot of the right decisions. So he has had an amazing career at Apple. Again, I will always be fond of him because he kind of brought me into the Apple PR world in a way that that no one else there has before or since. And I think he really believes in and pushes for most of the best things that we love about Apple products. I would agree with that wholeheartedly. And I don't know that some of the crummy decisions around the App Store were him. I mean, I feel like we learned in discovery for the epic thing that he was trying to pump the brakes on some of the commissions that they charge us once they hit like a billion dollars in revenue or something like that. I'm getting the details wrong. I'm sure we get the idea. I thought that we had seen emails where he was like, do we really need any more money

1:03:12from developers? Like, aren't we good now? Yeah, we did. Like that's part of what came out in that trial. I mean, the answer was yes, they did need more money. Exactly. He was overruled in that decision, asked them answered. Tim Cook says, yes, we do need more money. Sit down, Phil. No, I've never had the pleasure of meeting him in person, but obviously we interviewed him in episode 317, which was March 15th of 2019. Without hyperbole, I really mean this hand on heart. One of the coolest and best moments of my entire career was I forget exactly what question I asked Phil, but it was at the end where we were just kind of goofed off. We were still on air, but we were kind of goofed off. And I asked Phil something car-related. And he started rattling off a couple of cars that I was like, yeah, okay, I know what that is. And then he went deep into the weeds about, I think Porsche's, I might have that wrong, but I got the floor wiped with me. He was just like, oh, you think you know cars, sir. And he wasn't being a jerk about it. It was just, oh, no, no, no, no. You sweet summer child Casey. Let me tell you about cars. And it was incredible. One of the coolest moments of my entire career. I genuinely mean that.

1:04:12And so Phil, I don't think you listened to this show. I'm not sure you ever did other than perhaps the episode you were on. But if you ever, ever, ever want to come back, I don't care if you're an Apple employee or not, we don't even need to talk about Apple. I'll talk to you about cars stuff again. I don't care if you ever want to come back. The offer is there. You are, we are ready and waiting. Yeah, we're saying this is like a Phil Exit interview, but again, he hasn't actually exited yet. He's on his way. Anyway, yeah, he could do the Chris Latner thing and leave Apple and then come on the show. My favorite part of that interview, by the way, you should listen to him. I'm not sure how good a job we did interviewing him. But at the end, where he was a little bit loose, he did give us some fun stuff, which was retelling the story of how Steve Jobs made him jump off a tower onto a stage holding the first Apple laptop with Wi-Fi to show that it didn't have any wires attached to it. And you can hear in his retelling of the backstage story of like Steve Jobs telling him, hey, we're going to have you jump off this thing and try to get him to sign like an insurance waiver. And him basically say, I'm not signing that. Listen to that story again and think back to Marco's description of him of being a nice friendly guy who has also got a little bit of an edge.

1:05:14I think you'll hear it in the story. Yeah, oh yeah. It's solid, solid fill for sure. I really, not, I mean, I'm saying this is how the man has passed away and God willing far from it, but he hasn't even left Apple. I know, I know. But I really wish I had the opportunity to meet him at some point. I'm sure he would have no freaking clue who I was. But it would be, it would be really great to take his hand and thank him for all the incredible work that he has done. Like it wasn't the iPod click wheel his from that mistaken. I mean, just incredible, incredible work over an impossibly long career. Yeah. Well, if I see him in town, I'll tell him you say, I, that's true. He is from Boston, isn't he? Yeah. So last, last time we said when he, when he moved to Apple Fellow and left his marketing role to Jobs, Johnny I, we were saying like Johnny I had like went to the sky and we were like, fill up from words of the roof. Like he was like still like near the building on the building, you know, where is he now? Like in the visitor center? He's just haunting the campus like a ghost. You just walk around the corner and there he is with sage advice. Cause like unspecified projects is, I mean, that could be, that could be something like,

1:06:14you know, whatever the next car project is or that could be like feeding the ducks in the duck pond in the middle. It's working on the new pizza boxes for cafe max. There you go. Oh, yeah, yeah. All right. Let's do some actual exit interviews for the hardware. So the event is next week. It is one is I don't even know. It's like Wednesday, I think Wednesday. Yeah. Yeah. It's a Labor Day's Monday. That's right. So it's Wednesday next week. So let's do the iPhone 17, 17 pro 17 pro max and iPhone air exit interviews. First of all, we should note, there are rumors that the iPhone 17 isn't really exiting quite yet. Allegedly, we're just getting the pros and the fold next week. But. I don't remember is the air is supposed to come next week to. I don't know. That's kind of, it's been a rumor to probably be in the spring with the others. Yeah. So it doesn't seem like the air is being updated yet. Yeah, there is another air coming, we're just not sure of the day. But we'll exit interview all of them, even though again, it's certainly the iPhone 17. If the rumors do be believed is not exiting and maybe the air is also not exiting, but they will exit eventually. Yeah, for me, so I have an iPhone 17 pro.

1:07:16I have it in whatever the flavor of blue is from this past year. I really love this phone a lot and I don't have too much to say about it. Or at least I don't think I do, but a couple of things I wanted to call out. I am brutal on my phone since we've learned over the years. I have went from never shattering a phone to shattering like two or three in a row. I went through something like seven screen protectors on the last phone on my iPhone 16 pro. For this one, it has never ever been in a case and I have yet to shatter it. And we are coming up on the end of its service life. That's me knocking on wood. I have yet to shatter it. I did get a couple of gouges in the screen, which I'm not sure how that happened, but here we are. But I am very satisfied that I went almost the entire year with nary a scratch on it. And now I have a couple of scratches on the upper left. But I never shattered it. I have dropped it. Now not as brutally as I have some other. No, that's not true. I dropped it on concrete once or twice. So yeah, really good work on the ceramic shield too or whatever they're calling it.

1:08:18I forget the marketing name for it. I'm a little unhappy that there's a couple of scratches. But given the way this thing has been treated, really a a maybe even a plus for the ceramic shield, really, really good work there. The aluminum has chipped in a couple of spots, but I don't really mind it to be honest. I think it would kind of like a patina. The other thing that really chapped my bottom around the 15 and 16 pros of memory serves was the thermal throttling. And I mean that not only in terms of speed, but especially in terms of screen brightness. And as someone who goes to football games in the fall and late summer, using your phone outside can really suck because you know, you have it get hot. And then you can barely see the screen because it's cranked the brightness to like negative 100%. And this phone is not impervious to that. But thanks to the vapor chamber, I think it's called. It definitely does a lot better than any iPhone I've had in years. So I'd say B to B plus for the thermal throttling in this phone and A to A plus for the screen

1:09:21or ceramic shield. I have a couple of thoughts about the air that are kind of tangential. But with regard to the 17 pro, Marco, you also have a 17 pro if I remember correctly. But John, this is the last year was not your years. That right? And my wife has a 17 pro though. And really the only exposure I have to it is, you know, she uses phones differently than I do. And the massive cases, she has like the wallet cases, like the magnetically attaching wallet case with like an air tag type thing embedded in it. It's just, she's got a lot of stuff on her phone. Her phone is big and heavy and you could like bludge in someone with it. It's the same 17 pro in there. It's not a pro max. It's just a pro. But I compare it to my 16 pro and her thing is just way bigger. But and she plays Pokemon gun at all the time. So my exposure to it is when I borrow her phone or pick it up or hand it to her or whatever to basically feel how hot it is. And you would think you wouldn't be able to feel any heat through all that stuff. But my subjective impression of handling my wife's phone for the past year because she got it on launch time is that the vapor chamber did help. I'm not sure if it helped her battery life because she's very rough on these batteries

1:10:24and she has lots of charging solutions and stuff like that. But she and the other thing I will measure it by is as she had complaints, she's constantly saying my phone battery dying or it's doing a weird thing or it's getting too hot. And the answer is no, she hasn't complained to me anything about her phone. So I give the 17 pro a thumbs up. I think the vapor chamber actually did do something and the rumor is that the phone that I'm getting this year or the 18 pro will have an even bigger vapor chamber. So thumbs up for cooling. My experience using the 17 pro for the past year, I just love this phone. It is awesome. I have no major complaints about the 17 pro that I think are actually related to it. My only complaint is that tethering just doesn't work for me for more than like two minutes. And so I've been carrying around this hotspot for a year because I haven't wanted to go to an AT&T store and have them like fix my whatever sims causing that to be a problem. But but otherwise like I love my 17 pro. I got the orange one, which was the right choice.

1:11:27It is the best iPhone color I've ever had. It is I think I think it's the best color it's ever been offered in the pro line. And I think the sales of the 17 pro backed that up. It's been a huge hit. And when you look around the world, you see some of the dark blue ones. A very small handful of the sliver ones and a ton of the orange ones. Everyone chose orange. And I think the orange being such a good color play the significant role in the 17 pro sales, which by all accounts have been very, very strong, even stronger than Apple expected by it by most accounts. So I think it is no question that objectively having this be an awesome color was was good idea and helped the iPhone a lot and just made it a great fun awesome new release. And then functionality wise, the cameras are great. The 4X is like finally the right distance for that camera to be the 8X mode where it's we're like, you know, Optica or it digitally samples the 4X middle section.

1:12:29Actually is usable. The stabilization of it is also perfect. Like I've never had a problem with blurry shots in the 4X or 8X distances. I use those I use the 4X all the time. And it actually provides a significantly different point of view than the 1X. So I do find frequent uses for it. The battery life has been awesome on it. And I don't have the max. I just have like the medium sized one, the regular size one. It's been great. I don't think I've ever seen the battery below 25%. It's just been awesome. Cooling wise, the vapor chamber for me has been way better than previous phones. Like if anything, I think that was one of the worst things about the 16 Pro line. That it was the 16 Pro was pretty good, but it got really hot and thermally throttled all the time. The 17 Pro with the vapor chamber, it really needed it and it performs great. It delivered. Overall, I really, I can't say anything bad about this phone. Like when I got it, I also did originally get an iPhone Air.

1:13:32I ended up returning it and then a couple of months ago for beta season, I ended up buying a renewed refurbished iPhone Air for a test phone for this summer. And so I've had some more time with the Air. I'll get to that when we get to the Air. But when I was deciding to go with the Pro, what I said last year was, I wanted the Pro because I want to know that whatever situation I'm in, I'm not going to regret the phone I have. Whatever situation I'm in, I know I'm going to have enough battery life. I'm going to have the best cameras I can have with me. It's not going to throttle under heat or whatever. It's going to be the best iPhone that it can be in every situation. And the iPhone 17 Pro has delivered. It has been that the entire year this phone has been great. It has been so great that honestly, I don't think I'm going to upgrade. I know that to the rest of the reasonable world, they're like, why the hell do you upgrade every year? You crazy lunatic.

1:14:34But the fact is, I have upgraded every year. And I'll say it's for the show. But it's not, of course, it's for me. Like, we all know that. It's fine if not, if we don't all get the newest phones. John has never gotten the phone every year. And the show has gone on. It's been fine. But honestly, between the new colors that are rumored, honestly, not doing much for me. And I love the orange. But also, this phone just is so good. I will see what, you know, whatever the 18 Pro has. Maybe I'll convince myself I need it. But you will. Ultimately, honestly, I think I'm just going to get the foldable as and try that for a while for development design purposes, which actually is important. But I think I will probably end up switching back to this after I use the foldable for a little while. If I had to guess now at this point. But I love the 17 Pro. It has been remarkably good. And here I am a year in thinking, I don't see any reason why I would replace this phone at all.

1:15:36Yeah, the new color has me a little bit nervous. I do think the 18 Pro, they picked one color for it. And it's, I don't think it was a particularly controversial color. Like it was bold enough that it's going to stand out and make people notice it. But it wasn't like, oh, I can't look at that. It's like a traffic cone or it's like green neon. It was, it was a crowd pleaser. Okay. Like it was, I think it was tasteful and bright. It was just, just walk that line. The rumors of the new color being like a deep cherry. And maybe, all right, I will admit that I didn't have my finger on the pulse of what colors are in fashion. Okay. So maybe for all I know, deep cherries going to make the world go wild. But it's not making Marco go wild. It's not making me go wild either. So maybe for the old man set, it's not as popular as the orange one. So maybe they're changing tactics. We'll see how it sells. But, uh, but yeah, the 17 Pro definitely is a milestone in the iPhone. It's the year they decided to give the pro phone a color. Yeah. And to, I forget which one of you said it. But to one of your points, I see the orange one everywhere.

1:16:37And I would have hoped that the, the message that Apple received from that is, hey, we should embrace colors in the friggin' pro phones. No, but they're doing one color this year. The rumor is so they're not decreasing it, but they're also not increasing it. I mean, I think the other reason you see the orange everywhere is obviously it does stand out. And also if you got an orange phone, you're less likely to put a case on it or less likely to put have like, not a clear case on it because all those silver and black phones that are out there, they're all in just trying cases. You don't know any of a color there. Yeah, but I mean, what are they doing that you said like a wine color or something like that? Yeah, as well. I mean, again, we just have rumors and pictures, but it looks like a deep cherry kind of thing. And again, I, I, maybe it's in fashion and everyone's going to go go go for it. But for me, it's not as straight up the middle crowd pleasing as a really nice orange. Or a really nice red or something. You know what I mean? Like it's just like one of the sort of basic colors as opposed to a subtle mix of purplish, reddish, deep kind of, yeah, and we'll see. I think this one is like a little bit more like Batalic flaky again.

1:17:37Well, we have our spy shots. So who knows what the real color will look like. Yeah, I just, I think something more vibrant like that orange is the right or way to go, but here we are. I don't have an iPhone Air. I've handled an iPhone Air a handful of times over the last year. I'm curious to hear Marco's thoughts. But one thing I will say is that from those that I know that have one and I know a handful of people with one, it does not seem like for them anyway, the camera or the battery were near as much an issue as I would have expected. That is, that doesn't mean that the camera and the battery are not an issue at all. Just that it seems from the people I know with iPhone Airs, they make it work. And it's not nearly as burdensome as I would have thought. Now Marco, I don't think you've ever properly used the Air as a carry phone. But tell me what was your experience one way or the other. I use it as a carry phone for I think like two or three days. When I first got it and then I got a pro instance, which is just the pro. So the air I think the main problems with the air are that it makes some pretty big compromises

1:18:41in areas that people care a lot about for benefits in areas that people don't care a lot about. It's an interesting statement phone. In the way that like, I thought the cyber truck was an interesting statement vehicle design, but it doesn't mean I want it. I'm glad that Apple did the air because all of their other phones were fitting the same mold, making similar trade-offs and just different sizes and price tiers of the same kind of thing. And the air is way out there in a whole different, you know, continue up. Like it does not fall at the same trade-offs as their other phones. The problem is it follows trade-offs nobody wants. So the air significantly sacrifices the battery, the cameras, and also the performance. Which I know that's less of a thing that matters to most people, but the air thermal throttles when you do anything.

1:19:43It has no cooling whatsoever. The little island in the back that has the camera and everything that also houses a huge amount of the circuitry that's why it's so thin. That little island area gets so hot when it does anything that it turns out to do things very slowly. Even simple things like, you know, just like processing photos you've shot with the one camera. Or, you know, like doing the migration is like it takes forever on the air because it's just thermal throttling constantly because it does not have the vapor chamber. There are rumors that the next air might gain some kind of vapor chamber. It badly needs it. I hope those are true. Thermal throttling aside, the main compromise to the air are that yet the battery life is not amazing. Although, cases right, it was not as bad as most people expected it to be. In part because they gave the air the Apple design cellular modem, which the pro doesn't get. But that and it is apparently a pretty big savings. So that helps.

1:20:44The biggest thing with the air is the camera. Now, it has one camera. It is the one X camera. And they do it can focus a little bit closer, minimum focus distance than the one X camera on the pro. So it's not exactly the same camera. So it does sort of make up for some of the loss of the macro focusing but not having the wide. But it still doesn't have much close-up focusing ability and it doesn't have the wide and it doesn't have a zoom. And that's just a pretty big set of compromises for people. And if people want a phone with like simpler cameras, usually they go for one of the cheaper ones. That's smaller and cheaper. If you want a phone that's very light weight in your hand in your pocket, the base model 17 is I think a better overall balance of things for most people. If you want a phone that has a big screen, you're probably going to want the max or the regular pro. And so the air kind of sits in this weird middle ground where they're like,

1:21:50all right, what if we made a really thin phone? It's like, okay, well, nobody really cares about the thinness. But we made it really light. Okay, well, you're getting somewhere but you already make the 17. That's pretty light. And the the E, that's pretty light too. The air is big. It's like, okay, so it's harder to hold because it's wide. Okay, it feels good, but it is wide. It's like almost as big as a max phone, like footprint-wise. So okay. And we're going to make your battery life mediocre to bad. Oh, okay. And oh, and we're going to take away all your cameras and just leave one that's okay. Okay. So the problem is no one who's buying a phone gives a crap how thin it is. They want the best cameras that they can afford. They want the biggest battery they can afford. That's what people buy phones for. No one buys a phone saying, I want to put the thinnest phone on the market. They used to back well, the motor all a razor was groundbreaking. That used to

1:22:51matter a lot. That doesn't matter now. And oh, and as as Neil 58 in the chat points out, way worse speakers on the iPhone Air too. Another thing that people actually care a surprising amount about is people end up watching a lot of video and having a lot of speaker phone calls on their phones. Listening to music out loud, playing podcast out loud. It's actually a pretty common thing to use a speaker on a phone. So the air was a really interesting experiment. Industrial design wise, aesthetically, that they just made a product that nobody really wants. And that's why if you look at anything that tries to estimate iPhone Air sales, whether it's the analytics firms that look at having people buy stuff in Apple stores versus apps that can report device type usage. Like I see in my own stats, the air is so little in sales compared to anything else. Like no one bought the air. No one is buying the air. No one will buy the air. The upcoming folding phone is supposed to inherit a sum of these trade offs. But it sounds

1:24:00like they've done a better job of it. And the difference there is that the folding phone is going to offer a lot in return for those trade offs that people do care about. You know what people love giant screens on their phones. They that's been proven. People want the biggest screen they can possibly get and they will pay for it. And that for sure, like that's going to get people to the ultra or the fold, whatever it's going to be called. So if you tell those people, the battery life might only be okay and you might give up one camera. They're still this huge plus that the fold of the foldable will give them that will be a compelling thing. The air doesn't have one of those. The air just is all the trade offs and the pluses just aren't that big and aren't things that most people really care about. Just to save people from a save Marco from the feedback we're going to hear Marco saying that no one wants thin phone. He doesn't mean literally no one. I mean we know people who got it because it's so thin and they love it. And as I said when that phone was introduced, one of the reasons that it is that weird size where it's like almost as big as a max is because

1:25:02you need to make it that big if you want it to be that thin and have a decent battery because every little extra bit of screen you have there is presumably more than offset by the extra battery you get for being behind it. What I want to say about the air is I want to give kudos to the engineering effort where Apple sort of triumphantly returned to the thin phone game and created a thin phone that is so durable that as we saw on the youtubers try to test it, you cannot bend the thing with human hands. Like that's true. I know it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things people shouldn't be abusing their phones that way and the product is the product who cares how bendable it is. But from the same company that made the iPhone 6 that would bend when you looked at it sideways, they made this thing which is like like a miracle slab, you know, it looks beautiful. It feels great. It feels premium and you cannot bend it. So kudos to the team that did that. The team that did that is not responsible for the entire product. They didn't decide what the iPhone air was going to be. They didn't decide it was going to have one camera or whatever. The rest of the team that says, we're making a thin phone. You don't get to design this product. Your job is to make it so it

1:26:05doesn't bend and they did it. So I want to give that team a big thumbs up. And the fact that they're making a second one makes me think that either they're just recouping tooling costs of like, like we've already paid upfront for the all the stuff to make one of these. So we're going to make another one no matter what. But it does make me hope that again, what is it? I've already forgot a carbon silicon batteries like the next jump in battery composition to give a little bit more power that they could potentially shrink it down and maybe get some more of like, oh, it's it's light and thin, but it's actually not that small. I'm not advocating for the return of the many, but I hope that you keep pursuing this because as technology increases, all of the bad parts that Marco was talking about will start to be less bad. Maybe you can fit two cameras on it eventually. Maybe the battery life isn't as bad anymore. Like, I don't know, I think it is a viable option. I do think that the 20th anniversary phone is all glass and blah blah blah. That's going to really throw a monkey wrench into the air as possible role as pointing towards the future. But again, the ultra slash folding phone will have a lot in common with the air in terms of the,

1:27:10you know, the design and manufacturing that Apple developed to make things thin because the sides of the fold are going to be even thinner. I would imagine. And of course, there's two of them. So you put it together. The phone will be thick, but those individual pieces are going to be thin. So here's hoping they've gotten even better at it. Just to just to reiterate like something that I think most people who are buying at the high end don't really appreciate. If what you want is a phone that feels notice will be light in your hands and is lighter to handle. Get the base model iPhone 17 because it is almost as light as the air. It's a very small difference between those two. Both of them are well under the weight of the 17 pro. So if that's what you want, the iPhone 17 does a better job of it. It's cheaper. Well, at the moment, we'll see what happens with pricing next week that remains to be seen. And the 17 is kind of an interesting case because it is a continue and the air both continuing to be sold. So we'll see if they get price raises or not compared to the new models, which we'll almost certainly have them. But the iPhone 17 is almost as light.

1:28:17It's smaller in the hand, $200 cheaper. It has better cameras, better battery life. There's a lot about the iPhone 17 that's like, you should probably buy that instead of the air if what you're looking for is it's a lighter phone. I want to say for the iPhone 17, I think this is probably the best no suffix iPhone that they have ever made. Now, obviously good to newer or whatever. I'm just saying like in the time that they've made it because it really just, it came at a time when that phone with the specs that they gave it and it's surrounding phones make it the kind of thing where it was like the MacBook Air phones back in the day when the 2011 MacBook Air, we're just saying you need a Mac just get the MacBook Air. Everybody who was looking for phone and mic, I didn't have to ask them anything about what they wanted to just get the iPhone 17. The only thing I would say is like the iPhone 17 is still expensive, then you can look at the 17. But the default was go to the iPhone 17. I bought two of them. I want one for each of my kids. Hopefully the last fun all over by any of them. We'll see if that goes. But yeah, the iPhone 17 is what an amazing phone because

1:29:20most people don't pay the extra for the pro or the air or even the Macs. You're just like what is the cheapest I can get an iPhone for? The 17 E is the answer or like older models obviously. But the 17 I've just like there's a new iPhone. The number is one more than last year. I don't care about suffixes. What a great phone that is. Like it just everything's out of it. It's like the perfect size, the perfect weight. It looks nice. It came in fun colors. Like it just, I will definitely have fun memories of the plane 17. It was definitely a good year. It's going to be big shoes for the plane 18 to fill sometime in the spring. And also the plane 17 brought the plane phone line up to always on display and promotion. Yeah. Yeah. It was the year that they took a bunch of things they'd been using for market segmentation and say now is the filing year. Finally the year that we dropped them. So that's why you could recommend it. Oh, hard. You don't have to ask questions. Oh, do you care about the screen being on all the time? Do you have it? It was like they didn't drop all of them. There was still market segmentation, but they dropped a bunch of ones that people could see. Like they always on screen. That's the thing you notice. Like regular people will notice that. Yep. And promotion. Like that's like it's much smoother animation. I'm not sure if regular people

1:30:23noticed that, but it is true. Yeah. Like it's they brought the nicer screen to the the base phone for the first time ever. Like what a huge upgrade that was. I honestly, I think the only thing that I would really miss if I if I was using a 17. Obviously, I would miss the 4X camera. And I would probably miss the heat pipe. But also I would miss kind of another thing that that I forgot to mention with the iPhone 17 Pro. I would miss shooting in raw format. So the in Apple's pro raw. I don't I don't use any other apps to do it most of the time. But in the built-in regular iOS camera app, recent pro phones have supported shooting in Apple's pro raw. And you can just whenever you want you can just quickly go to toggle like per shot. You hit the format thing. That's usually like the the the heat 24 megapixel. And you can tap it and you can say make it 48 megapixel and make it raw. And it'll keep that setting for a couple of minutes. So if you're like shooting like a nice sunset or something, you can shoot a couple of raws there. But then you're not going to be shooting raw for all next week and accidentally blow up your storage. But what's

1:31:27great about the iPhone raw shots is that functionally speaking in like camera terms, it's a lot more like raw plus JPEG that you shoot the raw. But you don't have to deal with the raw if you don't want to. The only thing you're giving up is you're taking more storage space with the raw. And you can even you can do like the the kind of like slight compression options in it, which I do. But what's great about the iPhone raw is if like me, you are a little bit turned off a lot of times by like the very like kind of perfect processing a little bit over processing of iPhone pictures or kind of the sameness of iPhone pictures. If you shoot in pro raw, even again, even if you don't use any other apps, if you just shoot with Apple's camera app and edit with the photos app right on the phone, you have way more latitude in editing, especially if you're adjusting colors or exposure. So you can like bring up the shadows and tweet the contrast and tweet the white balance and everything. You can do so much with with the pro raw that it for me, it removed the need for me to really ever use the

1:32:30alternative. And I have like I've bought like every alternative camera app. But I'm just not a good enough photographer to really ever use them. But like to have Apple stuff built in the pro raw is so good. And to do it, you have to just toggle it on real fast for like one shot. And then I know later I can go edit that and get a lot out of it. It's been awesome. And that is something that is exclusive to the pro line. So that honestly, I think I would miss pro raw more than I would miss the Forex camera. It like I use it that much and it's and it's that big of a difference. But anyway, yeah, the fourth camera is like, but if you don't want any of that stuff, the regular 17, as John was saying, it is the best like regular line iPhone in years. And it was it was the biggest step up they've ever had in that line. Like it closed the gap from the regular to the pro line to be a smaller gap than we've had in a long time. I think it's worth stating, which I think all three of us are kind of dancing around this, but which worth stating plainly to my memory,

1:33:32having followed Apple closely since the iPhone 3GS and having this been my career or at least side hustle since 2013. This is the best iPhone lineup I think they've ever had. Like top to bottom inside now, there's not a dud in the bunch, even the air. That's what the air has done. Well, but it also doesn't matter like because no one's buying it. So it's not really like, if you want to think like if if the pro or if the main line phone of a year was kind of a stinker, that's a pretty big problem. Like that's a big deal because there's such high volume products, so many people buy them. The air is kind of a stinker, but no one's buying it. So it doesn't really affect the other lineups. It's it's it's it's own separate path in the same way that like the like the old plus model, like the not like the old old plus, but like the the middle one where they they gave like the the plain phone a larger screen. That was also a stinker didn't matter. The mini as much as I loved my iPhone 12 and 13 minis, the mini was a stinker sales wise too,

1:34:33but it didn't it didn't affect the the line really because just not a lot of people bought them. By the way, I still today have more users of the mini than I do of the iPhone air, which should tell you something. How many iPhone airs have you guys seen in real life being used outside of like you know, nerd events? They sell a bunch of minis though. You're comparing a one one year one generation phone to a multi generation mini, but how many how many iPhone airs have you seen in the world? I've seen zero and zero minis as well. In this entire every where I am I'm looking around at people's phones and stuff in this entire year. I've seen two. That's it. I've seen so many pros. She's so many base phones. I've seen two iPhone airs in the world. How many minis did you say? More than that honestly. I mean, I didn't count them because I saw too many to count, but compared to I mean, that's like think about that more minis than airs in

1:35:39overcast users and overcast users you would think would over would over represent the air. By the way, just to clear up a to clear a question in the chat about that there were two generations of the iPhone mini. So obviously that that's why it would would over represent. Nope, that's not it for overcast. I'll tell you the the iPhone air ranks below the 12 mini and also separately the 13 mini with approximately half of the usage of the 12 mini and about let's see. I mean, about a third of the usage of 13 mini. All right, let's let's do a iPhone event preview to the degree that we have anything to say about any of these devices. I'll walk through a list that John put together of what we think might happen potentially and we'll start with the iPhone 18 pro or pro max. I don't think I have anything to say about this. We'll get there in a second when we talk about the ultra, but John, do you have any thoughts about your potential future phone? I'm assuming it's this and not the ultra. Yeah, it is my future phone. I'll be getting the 18 pro. I'll probably get into the

1:36:41boring color. If it has a bigger vapor chamber, I'll be excited about it. I'm looking forward to it. I mean, the expectation in the rumor is that it's basically going to be the same as the 17 pro, except for the even bigger camera plateau, which I'm not actually very excited about. But you know, like this is true. You know, it's kind of a good thing that I only get a phone every two years because every time I do is just I just feel like it's such trauma trying to deal with the case situation for me because it's not like there's anything like Apple. I can't like, oh, Apple always will sell this case and I'll buy it. No, I have to always go third party. So there's like a delay and I end up buying multiple cases. And it's just very disruptive to my life to figure out, you know, I think on my 16 pro, I had like a couple different cases on it before I finally settled on the one that I have. And now I'm going to the giant plateau. My wife's done it. She's got the, I think she's got the case that like covers the plateau with the bra, you know, that one, which on the one hand looks ugly and is bulky, but on the other hand, it does actually protect the corners of that plateau that get chipped a lot. So I don't know what I'm going to do. So like, yes, I'm looking forward to my phone, but my current phone is doing great, especially since I've babyed the battery for this entire

1:37:42life. So it's it's a champ. And this new phone is going to be bigger and bulkier and heavier and have a bigger plateau in exchange, I'm, you know, it'll be faster and have better cameras. So I will, you know, I'll get over it. But I'm a little, I have a little bit of trepidation about that. But I'm almost certainly not going to get whatever the new color is if the rumor is even remotely close to being true because I've that, the cherry doesn't appeal to me. Yeah, I don't, I doesn't really appeal to me either. All right. Then we've got the iPhone Ultra, maybe the iPhone Fold. I think it was connected. That's, or maybe it's upgrade that somebody recommended or suggested the iPhone Studio, whatever it's called. I would guess iPhone Ultra would be my first pick and fold being my second pick. But anyways, this, I've been thinking a lot about this. And I, I am interested in the idea of a folding phone, even though it's sitting here now, it doesn't solve any problems that I feel like I have. But I think I will definitely get one to try. And I think certainly my other job as an app developer, it seems pretty logical to have one in the house despite the fact that it's

1:38:44going to be a million dollars. But I think it makes sense to have one in the house, even if I don't use it as a carry phone. I probably will try to use it as a carry phone for at least the two weeks until the return policy is up. I don't know if I'm going to like it or not. And I can tell you that if the rumors are true, if it does not have face ID, I'm going to be bummed. If it doesn't potentially have cheat charging, which I would find or Magsave charging, which I would find very surprising. But I would also believe that is going to seriously bum me out. And there was something else. What was the other thing that people are saying it's not going to have? Oh, the cameras cameras. That is going to massively bum me out. I use all three lenses on are all five different, uh, uh, what magnifications or whatever. I use all of them all the time. I'm constantly popping between them. I, I, I'm sure I could do some science and some math and figure out what ones I use and what quantity we've done this in years past. But suffice to say my perception anyway is that I use all

1:39:48of the different, uh, X's if you will, uh, you know, the ultra wide at half X one X I use two X and four X and eight X. I use all of them. And so to lose any of them will really bum me out a lot. And that I think might be the thing that breaks me and makes me return or shelve the iPhone ultra if that's the direction I go, which is currently the plan because I do think for the show at least one of us needs to have this thing. And, and I think I, I'm willing to take the fall at least for couple weeks. Don't worry. I wouldn't get one. Yeah. I figured, um, let's do our votes on what we think the name's going to be. Um, I guess you can introduce whatever choice you want. But I think, uh, ultra, uh, ultra fall duo, whatever name you want to pick. What's your, what's your pick for the name? I think it's going to be ultra. I think there's been so much smoke behind that fire. Like there's probably, right? And that also just plausibly makes sense because like apples phone, they're apples product naming in general. It usually is fairly formulaic and a little bit problematic

1:40:55like logically speaking. Like, and that's what this is. Like, you know, they, they have people have suggested like, well, you know, it doesn't make sense for the, for something named ultra to not actually have the best of everything. Like, it's not going to have the best cameras probably. It's not going to probably have the best battery life. Um, it's, it will have the best price for Apple's point of view. But, um, it's, it's not going to, like that front screen is going to be a little maybe compromise and weird. Like the whole thing, it's going to be like a little bit compromise and a little bit weird in certain ways. Uh, it's not going to have face ID. That's not, that's not the best. It's not, if it's not going to have like the best speakers, maybe like, there's a lot of things they're not going to have the best. But it's exactly the kind of like weird problem with naming the Apple marketing would just pave right over and just say, nope, ultra. That's it. This is what this means now. It's, so I, I think that's very likely to be the case. Casey. I think ultra is the most likely. I could see duo, but I think, I think they would go with fold before duo. Um, the all three of them seem plus. But doesn't stamp some call there is a fold. Like Apple would never do

1:41:59what Android people do. Yeah. Oh, that's true. That's true. All right. So maybe duo. There's a row boring on the ultra train. I'll, I'll also be with Marco that the reason I think is going to be the name is because it's dumb in certain ways. And that definitely fits with Apple's naming. Uh, duo would be the most fun just because I throw back to the power book duo. But that's, you know, just mean filter. Remember that. Oh, no, it's, let's throw back to the core two duo, John. No, it definitely is not. All right. Uh, yeah. I mean, I, I think, like I said, my intention is probably to order an iPhone 18 pro and just not open it. And then an iPhone ultra or whatever. And open that and use the ultra and then leave my options open. But we'll see what happens. Uh, I've had Aaron on the annual cycle much to her own protest because she doesn't really seem to see the point. She's probably right. Um, but I've had her on the annual cycle for years now. I think she's going to be, it's going to be very hard for me to get her away from her orange phone to come back to our last topic. She does not want to lose her orange phone and she's going to

1:43:03be very sad too. And so I think this is going to be the first time in several years that Aaron doesn't end up upgrading. I mean, well, I'll talk to her about it. We'll see what she ends up thinking once everything is announced. But I think she's going to say to me, there's nothing that really justifies it. And I don't like any of those colors. Why would I bother? And you know what? She ain't wrong. When she sees how much your folds is going to cause that's true. That's true. That's also convinced her. Uh, yeah, you basically just did buy my phone the second half of your phone. Yeah, right. No, you're exactly right. No, I'm, I'm, I'm getting the ultra. I, I don't know if it's going to be something I stick with for the whole year. I doubt it. Honestly, I, I think I'm probably going to use it for like a week or two. And then want to go back to, um, to my orange pro because ultimately I don't think I mean, look, we'll see this, people who use these foldable phones oftentimes fall in love with them and say they'd never go back to anything else. So maybe that's going to happen. I don't know. I haven't, I've never used one. Um, but sitting here today with the rumored tradeoffs and sizing and, and things like that, I don't think

1:44:08the foldable is going to be the way I want to go long term. Um, but I, I know that not only as a podcaster, but especially as a developer of iPhone apps, I need one of those to test with like, I have not done any of the work to design overcast, uh, for the foldable layout yet because I don't have one. Like when I, back when the iPad first came out, we had the simulator for the iPad before we had the hardware. Like we could, we could, we could develop our apps with the simulator for, I think I'm at least a month or two before the, before anybody could get the hardware. And so I made Insta paper. I adapted Insta paper to the iPad and basically blew up the phone layout. And I got my iPad on day one and I tried to do it on it. And immediately I was like, this sucks. Like I did everything wrong. And I tried, I had the cardboard prototypes. Like I, I did all that stuff right, but as soon as I ran it on a real iPad and could actually interact with it, I instantly knew that all of the UI decisions I made were crap. And I had, and I ended up having to redo the

1:45:12whole design. So this time, like, you know what? I'm not going to play that game with, I don't even have a simulator yet. I have a simulator that can kind of simulate wide apps, but like I don't know exactly what size these things are going to be. I don't know like how, like what am I going to be able to reach like control wise with my thumb? How am I going to operate that outside screen? That's really weirdly squat. Like that's going to be a huge design challenge for a lot of apps. How do, how do the keyboards work? I have no idea. Like that's, it's going to be a big challenge. And I'm not going to do that design without having the hardware. I've learned that lesson. So anyway, I need one for my app design no matter what. So that's why I'm going to get it. I'm going to try it out for the show. But I think I'm going to end up mostly probably going back to my 17 pro for, you know, most of the year. That's fair. I think I'm in a similar, similar path for sure. All right. iPhone Air 2, we briefly talked about this. We don't think it sounds like there's a consensus. We don't think it's going to happen. I'm sorry. We haven't probably the rumors to

1:46:13tell us the answer to this, but apparently none of us have looked it up because none of us care. But the rumors probably tell you what the answer whether it's going to come out or not. So we just go read them. They have. The rumors have been very consistent that the Air 2 is not coming out now that there is apparently an Air 2 being worked on, but they've been pretty consistent that's probably coming out like in the spring or next year sometime. Yeah. The next item here is, I mean, again, it's the thing that most people don't care about, but I did see it mentioned in the past week, which is AirPods 5, not AirPods Pro, just the plain AirPods that used to be four. Those are the ones I have five. And I briefly looked at like here's what the AirPods 5 will be. And it was like that's what the AirPods 4 are, but with a bigger number like maybe it has an 8-3 chip, you know what I mean? Like upgrade the chips in them, but it seems like if the rumors are correct, that product is simply a slightly better version of the Air 4. Which is fine. I'm wearing AirPods for all the time. I like them. They're good. They fit my ears well, so I'm perfectly happy with the fives. I may actually get them because I wear my AirPods so much and they have such tiny

1:47:15batteries and that are not replaceable that I've really kind of worn down the battery life in those like I've had many times where I'm trying to like watch the end of an episode of TV late at night on my iPad and my bed. And one of the AirPods goes, I gotta watch the rest of the show with one. It's always one ear that's lower than the other. It's like weird. I don't know. They're both put in the charging case at the same time, but they just anyway. So I'll probably end up, that's interestingly, I'll get an iPhone 18 Pro. And if they introduce the AirPods 5, I'll probably get them. And the other thing about the AirPods is both of my children have some magical ability to destroy AirPods with their mind or their body. I have the same AirPods as them. And it's not like they're stepping on them or like running them through the wash. They're just using them the way. I mean, the one thing they do is they leave them all over the house or one of my kids does. But anyway, and they let them fill with your wax. But just somehow, like first of all, my daughter, if you give her AirPods and she said so many AirPods across her life, she'll tell you within a month or two the microphone doesn't work anymore. And we've done Apple Karen a bunch of them and

1:48:17they've given her new ones. Then she said the microphone doesn't work anymore. I don't know what she's doing to make the microphone's non-functional. Sometimes I think you had the microphone muted or it does work. And you just think people can't hear you. Sometimes I've confirmed that they don't work. But anyway, it's mysterious. I use them all the time every single day. Like anytime I'm doing dishes and there's no one else to get, I'm those things are in and I listen to podcasts. I put them on when I walk the dog. Like I use them like crazy. And they just keep working. But my kids destroy them all the time. So maybe my kids will get themselves some new AirPods 5, maybe I pull as well. That's actually one of the products that is that no one probably cares about it except for me. But you know, it's like just you got to cycle through these things. And I maybe I'll rotate my perfectly good working. Everything works on them. AirPods forward down to one of my kids so they don't have to get any of it. But anyway, I must commend you on your perfect reproduction of the AirPods low battery sound. I messed it up a little bit. I know you did the wrong number of boobs, but yeah, I don't think you were talking about it. It was pretty much flawless. It's pretty great. Oh, yeah, yeah, is there anything else we expect to see? Maybe Apple watches. I mean, that's,

1:49:18it was that easy thing that might be later in the fall, but usually it's with the iPhones, right? Oh, that's true. It is usually with the iPhone. Yeah, I think we lost so much in just the, yeah, the Apple Watch 12 was it, but they've lost so much in just them because the rumors are, yeah, any of that cool stuff that we talked about, it's not this year. Maybe we'll be surprised in those because Apple Watch rumors are wildly wrong sometimes. But I feel like every, every new generation of Apple Watch in for like the last, I don't know, five, six years, there's not much there, but there's like one good feature every year that they add. This one's going to have a new S.O.C. So I mean, that's good because they're one on year three with the current one. Or four? Maybe you're four. I forget how long ago the same S.O.C. they just kept renaming. I have, I honestly, I haven't even put Watch O.S. Beta on my any of my watches yet, but I've heard that new Siri operation on the Watch O.S. Beta is pretty slow, but that's obviously not why you need the new S.O.C. Just so you can do what you used to be able to do close to the same speed. I know, right? And I don't even, I'm not sure why it would be because like the watch is not running Apple intelligence, like a, but the, I think about three years ago, they did, yeah, I guess

1:50:21when this, when this S.O.C. started, they did move some of Siri's processing to run locally on the Watch. So for simple things like timers, I believe that runs locally on everything past, I think a series nine. Yeah, every year you get like one good Apple Watch feature. That's, that you know, it's not really worth upgrading just for that, but if you wait, you know, if you wait until your current Apple Watch is battery kind of sucks and maybe you have like a three or four year old Apple Watch, then you upgrade. You get a nice combination of things, but yeah, the rumors are basically no fun factor redesign, maybe ceramic coming back as a premium material. So that, that could be very nice. I was a big fan of the white ceramic back in the day. So we'll see about that. But probably just a like materials, maybe, you know, processing speed and maybe one one new or tweaked health feature. And that's fine. I do wish the Apple Watch was a little more exciting. I almost, and I believe we

1:51:24talked about this last year, I almost wish they wouldn't release it every year because each incremental update is so so much of a nothing burger most of the time. But if you look again, if you look at like a two or three year cycle on them, they actually do get significantly better over like three years. So I almost wish the Apple Watch would go on like an AirPods release cycle. Like you don't get air, you don't get new AirPods Pro every year. Like the AirPods Pro is staggered. So I mean, like if they did the Apple Watch that way, maybe they would do like, you know, the ultra would be one year. And then the next year, the regular Apple Watch would get updated, but not the ultra, you know, stuff like that. Like if they could stagger it out to make just a little bit better of an update. But anyway, we'll see what they give us. I'm not expecting it to be very exciting. I think that's it, right? I mean, we don't expect anything else. Oh, we're going to be getting much more iCloud free storage. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're going to be getting John Termis. Like, that's, you know, that's a pretty big change. Not, you know, not in terms of like at the end of the day what the products are going to be. But that is a pretty big change. And also, by the way,

1:52:25I should also, this is a good time to also point out that Phil Schiller is stepping away allegedly from the App Store and Apple events that those were his two big duties that he was working on that we knew about. He was still actively playing a role in planning the events. And I assume that means the presentation style to like maybe he was somehow leading or somehow heavily involved in the style of the videos that we get. Or, you know, how those things are presented. Certainly, the events around like Apple Park and stuff like the developer events and the press events. I'm sure he was involved in those two. If he is stepping away from that also that also might introduce changes there. Like, maybe not immediate, probably not like this event, you know, but maybe within the next couple of years, we might start to see like, oh, the style of this has shifted a little bit or they started to do something differently that they weren't doing before. That's something to look out for too with this change. So we'll see, you know, between a new CEO

1:53:27and Phil's change, this could be the start of a whole, you know, shift of the entire format of these events. So that's something I'm also looking forward to. Just to say that the last presentation we saw, whatever it was, the golden gate announcement, I guess it was WRC, I felt like that was actually a shift. We talked about it at the time, but I do think that that actually represented a realignment of like they took some of the feedback to heart and were a little bit less stiff than they had been in the past and everything. So I hope they just continue along that trend. Yeah. And they were like, they were showing things in real time that were actually kind of slow and to be honest about it. Like, that was, I remember we all commented and commented that because it's like, oh, yeah, they actually did bring like a little bit more humanity into this. So I think that whole story will be interesting to see like, it's John Ternes' first event. I assume, I mean, maybe there'll be some kind of like thank you to Tim on the way or something, but either way, Tim Ho. Tim Apple. Like, even if the products were all really boring, and I don't think they will be, you know, certainly the foldable phone is going to be pretty interesting if

1:54:29nothing else is, but even if the products were really boring, I think just the story around this event would be very interesting by itself. But it seemed like we're also going to get some pretty setting products. So that should be fun too. Thank you to our sponsor this episode, ZockDock. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP over time, our weekly bonus topic. This week and over time, we're going to talking about Ternes and the Vision Pro. There's been some recent events and rumors around what might be happening there. So we can be covering that over time. You can listen ATP.fm slash join, get that and all of our other exclusive member content and various member perks there. Once again, ATP.fm slash join. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week.

1:55:59Arm and SIR AC USA C-RUSA is accidental. So I talked, I think a couple of episodes ago about me doing some stuff related to storage and I would have some updates. Maybe it was more than a couple episodes ago. I have a couple of updates and a couple of months. Here's why. Here's what I was doing. As my ongoing filling of every ounce of storage I have in my entire life, I was doing some triage as usual and certain things even hyperspace can't help me with. Like, for example, space on my Synology, which I remember was saying, why are you using an external drive for your photos? I'll just put it on your NAS. My NAS is full too, man. Like everything. You think this, I have some huge amount of space sitting there. My network attached to ours? No, I fell it. I fell everything. This isn't a good time to buy that either. This summer with the

1:56:59restaurant, we have the ubiquity cameras and they have the big ubiquity NAS thing to record the camera footage. It has four hard drive bays in it. When I bought it last winter or two inches ago, I bought 24 terabyte drives. I have big drives. It turns out we need a little more space, a little more retention. I went to go look at drive pricing and I'm like, oh no, even hard drive. I figured maybe it was just SSDs or SIT models that were expensive. Nope, hard drives are also incredibly expensive right now compared to where they were a few years ago. Fingers crossed from a NAS that has had constantly spinning hard drives since the year 2013 and has not lost a drive yet. Fingers crossed that continues to go well. Incredible. But I was trying to save space on everything that I possible good. I'm not such a safe space, but also look at my bills. One of the things I do is I back up my NAS to cloud storage. Because it's not directly attached, I'm doing the eye scusy thing or anything. I can't use my flat-rate

1:58:01back place thing to somehow let it back up my giant NAS, which is not that giant these days. But anyway, I was using B2 back up because it was the cheapest. It's back places, S3, get it B2. They're object storage with a, I think it has an S3 compatible API, I like that I'll do, but their rates are cheap. And Synology has an app that will back up your NAS over B2. It's just a built-in feature. You just say, I wanted to go to B2. Here's my account, blah, blah, and it does it. And I've done that for years. Not backing up my entire Synology. Obviously, I'm not backing up my time machine backups on the Synology because that would be probably any work. But anyway, I'm backing up my other stuff that's there because that's the only way I have to back up my Synology. The cloud backup is it other than the rate redundancy that I have. And I can lose a driver too, depending on the rate configs, which I did poorly and made port choices, but it's too late now. Anyway, that used to cost me like, it was like 10 bucks a month for me to back up my Synology because it was so cheap. But as time went on, I was backing up more and more stuff than it was like 15 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month. It used to be like, oh, 28, 29. I'm like, well, as long as I keep it under

1:59:0530. But then in, I think in this past year, it was like, oh, now it's 32, 37, 36, it varies because like I'll delete stuff from my Synology and it'll go up and down. And I'm like, it's just too much. Now it's pushing up against 40 bucks a month for me to back up my Synology. Like, that's just my like backup of last resort. If I lose like two drives at the same time or something or like my house burns down and I'm paying 40 bucks a month for that, like I've literally never used it. I know it's not a reason not to have backup. But I'm like, I feel like the price is out of whack with the value that I'm getting from it. And so, you know, I looked at it and I said, I mean, I've talked about this on the show many times. When Marco has mused about this that AWS is an RPG. It's a game that you can play. And the wind condition is how can you figure out how to get what you want by not paying a lot. And I have a lot of experience dealing with S3 in particular in my joby job. And so I'm like, okay, let me look. Let me see if I can do it. You know, S3 has changed a lot over the years. Can I beat B2 with S3? The goal would be stop backing up to B2 and use the same

2:00:12Synology feature and start backing up to S3 instead and then delete everything from B2 and stop paying that bill. So that was my goal. Now, I do have a lot of experience literally writing billions of files to S3 in my joby job, okay, billion with the beat, many billions. But the thing about my joby job is I didn't have to pay for that. Now, I was trying to save the company money, obviously, but I can tell you that when you're spending the amount of money that my joby jobs are spending in AWS, you have like your own personal like concierge people who are talking to you and helping you with things. And it's just a very different experience to being like a loan developer with a free AWS account, okay? This is not excuse, but merely to explain that when I went about doing this and I'm like, okay, I think I know how I can do this. I've done the math and by the way, their price calculator was and remains terrible. Third party price calculators are a little bit better. I'm like, I think I can save money. Like before I even attempted this, I'm like, I think I can save money on this. So let me try it. And I made like all of the rookie mistakes. Like,

2:01:18I don't know if I've forgotten everything. I didn't forget, as soon as I did it, I'm like, oh yeah, don't you remember when you had your job? This was a thing. And when I was planning to do, you know, millions and billions of files, you're very careful and cautious. But I'm like, oh, it's just my little thing. I'll just do it. I'll pick this ball of ball. It was again, not excusing, but explaining the Synology interface doesn't let you pick all of these storage tiers when you say you're going to upload S3. It just has like a limited selection. And I made a poor choice in that first thing. I was like, oh, well, I'll just put it here and then I'll re-tier it. And I know this re-tiering costs, but how bad could it be? I should have looked at the numbers. Because month one of my transition, where I, you know, I stopped sending it to B2 and started sending it to S3. I was going from like a $36 bill, month one, June, $60.84. Whoops. Going in their own direction. That is not a success. And part of it was because I made a poor choice in the limited tiering pop-up menu, because I, again, I had forgotten what I once knew. This is the thing that happens, kids. You think once you know a thing, you're never going to make

2:02:21that mistake again. But then you'll get old. And you're like, I knew it the second I did it, but it was too late. It was pretty much damn gigabit upload connection. I had already uploaded so much stuff there. There is minimum time span costs. So it's like X amount per, like, byte per period of time. But there's a minimum. If you keep the file there for one second, we charge you for 30 days, like that type of thing. And that will screw you real bad, because if you put that thing up there and then re-tier it, because I had to re-tier it, because I couldn't upload it in the tier I wanted, because the Synology tool only had a limited tier choice. When I talk about tiers, by the way, it's like, do you want to have it in the fast storage, the not so fast storage? Like there's different levels of storage that cost you different amounts of money and give you different performance trade-offs. And there's a lot of tiers. And the names don't make any sense, even if you know the history behind them. So I had to upload into one tier and then immediately re-tier into the tier that I wanted. But the one second it was in the other tier charged me 30 days worth of being there. And I was bad. But I still had hope. I'm like, I think I can fix this. And I did some more

2:03:21re-tiering. And the way you have to re-tier things suck so bad. It's like, just I should have just done it like instead of using the Synology thing, I should just written the script myself, because then maybe Walnuttype in the code I would have like remembered. Oh yeah, 30-day minimum done. We don't do that. Okay. Month two, July, after re-tiering, rearranging, just dealing with everything, trying to do it. And by the way, they're price, not calculator, but they're price predictor. Here's what we think your month's gonna be. It's so bad, man. Like it'll be like, you're price for this month's gonna be two cents. And like the day before the month ends, like, oh, just getting. And then it shows you like the real price is gonna be cool. Let's make it this. Anyway, month two, July, $23.32. Oh, that's better. It's better than 36, but I'm like, but it's still, I still feel like I can do better here. I still feel like I'm going to do better. But you never know until the month ends, you know what I mean? Like, because the predictions are all over the place. Like I can't trust what it says, but it thinks it's gonna do. It fluctuates. I don't know how they're predicting. There's not so much activity. Like once I've got everything uploaded, you have some fluctuation of like, I'm pulling down like a new season of a television show or like,

2:04:24who wanted something recently? One of my kids wanted a TV show that I already watched that I had deleted, so I put it back on. And yes, I am backing up download of TV shows to just, don't worry about this. What I do. Okay. Um, month three, August, August just ended month three, and keep in mind, the amount of stuff that I have in S3 is exactly the same as I had in B2, fluctuating plus or minus as it like fluctuates. Because again, the system is basically full. So that's how much stuff is there. Month three, $4.74. Wow. Victory. Well done. So exciting. And the tradeoff is that if I ever need to do a restore, and it's gonna take a long time and B, I think I'll actually be charged more for the restore. But like considering I have never had to restore it, and this is my like thing of last resort, that's the tradeoff they don't want to do. Like how are you saving this money? I'm using the the worst, slowest thing where you can't even get your data immediately. You just have to like put in a request and since like send a letter and we'll pull your things out of Glacier Deep Archive and it will tell you when they're ready. Like, but that's fine because the

2:05:25whole point of this is like, this is not live storage. I don't access it. It is just there just in case. So I wanted the cheapest you can get $4.74. Big degrees from $36 a month. I'm very happy. And all this is to say that the the RPG that is AWS can be won sometimes if you're persistent. Well done, Sean. Awesome.