664: Humanity Gets in the Way  ## Metadata - Author: [[Accidental Tech Podcast]] - Full Title: 664: Humanity Gets in the Way - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/6979d5fe-3d61-4017-bca3-b7b4a5198719 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Repeated Phone Drops From Shorts Pocket** - Casey repeatedly drops phones from shorts pockets and survived multiple concrete impacts with minimal damage on recent iPhones. - He describes specific garage/door motions that led to phone falls and attributes survival partly to luck and phone durability. Transcript: Casey Liss I think we should figure out a way to do some sort of completely legal betting on how long it takes me to ruin a phone. Because I've gone from never ruining phones to doing it like it's going out of style. John Siracusa You've got to have one of those signs that says it has been X days since someone dropped their phone on ATP. And we'll just take the number. We had to reset it to zero for Marco. And now it had gone up to, I don't know, 1520. But it sounds like we might have to reset that number again. Casey Liss Well, actually, you don't. So I'm exaggerating for comedic effect. But sometimes since we last recorded, I forget what day it was, I have to back up a half step. So we have a two car garage. And although it does fit both cars, there is a lot of superfluous stuff around the cars. And we do park both cars in there every night. But there's bikes. There's a wagon. There's a stroller. Some of these things we don't really use anymore because our children are older. There's a garage refrigerator. There's our hot water heater is in the garage. It used to be that our furnace was in the garage. It's not anymore. There's a lot of stuff in there. And when we need to get to the outdoor fridge, because of uninteresting reasons, it's the door basically opens into the passenger side of Aaron's car. And there's a little bit of room to open the door, but not a lot. And it so happened that one morning, I want to say it was like Friday morning or something like that. I needed to get something that was kind of deeper within the outdoor fridge. And so I decided, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to move Erin's car out of the garage because she inevitably has some errand to run at some point. John Siracusa Oh, you were talking about the door to the fridge. Casey Liss Yes. I'm sorry. Was that unclear? John Siracusa I thought you meant the door from the house into the garage. Casey Liss Oh, no, no, no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That is a fair interpretation, but that is not at all what I meant. The garage is below the house by a couple of feet because, you know, the house is sitting on a crawl space and the garage is just, you know, concrete on the ground. So, yeah. So there's no issue with the people door. There's an issue with the refrigerator door. My apologies. Thank you for jumping in. So I move Aaron's car out and I'm doing this in my pajamas and my pajamas in the, in the summertime. And I've since switched, uh, for unrelated reasons, actually, but in the summertime, my pajamas are basically like really oversized, not, not exactly boxer shorts. I guess they're more like athletic shorts and a t-shirt. And I, my shorts have pockets in them. And so I'm in Aaron's car and I'm moving the car out of the garage and I go to get out of the car, and I hear clunk clunk clunk. Marco Arment Never trust soft shorts pockets to hold a phone securely. Casey Liss You've said this before. You've said this before, and yet I don't listen. John Siracusa Did the phone fall all the way out of the car, or did it just fall into the crack between the seat and the... Casey Liss John, it fell all the way onto the concrete, screen down. John Siracusa Oh, God. Casey Liss And then I went and grabbed it. There's a little teeny tiny dent by the camera control. Otherwise, it's fine. No damage. ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/157527ee-73fa-4c27-b711-388081807904)) - **Prepare For AI-Generated Podcast Chapters** - Apple Podcasts and Spotify are auto-generating AI chapters from transcripts, changing how listeners navigate shows. - Marco suggests podcasters and app developers prepare for AI chapter marks and consider implementing manual chapters where possible. Transcript: Marco Arment I mean, I'm not really prepared to talk about it yet, but Apple Podcasts did just announce that they are going to be doing AI chapter marks, which I believe, I think Spotify Podcasts did That a few months ago, where they're basically like taking the transcripts they're generating for podcasts and then making chapters based on like, hey, what topics are they talking About and when? Which honestly, I think it's an interesting feature. I'm investigating it myself for Overcast. I have nothing really to show for it yet. But I think this is starting to significantly change the listening experience of podcasts. And I think what we all look, how we all navigate our podcasts in like a year or two might look very different than how we do it now. I think it's kind of interesting news. Spotify did it. I didn't really hear about it, but for Apple Podcasts to be doing it, I think that's kind of a big deal. John Siracusa Yeah, I have a link in it for next week's episode, but since we're talking about it now, I believe they won't do it if you have manually created chapters. And I kind of know what AI-generated chapters are like because Merlin makes them all the time for recitive stuff just to sort of organize his thoughts about the show or whatever. And I can tell you, especially for a show like ours, manually created chapters are much more accurate and succinct because we know exactly what we're talking about. This is the overtime topic we have a snappy line for. We have a, we can be very precise. Whereas an AI generated description would be like, they're talking about some kind of Apple and technology stuff again. Like I didn't make a little bit, a little bit more specific like that, but invests for some reason. Yeah. I really do hope that, uh, my, uh, my recollection of what I read today is correct, that if you have manually created chapters, that Apple Podcasts will not try to auto-generate its own. Or rather, if it did, like I'm happy for it to do both. Here's the manually created chapters and here's the auto-generated ones. But what I don't want to see is, oh, now we're just ignoring the manual created ones and we'll just show you the auto-generated ones. Because manual ones are always going to be more precise, better, like you know we know what we're going to talk about we can put a one-liner description instead of a bunch of vague stuff So yeah i think this is a good feature and it'll be very useful for people who listen to podcasts that don't have chapters at all but i really hope it doesn't mess up our good thing that we Have going here which is a podcast with very good chapters and all the episodes i mean in all fairness like we'll be fine because most of our listeners use Apple Podcasts. Marco Arment So we'll be fine. And I think the listeners, most listeners who listen to shows that put in manual chapter markers, I think are much more likely to use third-party apps for their podcast listening. Chapter markers are pretty nerdy for certain audiences, typically like tech people and Germans, and especially German tech people. And so that community tends to not use Apple Podcasts proportionally as much as everyone else. But certainly, again, I think this is very interesting. It basically makes podcasts more navigable and more accessible if it works well. And that's a big if, and there's a lot of challenges to overcome, but that could be really, I think, experience changing for the medium. You know it's some ways good in some ways not so good we'll find out but i think it's it's kind of interesting like there you know that we're you know the rise of cheap transcripts basically Um is going to dramatically change what podcasts are doing and credit to apple spotify entering the podcast game made apple finally start working on Apple Podcasts in a meaningful Way. Like before Spotify really challenged them in podcasts, Apple Podcasts, I could always depend on them to not do much of anything. Like no offense to the podcast team, but like they didn't move much at all. They didn't move quickly, which I considered a feature not a bug for me being in the alternative app business. I was fine with that. Apple Podcasts really has not done much of anything for most of the last 15 years. But then, ever since Spotify started competing with them pretty well, pretty effectively, Apple is now matching Spotify feature for feature in podcasts and sometimes getting ahead Of them and sometimes falling behind. But they're moving again. They're doing big features. As an app developer who has to compete with them, I'm kind of like, you know, grumbly. But as a fan of podcasts, like, that's great, because they're still the biggest podcast player by a pretty good margin. ([Time 0:09:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/554bdeeb-cb7e-42e5-90aa-cd6893fbd354)) - **Apple Chip Codename Clarity** - Apple's internal chip codename scheme maps generations and variants to H-prefixed identifiers, clarifying which chips correspond to M-series parts. - John concludes there’s no obvious Mac Pro-class M5 rumor yet and Mac Pro hopes remain slim. Transcript: Casey Liss Design. John, which one of us said this wrong, and do we have to fire them? John Siracusa That was me. I was trying to think of how long the M1 was in the various parts. Was it? No, how long the current hardware design for laptops existed? Like the boxy kind of, I don't know what you call it. We don't have a good name for it, but the way the MacBook Pros look. And I said that it was like M2 through M5. And I was wrong. As Ben Madison points out, the MacBook Pro got its current form factor. In the M1 generation, not the M2, I was remembering the plain old MacBook, which came in the Intel form factor, the same one the Intel chips came in. But when they released the MacBook Pros, there was in fact an M1 Pro and M1 Max version of that. So thank you for the correction, Ben. Casey Liss All right. We need to really sell, apparently, some more Mac Pro Believe shirts because things are not looking good in Mac Pro land. John, I'm sorry. Tell me what's going on here. John Siracusa Yeah. Last episode, there was a – I forget who posted it. Brendan, somebody had posted something about – and to the of that person they didn't imply that this meant that there was mac pro stuff coming but they said they posted the name of a constant That they found in xcode 26.1 beta 3 and it was cpu family arm hydra hidra and we had talked about that in the past as a possible code name for a mac pro level chip uh luna is here to throw some Cold water on that idea uh they write Apple's internal chip code nomenclature dictates that the H one seven G, which was the, the number associated with that constant, um, is in fact The base M five, not some hypothetical M five extreme. The nomenclature is as follows. It's H then a generation and then a variant generation is the same as the a series year minus one. And the variant is p for the a series chips g for the a something x a something z and m something chips s for the m something pro c for the m something max d for the m something something ultra And x for the m something pro max and ultra yes they've reused some letters from multiple chips can you imagine the ai transcribing this right so for some examples the a11 is h10p because It's the a number minus one and p for the a blank chips a12x is h11g um a14 is h13p m1 is h13g m2 pros h14s those are how that's how the code names go and the gpus use the same naming except they Prefix with g instead of h um i looked up some more uh chip code names and stuff i because i get this the time i did this xcode 26.1 rc is out now 26.1 full is out which we'll talk about in a second But we'll put in the show notes the path to some files that are part of xcode that you can look at if you have xcode 26.1 and you will find some more constants and and uh code names here so to Give some examples h17g hedra is seemingly the plane m5 there's also one called tupai 2pi that i think is the a18 according to this nomenclature and then there is uh h18p thera which i Think is the a19 pro uh it's tricky we'll put another link to an apple uh code named wiki page that has a bunch of chip names in it um it's sad uh that there's still no mac pro caliber chip code Name rumor anything anywhere ever for this year or for next but that's the way it is i did see the uh m5 ultra rumor but again the ultra will be in the mac studio presumably and that's not A mac pro caliber chip so yeah at this at this point we will stop selling the mac pro believe shirts simply because nobody wants them anymore and still apple will not have done anything About the mac pro That's a sad state of affairs. They stopped believing. Yeah. You're supposed to not. ([Time 0:14:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/40b2cf47-cb2c-4938-92c5-a7667480a648)) - **Xcode 26.1 Broke Icon Workarounds** - John and other developers used an undocumented Xcode workaround to keep old icons on older macOS, which Xcode 26.1 broke. - He filed bugs and enhancement requests and now sticks with Xcode 26.0 to avoid ugly Tahoe-only icons on older OSes. Transcript: John Siracusa Yes. Bad on me for not paying attention to the Xcode betas. I'm like, ah, well, whatever. There's nothing wrong with the Xcode 26.1 that I've been using. Xcode 26.1 comes out. I'm sure it'll be fine, whatever. Nope. I'd forgotten all about this stupidity with the icons in Tahoe and apparently also in iOS, from what I hear. To review, when Tahoe came out, Apple insisted that everybody make Tahoe- icons that can be tinted and turn dark and light. And they want you to make them this new Icon Composer app where you sort of make a bunch of layers. And you can use bitmaps or vector graphics in the layers and apply glassy effects to them and do all sorts of stuff. And it's so that you can do different icon styles across all their OSs. You can make the icons look clear, dark mode and light mode. And you don't have to draw all these separate icons. You just kind of make this vector definition file with bitmaps and vectors, and it makes the icons out of it. Uh, and with my apps, uh, I begrudgingly made these stupid, ugly icons for Tahoe for all my apps, but on pre-Tahoe versions of macOS, I wanted all my old icons to be there because the Tahoe Icons, in addition to being ugly, look very different than the pre-Tahoe icons. So I wanted the Tahoe icons if you're running on Tahoe, but that very same app, if you put it on a pre-Tahoe version of macOS, I want it to look like how it used to with the old icons. And it was very painful for me to figure out a way to do that. I didn't actually figure it out. Someone figured it out online and I just copied what they did. But a bunch of developers were struggling with this problem because it seemed like an obvious thing that we want to do again the wwdc section where they're like adopt these new icons For taho i fully expected them to say here's how you get these new icons on taho and of course you want your old icons to appear on earlier versions nope they never said that they did not Provide a way to do it someone found an undocumented flag to some command line tool that's part of xcode that could do it with some weird work around and that's what i did and that's how I shipped my apps xcode 26.1 broke that so that system that we were all using that some clever person figured out to make it so that our icons look like the old icons the old os the new icons And new us doesn't work anymore both on mac os and according to people who have written to me and mastodon also ios is the same exact deal we were all using the same workaround and now it Just plain doesn't work anymore I filed bugs against it Apple said working as designed I filed an enhancement request it says it would be great if you provided us for with an official Supported way to show the new icons of the new OS and the old icons in the old OS no reply and so now I'm kind of stuck not being able to upgrade xcode i'm just sticking with xcode 26.0 and i Will keep using that until i can't anymore because if i build my app with 26.1 it will break all my icons on the old os and make them all look like the new ugly ones i'm sad about this this is Dumb squir jail is dumb. ([Time 0:19:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/edbfb6d5-70b2-4ca6-9d00-6f9f1328f7ce)) - **Check Electron Apps Before Upgrading** - Before upgrading to macOS Tahoe, check which installed Electron-based apps ship fixed Electron versions. - John recommends updating or removing apps using old Electron releases to avoid Tahoe slowdowns. Transcript: John Siracusa Talked about that in an earlier episode. We're asking, is it safe to upgrade to Tahoe? And we mentioned that there's a bug in Electron where they were using a private API and it was slowing things down. And a new version of Electron came out that fixed that. But of course, every app that embeds Electron, which is like a web rendering engine lots of Mac apps use, would have to be updated. And there was this detector app that we linked to that will, it's like an Apple script that will just search your system and find all the apps that use Electron and check the version of Electron they're using and tell you here are all the apps that have the bug that you have installed. And when I ran it, um, I'm still, I'm still running, uh, the earlier version of AgWest. Um, but when I ran it, it found 23 apps that I had on my Mac that had the bad version, uh, a non-fixed version of Electron. So were I to upgrade to Tahoe, which to be clear, I have not, but were I to upgrade to Tahoe, I have 23 apps that if I was running any of them, it could cause this slowdown, system-wide slowdown. So I went through and I updated all the apps. I went through all 23 of those apps and tried to get the latest version, make sure I had the latest version of everything. Some of them were already updated because they're like Mac App Store apps or whatever. And I have auto update on, but other ones I had to go download. After that, here's what I'm left with. And I deleted some apps, too, that were just like old stuff. And I was kind of surprised that this has been, you know, going on since the early last month. And here we are in November and still it's a problem. ([Time 0:26:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5a3c3dc0-ea4f-40d0-b796-56b4b5e815d9)) - **M5 Removes IO Bottlenecks** - The M5 MacBook Pro shows major storage bandwidth and CPU gains versus M4, but real-world speedups depend on workload bottlenecks. - John and Marco note the SSD bandwidth jump removes a key bottleneck for base M-series machines, improving IO-heavy tasks. Transcript: Casey Liss We finally have to turn these rounds upside down and in mac os tahoe 26.1 you get more clipboard history options reading from mac rumors in system settings spotlight in tahoe 26.1 there Are new clipboard history controls allowing users to decide how long copied items remain accessible previously spotlight could optionally retain clipboard contents for up to eight Hours but the latest update expands that flexibility with three options 30 minutes eight hours or seven days there's also a new clear clipboard history button yeah that's a nice enhancement John Siracusa Like i i continue to think the main downside to the built-in clipboard manager is that it takes more keystrokes than third-party ones uh i'm continuing to use pacebot but um i love that The this is built into the os and i wish it was built into ios as well yeah i'm still using launch bar's clip bar history. Marco Arment And like, I don't like LaunchBar itself, the rest of it, I use almost none of the features of these launcher apps. They can do a million different things. All of them can. And for me, like all of the app launching stuff, like I mainly use it as, you know, a very basic version of what Quicksilver used to do of just like the name of the app. Even Spotlight has been able to do that for years. Like, let me type the first few letters of an app and launch it. And clipboard history. And it's wonderful for that. But like the ergonomics of LaunchBar clipboard history are so built into my fingers. Like whenever I've tried to use anything else, just like minor differences just get me and i can't do it so i'm still happy to stick with launch bar until you know there's some reason why I can't i also love using launch bar to type uh emoji into messages and stuff because you can like you can have it index emoji names and then you can just you know hit command space and you Know grimace and enter like there bam grimace face like you can i know there's other ways to do that but without having like an apple keyboard with the emoji button it's not super convenient To do in most other ways um so i'm still happy with launch bar and that's i'm glad tahoe was bringing this to the mainstream and i think tahoe bringing clipboard history like first party Is probably also a good sign for i, John, in the sense that like, maybe in the next couple iOS releases, maybe Apple brings it at least to the iPad and maybe to the phone in some way. I don't know how that would work, but I bet it will come to the iPad pretty soon. Casey Liss I'm still on Alfred and I don't have any particular compulsion to leave Alfred behind. And it's very much, you know, similar to what Marco was saying. I use a little bit of Alfred's, you know, fancy bits, but not a ton. And certainly there's a lot of fancy bits that I don't touch. All right. Uh, we've got some speed tests that have been done on the M5 MacBook Pro. Uh, we are largely going to be talking about a max tech video about this, which we'll put in the show notes. Uh, the black magic disc speed test was fascinating. The read speeds on the M four MacBook pro, uh, 2031. What is this like, uh, megabits per second or something like that? It's whatever the unit is. It doesn't really matter. John Siracusa Yeah. I forget what the number is, but I think the units is like, um, maybe megabytes per second. Anyway. Anyway. Casey Liss So 2031 for the M four 6,323 for the M five MacBook Pro, that is a 3.1X improvement. Very, very, very impressive. The write speed, the M4, 3300 basically. The M5, 6,100. So that's about 1.8x multiplier improvement for geek bench geek bench six the cpu m4 uh single core 3688 m5 4263 so about 15 improvement multi-core on the m4 just shy of 15 000 on the m5 A little shy of 18 000 so that's an improvement of about 20 for the gpu using metal, the M4 MacBook Pro, 57,000. The M5 MacBook Pro, 76,000, which is an improvement of about 33%. The M4 Pro MacBook Pro is 79,000, which is about 3% faster than the M5. But that's not a like-for chip. ([Time 0:29:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8a9f0963-e19a-41b9-868c-0d4a37a9ab47)) - **Consider Developer Strap For Vision Pro** - If you use Vision Pro extensively, consider the official developer strap for lower latency and comfort. - Casey notes the new dual-knit strap improves comfort but questions necessity unless you rely on Mac virtual display workflows. Transcript: Casey Liss I got sent a new developer strap. What is the official name for this? I don't know. The developer strap Mark II or whatever. And I had the occasion to go to a local library this morning and do my ATP prep that I usually do on Wednesday mornings. Instead of going to Wegmans, I went to the library. And I did that in no small part so I could reserve a study room so I wouldn't be out in the middle of everything. So I could try doing Mac virtual display with the Vision Pro. It is incredible. With the developer strap, there is almost no latency. I feel like the image is great. I know everyone has conflicting opinions about that. I'm not here to relitigate it, but everything went really, really well. I don't think that the developer strap is absolutely necessary, and it is quite expensive. It's something like $400 or something like that, I believe. Um, but it did work out quite well. And if you are someone who lives in Mac virtual display, and I've talked to a few people that are like that, um, I do not do that personally, but I know that there are people who do, um, then I strongly recommend the new developer Strap. It's quite good. I didn't do any like speed tests or anything like that. I didn't run any performance tests. I just used it and job well done. The other nice thing is the new strap. I know everyone is raving about it and I will repeat what I said a week or two ago. The new dual knit band, whatever they call it, is incredible. It is so, so much more comfortable than any version of strap that I have tried previously. Really, really good. One curious thing that I noted, and I'd be curious for the three of you that have Vision Pros, if you could try this. So I'm on 26.1 on the released version, 26.1. And for whatever reason, and this is not the point, but for some reason, as I was playing music and as sound effects were happening and whatnot, I noticed that the balance was somewhere, I would say like 60 to 70 percent to the left channel. I have no idea why. I have no idea how. This is with both the, what do they call them, the audio pods or whatever that are on the stems or the legs of the Vision Pro. Again, my terminology is all wrong. I'm sorry. Sticks. Okay, there you go. So anyway on the straps, I guess, strictly speaking, if it's a developer strap. But anyways, it's both those speakers in there and my AirPods Pro Mark III. I was getting like weird balance issues where, again, it was like halfway between the center and the left channel. So I was getting some out of the right, but not a lot. So I was casting about trying to figure out what I can do about this. And I went into accessibility, audio and visual balance. And I thought, oh, I will slide the balance, you know, 60% of the way to the right to kind of fix this. I also tried, I also wondered if maybe this had something to do with spatial audio. Maybe that is what was happening. But when I tried to turn the balance to in between center and right, I could only slide all the way to the right or all the way to the left. And the little numeral at the top in between L and R showed 1.00. I don't know what's going on here, but it sure seemed like where it was expecting to have a float or something or double or something like that, it was only taking an integer because my Options were zero or one, or negative one, I guess, strictly speaking, which I thought was very funny. And I'd be curious for the three of you that have Vision Pros if you run into this. But the point of bringing this up was just that the developer strap is very good. ([Time 0:43:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ba6390d2-16b9-4d44-9a08-409fb4c831ed)) - **Nanotexture Makes Pencil Feel Better** - Marco saw the iPad Pro nanotexture display in-store and found pencil feel and texture vastly improved with minimal blur. - He plans to buy nanotexture on future iPads despite cost and worries about fingerprints being manageable. Transcript: Marco Arment Uh i actually i went to an apple store this morning i like i was breezing through grand central and i stopped at the apple store there and i got to see for the first time the iPad Pro nanotexture Screen option because they have it on display. It is so nice. And now I'm to the point where I'm like, I want nanotexture on all of my screens. Now, the iPad is like my least used Apple device. And so it does not make sense for me to buy a new iPad. But just for the sake of it, I looked. I'm like, well, you know, my iPad Pro is a few years old. What would it cost me to get a new iPad Pro setup now? What that would mean is I would also need to get the new Magic Keyboard because I have the old keyboard folio. I would need to get a new Apple Pencil Pro. And because the nanotexture is only available on the one and two terabyte models to get the minute. And of course, I need cellular. To get one terabyte cellular nanotexture magic keyboard and pencil pro in the 11 inch it's like 2300 like oh i don't use my ipad quite that much so that i'm not going to jump on that and people John Siracusa Always think that i mean obviously you're getting killed on the ssd which is's stupid, you know, shoving all the margins. But I will point out that that weird ass floppy laptop you have has a better screen than any of Apple's laptops. Yeah, it's OLED and has a processor that is faster and single core than any of Apple's laptops, except for the plain M5 MacBook. It's you know in the in the apple realm it is not excessively priced because if you were to configure any comparably capable similar machine from apple you would get similar prices but Uh that's you know you don't want all that you want to mix and match i just want nanotexture i don't care if it has a terabyte give me the lowest possible storage but that's not a thing they Marco Arment Offer. Yeah, and it's so frustrating because it's like nanotexture is so nice. Like once you get used to it, you want it everywhere. I'm so glad I don't like it. Oh my god. Like I will never buy another non-nanotexture screen if that product is offered with nanotexture. John Siracusa Well, at the Apple store, they're constantly cleaning those screens though. How do you feel about nanotexture with finger spooge all over it? Well, all of my tuck screens are always covered in finger stuff. I know, but it's harder to clean off nanotexture and it shows up more. I'm not a nanotexture fan. Marco Arment Honestly, I don't think it does show up more. So right now, on iPadsads like right now on my ipad on my kind of older ipad pro i have one of those um is it paper like no i don't use paper like anymore there's like an astro pad cover or something Like that um that's a little bit easier to apply and has a little bit different finish um and so for you know for years now before that i used i used the paper like ones i've used these kind Of like textured screen covers for the iPad because I like the way that they both feel and the way the pencil feels on them way better than the flat, slick glass. And so I've used those all the time. And they all like nanotexture. They all show smears and fingerprints differently, and they're a little bit harder to wipe off. But they're not impossible to wipe off. You just wipe them across your pants or whatever you have available. You take a cloth or whatever it is. You get it done. It's fine. It's like when people say, oh, don't buy a white car because it looks dirty all the time. Every car I've ever had looks dirty all the time in every color. That's just cars. They just get dirty. That's how touch screens are. Touch screens get fingerprints on them. And if you look at the wrong angle in the light, you'll see all the fingerprints, no matter what finish it is. I don't think the Anotexture is meaningfully different. I will say our friend Steve Trouton-Smith recently got an Anotexture iPad Pro and has been posting about it on a Mastodon here and there. And one thing Steve pointed out was that the pencil texture on it, it feels closer to a remarkable. And I tested that today in the store. I was curious about that. That's part of the reason why I wanted to see it. So I tested it. And indeed, I had two iPads side by side, one with nanotexture, one without. And the pencil texture with nanotexture is way better. Night and day difference. It wouldn't surprise me if that's why Apple added it to the high-end models, not necessarily for like, you know, video producers, but maybe for people using the pencil, like high-end Artists. It's a huge difference and a huge improvement. And compared to using a paper-like or this AstroPad thing that I have, compared to using like a paper screen protector, it's way more refined. It doesn't have quite as much like friction as a texture, but those screen protectors introduce way more blur to the screen image than the nanotexture itself does. Nanotexture itself, there's honestly almost no blurring of the image. And you do get a little bit of that texture that makes a pretty big difference. So whenever I get a new iPad, that's what I'm getting. ([Time 0:49:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fb34a33f-ce88-4410-8916-f1be87169df2)) - **Finder and Sidebar Changes Frustrate Users** - Casey upgraded to Tahoe and dislikes Finder's new window depth, sidebar icons, and vibrantly colored folders. - He reports Synology Drive icon stands out in the sidebar and struggles to make sidebar icons honor custom folder icons. Transcript: Casey Liss Right. So back at the ranch, we're going to talk about. And I have upgraded my MacBook Pro. The upgrade went fine. My initial impressions after having used this for about 24 hours, the transparent menu bar, it's fine. Like I don't have any strong feelings about it. However, what in the actual hell is up with these folder icons? They are so loud. John Siracusa What is happening? You can pick a different color for them that's also loud. Great. I'm so excited. But it's a different color. Casey Liss I don't know what I expected, but these are so much more vibrant and in-your whereas I feel like a folder should, to a degree, not fade into the background, but certainly be a lot less in-your Don't love that. Also, what did they do to our baby? Finder Windows look bananas. Generally speaking, I actually don't mind the look of this OS as much as I thought I would. I mostly think it's pretty good, which I know is a relatively hot take. What did they do to Finder Windows? There are so many different orbs at different depths, and I can't tell what's where in terms of depth. I don't care for it. Marco Arment But Casey, they're spotlighting your content. John Siracusa Yeah, Finder demonstrates most of the controls that have their appearance changed radically in Tahoe. So you've got sidebar, obviously. You're talking about a sidebar Finder window because that's the kind of person you are. You've got toolbars, which also are changed a lot. You've got tab bars, which also are changed a lot if you have multiple tabs open. And that's all combined into a single window, so you get to see how unharmonious all those... First of all, you see how much those controls change because the sidebar is now inset, and it's got rounded corners, and the tabs aren't tabs anymore. They're capsules, and the toolbar buttons are different. You have a dark mode screenshot here. I think it's worse than light mode because it looks like everything is overexposed, they have the weird drop shadows that have been toned down a little bit. Yeah, it really highlights exactly how ugly and not space efficient and not harmonious. It's just bad. I don't like it. Yeah. And, of course, I think part of the reason the folder icons stand out so much is that the rest of the os has been drained of all color and basically bleached or in this case i mean in dark mode People like it to be dark so i actually i think this dark mode looks better than light mode but switch into light mode and just everything looks like it's uh bone bleached in the desert And everything is all completely white and the only piece of color is your highlight color whatever color you picked and your folder color completely like i said i believe you can change The default folder color and you can also pick on a per folder basis the color you want a specific color folder to be with the labeling system which then the doc will entirely ignore well Casey Liss And it's funny you bring that up so i want to come back to that in just a second but uh for the record, I am a grown-up. And so I use my devices in light mode during the daytime and dark mode at nighttime. You heathens with the full-time dark mode, I don't know what you're doing. You're lunatics. But nevertheless. So, yes, the screenshot, which I'm about to discuss, I did happen to take just a few minutes before recording. It was nighttime, so it's a dark mode screenshot. But my initial, oh, was because I saw Finder in light mode and I just, I don't like it. Again, I actually think for the most part, this isn't bad. Like Safari, it's not stellar, but I was expected to be offended by the entire operating system and I'm really not. I am offended by Finder though. Finder's real rough. But speaking of Finder and speaking of the sidebar, I use Synology Drive. We've talked about this many times in the past. Synology Drive is kind of a bespoke Dropbox alike that, among other things, also will sync with Dropbox through other means, but that's not really relevant. But when I put that in my sidebar, which is where I like it to be because this is effectively my Dropbox, everything in my sidebar looks, you know, muted and black and white, except the Synology Drive folder, which is the icon for Synology Drive in the Squirtle jail. I don't know if this is something that I have done at some point during my time with this Mac, but I tried going in and doing the, like, customize this folder icon by putting a, even though It's not really an emoji, I think they call it an emoji on it, and that doesn't seem to matter. It matters for, like, the main finder window, but to your point about the dock, it doesn't affect the sidebar in Finder. So if you have a mechanism by which I can make this not look awful, I would love to hear it because I don't want to remove this from my favorites on my sidebar. And I know, John, you're about to say, just get rid of the sidebar, but that's also not happening. But if I can make this not look awful, that would be great. ([Time 0:54:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3d795e7b-74d7-45d8-9ac3-c7684d85e2fd)) - **Link Community Answers To A FAQ** - Provide a public, indexed FAQ or knowledge base to reduce repetitive answers and let community members link to canonical explanations. - John advises linking to a controlled resource so replies don't require rewriting the same long explanation repeatedly. Transcript: Marco Arment And so far, you know, the more I participate, the better it gets. John Siracusa You may be in a honeymoon period, but we'll see. But like, that's the kind of the issue with things like Reddit and someone mentioned in the chat room, like that we should have like a members only discord or whatever. In the beginning, beginning it looks like everything's all upside and isn't this great and everyone's happened to be here um but running any kind of online community or not even running It but just you know participating in an online community and having that community be sustained in a way that pleases you especially if you're the one who started the community you Started it with the purpose you want something out of it you want it to be different than the existing community. Ideally, it should do X, Y, and Z for you. You're like, I did it, and so far, it's working great. It's doing what I want. But how do communities maintain that? You have a way that you want this community to be. It is that way now. How do you make it stay that way? Inevitably, you run up to the exact same things that anyone who's ever had any kind of community, online or otherwise, but especially online because it's been done at scale, runs into. What are the rules of this community? What are the social norms? How are they enforced? Do we need moderators? What are the rules? Now, we argue about the rules. Are we banning people? I mean, look at the Procreate community. They thought it was great. We're just here sharing art for years and years until, you know, I think they did some kind of like vote. Like we're going to vote among the community guidelines are. And like this is a subreddit with like 100,000 people in it, right? 43 people voted in the poll about whether they should allow, quote unquote, politics. And of the 43 people that voted, the majority of them said no we shouldn't have politics here and that that little decision slept there until someone posted message for the trans flag And now it's like we didn't realize we were in this community and now there's a schism and people are branching off and people are angry and what happens to the old community and it's it's A thankless job to try to run a community like that or to try to you know make sure that everybody who is participating understands the rules of that community and gets them enforced and Doesn't get mad about it or whatever and in many respects when a community is small and self-selecting you don't have to worry about that but if it as time goes on like outside threats What if people from the other uh community come over and decide they're going to participate in this new community because that's where the action is happening but now they are all mean Anything is there some mechanism in place to stop them from doing that would you just leave and start another community would you constantly be fleeing from them would would you think That everyone else would shout them down like and then if it comes to screaming match between the old people and the new people online community is really really hard so i hope that doesn't Happen to your reddit but like you always have to think like well what, what's stopping it from happening? Just that people have decided not to do that so far. Right. And, you know, if it doesn't work out, doesn't work out. You leave like so what? Like it was good for a time and, you know, whatever. And as you noted, the information that is there and getting indexed, that is a value, even if it only lasts a short period of time and presumably you're getting value out of it now with Interacting with customers and so on and so forth like all the things you said are true and that doesn't change even if things go south sometime in the future although i will point out Two things one uh it would have that exact same value without ai like google search index it like half the time i'm finding myself on a reddit thing because i'm googling for how to fix some Dishwasher and i land on a reddit post or whatever like even the shortcuts thing that solution i found in reddit about like don't overwrite files that was just a google search right obviously Ai is uh another ingredient because so many people are using it now that who will never actually go to reddit.com which is why reddit wants money from them because they're not actually Sending any traffic there and yes it's good that you're participating in that as well um so that has value no matter how this goes but one of the when people ask about discords that i mentioned Before one of the reasons we don't have that is because i think all three of us understand that if we were to run an official discord now we're taking on a responsibility for governance In a community of fans if atp fans want to have their own discord, they can do that right now. Like we're nothing, we're not stopping them, right? It's just that we don't want to run that community because it's a lot of work to run any kind of community. And there's significant downside if we're seen as the people who are setting the rules for the community and forcing them and people are angry about it. And it's like, guys, if you want a community of ATP fans, go make one. And then you get to run that community and you can see how hard it is. You can make seven communities. You can have 10 subreddits. You can have Slack channels. You can have hotline channels. You can have IRC channels. Like that just, but running a community is so difficult. So that's why we haven't ever done that as an official type thing. I know some people want it, but it's a subset and running that community becomes like a huge amount of work for a small number of people and there's only so many things we can all take on Since we have so many plates spinning here um so i don't know i i'm i'm wary about your red i'm glad it's working out for you and another thing you mentioned on on uh under the radar which I thought was a good self-knowledge but also uh you know is kind of a bummer is i think underscore s like um oh no you said this yourself like uh like you're not creating a knowledge base Like you're not like making uh like a an actual repository of information you're answering people's questions on reddit and those get indexed and that's the system working the way It intended and you said it's because i know i will never actually sit down and make some kind of like official structured knowledge base it's like i know myself i haven't done that in The past. I'm probably not going to do it in the future, but I will do this. I will answer someone's question on Reddit and allow that to be passively indexed. Um, my pitch would be having some kind of self-created set of documentation, knowledge base or whatever, will make answering people's questions on Reddit easier because you can then Give a quick summary and link them to the length of your explanation instead of writing it over and over again. That's the one of the reasons we have a membership fact on ATP.fm is because people have membership questions and there's no way in how and lots of people they email for support or whatever, Because again, we don't have a community to do this, which is but i don't want to write the same email reply seven times so that's why i have anchor links to the specific question that they Asked in the membership fact that gives a longer explanation and if five or six people ask a question that becomes frequently asked guess what it goes into the fact which is kind of like A knowledge base which gets indexed which yada yada so i would encourage you to at least if something keeps coming up consider at overcast.fm having a fac or something where the most Frequently asked questions are and you have a formal longer answer and you can still informally answer people's questions there but i think what you'll see then is people who are an... ([Time 1:27:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/662e0ff0-e332-469c-af14-3c762a433a75)) - **3D Printing Solved Small Home Problems** - Marco got into 3D printing, used Tinkercad and calipers to print practical parts like a YoLink bracket and bedside lamp wing-nut grips. - He now recommends Bambu/BambuLab printers for ease of use, RFID filament management, and lower failure rates versus older machines. Transcript: Casey Liss Oh, what are you trying to print? And I think that came out sarcastic or about you. I don't mean it that way. I'm genuinely asking. Marco Arment For a long time ago, Tiff got me as like an experimental Christmas gift. She got me a 3D printer many years ago. The company, I believe it's Shindo. The company went out of business long ago. They had like proprietary filament uh which is the rolls of plastic that you like that get extruded to print stuff um and like nobody like you had to like hack the microchips in their filament With third-party refills to get it to you know so like it maintaining that printer over time is difficult and it was a very early model. Like for the time, it was good. But I mean, that was probably almost 10 years ago. And printers have come a long way since then. So our plan was, okay, that printer, you know, we will, I never really used it that much. I used it basically to print a few HomePod cord management stands and a coffee filter holder. And that's about all I ever made with it. But what happened was as it was sitting on a shelf for a while, is that over time, Tiff and Adam would play with it. And especially around Halloween, Adam would often request a Halloween costume that would be based on like a video game character or something. And we would be able to 3D print like a mask or a helmet or something as part of the costume and then over time adam learned oh you can also 3d print a bunch of like fun little toys and doodads And stuff and so we would print some of those and the old 3d printer um eventually we ran out of first party filament and we got tired of trying to hack it and so we're like you know what this Halloween he had a pretty ambitious costume model to print and like let's get a new 3D printer for the family and my interest in it is much more limited my interest in it has basically been Like when I have a need for something to be 3D printed I will I will solve that need that need doesn't happen very often for me but it does like the wi-fi thing at the restaurant that you told Us about yeah so one like the first thing i had in a long time was and this was actually with the old printer um was my um yo link temperature monitors that i put in the restaurant fridges Yo link didn't have any kind of bracket so i went on i think it's is it tinkercad is that what the site tinkercad yeah i like i asked chat gpt like what do people use like what do children use To make 3d models from scratch basically and i came upon tinkercad which is this like kind of you know simplified web app version of like that that's sponsored by autocCAD that basically Is a web app to make very simple 3D models. I went on Tinkercad. I figured out how to use it. I have calipers, and so I measured the temperature sensor, and I made myself a bracket for the O-Link sensor. I printed it out in this ugly red plastic because it's the only filament we had left. It felt very good to have a problem and to solve that problem myself and and you know i couldn't just go on amazon and buy a bracket for six dollars because they didn't exist like no one made Them and there was no model existing on like thing averse or maker world or anything like that and so i couldn't use someone else's model i had to make my own model from scratch and solve This problem myself. And it felt pretty good, to be honest. But like, I'm not like a maker. I'm not constantly thinking about new things to print, new things to make. That's just kind of not how my brain works. And so I don't really have a frequent use for it. But the rest of the time, my family is printing fun stuff all the time. So we got the new printer. And a special thanks to our friend merlin mann who's been talking about 3d printing for a couple of years now on all his various podcasts as he's gotten really into it and i've been following His post on mastodon about it and everything else and he a couple years ago i asked him like hey whenever I upgrade my printer, what should I get? And he recommended the Bamboo company, B-A because they basically have, like, almost like an Apple-like integrated system. They sell the printers, they sell spools of filament. You can use other filament if you want to, but, like, if you stick within their system and get their stuff, it's very easy. Everything is like, you know, tagged with RFID. So like you put in, you put in their filament and it'll, it reads it and it knows what it is. It knows what color it is. It knows what material it is. It knows like how hot to set the nozzle and stuff like that. All these different variables you need with 3D printing. So if you are not a 3D printing nerd and just want to like into it, it's a great solution for that because it takes care of a lot of those details for you if you stick within their system. And I don't – who cares? If I have to only buy their filament, fine. I'm not a power user here. I don't need anyone else's filament. I'll just stick with theirs. So it makes it easier. Anyway, so I can now say with a little bit more experience with it the first of all the bamboo printers are awesome like they have come 3d printers have come a long way in the last 10 years A long way a mile like oh my god it's so much easier now it's so much better than it used to be um but also now like i because it has gotten easier and better and faster i'm also now finding a Few more opportunities to use it so first of all i'm having fun just like helping my kid with like stuff he wants to make you know we i got a roll of tpu because that's hard to print but we now Have a nice printer that can print it so like and tpu can be like a little bit squishy so that's kind of fun you can make you know certain different types of things with different behaviors With that so like we figured out how do we print tpu we figured it out and we printed a few little things and they're squishy and it's delightful um also the other day i had this stupid idea I'm like you know what i have a 3D printer now. For the last, I don't know, year? Ever since we've remodeled this house, our bedside lamps, we've redid the bed area, and our bedside lamps are these, like, sconces on the walls, and the switches to them are those little Metal knobs. You know the ones that are, like, about as thick as, like, a pencil eraser? And they're three-way lamps so to turn it off you might have to turn this thing three clicks and they just have those little like you know ridges on these little knobs and next to your bed First of all it's like that's they're annoying they're hard to turn and then like in the winter if i just if i just put moisturizer on my hands before I went to bed, I can't turn those knobs. John Siracusa You need also good grips for your lights or you could have hooked up to a smart thing, which I'm sure everyone could write it and say, you know, you could just clap like the clapper and they'll Turn off. Marco Arment Yeah, I tried those things. But basically the way they're wired, it would be very difficult to have a smart switch. So I'm like, all right, that option is out. John Siracusa Smart light bulb is what people are going to suggest. Marco Arment But of ([Time 1:41:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/39eaf5e4-2326-4c46-b062-d755e2196b21))