619: Master Plan to Take Over the World
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Happy almost Christmas and almost Hanukkah. Did you know that Hanukkah and Christmas, the first night of Hanukkah is Christmas Day? Yeah, I heard that, and that's pretty unusual, right? It happens every great once in a while. I don't love it. I don't love it, to be honest with you, because we are a blended household in many different ways. I guess I'm a blended human title insofar as, as I think I've said many times on the show, dad was raised Jewish, although he doesn't really practice now. Mom was raised Catholic, doesn't really practice. So I was basically raised Jewish.

feeling guilty for everything. Um, uh, we celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas, uh, as I was growing up and in my family and, you know, with Aaron and the kids, we, we recognize Hanukkah and to, to a small degree celebrated. And of course, Christmas and don't love when they overlap like this. Not my favorite. What's bad about it. What's bad about the overlap? Cause then, then, then,

neither one of the... Well, Christmas, first of all, Christmas overshadows everything, which... Fine. I mean, I get it. That makes sense. But then Hanukkah doesn't have the space to be its own thing, to be its own person, if you will. And that kind of bums me out. But it's fine. It also, you know...

How do you delineate the presents and what's from Santa and what isn't and what's, you know, Hanukkah and what isn't? And it's... I don't know. It's fine. It's just not my favorite. But you know what is my favorite? Doing member specials. And we did a member special even before the last recording of the regular episodes. But we did...

what is probably the worst promo for that member special. When we recorded, it actually happened, I believe, at the very end of the episode. And through the magic of editing and Marco, he shimmied it up to the front. But we're going to make an attempt at doing a better copy this time. So let me tell you, guess what? There's a new member special. And it's called ATP Insider Making the Show. And this was John's idea, as many of them are. So John, would you like me to summarize or would you like to give the pitch?

I can give a pitch. And actually, it wasn't my idea. It was sent from a listener. But that's the whole point of these things. We get asked all the time questions about the making of the show, the mechanics of making of the show from people who want to start their own podcast, from people who are just curious. And sometimes we answer them and ask ATP. Sometimes we say things offhandedly. We thought it would be a good idea to have a single episode of the show that we can point people to to say, if you would like to know how we make the show from beginning to end,

each week, here is an episode for you. You'll hear about our process, you'll hear about the equipment we use, you'll hear about

All the different aspects, gathering up the show, writing both versions of the show notes, editing the episode, posting the episode, things we think about when we're recording it, and just everything you can imagine. It might sound boring to you, like, oh, great, you're going to tell me the nuts and bolts of how you make a podcast. Why would I care about this? But hopefully there'll be at least some insight into how we think about the show and certainly lots of tidbits.

about the gear we use, which is not particularly exciting. And hopefully when you listen to this, you realize making a podcast, it's not about the software. It's not about the hardware. Like the holiday season, it's about the people. Yeah.

It's true, though. It's very true. I thought it was a fun episode. This is classic ATP because when we sat down, I think all three of us thought, eh, it'll be 30, 45 minutes, maybe an hour. And Marco, what was the total? I never think that, but apparently you do a lot. Casey always comes to the member specials thinking this is going to be 45 minutes. You'll say it in the show. You'll say, yeah, we should be done in 45 minutes. It's never going to happen.

Literally, when I came upstairs to record that, I told Tiff, I'm like, I bet I can come down afterwards and watch some TV with you. Right? I'm saying. I'm pretty sure this would be like at most an hour. Right? I'm pretty sure I said almost verbatim the exact same thing to Aaron. And like an hour in, I don't think we had even gotten past John and slightly me, but mostly John assembling the internal notes for the week. And I think I sent Aaron a text like, yep, I'll see you tomorrow. Yep. This isn't going to work.

Anyway, I think I sound like I'm complaining and whining, and if I do, I apologize. I'm not trying to. It was just one of those things where I was so convinced, so convinced that it was going to be a quick one, and

It was not a quick one. So that being said, it was fun and I did really enjoy it. And I think there is a lot of fun to be had, even for the three of us, hearing how each of us thinks about our different roles in the creation of the show. Because obviously we talk about it, but it's not often that we get to, I don't know, get to the feels behind it. It wasn't a heavy feeling show, but there's a little bit of that too. I don't know. It was just, it was fun and I really enjoyed it. And even if you're not looking to start a podcast, I do think there's something in there for everyone. So check it out.

Now, John, if you aren't already a member and thus don't have access to this incredible content, how would one go about becoming a member? Very simple. Go to ATP.FM slash join and you can become a member. Don't want to pay for your own membership? Get someone else to do it for you. ATP.FM slash gift. Direct them to that page. Tell them your email address. They can buy you a membership. You can get it for the holidays. Redeem it and have a membership that someone else paid for. It's the perfect time of year for it.

And I believe you can schedule delivery or is it on? How is it set up? If only you knew how our website works. I know. It's been so long since I've looked at this because I did your user acceptance testing for you and that was so long ago I forgot exactly how it works. We're having pretty good luck with this. Here's how it works. When you buy someone a gift membership,

It does not immediately like send them an email and like spoil it for them or whatever. And I considered having a thing where like you can schedule for when it's going to arrive or whatever. But in the end, I picked the simpler method, which so far has been working really well, which is when the person who is buying the gift buys the gift membership after they've successfully bought it. There's a screen that says, here's what you got to do. Take this link or this promo code or whatever, like the seven different things that explains and give them to the other person. However, you feel like it.

You can message them. You can write it on a piece of paper. You can put it in a card. You can, you know, print this web page out as a PDF and send it. You can do anything you want. It's just like you're never going to lose this information. It will always be like the gift giver will always be on their page at ATP.FM. They can always see the gifts they gave. They can always get the link. You're not going to lose it if you miss that screen. But it just says you have to give it to them. Then you can give it to them whenever you want. Like whatever holiday you're celebrating, wherever you are, however you want to give it.

you have the choice. Uh, and that's been working really well. Uh, some people have been getting early presents because I've done a little bit of support for people who bought a present and they guess they didn't wait for Christmas or Hanukkah. They're just like, Oh, here you go. Giving it to you immediately. But yeah, you can decide when you want to deliver it and how you want to deliver it. Uh,

And if you want to print it out and put it in a nice little card, that would be nice. Yeah. So you should go to ATP.FM slash join or ATP.FM slash gift and check it out. We have built up quite the assembly of pretty solid member specials that run the gamut from, you know, food, movies, feelings, all sorts of stuff. So you should definitely check it out. I think there's a lot of good stuff in there.

Let's do some follow-up. And speaking of that member special, Martim asks, on your latest member special, you forgot one thing. What's with the, hey, future Marco, blah, blah, blah. Goodbye, future Marco. Goodbye. And so the comment, I think I said it off the cuff.

probably like a year ago now, but that's my cue to Marco to say, hey, we're entering in like a huddle, to use football terms. We're going to do some kind of chit-chat amongst the three of us that we don't intend to air today.

on the released version of the episode. Obviously, if you are a member, you will hear all of this in the bootleg. But the idea is for Marco to be able to see or hear this in the future and take out that conversation. And I think a lot of, I presume the goodbye is in part to try to get a little bit of crosstalk to cue you that something's going on. What does it look like from your end?

That's exactly it. Whenever the speaker changes, it's very visually obvious as I'm skimming through the track. And so I say bye because that'll be like a blip on my track that will show up as a block and it'll be very obvious as I'm skimming forward listening. That's a point that needs attention. So that's why.

Are you at the point, I meant to ask this during the episode and I completely forgot. I'm so mad at myself. Are you at the point that you can recognize the waveform for hello future Marco? And if it, whether or not the answer to that is yes or no, what waveforms like verbal tics or whatever, especially for me, do you, do you, or can you visually recognize at this point? Like, are you at the point that you can see my, that being said waveform? No.

I don't look that closely and I don't recognize words that well. What I can do is, you know, so during the live recording, for the same reason, if somebody swears, Casey, I will say afterwards, beep, same reason. So that just so that I will have a block on my track so that as I'm skimming through, I'll see, oh, crosstalk, and I'll pay attention to that and I'll play it and see what that is. When I am beeping out a swear word,

Obviously, you want it to be bleeped out in such a way that the adults listening get the intention, but we don't get anybody in trouble. And so I will try to leave in the first consonant sound or whatever so that adults can figure out what word was there in case it's not super obvious. Okay.

I have figured out what the waveforms look like of common swear words, so I know which parts to remove. That's very good. Otherwise, for a while, I would try to remove things like one of the peeves I have about modern speech. This is probably not something that I should care about.

I don't like how we've all started to end sentences with, right? Oh, yes. I really don't like that. And I used to try to edit that out. And there's so many of them, it's just impossible. It's way too much of a job. But I used to look for that. For a period, I would actually look for at the end of sentences before a gap in the waveform. You could often see the, right?

Right. So I would actually try to edit them out if I could. And they're actually somewhat tricky to edit out a lot of the time. Sometimes you'd be surprised how often you can just cut it out and the sentence sounds better without them every time. But sometimes like the way it works with the person's breath or whatever or the next word or whatever, sometimes you can't cleanly edit it out. But other than those two things, I don't really recognize individual waveforms.

Right? I don't think there's enough information in the track to do that. Like, it's mostly amplitude you're seeing in the waveforms and logic. You don't have enough frequency information, and it's too squished together on the screen with too few pixels that I don't think you can actually see

high pitch versus low pitch. Like there's no way you could quote unquote recognize a waveform visually except by like brute force pattern matching of like, well, this is what the amplitude bump tends to look like for this word when this person says it, which is not quite the same thing, but it's the type of thing where you could easily fool it by making a totally different word with different frequencies with similar amplitudes. Well, but there are certain words where, like, so when I was saying, you know, the pieces of the swear word, like for example, the S word,

the shh at the beginning, that's a very distinctive look. And then the rest of the word doesn't look like that at all. So that's why you can recognize certain sounds that do look very distinctive in a waveform, but I'm not looking that closely at everything we're saying because that would take...

12 hours to edit a show. That would be ridiculous. But even the show, it's mostly just about amplitude because you don't have the frequency information in there. It's too, like, unless you're zoomed all the way in and can literally see, like, I don't think the auto-editor even lets you zoom in that far to be able to see the waves and figure out the distance between the peaks to come up with the frequency to know what frequency the S sound is. Yeah, I mean, the frequencies we're dealing with would be so...

It would be absurd to try to recognize that. Now, there are certain wave editors will allow you to show, instead of the amplitude view, they'll show you a frequency breakdown, which looks kind of like this colorful, almost like a histogram kind of view, right?

It's easier to see different word shapes in that view in certain ways, but I'm not advanced enough to do that. And logic doesn't show that to me the way I'm editing. So there are many ways to view sound information when you're editing and in certain contexts. Like if I'm pulling noise out, like if somebody had their leaf blower guy show up next door or the air conditioner or the fan running, if I'm doing noise removal,

Then I'll pull it into iZotope RX, which is kind of an advanced wave editor with all different noise removal and fixing tools for sound problems. And iZotope, I will see the frequency breakdown there. And I'll be able to see down like, oh, there's the 60 hertz frequency.

That's the leaf blower. So I'll pull that one out. So there are different techniques to use different views to show you what you need to see in audio. But none of those really work for seeing the words as you're going by. I think if that's the kind of view you want, it's probably better these days to use some kind of editor or editor service that transcribes the audio and then just puts the words below it, which...

I don't, I've never seen that done in like in Logic, but I know there are apps that can do that. Yeah, Descript does it, the app that Merlin loves where you actually edit it by, you edit the audio by editing the text because it just puts a transcript there. And if you see a word that you want to remove, you just literally remove the word from the text and it removes the waveform. It's a different way of doing things.

Oh, that's fascinating. Thank you. Moving on, let's talk about Emo Siri. Dan Mealkars writes, Siri has definitely gotten sassier in iOS 18. I like it. I sent a text to my daughter about it when I noticed, and the timestamp on the text was only after iOS 18.0, not 18.2. We got a few different pieces of feedback with regard to this. I had thought it was new in 18.2 because I didn't notice it before then.

Dan obviously says that it was before for him. And then a friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, wrote to me, pretty sure the Siri thing you've experienced has shipped back during the 18 betas, but it relies on your devices having to download the updated Siri voice, which happens at seemingly random times for different people. So that perhaps and probably does explain why for me it was 18.2, but for others it wasn't.

With regard to Emo Siri, Dave Martin writes, not only have I noticed some effect in Siri, she just spoke a text message into my ears with a hint of doubt that the text wanted to portray, but I live in the Boston area like John. I've had cause to ask her to direct me to addresses in my town lately, and my town has a midword R in it.

I jokingly speak the town name with a Boston accent, often exaggerated. Siri is doing that now, too. I thought I misheard her the first time, but she did it again. So I guess you do pock the car down at Harvard Yard. Am I right, John? Well, John doesn't have a Boston accent, remember? Except for all those words that have slight Boston accents. But other than those... The whole zero of them? Yeah, sure. Okay. Okay.

Once again, of the many things that Marco holds dear to himself, incredibly wrong ideas like the fact that I have a Boston accent. He will go to his grave believing it despite the fact that it is absolutely not true. Okay. It's like I always think that you've been dissuaded of these things, but then you bring them up a year later and you're like, well, as we all know, John has a Boston accent. Okay. All right. Marco, take that one and just remove it completely.

Drop it in the trash. Sure. And then empty the trash. In what order should I do that in, John? You sound so much like me. Oh my God. It's just, it's like I'm talking to myself. God help me for defending John on this because nothing makes me happier than us making fun of John. But I think our, I can't even do it right. The ardor or whatever it is. That's not it either. Whatever it is that John says, that's just,

His bananas and just demonstrably terrible Long Island accents. He also Mario. That has nothing to do with Boston. That's just Long Island. Parker doesn't have a good year for accents, maybe. We are products of where we spend time. I spent the first half of my life in the Midwest, and now I live in New York. And so the way I speak is some kind of probably weird hybrid of some New York-ish, some Midwest-ish.

John thinks that he left Long Island a thousand years ago and somehow has not picked up any influence from his surrounding area. And that's just, it's impossible. The influence has been a filing down of my Long Island accent. It has not been the adoption of a new accent for the new region. No, it's a hybrid. It's a hybrid. Everyone has a hybrid accent of wherever they've lived. It's kind of hybrid, new kind of hybrid accent. Yeah.

I love this. Just the right awe and just the right sink and just the right bounce. Oh my God. All right, we got to move on, but that is amazing. With regard to filming immersive video, which we're also going to talk about later, Video Alex writes, this camera is a modification of the Blackmagic

Ursa. Oh, I'm sorry. This was the Blackmagic immersive camera specifically that we talked about last episode. Yeah, the Ursa Cine Immersive, I believe, is the full name. Thank you. So that camera is a modification of the Blackmagic Ursa URSA. While the standard Ursa has interchangeable lenses and lens mounts, the lens on this new camera does not appear to be removable. The regular Ursa Cine is also only $15,000. Wow.

I think this new camera has two sensors built into the front lens unit, which would have specific demands for cooling, hence the high price. So no, the lens won't come off. This is just my best guess. There's not much info on the Blackmagic website so far.

I think Apple has been using the Insta360 Titan for the Vision Pro stuff that they've been doing so far. I briefly was now Casey speaking. Hi, this is Casey. I looked into this briefly. Hello, future market. I looked into this briefly and this is a weird, extremely weird looking like, uh,

ball of a of a camera that has apparently eight micro four-thirds um uh sensors going around it around the like mid-axis of the of this orb i don't think i'm doing the best job of painting word picture but it is really really cool and really weird anyway back to video alex

It shoots full 360 degrees in stereo at 11K resolution. It has very large sensors, and you can choose to shoot just 180 degrees. And by the way, Marco, you can rent the Titan from Lens Rentals today for $700 per week. The Insta360 Pro 2 is also great, 8K resolution, renting at $325 per week.

But the software is fiddly. When I rented the Pro 2 a few years ago for a project, it included seven SD cards for the recording and then seven SD readers in a seven-port USB hub. Also, monitoring is hard. So they all record individually? I guess, yeah. You stitch it all together afterwards. I'm sure the software to do that's great. Oh, yeah.

One more point on 3D video, writes Video Alex. In 2016, I worked with a company that had three live VR cameras at the Indy 500. They were seven GoPros and a custom rig with fiber adapters coming out of them that ran seven fiber feeds to three computers that did the stitching live and broadcast it to three headsets next door. They wanted to feed it to the internet, but ABC shut them down immediately.

Cool. Yeah, so all this is to say, we were talking about the new Blackmagic camera for immersive video that's coming out in the winter or spring this year, and

you know, we were speculating like, what is the state of, you know, VR capture, you know, video capture hardware for VR one 80 for, you know, for immersive 180 degree field of view video. And it seems like there are other options out there. We have, we have had a number of people send in reports like this and, and, you know, showing us different options that exist. Um, but this is still very early days. Many of them are hacky or limited. Um,

And as far as I could tell, the Blackmagic one, because it has 8K sensor per eye and 8K resolution per eye that it's recording, that seems to be higher resolution than not only everything else that we're seeing from other companies, but also higher resolution than what Apple's actually serving to the Vision Pro, which...

Probably makes some sense given that the Vision Pro only has 4K displays per eye. So that's probably fine. But one thing I notice when I'm watching the immersive video content is...

It's not as sharp as I would like it to be. It's kind of an odd experience with your eyes for lots of reasons. We've mentioned in the past it's weird because you think you can focus on everything because in real life you would be able to focus on whatever you wanted. With VR video, you can't. You can only focus on what was in focus by the lenses when they shot it. One of the weird things about it is you can't focus wherever you want. Another weird thing about it is it looks so realistic. It looks so much like you are there.

that when you try to look at something that should be sharp and you can kind of see the inherent softness of the pixels at that resolution, you almost feel like your eyes can't focus right. You rub your eyes or you need to put on your glasses or something. It feels weird because your eyes aren't focusing as sharply as they would in real life because it's only 4K and being viewed at such close distances and everything. So,

Anyway, all this to say, this is still very early days. I think for this, I think we're in right now the 1x non-retina world here. Right.

And hopefully in the near future, hopefully we will be able to upgrade the resolution of both the cameras going to 8K per eye and then also hopefully the displays inside the headsets eventually will get higher resolution as well. I'm glad to see the hardware getting better on the Blackmagic side. But that being said, there are lots of reasons, including things like data size and complexity, why it seems like what almost everyone is doing is 4K per eye. Right.

All the other hardware was 4K per eye. People will throw around the term 8K, but that just means there's two 4K eyes, which is not 8K. That's not what that means. But they throw around 8K as if it's like, oh, it's just 4 plus 4. No, that's not what that means. But okay. And the other thing is that we were...

I believe John was speculating about what possibilities might exist for different lenses on this. The reason the Blackmagic Cine Immersive seems to have fixed lenses, we had a number of people write in to say basically that the 180-degree field of view, that is the lens. It's a fixed perspective where that works. And that if you try any other perspective with any other lens, focal length or anything, it just doesn't look right.

Certainly wouldn't look right if you tried to project it at 180. And speaking of projecting, like the using of the terms like 4K and 8K for headset recording of stuff and playing it back is not really appropriate. Because when we talk about a 4K TV, you can see all 4K of those pixels in front of you. But when you're seeing something like immersive video and it was shot, quote unquote, in 8K per eye,

you're almost never seeing all the pixels that were shot in any one of your eyes because it wraps around you. You can't like, if you could move back and like have, shove the, shove the, you know, immersive video so far away from you that it's like this little curved thing that's in front of you. That's a good point. It looks like, you know what I mean? Then you'd see all the pixels. But when you're looking around, you're like, oh, well the screens inside the Vision Pro only have 4K, but you're never looking at the whole screen.

thing that was recorded at once. So yeah, the resolution is insufficient. Oh, that's true. They recorded it at 8K, but that 8K takes up 50 feet and you're only looking at a tiny portion of it at a time. But your tiny portion has 4K per eyeball. So they need way more resolution if they want to match the resolution that is in the headset than recording it in 8K per eyeball. Yeah, part of the big challenge with the sharpness and fidelity and resolution of everything in the Vision Pro is you have to think about like

you know, that effective, like, yes, it's 4k per eye, but you are not seeing all of those 4k pixels for, for all the content that is being used. It's, it's, it's like, like, you know, the same way where on a regular computer monitor, if you use one of the scaling modes that is not native to the panels, pixels, uh,

everything gets a little bit blurry in certain ways. Especially if you scale it to be larger than what the pixels can actually do. So it's scaling down a higher resolution image to the lower resolution pixels on the screen. Things get blurry. The way things are shown in a VR headset...

You're going through multiple different levels of that because you have the screens that actually physically exist in there. Those are being projected through a system of lenses that kind of bend and warp it to go around you

And so, first of all, the pixels per angular degree are different at different parts of your eye. Like the middle, you have more detail in the middle than you have on the edges where they're being warped out. So you have the warping happening there to try to map this rectangular screen

to fill your whole view. And then you have whatever the software is running inside of that, that is like scaling itself to some virtual viewport, then projecting it onto the physical screen, which is itself warping it back around your eyes. So the result is you're going through tons of those like scaling steps and there is nowhere near enough resolution yet with the hardware that we, that is,

seemingly possible to exist today or that we know how to make today. Like we have nowhere near the number of pixels needed to make that look good for most things. So it's both a hardware problem in the sense of, you know, we need that 4K per eye to get a lot bigger. We need those to be at least 8K per eye and probably more than that. And that's, you know, given how hard it is to get 4K per eye today, we're

I think we're a ways off from that. And then after that, once we have higher resolution displays in the Vision Pro, then you also need higher resolution content. And so it's easy to render the UI higher resolution. We can do that with computers. We know how to do that. But then you're going to need the 8K per eye or more in the video that you're watching. So we have a long way to go on all this stuff.

You need a lot more than that. Like if they increase the resolution of the screens inside the headset, that makes it so much harder for recording. Because right now, as you look around, your field of view is 4K per eye. And you can imagine taking 4K per eye chunks out of the giant thing that was wrapping around you, right? So you look a little bit to the left. That's 4K per eye in the part you can see now. Look a little bit more to the left. You're taking 4K chunks out. Every single one of those 4K chunks of your field of view

has to be at least 4K in the source material, right? Suddenly, if those same field-of-view chunks are now 8K because they doubled the... Well, because they doubled the Ks, quadrupled the resolution or whatever of the eyepieces, now you've just demanded that the source material also increase resolution by the same proportion. So...

and we're not even close to what it is now, but it's like, you know, eight K per eye, right? How many different feel four K, uh, you know, field of view things. Can you get out of that? You can get like one looking all the way to your left and like, like non-overlapping ones. You can probably get three, four, five of those. So already you're, you're the resolution is five times lower than it needs to be in each dimension. So yeah, there's a long way to go. And this is even just for, you know, still single focal plane images or whatever. Um,

And that's also, by the way, that's also even more complicated by the fact that that's also not linear. Like if you look at like, you know, what the video data actually is, it's a fisheye view per eye. So if you see like a fisheye picture, like a picture that actually has 180 degree field of view viewed on a flat screen,

It looks very bulbous. Like, you know, the middle of it is where almost all the detail is. And around the edges, there's way less detail. Like once it is kind of re-projected onto like a sphere that you're kind of looking at it from within when you're in 3D. Because they're recording it on a flat rectangle instead of recording it on the back of a sphere. Right. So we actually are closer to the center of it.

looking pretty good on higher resolution screens. They still need more than 4K, but I bet the Blackmagic one, I bet if you're shooting in 8K, I bet the middle of it will look pretty good on Vision Pro's hardware.

All right, so we have some more feedback about immersive video. This is from an anonymous visual effects worker. While certainly the dedicated hardware for capturing immersive video is becoming more accessible, there's ML-based approaches that are also rapidly becoming shockingly good. Depth Anything is a project, one of many, that can infer depth from a single monocular image. Monocular? Monocular? I don't know. Anyway. While simultaneously being mostly temporally stable, this means that the depth approximations

aren't going to jump around on you between frames. My suspicion is that while it will be a combination of hardware and software, it's more likely that the solution will lie more in the software and less so in the specialized hardware. Imagine shooting on your iPhone 18's ultra-wide camera and iOS processing the video into an immersive video in the background or maybe even real time.

Or even being able to run a depth process on an old pre-iPhone era video and getting to watch that video on the Vision Pro. That would be magic. Can confirm. We're probably a few years out from the iPhone's ultra-wide video being of the quality you'd want, but it's only a matter of time.

That definitely sounds like a thing that Apple would try. They love to sort of do in software what they can't quite do in hardware, witness the portrait mode, you know, background blur and stuff. So take a flat image and try to infer depth from it and then let you view it and have it be a little bit 3D-ish. That sounds like something that they would definitely try. They did try it. It's new in Vision OS 2.0. It's already there.

Yeah, I know. That's the trying to add. Do they just do it for your videos or do they do it for pictures? I thought it was stills. I think it's only stills. I viewed some stills earlier testing out that feature for the first time, actually. It's really weird. It's weird.

It's really weird. My personal opinion of that, I don't think we've ever talked about it on the show. It is cool. I would not say it's the mind-bending, like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen that a lot of people seem to pitch it as. I didn't really get that bowled over by it, but it is very cool. Yeah, it's an interesting toy to play with. It

you know, like all of their other early stuff, like, like, um, you know, portrait mode, it, it works better with some content than others. So like you, you know, you, you can find pictures where it looks really impressive and it's a pretty cool effect. Uh, but that is not universal. So there's depth. Anything thing is like the, the reason it's innovative or interesting is that it's like what Apple is doing with the still images, but, uh,

now do that on every frame of video and have it not... have it be consistent. So if it thinks the depth map is this in one frame of video, the next frame of the depth map shouldn't be wildly different because it would look all sorts of wacky. So it's got to sort of figure out...

What a stable depth map is for a moving image of things moving through the frame, and that would be interesting. But I would imagine it's not going to be any better than the 2D version of it. So whatever quality the 2D one is at, the video one is probably limited by that quality. Indeed.

Then continuing on James Laughlin writes Google experimented with light field capture first static captures. See welcome to light fields on steam and then video captures. And there's a video from SIGGRAPH 2020. The technical paper was immersive light field video with a layered mesh representation and,

and a couple of poll quotes that I collected from this video, which is only like five minutes or something like that, and it's very interesting. They said, are videos compressed efficiently for streaming over one gigabit per second internet connection? So you could stream a full...

immersive video over a gigabit connection. Although I guess in retrospect, actually, this is already happening with Apple's immersive stuff on considerably less than that, but you know, whatever. Uh, also apparently the way they made this work was they put 46 time synchronized. I don't think they were literally GoPros, but effectively GoPros in the sphere and wired them up, wired them all up together. Like I said, so they could be time synchronized and that's the camera they use for this, which is very interesting. Uh,

Anyways, it allows for some six degree of freedoms movement, but still in a small bubble around the capture device. And again, you can see that in the demo video. Another quote, I think John pulled this one. Our pipeline produces volumetric free viewpoint video that can be explored with six degrees of freedom within a spherical 70 centimeter diameter viewing volume. This allows you to move your head and change your perspective, peek behind objects and enjoy a greater sense of depth through motion parallax. Yeah. So the camera you were describing, I think you'll see in the video, uh,

It's like many sort of SIGGRAPH research type papers. It's one of the jankiest things you've ever seen. Picture just a big clear plastic sphere with cameras stuck to the inside of it with tape. Like that's what it is. It's not, you know, it's all through the magic of software. So that's just... Well, and the cameras are stuck, not at random, but like...

hand placed roughly equal. It's not like a precision type of thing. They're just kind of, I mean, I don't know how precisely they're putting that, but it looked pretty haphazard and pretty like DIY. Right. And so what this gives you with, you know, a bunch of cameras and a plastic sphere and a lot of computers, which is the important part is the ability to watch a video. And while the video is playing, you can change anything.

Your perspective in the video, you can do the thing that we were talking about last time or like if you if you have a video of a concert and you want to, you know, if you stand up or you're watching it in a headset and you stand up on your couch while you're watching it, the camera that recorded the video of the concert does not stand up. The camera was on a tripod. It never moved.

never get any higher or any lower never move to the left never move to the right it was on a tripod the whole time right you can't control that by you getting up with your headset right you so you should just sit sit still because then your movement will match the movement of the camera which is no movement you can turn your head because the camera captured a field that is 80 to 180 degrees 360 or whatever you can turn your head up and down left and right and that works fine but you can't move so this sort of light field capture thing lets you move your head and

and have that motion reflected in the video as long as you move within a 70-centimeter viewing volume. So you can't move a lot, but you can move. And there are demo videos of this on the website. We'll put the links in the show notes.

go to the demo videos. It's just in a webpage and you can move your mouse around essentially to say, all right, I'm watching this video. If you don't move your mouse, it just looks like a video. But if you move your mouse, you can be like, now I can see more on the top of that workbench or less if I go down, right? You can move around left, right, up and down in the video, not just turning your head like QuickTime VR or these things, but moving within the video. And part of the thing that is,

exciting about this paper is like okay the way they do that is essentially brute force it like they have if you if you picture a series of um concentric spheres a little sphere than a bigger one than a bigger one like a concentric spherical shells right that's what they're recording and then when you move around it's sort of moving you through those shells but as you can imagine that's just incredibly data intensive to do so there this paper is about how they figured out how to

compress that down into, as Casey mentioned, a one gigabit video stream by figuring out what parts they can throw away and how to efficiently store all of them. And that's the innovative part. Instead of just saying we need a giant supercomputer to do this, we can put this on a web page and you can move around in it and it looks okay and it doesn't break up or

They don't, you know, you can look at the video, you can see what they're constructing the video out of all the different pieces of the shells as you move around, but they do a really good job of blending them together. So it really looks like, I don't know how to describe it because there's not really any parallel. Like even in vision pro there's not really any sort of like thing to compare it to, but like, like actually being there, if you were really there and you move and you like sat up or, you know, stood up or sat down, your perspective would change and you can do that with these videos.

Maybe it's, I don't know, maybe it's like the Harry Potter things with the little animated. No, it's not even that. It's holographic maybe. I don't know. They need to come up with a better marketing name for this. But this is what I was talking about with like the Bahamas thing. If they could do this and make it maybe a little bit bigger than a 70 centimeter diameter viewing volume, then you could walk around on the beach and it would all be captured live video.

And you're looking at a real thing. It's not a 3D rendered scene. It's just concentric spheres of live video from many different positions. Again, this is what I was getting at with last time with like the real estate things where they put a camera in six different places in a room.

put it in like 6 million places in the room. So now you can just walk into the room and look around. And again, different than making a 3D model of it, which is probably the much more efficient way to do this. But this would be all real video, right? Somehow all real video. I'm not sure what the mechanics are, but it really is kind of like sci-fi fantasy stuff when I look at this. Even though it is a very, very limited tech demo with very janky hardware, I'm still very impressed by it. Yeah, it is super cool.

And then continuing on in a similar vein, Joseph Humphrey writes, one technology I find fascinating and that could shape the future of VR capture, if VR sticks around long enough, is neural radiance fields. It's essentially a photogrammetry-based, I hope I got that right, method for capturing still 3D images of objects or entire environments. What's remarkable is its ability to render realistic perspectives from multiple angles, complete with accurate reflections and specular highlights. So this is NeRF.

which is representing scenes as neural, N-E, radiance, R, fields, F, for view synthesis. Again, we'll put a link in the show notes to a talk that was given by, among other people, Matthew Tancic. We present a method that achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of complex scenes by optimizing an underlying continuous volumetric scene function using a sparse set of input views.

So I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I can tell you, having watched the video, what it appears to be is let's take, I think it's a couple of stills. I don't recall if it was one or several, but one way or another, take one or more stills and be able to figure out, okay, what is the depth in this? Very much like, you know, the portrait videos on an iPhone. Yeah, it definitely is. I think it is more than one picture because the whole point is like, the thing I just described where you can watch a video and view it for different perspectives, this is the photo version of that where...

It's just one moment in time, but it's captured from different perspectives. And then when you look at it, you have the ability to look from different angles at your still image.

Yep. So continuing on from Joseph Humphrey, while it's not ready for video capture yet and the quality isn't perfect, Meta has created an impressive demo for the Quest. And there's a Meta Nerf demo for the Quest, which is called Meta Horizon Hyperspace Demo. The description is, this is a demo experience to showcase our vision for photorealism as a profound new way to feel like you're physically there. We created these digital replicas using mobile phone scanning and cloud-based processing. Scanning is not available to users today.

So now we're returning back to Joseph. What excites me most in the, is the potential to fully capture 3d scenes, including different perspectives without the need for manual 3d modeling. If future research leads to viable quote unquote video version of this, the possibilities could be incredible. You should check out that Google link. Cause that's what they're doing. It's basically the video version of that, but the, the 2d version of it is much more well established. Like Nerf stuff has been around for a while. Again, this is from a 2020 paper. Um,

If you have the sort of still image version of it, that works really well for... To fool you into thinking it's an dynamic environment, you can do what they do in video games. It's just like it's basically a bunch of still textures, but then you put like...

some video of rippling water on top of the water thing so the things that you expect to be moving are moving but you know even just like if you look at the demos of Hero you can be convinced like that this is video until you notice like none of the blades of grass are moving or whatever so the Google thing is exciting because they're really trying to do it with a video with very limited motion and this Nerf thing is exciting because I imagine this is the type of thing you could actually do on a phone

Take it, you know, wave your phone in front of a person. It takes 15 pictures. It reconstructs this. And now you have what appears to be a 3D image of the person. Yeah, these video demos are incredibly impressive. All right, moving on from immersive video, let's talk about John's app and some feedback with regard to it or things adjacent to it. Wait, are we talking about Storacusa or are we talking about Forex Space?

I don't know if you like forage space. Did you like the British person who pointed out that in UK English, those words don't rhyme? Forage and storage don't rhyme? Yes, because they pronounce the O as an A. It's forage space or whatever. It's ridiculous. Must be their Boston accent. It's a hybrid accent. Anyway, all right. So I'll stick with Storacusa. I'm going to keep calling it Storacusa until you tell us another name. I like forage space. I also like Storacusa for the record, but I like forage space. I think that's great. And, you know, they're the same people that can't understand when we say hover.

which is bananas. So I don't really care what they have to say. Theirs is English traditional. We're English modern. Anyway. Staracusa. Dave Nanian, front of the show, Dave Nanian. Dave Nanian writes, and this is with regard to SuperDuper's smart update in making clones. Dave writes, to be clear, smart update does not separate clones unless, oh, excuse me, not making clones, I'm sorry, using clones on the file system.

To be clear, Smart Update does not separate clones unless those clones change, which starts to separate them on the source as well. What we can't do is only change the diverged blocks. And also, I'm not worried about my support because I can offer solutions. I'm worried about things like migration. And again, this is going to be run by those who are out of space, not those who want to optimize their drive storage.

Yeah, the thing about Smart Update, like, that's a good nuance about what I was describing last time. Like, on the first clone with SuperDuper, it will faithfully reproduce your clones. So if you have some drive that is essentially over-provisioned because...

You have many, many clones of a very large file that if they all took up their individual space, it would overflow your drive. When you do that first erasing clone with SuperDuper, it will faithfully reproduce that. But in subsequent clones like we do using SmartUpdate, which says, hey, just copy the stuff that's changed since last time.

At that point, if one of the clones has changed and diverged on the source, it can diverge a little bit at a time based on how much has differed from the other ones. But during smart update, if it's diverged at all, you get an entire complete separate copy during the smart update. And that can cause you to slowly fill your quote unquote equally sized drive with a series of smart updates. Of course, you can always fix this by doing an erase update.

And that will restore all your clones, but that's just a fact of life. And in terms of people oversubscribing their disks and having problems during migration, yeah, that's potentially a problem. Like I said, that could be a problem today because the Finder does the same thing when you duplicate files. And depending on how oversubscribed people are on their drives, they could already be in a situation where they can't migrate. I would hope that Apple would come up with a way to faithfully reproduce clones during the migration process.

That would be very helpful. They certainly have the expertise, technology and access to the innards of macOS to do that. But I also don't see that as something that is forthcoming. So make sure your drives are always big enough.

Peter Marks writes, all this talk of RAM doubler and disk doubler and ATP triggered a memory of a time in the 90s when someone released software that drastically sped up Finder copies. I was working at Apple at the time and we were amazed. It turned out, this is such an amazing story. It turned out that the Finder was updating the progress bar so frequently that it slowed down the file copy. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Still a modern thing. Early in my development of my app that I'm working on,

I was testing the speed of scanning for duplicates and stuff like that. And I at first tried the naive implementation of every time you've scanned another item, you know, convey that information in the UI. And scanning, especially on SSD, goes really, really fast and probably faster than 60 frames per second.

It was a lot of updates. I'm not sure if it was slowing things down, but I think it might have actually gotten faster when I throttled the UI updates because I don't want, I mean, it's probably not that big of a deal, especially since it's two separate threads and I have a lot of cores and had a thread dedicated just updating the UI, but it's still kind of a waste. So yeah, updating the UI at faster than the refresh rate of the screen is usually not a good idea.

And then back in the bad old days, I think it was just probably burning CPU because you didn't have multiple cores. And I think it was probably wasting a lot of CPU time, you know, updating the UI as fast as it possibly could. I think he might be referring to Speed Doubler, the thing I mentioned on the past show. I don't remember what Speed Doubler did. I only remember that I ran it and it did make things perceptibly faster. And maybe this was one of the things that it sped up file copies by updating the progress bar less frequently.

Then Harvey Simon writes, why should we care about how much free space we have if we've turned on desktop and document sync in iCloud Drive? If we run low on storage, older files are offloaded to iCloud, freeing up space locally, especially if one has, say, a desktop Mac with a large SSD and a MacBook with an only 256 gig SSD. Why worry if 256 gigs is sufficient if it looks like all one's files are where they belong and everything's backed up and you're online?

I don't personally like, I mean, on paper, this makes sense, but I don't think I would trust Apple to do this and do this well personally.

Yeah, I mean, it looks like everything's there until you need that one file and you don't have an internet connection. And also, I will add that some cloud services, in my experience, iCloud Drive, are not really great about doing the thing you want them to do right now, right now. I know they have pinning for iCloud now, finally, where you can say, please don't offload this file. I always want it to be local. But in situations even when you have a network connection problem,

you can be waiting for iCloud to take its sweet time to do something. I talked about my son's iCloud file, iCloud drive disaster where he had so many files.

You could just sit there staring at them for all day saying, when is it going to download the files that are in this folder? You can double click them and it would just sit there spinning. And it's like, eventually it might do it. Or maybe it never will because there's too many files. It's not a, I'm not a fan of iCloud Drive. I've never been a fan. I continue not to be a fan. That big disaster with my son did not make me a fan. That's years after iCloud Drive has been out for a while. I know people have a lot of success with it, but I think they're using it lightly. They don't have lots of files. They don't have lots of churn.

And it's just like, oh, it's magic. My files are just always there. In my experience, that is not how iCloud Drive works when pressed even a little bit. Dropbox, at the very least, has, like I said, one of the things I like about Dropbox is if you use it the old way, I'm still not using the one with the file providers, which I know everyone else is probably using, but somehow I'm still not updated to it.

But the old one, when you launched it, it would brute force right now, right now with all its CPU cycles, download all the files locally. I'd had it not to do streaming, keep every file locally, like the old style, old school way. I could see it working. It would go through the files, find all the ones that have changed, download them all, and then be done. I was never staring at like a little cloud icon and list you in the finder wondering, when is it going to download? Is there anything I can make it download faster? So...

Yeah, as far as should we care about disk space? If you keep everything in like a Google Drive or OneDrive or something that you do trust that you think is reliable that you can actually get to upload and download files when you need them to and you're always connected to the network, sure, feel free. But I think that for most people, they either don't have as reliable network access as that or they don't have fast enough network access as that as both or both. And even if you do have all that, I have very fast, very reliable network access in my house.

practically speaking, I don't want to have to wait around for something to download. If I want to like, you know, we're doing our member special on Kiki's Delivery Service and I want to scrub through the movie, I don't want to have to wait for a multi-gigabyte movie to download. I just double click it and move the scrubber and it should be as fast as my SSD can read it. And I don't have to worry about, oh, that file isn't there yet. How fast can you download a gigabyte? Because remember, it's not just your network connection. The server has to serve it to you at that speed. Your network connection can be as fast as you want, but if the server is doling the thing out to you,

a slow data rate because it's overwhelmed with doing a bunch of other stuff or because the network connection between you and it is slow, you're still SOL. So yeah, if you think local storage is still not relevant and you're leading that life, that's good for you, but I don't think we're there yet.

All right, let's talk some topics. And Marco, you had yet more homework. I feel like we've done maybe three out of four of the last episodes. You've had some sort of Vision Pro-related homework, and here we are yet again with Vision Pro-related homework. Apple, right after we recorded last week,

a new episode of their adventure series. And this one is called Ice Dive and it's 15 minutes long. Uh, it's peers off the top of my head are, was it the hot? No, it was the tightrope walker and then the, uh, parkour, if I'm not mistaken, were the two others. That's right. Uh, and this one is Ice Dive where we follow, um,

an ice diver, an ice diver that's trying to set a world record for swimming 200 yards, which is something like 180 meters underwater with, you know, a fin on, but with one breath of air. And so he is swimming, hopefully, uh, 200 yards, one breath of air under, you know, under ice in the water, under ice. Um, so it's probably a little bit cold.

Yeah, it's very, very cold. He doesn't have a wetsuit on, but still. Anyways, it's like 15 minutes, and I wanted to not only alert some of you that this exists, but I also wanted to hear your thoughts, and I have some thoughts. Would you like me to start, or would you like to start? I think mine will be pretty quick. I didn't get all the way through it. I got about eight minutes in. I stopped because I was getting motion sick. Oh, really? Oh, that's very surprising to me.

Huh. Yeah. So this series, I didn't see the middle one, the parkour one. I saw the tightrope walking one. I got about the same amount into that one before I had to stop. This series does a lot more camera movement and a lot more cuts between different scenes. And so what I find is like I'm trying to focus on things and then all of a sudden, boom, we're cut away. And then, oh, now I'm flying over a mountain. Like, whoa. Yeah.

So there's a lot more motion in this. And this series, too, they focus on very close-up shots of people and things. So similar to, like, you know, the very first...

opening scene of the tightrope walking one you I described in the past how like you're like right in front of this woman's face it's a little unnerving you're like I would never be this close to a person I was not romantically involved with of you know in any other context in life so it kind of feels wrong to be that close to somebody and to have it look so so lifelike

Well, they start this one the same way with the swimmer guy. So again, it's like, whoa, this is very intimate, a little bit oddly so. So they keep doing all these close-up shots of people and things, but I think they are doing the close-up shots with an assumption of sharpness that, as I was saying earlier, isn't actually there in the viewing experience.

So what you get is really close up people that look a little bit out of focus or a little bit blurry or a little bit soft. And so your eyes, it like plays tricks on your eyes in ways that the other immersive series I haven't had that much of a problem with.

because I think they just shot like a little bit further away from things with a little bit less camera movement. So this one, this series, I think it's just, I can't, like my eyes and my motion brain, I think can't handle this series. But hey, I'm glad they're putting out more content. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, again, the pace of the new content has been really good. I'm bummed. Well.

Sorry, I'm grading on a heavy curve there. To be clear, you can still watch every single bit of immersive video on the Vision Pro the first night you take one home. Yep, I think that is true. And certainly Underscore's chart from a few weeks back would probably lend credence to it. Anyways, I wanted to call this out partially, like I said, because it's new. But also, I thought that this one was possibly my favorite of the...

like, reality, or not reality, but like docu-serieses that Apple has done so far. I feel like it's a bit longer. My recollection is the parkour one was closer to 10-ish minutes, and this is like a full 15 or so. And I've been thinking a lot about what do I think made this good? And I didn't get a chance to look and see if the director is the same or not, but she did a phenomenal job on this one. And I think part of what I really, really enjoyed about this was that...

The tightrope walking one just had the smell of it being completely staged. Of course, at one point, she's going to fall off the tightrope, and of course, she's tethered to it, so it's no big deal, but you still have that moment and whatnot. The parkour one was a little of that, but they tried to a degree to build a little bit of a story, and toward the end, spoiler alert, they're trying to do a really big jump, and

And you're supposed to be stressed out about whether or not they're going to make the jump. And I mean, you are to a degree because you can look down where the camera is and see how high up they are. But it was kind of a contrived story. You know, it was clear that it was a story, but it was kind of forced.

Whereas this one, there is a plot, and I'm using air quotes here, but there's a plot to it. There is a thing, a challenge that is going to be conquered if all goes according to plan. And there's consequences if it doesn't. And so you have a hero, and the villain, I guess, to the degree that there is, is the situation. But there's a hero, and you're watching a hero's journey, literally. And not only that, but I thought...

I mean, I didn't have any motion sickness problems and I thought that the way it was filmed was good. There's some, you know, annotations on the video showing how far away everything is and like where the start is and where the end is. And it's not overdone. It's in that Apple style that they're developing over these immersive videos that I like.

I just thought it was really, really, really good. And I really enjoyed it. And I thought it was very captivating. And so here again, if you live near an Apple store, have a friend that has one of these, I presume they'll let you watch it if you want to. And I think it's worth your time. I thought it was pretty darn good. So check that out, Apple Adventure Ice Dive. John, thoughts on this? I can't believe Marco's getting motion sick and you're not. I mean, neither one of you is particularly prone to it. But, you know, it's one of the... I feel like it's one of the limitations of this type of content. It's just...

I'm not sure how you can get over that other than just not making content that moves around too much. Because it's really limiting from the recording perspective to try to do interesting things or show something dynamic. And again, the assumption is that...

The person who's watching it is not going to know how to move to match the movement of the camera, even if they could, which they probably can't because they're sitting on their couch. So there's always going to be this disconnect between what you see and what you're actually feeling as you sit there. So, yeah, I think this stuff is cool and I like to watch it, but I definitely don't like to feel sick. So I'm torn. Fair enough. No, I just think it's really cool. And again, if you have the ability to go check this out, I strongly encourage you to.

Speaking earlier of Dave Nanian and SuperDuper, there's been a bit of a brouhaha over bootable backups on macOS. And so to back up a little bit and set the stage, SuperDuper, and I can't speak for a carbon copy cloner, which is a, I guess, a competitive product to SuperDuper. I've only ever used SuperDuper. But anyway, SuperDuper's thing, or one of its things, is that you can create a bootable backup of your drive and then update it, you know, every night, every other night, you know, however often you want to update it. But the

The key is that if you plug in this external drive and do whatever incantation and dance you need to do in order to tell your Mac to boot from it, it should be able to boot from it.

And that's worked really, really well for a really, really, really long time. But then a week or so ago, or whenever I guess 15.2 came out, Dave had problems. And so Dave wrote a blog post of which I will read some excerpts. Mac OS 15.2 was released with a surprise, a terrible, awful surprise. Apple broke the replicator or ASR, Apple Software Restore.

Toward the end of replicating the data volume, seemingly when it's about to copy either pre-boot or recovery, which is to say the system stuff, it fails with a resource busy error. In the past, resource busy could be worked around by ensuring the system was kept awake. But this new bug means on most systems, there's no fix. It just fails.

Since Apple took away the ability for third parties, for example, the super duper folks, to copy the OS, it took on the responsibility themselves. It's been up to them to ensure this functionality continues to work. And in that, they failed in Mac OS 15.2. Because this is their code and we're forced to rely on it to copy the OS, OS copying will not work until they fix it. To put it bluntly, this sucks. It's bad enough we have to work around other bugs in this code, but when it breaks completely, we're stuck pointing fingers and offering workarounds that don't involve the replicator.

Now, with that said, we had a response to a degree from Mike Bombich, who is the or a developer on Carbon Copy Cloner for macOS.

And we took out some of the spicier hot takes in this blog post, but it was a spicy blog post. So it might be worth checking out if you're interested. Anyways, Mike writes, while some developers seem surprised by a change in macOS 15.2, there's a little bit of spice, we've known for several years that making bootable backups would eventually become impossible. We shifted CarbonCopyCloner's strategy away from relying on external boots so our users wouldn't be affected by this inevitable result.

Several years ago, I wrote a blog post about the macOS Big Sur changes that affected how third-party developers would be able to make copies of the system. In that blog post, I made reference to a conference call that I had with Apple on December 2, 2020. Participating in that conference call was the APFS team lead, someone from Developer Technical Support, and to my surprise, Apple's Director of Product Marketing.

Hmm.

He and the more technical folks on the call went on to explain why only ASR could be allowed to copy the system and that they were committed to addressing any problems with it as long as it did not require making a compromise to platform security. Platform security is a top priority at Apple, and one of the keys to that security is a secure boot environment. Allowing system files to be copied introduces an opportunity for attackers to modify key system components.

Some of this can be mitigated by only allowing Apple's ASR utility to make the copy, but there are still inherent opportunities to inject changes when copying system files. Apple has invested a lot of effort into the recovery mode environment in Migration Assistant. It has become trivial to boot a Mac into recovery mode, perform a clean and secure install of the system, verified and signed, and then recover user data via Migration Assistant. All that can be done without compromising the security of the boot environment.

Will Apple fix this issue so that bootable backups can limp along a little further? Maybe, but that's getting to be a moot question. Apple made it unambiguously clear that bootable backups and system cloning are fundamentally incompatible with platform security.

All right, so a couple of things here. To start, why do we care about bootable backups? Why do we use something like SuperDuper? Why is this a valuable thing to have? And most importantly, on Mike's post, why is recovery mode not a sufficient replacement? The magic of bootable backups is that if something goes wrong with your main drive,

You can just reboot and be back up and running in the time it takes you to boot from your other drive. This was much more important in the days of spinning disks and also much more reliable in the days before Apple Silicon, because as we noted on a show a week or two ago, Apple Silicon Macs cannot really boot from external drives.

They always essentially boot from the internal drive and say, oh, I see you wanted to boot from an external drive and essentially hand off control and continue to boot from there. But the secure boot environment is all contained within the hardware that Apple sells. And it's, you know, cryptographically as secure as it can be, knowing that it's booting off a known good system and allowing users

That all to be bypassed by saying just trust whatever's on this drive is a potential problem. That's the secure boot environment that Apple is defending.

That's why Apple Silicon Macs work like they do. But what it also means is, unlike the old days, if your boot drive like dies, dies, like, you know, is totally broken or is fried or like just, you know, you're in the old days, you're spinning hard drive. The heads crashed into the platters like it's just dead. The old days, you're like, OK, I'll take this internal drive, rip it out of my computer, throw it in the garbage can and boot for my super duper clone.

And I'm up and running as of whenever the last backup was, which might have been last night, right? Just in the amount of time it takes to boot. I don't have to wait for a whole OS install, which can take a very long time. I don't have to do any of that stuff. I'm just up and running. And by the way, I just booted my Mac that has no hard drive in it. I booted it from an external drive because that hard drive that was broken is now in the garbage can.

If you're Apple Silicon Mac, if the SSD goes bad, like totally dead on it, you cannot boot off an external drive. That Mac will not boot off anything because you need the internal SSD to at least have enough parts of it working to boot from the little part of the OS that's needed to go to external boot stuff. So that is different. But...

Still, if you hosed yourself, accidentally deleted a bunch of files, broke some part of your user directory, you know, accidentally recursively deleted parts of your home library directory as root, your system could be entirely hosed, but your SSD still works. So you will be able to boot from an external backup. And that's where having a super duper bootable backup can get you up and running much faster. I mean, that whole like, you know, as I developed this app that I'm working on,

maybe i will accidentally host my you know host my directories my files in a way that didn't damage the ssd but it renders my system entirely useless to me it will be great to boot from my super duper backup in that scenario so i think bootable backup still is very important and recovery is absolutely not a substitute because if anyone has ever done recovery mode even though we have fast computers fast internet connections reinstalling mac os takes longer than you think it does if

If you're in a hurry or you know if you're trying like you might as well just write off the whole rest of the day to dealing with that sometimes because it takes you just be sparing it staring at indeterminate spinners for a long time wondering how long it's going to take how many more reboots is going to take how many more progress bars am I going to have to see. So I don't think that's a great solution. All right. Given all that.

This whole discussion in 2020 with, was it Phil Schiller at the time? Was he director of product marketing? I think that was already past the change. I don't know who it is, but anyway. So the quote, we know there's a quote or a paraphrase or whatever it is. How would it look someday in the future if you simply couldn't make a copy of the system at all?

The conclusions that Mike draws from this, that bootable backups are not a thing, and that Apple made it unambiguously clear that bootable backups and system cloning are fundamentally incompatible with platform security,

I'm not sure I agree with that. So first of all, the statement is, this is an Apple person saying, how would it look someday in the future if you simply couldn't make a copy? If you, third-party developer, simply couldn't, that came to pass. Third-party developers can't make bootable copies. You have to run Apple's ASR tool to do it. Apple can make a bootable backup. You can't, which is why SuperDuper is in the bind it is because they can't do it. They have to use Apple's, you know, privilege signed secure tool to do it.

But I'm not... And the second thing is I'm not sure... I'm not saying this is not true, only that I have not been convinced that it's true by reading this post. The idea that if copies of system files can be made by anybody, including Apple...

somehow this is a security issue. So saying like allowing system files to be copied introduces an opportunity for attackers to modify key system components. Some of this can be mitigated by only allowing ASR to make a copy, but there are still opportunities to inject changes. I don't understand how that could possibly be the case. The whole point is you cryptographically sign the whole thing with the sealed system volume or whatever, and those cryptographic keys are secured by keys that are

in the hardware and verified over the internet and yada yada like if you modify any part of the system if you if a nefarious third party modified part of the operating system when copying it like that would be detected because the signatures wouldn't match like in a secure boot environment like the Apple Silicon Macs booting from their internal drive and making sure they have a secure boot environment

ensures that the thing doing the verification can't be tampered with because that's the thing that kicks off the boot process on the external drive and it can verify that the system volume is sealed correctly. Maybe I'm missing something here, but I think the conclusions being drawn here are, at least do not convince me that Apple thinks that bootable, that making a bootable drive should not be possible because that doesn't make any sense. You make a bootable drive all the time. You make a bootable drive when you install the OS. That is an example of Apple software making a bootable drive.

It's no different when they're doing it to the one and only drive on your Mac or doing it to the second and, you know, another drive on your Mac. It is still Apple software connecting to the internet and putting in an OS there. And yes, it put it by downloading off the internet, but it's no difference than it putting it by copying it from another location. In both cases, it has to verify that the OS is proper and signed and so on and so forth. So...

This is unfortunate. Like ASR has broken before, by the way, super duper has always been dealing. We've been in the age where only ASR can copy the operating system for a while now. And it's, as Dave says, it's broken in the past and it's cruddy because you're a third party. You're like, look, I can't do it myself. I have to use this tool that Apple provides. And if the Apple provided tool has bugs or does weird things or just plain doesn't work,

You just have to sit around and wait for Apple to fix it for you. I assume that's what will happen in this case. I assume Apple will fix it. Like I said, I'm not personally convinced that Apple was trying to say that it is impossible to make a bootable version of, make a drive that is able to boot macOS using Apple software because it just doesn't make any sense to me. That's what software, that's what the OS installation and recovery process do. I don't see how cloning is that different. Worst case scenario.

You could say, okay, it won't copy the operating system from one drive to another. It will install a fresh one from the internet. But because the thing that you boot from is a read-only cryptographically signed snapshot, it's the same for everybody. It's a separate volume. It's not where your data is.

There should be no difference between copying the operating system from one drive to another and putting a fresh version of that operating system by downloading it from the internet. The only place where there are questions here is like, okay, well, what if Apple is no longer signing that version of the operating system or you can't get it because it's so old or whatever? In that case, a copy would work, but a download wouldn't. But I don't know. I just...

I think and hope that this is just yet another one of unfortunate bugs in macOS because these parts of the OS are understaffed and that they will eventually fix it and SuperDuper will start working again and all will be, if not right with the world, then better. But I just, like, again, if someone knows, if someone can explain to me how...

how what Mike Bombich is saying makes any kind of sense, please do. But right now, I feel like Apple was not trying to say that it will be impossible to make bootable versions of macOS, only that third-party developers wouldn't be able to do it themselves. Only Apple could do it. That's another thing that only Apple can do.

I would hope that Apple provides a mechanism to do this and maintains it, but I don't know. We'll see what happens. We'll see how this shakes out. Yeah. I kind of wish like, so the, the promise of APFS and all of the new file system stuff they did is that this type of stuff could get better. And it did get better in many ways. Like a lot of the parts of the system that deal with this, like time machine and stuff like time machine will now like make a snapshot first and then copy that snapshot and

kind of I'm assuming one of the benefits of that is that it helps with the painting the Golden Gate Bridge problem where in the bad old days time machine would start running and it would start copying files from your disk to your time machine backup and

And in the beginning, it would copy a bunch of files or whatever. Two hours pass and it's copying the last files. During that two hours, the files that it copied at the beginning could have changed. And so you're like, oh, well, when am I done? Do I have to go back to the beginning now because I noticed some new things changed? Oh, wait, now by the time I get to the end of that, there's still things that you keep going back and back. And now it just copies it once and says, OK, I'm done. You may end up writing an inconsistent view like the source disk never looked like this at any moment in time.

The beginning of the source disc looks like this. And by two hours later, the end of the source disc looked like this. But the thing that you wrote has files that you copied in the beginning look like it did an hour ago and files that you copy the end look like they do right now. Snapshots...

avoid that because you can take a moment in time snapshot and say, here's a frozen snapshot of what this drive looked like at a given moment. And now I can take my time leisurely copying that snapshot because that snapshot is never going to change. It is literally a moment in time snapshot. So even if it takes you four hours to copy that snapshot,

The file you copy at the end is exactly from the exact same moment of time as the file you copied at the beginning. Stuff like that is great. One of the strategies Time Machine uses to figure out what has changed since my last backup so I don't have to scan the entire disk again, one of the strategies is some kind of snapshot diffing thing.

I really hoped that they would go whole hog ZFS things. ZFS has the ability to send block level diffs between snapshots where not only does it, you know, know exactly what changed in, I'm not sure if it's constant time, but it might just be linear. But anyway, an efficient way to tell exactly what changed. It does it at the block level, not at the file level. So it doesn't, if a file changes, it's not like copying whole files. It says, I know this block from this file change and these two blocks in this file change and can efficiently transfer just those blocks to

to another thing but there's lots of limitations to doing that in zfs anyway i was hoping that kind of technology would come to mac os and they've sort of kind of got a little bit of it but not really and you know cloning is a whole other thing it would be but anyway it would be great if they continued to advance their file system apis and support for this type of thing to do efficient um essentially what super duper does efficient copies like that smart update

only copy the things that changed over here. And yes, to also be able to make bootable, efficient clone copy backup things. Like I'm not saying put super duper out of business, but I'm kind of saying like eventually technology gets to the point where what was once a, a,

thing that only a third party could do because it was so not supported by the operating system eventually should become something that is so easily supported by the operating system kind of like what i'm doing my app is doing stuff that is so easily supported by the operating system i'm just providing like a fancy wrapper on top of it i would hope that's where super duper would get eventually

building on ASR to say, okay, well, we can't do it. We have to use Apple's tool. It seems like it's going in that direction, except ASR is so much less capable. They code the super duper when it was doing it itself because ASR is just like, well, I've just got one job. I'm called Apple software restore. I'm not called, uh, be the underlying engine for super duper. So it is so limited and so brute force. And so not what super duper would want. Uh,

but, you know, maybe someday. Like, it took us so long to get APFS, and we got lots of benefits from it, but I still think we're a long way from really realizing all the benefits of modern file systems to make stuff like this so much better. And, you know, again, I appreciate the time machine snapshots, local snapshots, where you can do essentially time machine backups without having your time machine drive attached, so you can go back in time to something from 10 minutes ago because a local time machine backup was taken. That's all well and good, but

Time machine itself still feels like kind of abandoned and lonely and filled with bugs. And yeah, ASR being the one and only tool that can copy a bootable version of the operating system from one disk to another doesn't seem tenable to me. And as for only being able to boot off internal drive on Apple Silicon, I don't know what the solution to that is because I do understand why they do that. Like that's the security implications of not allowing that makes sense to me.

but it is very limiting when it comes to the ability to recover quickly from a disaster. It kind of makes the most...

workable solution for that to essentially have a second Mac, right? So, you know, I have two Macs that are both as up-to-date as they can start your project. And if you really, if you're like, if this Mac fails, I need to be able to continue work immediately. Just throw that whole Mac away, slide in the new Mac and just try to pick up where you left off. If Apple's cloud syncing was better than it actually is, you could probably do that. But as it stands, you're probably starting work from wherever you were at the beginning of the day.

All right, let's do some Ask ATP. Ciro Mazzola writes, with the Mac's latest operating system update, Sequoia 15.2, Apple's created a new folder for recording your history. It's called Recents. It's an option in the Finder sidebar. How does this fit in with Apple's policy of privacy? Is this really new? I swear this is not new, but maybe it is. I think I might be missing the point here. Why is this not privacy friendly? All right, so I think what Ciro is saying is like,

If this isn't a sidebar and if you see it in the sidebar and you click on it, you may be shocked to see there's all the files that I've messed with recently. And it's sort of like a trail of your activity. And if you thought you were secretly messing with some files somewhere and you have a document that says my master plan to take over the world dot TXT. And suddenly when someone clicks on something in your sidebar, they see that file and your plans have been revealed. Um,

What that recent thing is doing is the same thing you can do if you hit Command F in the Finder and you search for files recently opened within the last 30 days, which is a thing that you can do that you've been able to do for decades on macOS. It's just a saved search, finding files that have been opened recently or whatever the thing is. Let me put it up in the Finder to see the...

exact thing. I think it is last opened date. Last opened date is within the last 30 days. You've always been able to run that search. Now, it's more accessible as a sidebar item in the finder than having to hit Command-F, pick one item from a pop-up menu, type 3-0, and hit return. But practically speaking, this is not a privacy-invading feature. This is just part of a fact of life. If someone else has access to your computer...

logged in as you, they can hit command F and find files based on any criteria they want. They can find image files,

last opened within the last 30 days that are jpegs that are larger than this site like and they can save that as a a save search in a smart folder that looks like a little folder icon but when you double click it it opens the folder but the contents of that folder are the contents of a saved search this whole idea was something i really uh liked back in the days of like bos where their file system had native support for this with like indexing in the file system and really fast searches

macOS still supports it. Some people get a lot of use out of it. I think its implementation is a little bit janky and its integration in the Finder is not great. So many people don't even know it exists, such that when they put something called "recent files" in the sidebar, they're like "Privacy invasion! Where'd this come from? It's a new feature in 15.2!" I kind of see the point, but just FYI, this has always been there. It's kind of like realizing that your web browser is keeping track of your browser history if you're not running in incognito mode all the time.

You can just go and there's a menu item that shows history and you'll scroll. This is every web page I've been doing. It's watching my every move. I mean, you know, Google Chrome was probably reporting it back to Google as well. But yeah, that's how computers work to some degree. If you don't like it, there's not much of a solution. Some things in like macOS...

like within individual applications if you go to the file menu there'll be an open sub menu with like recent items you can clear that recent items menu which is it used to be just like a p-list somewhere i don't know where they're storing it these days but anyway you sometimes you can clear the recent items to clear the last things that you've opened but practically speaking if it's file system metadata the find command can search based on it and return results uh

you could wipe that metadata if you wanted every file that you last opened go through it and wipe the metadata or duplicate that file and delete the original or like there's all sorts of stuff you can do but like what are you trying to do here really if you don't want people knowing this about your computer don't let them access to your computer logged in as you that's the solution

All right. Tucker writes, what is the quote unquote correct directory location to save random Python shell, Ruby, Pearl, PHP, et cetera, scripts to keep them organized and easily accessible or excuse me, executable? Um,

I use the fish shell, and I typically write my scripts of that sort using fish. And so there's a particular folder that you're supposed to put them in. And then occasionally, if I write other stuff, I'll just put it in my home folder because I have very little in my home folder. I'm sure this is going to make John roll over in his not grave, but grave. So before John tells us all what we're supposed to be doing, Marco, what is your approach?

For this kind of random script and stuff for my local Mac to run, I actually have a folder in Dropbox for those. And part of my new Mac setup is to add to my... Well, first install Bash, and then add to my Bash profile to include a Bash profile...

file that is in this Dropbox folder. And then that does everything else for me. So that way when I set up a new Mac or managing between my desktop and laptop, I don't need to constantly be shuttling things back and forth manually or resetting things up. Any of that stuff just lives in Dropbox and

And including most of my bash profile, which again is just included by the actual local bash profile, it includes the Dropbox bash profile and that sets everything else up. That's where all of my aliases are and all sorts of stuff like that. So I suggest whether you use Dropbox or whatever other file sync provider you use, keep it in there unless you have some really good reason not to.

All right, John, what are we supposed to be doing? So there is a correct, with the scare quotes like this question says, a correct directory for saving executable scripts from a cultural perspective for everybody my age and older who cut their teeth on Unix in the late 80s or early 90s. And that answer is tilde slash bin.

B-I-N, lowercase. You make a directory called bin in your home directory. You put all your executable files there. You add your tilde slash bin to your path. And then on every system you do that and whatever things you want to be executable, you put in there. That's mostly just a cultural answer. And it's based on the fact that if you were on a multi-user Unix system back in those days, probably at your university or whatever...

you didn't have access to the system-wide directories. So you had to pick some other directory to put things, but you did have access to your home directory, but you'd want the directories in your home directory to be structured like the system-wide ones. And so, you know, the ls command is "bin ls" and your customized version of the ls command would be "tilde slash bin ls". I, in fact, do have a bin directory in my home directory. I make it invisible so it doesn't show up in the Mac side of things with just the hidden attribute, but it is in fact there. It is in my path.

that is the correct location for files that you want to be in your home directory. Now, if you just want to say stuff that you just want to be able to run the other correct location on your own Mac, where unlike in the university, you do have access to the system wide files is user local bin. And that's USR, not USER. And it's all lowercase, all lowercase slash USR slash local slash bin user local. Apple has essentially pledged, uh, like, uh,

uh europa in 2010 uh you know attempt no landing there all these words a year all these worlds of yours except user local um they said they won't mess with user local they're not going to put their stuff there they're not going to accidentally wipe it during an os update that was a promise statement for many many years ago so far it has still been true if you would like to put system-wide stuff somewhere

For yourself, manually, user local. User local bin, user local include, user local man, user local lib, user local share. Everything in user local is yours. And what do you put there? The same directories that are at the top level. A bin, a lib, a share, an include, etc.

Anything you want, you put there. So user local bin is where I put the executables that I want to be generally available to everybody on the system. And my path also includes user local bin, which is another common thing to have in your shell path on a Unix system. So those are the answers, bin and user local bin for executables.

As for keeping them organized, that's different than keeping them easily executable. You might want to organize them by category and make subfolders, but now you're adding even more files to your path and maybe you could have some links up to the top level, put them down to other things. And if you're using a package manager, all your crap is an opt and it's messing with your path and you're using RVM and NVM and all these virtual environments to point to different versions of node and different versions of Ruby and different versions of Python. And there's a whole web of sim links and just everything.

I don't like that. It runs me the wrong way, but it is how a lot of the world works. And speaking of fish, every single one of these freaking things assumes, of course, you're running ZSH, Bash, or Fish, or some other POSIX-compliant shell, so it's no problem. If you want to use NVM, just type .NVM.SH and you're up and running. Oh, but you're not running ZSH or Bash or SH or Fish, are you?

oh well tough luck because you can't source that file because it's written in the shell that your thing doesn't support so i guess you just can't use our thing oh well there's no other shells in the world except for bash csh and fish as we all know so that will never come up guess which shell i use not one of those three um what do you use so that i'm used tcsh uh because i'm old and that was on my first unix system and someday i'll be forced to change probably to zsh or bash or something else i probably won't change the fish a little too weird for me um

But yeah, a lot of those systems just assume they know what shell you're using and nothing works. You can't use the node installed by NVM until you source the NVM thing or unless you port it to TCSH or figure out how it's manipulating your path to do what it's supposed to do.

This is why I compile everything from source and put it installed under user link. It comes with me across OS updates. It's always where I want it to be. It's not a web of symlinks and everything works fine. I think that is a reasonable organization, but I'm an old Unix person and I don't like these newfangled things and I don't use Homebrew and I don't use any kind of package manager. And I kind of wish Apple would write a package manager for macOS that was natively supported, but so far they haven't.

All right. John had opinions. Who knew? Shocked. Saul Sutherland writes, do you keep the internet firewall enabled on your Mac? It comes off by default on new installs, but I make it a habit to enable it to protect myself from incoming connections on coffee shop wifi. And when my Mac is connected directly to the internet for testing at work, uh, for me, I don't turn it on and I don't think I ever have. Um, I'm not that concerned about incoming connections. I mean, I could make an argument why one should or could be, but I,

I don't know. I'm not that worried about it. And no, I leave it off. Um, and when I'm on coffee shop, wifi, I use tail scales, not a sponsor of this episode, but obviously I'm in love with them. Uh, tail scales, exit node functionality basically says, take all of your outbound traffic anyway, and route it through something else. And I route it through my house. So,

For me, no, don't use it. Again, because I think John will have most opinions. Let's start with Marco. Marco, do you use the internet firewall? No, I think most software these days is designed to assume any network you're on is hostile.

And to not grant open access to others on your network without your permission. So I don't think it's super necessary for most people to worry about that. But if you have that kind of extremely high security need for the networks you're on, then you might have different priorities. But I think for most people, you don't have to.

Yeah. John. As someone who essentially never does a clean install and has just simply been migrating from one Mac to the next and installing new versions of Mac OS on top of the old ones since 1984, I

And it's sometimes a mystery to me what my settings actually are, because the last time I looked at them, they have been a decade or more in the past. So I had to actually go to system settings to see, do I have the firewall enabled? And this would have been something that I set back on the Mac OS 10 days, right? Because it didn't exist in classic Mac OS. The answer to my surprise, as I thought I had it turned off, is yes, I do have it active.

Why? Maybe it was the default a long time ago. Maybe it's currently the default, but I have it active and it has never affected my life, so I'm inclined to keep it that way. I don't think about it actively. In general, I agree that most sort of network security happens outside the realm of your computer. I'm a desktop guy, so I'm not going to coffee shops with laptops. But my advice for Firewall is...

If it's not on by default on a new Mac, which I don't know the answer of, if it's not on by default, try turning it on and see if it annoys you. If it doesn't annoy you, leave it on. It's providing some additional measure of protection. If it starts annoying you too much, then you can figure out, is there a way I can keep this on and have it be less annoying? And if you can't figure it out, then just turn it off. But I would advise the default being turn it on and leave it on until or unless there's some reason not to.

Torstein writes, is Marco still using his XT5 or did he go back to his iPhone again like he predicted he would? Also, what are the rest of y'all using these days going into the holiday season? iPhones or camera cameras?

I guess since Marco was quoted in this or named in this, why don't you start Marco and then I'll start, I'll continue after you. Yeah. So my, my Fuji XT5 remains my most commonly used standalone camera. That's not an iPhone. I believe I've mentioned a couple of times in the past. I did, uh,

really bite the Fuji bug or get bitten by the Fuji bug hard. And last year, uh, around the black Friday season, I picked up on great sale, uh, their giant medium format X or a GFX 100 S and,

It has since been succeeded by the GFX 100S II. I have the first one. Whenever I'm willing to carry around a very big camera, I bring the GFX 100S, and it is ridiculous. And I only have the... I only have two primes for it. I have the 110mm portrait and the little...

The relatively little pancake lens for it, which is the size of a grapefruit, the 50 or 55 millimeter one, I keep that 50-ish millimeter one on most of the time.

That is my landscape everything camera. Because it is so big and heavy, I more often have the Fuji with me. If I'm going somewhere with a backpack, I will often have the X-T5 with me is what I mean.

And on that, I have the little tiny pancake prime for that, the 27mm, which converts to like a 45-ish. I love that combo. It's a fantastic camera. The X-T5, even though it is not technically as amazing as the GFX100S, I greatly prefer its controls.

I think it is my favorite camera I have ever used in terms of handling and controls and capabilities. It has tons of manual control dials. And so I'm able, especially when I have a lens, which most of my lenses do, where the lens has an aperture ring on it.

Then I have physical controls for all of the main things. I have shutter speed, ISO, aperture and exposure. All of those there's rings for if your lens has an aperture ring on it. I just love the X-T5 because everything is just clear and obvious. You can tell what all the important settings are just by looking at the top of the camera. That's how I like to shoot.

It handles the way I want a camera to handle. Things are laid out in a great way, which is not what I can say about the GFX, but the GFX wins on tech detail. But anyway, the X-T5 I absolutely love. So to answer the question whether I'm still using it or whether I went back to my iPhone, I never stopped using my iPhone to take pictures. Now I just, when I have the ability to have a big camera with me,

I do take pictures with the X-T5 and I really enjoy it. And in fact, today I was going on like a sunny winter day walk at the beach and I brought the X-T5 and I took some pictures around the beach of the snowy town and it was delightful.

So, I do use the X-T5 as often as I've used any other big camera in the last 15 years, which is not incredibly often, but I'm glad I have it when I want it. Christmas, I'm going to be using both of those heavily.

Our Christmas setup is kind of a multi-camera setup usually. It's a big family ordeal and there's different cameras for different purposes. So I will have the GFX with me with that prime lens on it, especially when light gets low. But for other times of the day, I'll be using the X-T5 with a more versatile zoom lens on it. So the answer is yes, I use it and it's great.

For me, I have a Olympus micro four thirds camera, which is why I was, my interest was peaked earlier with that, that immersive camera I use. I don't remember what generation it is to be completely honest with you, but I was an Olympus OMD, OMD EM10. I want to say it's a Mark three, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. The Mark four appears to be the latest and greatest that camera. While I love it. And to my eyes takes incredible pictures and,

I've come to the conclusion over the last several years, I want to say three or four years ago now, that if I'm indoors, unless I have a lot of light, then the iPhone is likely to do a better job taking a photo than this is. Obviously, the bokeh won't be nearly as good from the iPhone. In fact, it will either be synthetic or not great. But

In general, I find that particularly indoors, the iPhone does better. And then outdoors, it depends on what I'm up to because the Olympus doesn't have automatic or my Olympus doesn't have automatic like HDR or anything like that. And so I will choose between having subjects that are, you know, exposed properly in a washed out sky or vice versa or.

And so I do still use the Olympus, particularly when I want a zoom, because I have some flavor of zoom lens that I forget off top my head on it, which is again, less relevant now with the iPhone's five X camera. Or if I'm outdoors for sure, if I'm outdoors trying to capture like people or whatever, I am 100% reaching for the, for the Olympus, but that's about it. If I'm not outdoors in decent light, I,

oftentimes it's just less fuss to use the iPhone and that's typically what I'm doing. John, I need you to keep this to under three hours. Which one of your 17 cameras are you using? What scenarios, please? So for the holidays, I

I just, well, really for everything except for Long Island beach photography, I use my phone obviously. And also what I consider my main camera, which is the Sony a seven three that Marco generously gifted me all those years ago. Love it. Still getting great mileage out of it. The lens I use on it is what I consider my sort of everyday lens. It's the most versatile single lens I have for this camera. It's the Sony 24 to 70 F1.

f 2.8 gm2 what i like about the lens is the zoom range is reasonable the aperture at 2.8 is reasonable and

and the size is reasonable. You can get lenses with longer ranges and with a wider aperture. They're all bigger and heavier. This one is already kind of at the limit of big and heaviness, but it is versatile enough that I can use it in any kind of indoor or outdoor scenario where I'm going to be taking pictures of people at an event or doing a thing. So Christmas morning is...

is that camera and occasionally the phone, which I will take out for, I don't do it. Don't do any video on my big camera. I do video only on the phone. And occasionally I'll take out my phone to do video and then snap some shots with it as well, depending on how quickly I need to get the shot is the camera around my neck. My family complains that all the pictures of me at Christmas morning, I have a camera around my neck with like, someone's got to take the pictures and it's going to be me. So any picture they take of me with their phones, which they're terrible quality phones, um,

is me with a camera around their neck. Yeah, so that's my plan for this year as well. Same lens, same camera. It'll be around my neck while opening presents. I'm going to be taking pictures of everybody else and they're going to end up going in the calendar that hangs in the fridge and it's just the way it works plus my iPhone pictures. My iPhone pictures get better every year because, well, not every year. Every two years my iPhone pictures get better because I get a better phone and that trend continues but...

Uh, it's going to be a little while before I ever upgrade the big camera. There are obviously many better cameras, but like me with my TVs, I'm waiting for that right. Better Campbell. First of all, a better camera is going to cost me a whole bunch of money. So, uh, you know, and I'm going to, I'm looking at the Sony cameras cause I want to be able to reuse all my lenses and I like Sony cameras. And so I'm just waiting for that right one. Like the, uh,

The A7R5 was actually a really good one, but I don't know if I want the R series with that much extra resolution. I'm not sure if I want or need that to make my photos bigger. The A1 was tempting, but super expensive. The new version of the A1 is like, oh, it's better, but they didn't change really the sensor. Then there's the A9 with the electronic sensor. It's like, maybe I should just wait until they basically have

something with the dynamic range of the A1 series, but with the instant readout, I forget what the name of it is, but like the electronic shutter instant readout thing of the A9, and that is a technology that doesn't exist yet. So I'm just sitting here waiting. I'm saying, in the meantime, I love my A7 III, take tons of pictures with it. I have lots of different interesting lenses for it that I use on occasions when I have time to prepare, but my everyday lens, the Sony 24-70 GM2,

Highly recommended lens. Great compromise between image quality, weight, and aperture if you have to pick one single lens to use for anything. And when I take, you know, sometimes like my kids are going to like a dance at school or something like that, like where I know I'm going to be taking pictures of people like all dressed up in their nice outfits. I'll put on one of my prime lenses to get better pictures out of it. But most of the time, the everyday lens gets me through.

All right. Thank you to our sponsor this week, the members. Thank you so much, members. You mean a lot to us, especially now we're getting all sentimental about holidays and everything. Thank you very much. You really mean a lot to us. If you want to join and be a member, one of the perks of membership is ATP overtime. This week in overtime, we're going to go through a wonderful idea John had. We're going to name, each of us are going to name

our best tech thing of 2024, our worst tech thing of 2024, and the tech thing we are most looking forward to in 2025. If you want to hear that and every other thing we do in overtime every week and all of our other bonus content and all the other benefits of being a member, you can join us at ATP.FM slash join. Thank you, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week.

Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.

And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T. Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A. It's accidental. They did.

Accidental. Tech Podcasts. So long.

So I thought maybe we could take the opportunity to do like a quick catch up on Aaron's car. If you recall, in June, when we were all at WWDC together, Aaron's old Volvo had a catastrophic engine failure. I forget which episode we talked about it, but you should go and listen to it. Caused by a very small pebble.

Correct. No, you're not going to say... I was just waiting for you to get to that point. You're just going to say, oh, it had a catastrophic engine failure anyway, continuing on. It's like, no. It had a catastrophic engine failure caused by a pebble. It had an encounter with a pebble. It was defeated by a pebble. It was destroyed by a pebble. There's so many different ways you can do this. The important part...

is the pebble it was it was possibly the most interesting catastrophic engine failure i've ever heard yeah see there you go uh so anyway you can hear the details uh on a prior episode i don't recall which one but uh that was in june and then in early july we figured out that we really just wanted to stick with volvo and i don't need to hear any feedback as to whether or not that was smart don't care that's what we did it's already done uh and what we did this time though was it

Aaron had a Volvo XC90. It was a 2017. We bought a 2024. We leased, actually, a 2024 XC90. But this one is a plug-in hybrid, an XC90 T8.

And basically what that means is it has a turbocharged four-cylinder engine, and it also has a battery electric engine, if you're motor, I guess, strictly speaking, if you will. And anyway, so it gets about 30 to 35 miles of range, generally speaking. We can charge it in about five hours from dead here at home because we have an American dryer-style plug, which is a 220-volt plug plug.

I want to say it's like 50 amps, something like that, which then gets converted down to... I think it's a 30 amp, which is all that the car wants because it's not a huge battery. I believe it's 18 kilowatt hours or 18 kilowatts, excuse me. Something like that. Anyway... You were at the first one. There we go. I screwed it up. But I thought...

It would be interesting to talk about what it's like for someone to have a plug-in hybrid car. And I got to tell you, for our particular needs, and our particular needs are relatively unique, but for us, I freaking love this thing. And I think it was the perfect solution for our family. So...

Generally speaking, Erin drives 10 miles in a day, maybe 20 at most on an average day. And I just told you that the battery lasts roughly 30 miles, give or take a little bit, generally speaking. So that means that almost all of her driving she can do on electricity. And that also means that we bought the car, I want to say it was like July 10 or thereabouts. I forget exactly what day it was, but it was in the top half of July.

A couple of weeks ago, we put our second tank of gas in the car. How much horsepower is the electric motor? You know, I honestly don't know. I want to say it's like 100 horsepower, but I really, truly don't remember off the top of my head. Because I was wondering, are you forcing it into EV-only mode? Essentially, you get in, you put it into the mode that says don't use the gas engine at all? That does exist. It's called Pure. And I have done that a handful of times.

And oftentimes if I do it, it's because I want to allow myself the full depth of the accelerator pedal. You know how in like an automatic, you can just kind of feel, not physically feel, but you just kind of feel out that, oh, if I go any further, the car will downshift. And you know that unless you're really trying to get going somewhere, you can just that say 50% depth on the accelerator is all you've really got at that particular moment.

Well, the same sort of thing is true here. Now, it isn't automatic when it's using the gasoline engine, but that's not what I'm talking about. What I mean is you can just kind of tell that if I go beyond this depth of the pedal, it's going to kick on the gas motor. Not only that, but the tachometer, or I guess it's the power meter, strictly speaking, it has a droplet. I'm not sure why it's a droplet, but it's a droplet and a line that indicates, okay, if you ask for any power beyond this point, I'm kicking on the gasoline.

And so we run it in hybrid mode 99% of the time. And it is exceedingly rare that it will turn on the gasoline for just getting around town purposes. Now, if we're on an interstate or something like that, it will absolutely kick the gasoline on from time to time. And then also I've found that if you use the

onboard navigation and this has android automotive which means it's the google powered thing it has google maps and whatnot uh if you tell it if you tell the car the destination rather than using like apple maps on carplay it will do some sort of computational magic such that it will kick on the gasoline when there's plenty of battery power left i believe because it thinks okay later in the trip when you're close to your destination you're going to want the juice for then and

That being said, I'm not sure I really agree with some of its choices. Like it would use battery at times where I thought the gasoline might have served it better, like say on the interstate. And it used gasoline when I thought the battery might have served it better, like around town. Maybe it's right. And certainly it's

presumably smarter than me, but I don't know. It just felt weird. But that was many words to say, no, we don't typically put it in pure mode. We typically run it in hybrid mode. I'm surprised that your gas tanks last in that long, because you're essentially not... You're not disallowing the gas engine from turning on, so it turns on whenever it feels like it. Although it does sound like you're kind of babying it because you don't want the gas engine to turn on, but still, it's turning on in your daily use, but I guess...

just a little bit, just briefly, and not enough to go through? Does it have a big gas tank? How big is the gas tank? You know, that's a great question, which I also don't know off the top of my head. You've only filled it up twice. Yeah, I've only filled it twice. Let me see if I can quickly find the... I log our fuel spreadsheet, a number spreadsheet. I don't know why I do it. I just like doing it. I have no good justification for it. Even less so now. Yeah.

Yeah, right. The last time we filled it up, it was pretty darn near empty and we put in almost 16 gallons, like just a shade shy of 16 gallons. And that was an effective miles per gallon on that tank of 77.2.

And that is by taking the amount of miles driven, you know, divided by the amount of gallons burned. But again, that's not really fair because most of that time we were running on electricity rather than gasoline. That's one of the things that always worries me about hybrids and we're so worried about Marco's i3's range extension is like, if you don't ever use the gas engine, A, you're just, you know, wasting electricity hauling this big heavy thing around. And B...

if you don't run a gasoline engine for long periods of time it gets cranky like you do have to occasionally start it and you are like you're it's clearly turning on and although it auto stop start also makes me have empathy for the engine yes being I know they're designed to auto stop start I know all the things they did to change the engine so they can do that and more robust starters and yada yada it's still not good for the engine still right so I do worry that I mean you're at least in so who cares but like

It's one of the strange compromises about hybrids is

you know, depending on how you use them in like the quote unquote best case scenario where you're basically on EV almost all the time. A, it's inefficient to hug the line, lug the engine around and B, that engine is having a sad, difficult life. That's probably not being run enough. They, it wants to be run. It's like, you know, uh, you know, a thoroughbred horse. It wants to get out there and run. And you're just like, Nope, electric motors got it. Yeah. And I mean, I would say that it probably, if I were to wager a guess, uh,

In the six months or thereabouts that we've had the car, I would say the gasoline motor has been on 10 hours or less, maybe. Like, it is very rare for the gasoline motor to run. See, that's not a good healthy life for a gas engine. I know who cares about the whole point is you don't want to be burning gasoline. Like, I get that, but it's like, it just, that's why I always feel like a pure EV is so much more of a simple solution. But, you know, hey, live and learn. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, again, I can't find any particular, you know, beef that I have with anything you just said. I agree with you. But so far, you know, six months in, it has been incredible because we almost never use gasoline. And again, it's been...

a couple of thousand miles. Shoot, I already closed the numbers document. But I think we were at like at the time of the last fueling. Okay, here we go. We were at 3,000 miles at the time we last fueled it. 3,000 miles. And we have put in a sum total of 26 gallons of gas, which is just bananas.

And for our uses, it is the best of both worlds because easily 90 plus percent of the time, Aaron is using it just on electricity. And then the handful of times that we want to go further. Now, admittedly, we haven't taken it on a proper trip yet. When I say further, I'm saying like a sum total of 100, 150 miles, which I know most reasonable EVs would laugh at.

But that being said, anytime we want to take it further than like 30 or so, then the gasoline just kicks on and it's no problem. And that's worked out super duper well. And I think we could, our family could have a EX90, which is the full electric version of this car. I mean, it's strictly speaking a little bit different, but it's effectively the full electric version of the XC90.

And I certainly think we could make that work without too much compromise, but I really, I wasn't ready for the family hauler to be full electric yet. I 100% believe that I should have years ago gotten a full electric for myself. I haven't for several different reasons, but yeah,

For the family hauler, I didn't want it to be full electric yet. And I stand by that for now. And honestly, I could make a strong argument about how wrong I am. So I'm not, you know, this is a weak opinion held loosely. Right, exactly. It's a weak opinion held loosely. I'll be the first to tell you. But certainly for sticking our toe in the water, the plug-in hybrid has been excellent.

Excellent. And I'm really, really happy with it. The qualms I have with the car are, well, let me ask you guys, if you were to just hazard a guess, what do you think my biggest complaint about the car is? Infotainment. Close. Oh, I was going to say the transmission.

No, no, no, no. Well, there is no transmission 90% of the time we drive it. No, it's software. The software is not great. And it's Google's Android Automotive. Now, maybe it's Volvo's application thereof. I've never had an Android Automotive car before. Yeah, Android Automotive is a perfectly solid foundation. It's all the crap that the manufacturers put on top of it that often has bugs. By the way, that's what I meant by infotainment. How am I close? I'm exactly right. It's infotainment. That's the term of art for the thing you're describing. It's the software that runs on the middle thing that

Yeah, but I can't put my... There are times that it's something at a lower level than the infotainment. 90% of my complaints, you're exactly right. It's the infotainment. But there are occasions, and of course, I can't put my finger on one specifically, right? The second. But there are occasions that it's something that I think is a lower level than that. But definitely, most of my complaints are the infotainment. And I actually...

liked the, I think they called it census, which was the Volvo homegrown thing that predated Android auto or excuse me, Android automotive. Um, I liked it. Most people did not. They've kind of tried to make a faux census on top of Android automotive and it's all right, but,

But I just don't love the way some of it works. And some silly things have been regressions. So a great example of this is I don't particularly care for the radio in any capacity. Erin loves listening to the radio in the car. And she really has come to like SiriusXM. I think we've talked about this in the past. But she likes satellite radio. And Erin is not one to want to pay money for really anything if she can avoid it. She's very...

frugal maybe is the word I'm looking for. I think there's an even more complimentary term than that that I can't put my finger on, but she doesn't like to spend money frivolously. Meanwhile, that's my specialty, but that's neither here nor there. And I am a mere apprentice to Marco's expert level at this, but nevertheless. You see how he snuck in the new version of the big medium format Fuji in there?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. No, I didn't say I own the new version of the medium. There is a new version. I have the old version. Oh, I thought you'd bought the new version. No. I mentioned it off to the side during your story. Okay, that's a good clarification. Marco did not buy the new one. No. By the way, remind me to tell you sometime about Long Island Christmas Light installation pricing.

Oh my god. Anyway. Like paying somebody else to do it? Okay, I'm sorry for the derail. No, go for it. This is a thing. I don't know how long this has been a thing.

I'm relatively new to Long Island, but this is a thing that there are a lot of houses, especially as you get towards the nicer blocks in town. A lot of houses have professionally installed commercial-grade Christmas lights, and you can identify them pretty easily. I believe it's the C9 sizes. I think it's what they're called, but they're the large lights that are perfectly

perfectly evenly spaced and are all perfectly aligned to outline the roof line and all the sidelines of a house and usually some of their landscaping and maybe maybe their driveway and everything but

This is so prevalent. I like, I'm, I'm shocked. Like how many houses do this? And first of all, I respect what they're trying to achieve. I do think it kind of goes against the spirit of Christmas lights. If they're all perfect and corporate installed by like, you know, like somebody you're paying to put them on your house. Like,

I feel like that kind of is against the spirit of Christmas lights. And I prefer a more organic look where somebody just like went out there themselves and draped some lights over their bushes. Like I like that look better. It's a little more homey. And I think that's kind of what I go for. But anyway, so there's all these like, you know, just residential homes. Our kids saw this one time and was like, oh my God, we have to have that. How like, how did we do that? So we called around some different places that, you know, we saw signs for.

You would not believe what this costs. On Long Island, I'm sure it's thousands. Yes, which greatly surprised us. And we were asking for a very basic thing, and the quote blew us away. We scaled it back quite a bit. But based on the quote that we got, and based on what everyone else was charging for the same thing, and based on what everyone else seems to be doing to their houses, I think there are...

Don't forget about the electricity.

Believe me, that's nothing compared to, you know, if you're paying $5,000 or $10,000 for your light installations every year, the electricity is not going to matter at all. Back when they were incandescents, I think you could compete with that if you left them on all the time. But yeah, with LEDs, hopefully it's not that much. Yeah.

It's shocking to me that people would pay like, you know, five or ten thousand dollars to decorate their house for like three weeks. You see how it works because you just got done saying how you think it's, you know, not to your taste. But then also you're looked into paying for some because the neighbors did it. That's how it works. The neighbors have lights and you want to have the lights and keeping up with the Joneses. And it's happening to you, too. Why did you even agree just because Adam wanted it? And you're like, OK, well, I don't like it, but Adam wants it. So we'll do it. Yeah, I figure, you know, we try it for a year and then, whoa, whatever.

You could have hung them yourself. Like, I mean, that's the, you know, the old way to... I saw this by just not doing lights at all. But when I was a kid, my dad and I did lights. We hung them ourselves and it was dangerous and stupid. And that's the Christmas spirit. But these are...

somewhat involved to do yourself because like it's one of those you know to get the perfect alignment each light has its own bracket it isn't you're not just like you know stapling a couple of staples to the wires yeah no I understand like I agree with you I don't like that look I when I'm hanging them I say like you have nails stuck into like the the eaves of your house and you hang wires over the nails and nothing is evenly spaced and you know it's very organic yeah that I prefer that look but there are a lot of people who prefer this look and

I don't know. Once I learned how much it costs, it kind of ruined it for me. Now I'm just kind of like, oh my God, those people wasted so... So anyway, all this is to say that, believe me, Casey, there are people who are way better at wasting money than either of us. Good to know. You could put a projector on your lawn, Marco, and have it project lights onto your house. You know, those things where they take light and project things onto the surface. They won't be as bright as the neighbor's lights, but you can have any configuration you want, and it's just one little projector. Oh my God.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyways, Erin doesn't really love spending money if she can avoid it, which is great because I'm very good at it. And so she really likes SiriusXM. And I was starting to say before we got a little sidetracked that one of the things that's worse about this new version of Census, if they're even calling it that now, is that it's not as easy to get money for.

is that on her old car, when you looked at the list of channels in SiriusXM, if you're trying to flip to like a different channel, it would show you what the currently playing song was on each channel. So like on this list, it would say, you know, Hits Whatever is playing Justin Bieber and Hits in the 90s on 9 is playing so-and-so and...

zeros on zero is playing such and such and it would show you whatever's playing on each thing and it doesn't do that on this version of the software and to John's earlier point I believe that is Volvo I don't think that's Android or excuse me I don't think that's Google at all that's Volvo's work and

And it's silly things like that that are frustrating. And oftentimes there'll be little bugs and little quirks. And every great once in a while, we'll have to do a hard reset on the infotainment, which takes down like everything, including the HVAC. So we can be hurtling down the road and have to pull a Marco in his Model S and have to reboot the center console. This has only happened a handful of times in six months, but every time it does, it's

It's infuriating. And I can't tell if that's 100% Volvo, if it's 100% Google, or in all likelihood a combination thereof. But that drives me nuts. It's just the software is the issue on this car. And it's not bad enough that I would say don't buy one. I really do love this car, but it's the software. Oh, another great example. This hasn't happened in a while, actually. But when we first got the car, I don't know if it was where we had things stored in the garage or something like that. We have a fairly spacious garage, actually. But...

Aaron would go backing into the garage and it was not infrequent for the car to panic stop. And understandably, that drove her up a f***ing wall because every time it happened, it's infrequent.

Hence, you know, you're granted. She's not bombing into the garage. We back in because we're adults and that's what adults should do. And we back into the garage. And so she's, she's not driving at 15 miles an hour into the garage in reverse, but she's going quick enough that if you get this thing, panic stopping, it's all of a sudden, you know, it stopped.

You're going from moving to dead. And 90%, or maybe not 90% of the time, but a lot of the time she has the kids in the car and it scares the piss out of the kids too. Of course. And so we rearranged a couple of things we had in the garage that really were not that close to the car, but were close enough that I think it might've been setting this off. But like, that's a software thing. You can't just disable that? No.

I, you probably could, but I don't think you can permanently, you know, short of like, you know, coding the car or something like that. It's like the proximity things. Like when, you know, my wife got her new car, it's the first car we had with any of these proximity auto stop thingies. And we haven't had the auto stop thingy, but we did have like the BP things that yell at you if you get too close to something. Yeah. Or yell at you when you're changing lanes with your blind spot. And the proximity ones in particular, at least in this car, there's a very prominent actual physical button on the dashboard that

that you can hit to turn that feature on and off. So what you just do is when you're pulling into the garage, you hit the proximity thing off. I tell her, she has it off by default. I tell her, turn it on when you're parking so if you know you're getting close to some stuff. But in Aaron's case, I would say turn it off when you're backing into the garage,

even if it comes on as soon as you start the car, like that's what you want. So you should check to see if there's a way to turn off. I mean, your problem is not the proximity sensing. It's the emergency stopping that you don't like. And Volvo being Volvo may not let you turn that off, but you should double check. Exactly. But I mean, I think it was a software thing. And I think by rearranging some things in the garage, it has made a big difference. But when it does happen, it's happened with me in the car a couple of times. I don't get driven up a wall by it.

But unquestionably, it's unsettling. And that's being generous. Like, it's very unsettling to the point that it's almost scary. And that's as a passenger, much less as a driver. Does it beep at you, too, besides just emergency stopping? Well, it'll beep, beep, beep, beep. And then it'll, like, slam on the brakes and, like, you know, sound some sort of alarm or something like that. Ryan Booker in the chat is saying, that was a bug, I think. Polestar used to do the same thing back into our driveway if there was a blade of grass in the way. It's...

As soon as you go into the reverse gear, you can just turn it off, but you have to do it every time. And that, I believe, corroborates what my experience was. Do you have to go through menus on the touchscreen to turn it off? I don't recall, to be honest with you, but it's not great in that regard. But again, it's partially our work, potentially partially Volvo's work that's gotten better. That's, you know, so Volvo, again, being Volvo and being very safety-focused, I can see how they might turn a lot of these things on by default. But Honda...

trying to do the right thing in its interiors with both the proximity sensor and also the auto stop start.

The proximity sensor, again, a prominent button directly on the dashboard dedicated to this. Just turning the proximity on and off. And it defaults to on, but then you can turn it off. I think you can set it to default to off and then you can turn it on. But then the auto stop start has to default to on for them to get the good EPA mileage rating, blah, blah, blah. So it always turns on, but it's right by the gear shift lever, like the auto stop start button.

And there is an $80 thing, as I think I mentioned when she got this car. There is an $80 thing you can buy and shove inside your dashboard that will turn it off by default. But Honda's trying to say, look, we know which features of our car are annoying, and we will give you ways to defeat them that are as convenient as possible, very prominently located, easy to reach, easy to see. The auto stop start thing has a gigantic dedicated badge on the LCD instrument cluster that

So you always know when it's on and off. It never goes away. It's like the most important thing on the display besides like the amount of fuel you have and your speed. But they have to turn it on by default for safety reasons. So Volvo is not really meeting you halfway about knowing which things are annoying. I think they probably just think this emergency stopping thing is going to save your life someday. And you're like, I'm just trying to back into the garage. Yeah. The other nice thing about having a plug in hybrid is that even though the car is parked in a garage with garage door closed overnight, it's,

And even though you two, particularly John, seem to think that we live effectively on the equator because we are south of, I don't know, Philadelphia. That's obviously correct. As it turns out, it does actually get cold here by any reasonable definition. But not cold enough that your water heater isn't in your garage. You can't help yourself, can you? Anyway, the point is— It's 15 degrees here, okay? My water heater is not in my garage. Okay.

At least mine isn't outside like Jason's. Anyway, the point is... I mean, it's 24 degrees here, and my water heater is currently air conditioning my garage. It's 28 here. Thank you very much. So it's not like it's that friggin' different. Anyway... That's tropical. Jesus Christ, I quit. Anyway, so the point is, in the mornings, when it got properly cold here, which, again, happens more often than you two, John, think, I would...

oftentimes like pull aaron's car out before the kids and her got in it because she drives them to school um i would pull her car out maybe five or ten minutes before they were going to leave so the kids don't have to get into a freezing cold car and aaron too but particularly the kids and um and with this if the car isn't plugged in you can only run the electric like preheat or pre-cool for three minutes then it turns itself off probably because the battery is so darn small

But if the car is plugged in, you can run it for a solid 30 minutes. And so any time within 30 minutes of them needing to leave in the morning, I can just flip that bad boy on from my phone and it's just perfect in there by the time she gets in and unplugs it, which is great.

great. So again, there's a lot to be said for battery electric or plug-in hybrid cars. I'm sure there's other things I'm not thinking of that I could say about this, but I got to tell you, if you're in a situation where most of your driving happens within the range of the battery on your plug-in hybrid, but you still want to be able to drive two, three, four, 500 miles without having to stop for 45 minutes at a clip,

then I got to tell you, I am really happy with our plug-in hybrid. And I really do think that my next car will be full-on battery electric. And that will actually probably make some very interesting changes in the way Aaron and I drive our cars. Because right now, it is very clear that I have my car and she has hers because she can't drive a stick.

And once I get a battery electric, when that goes away and there are only two pedals, I'm very curious to see how we split the duty of our cars. You know, will she, generally speaking, take quote unquote mine when she's doing basic stuff around town because she's not going to want to haul the, I think it's like

5,000, 5,500, 6,000 pound car in order to do stuff? Or will she just take hers because she's more comfortable with it? How much do you think your EV is going to weigh? I was going to say, I have one of those 3,000 pound EVs. Yeah. I have bad news for you about how much EVs weigh. You make a very good point. Even when they're not SUVs, they're all heavy. Yeah. That is very true. You're right about that. But you still take my point though. I mean, whatever. Smaller dimensions would maybe be better around town for parking and stuff.

Exactly. So, I mean, I don't know. We'll see what happens. I'm not currently in the market for a car. And I do, I really do love my car. And I know I'm going to desperately miss having a stick whenever I get something different. But I am really, really happy with her plug-in hybrid. And

you know, some quibbles here and there for sure. But I'm really, really glad this is where we ended up. And it may come a time, I presume there will come a time that we get both of us full on electric cars. And I'll say to Marco, you know what, Marco, you were right. We could have done it for that 2024 that we leased.

But sitting here now to get our foot in the water, I'm really, really happy with it. And if you have this situation where, you know, you work from home or your commute is very, very, very short. I mean, when I was working outside the home, my commute was like three miles. So if you're in a situation where you're not driving a whole ton every day and yet you still want to be able to drive far if you so desire, plug-in hybrid, man, it's great. Plug-in hybrids are great for a lot of people. That being said...

Once you actually live with a full EV, you're going to realize how it was so not a big deal the way you thought it would be. I'm sure you're right. I don't doubt it. In terms of long trips. Look, I get range anxiety. I get trying to avoid EV charging infrastructure because it's unfamiliar and scary. I get that.

And yes, there are downsides for certain use cases for EVs, but it's so much less of a big deal than people think it will be to take EVs on long trips before they own them.

once you own one and live with it and actually do it, you're like, oh, that's fine. Like it's no, it's, it isn't better in every way, but it's better in a lot of ways. And it's, and it's not that much worse than you think it'll be in the few ways it is worse. So like, yeah, it's not a big deal. But in the meantime, yeah,

plug-in hybrids are a good transitional option. And so I'm glad you're enjoying it. I'm glad it's working as training wheels into the world of electric. And I'm glad you're able to enjoy some of those benefits of electric-only use or electric primary use in the meantime. So that's great. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more that this is training wheels at the moment. And

The funny thing about this is that if I'm honest with you two, there are definitely times that Aaron's prior XC90, the pure gasoline XC90, there are definitely some multi-hundred mile trips we went on with that car. But generally speaking, in an average year, the longest trip that Aaron's car made, and this one will make, is 140 miles, which is...

well within the range of, uh, now that's one way mind you. So what is that about 300 miles round trip, which is still almost, you know, I would say most electric cars jump in Marco, but most electric electric cars have roundabouts of 250, 300 mile range. So even round trip, we could probably do it in one charge if we really needed to. But, um, but you know, so generally speaking, her car does not go far. So that's even more credence that I'm full of it and

Marco's right that we should just have a full battery electric for Aaron. You're currently using an EV with 35 miles of range, you realize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is able to serve all of your needs with an EV with 35 miles of range. It just happens to weigh 5,500 pounds. I agree. You're not wrong.

That being said, we are going on a longer trip this upcoming summer, which is 320 miles each way. But that doesn't mean we couldn't charge when we're there. And it's going to be a week-long trip. So presumably, even if we were plugged into a standard 110-volt outlet, I would assume in the span of literally a week, we would be able to top that thing up. But you would never do that because fast charging is really easy.

Also fair. But my point is that like it could happen. I'm not trying to say that it is an impossibility for us. It's just something that I certainly wasn't comfortable with. And if I wasn't comfortable with it, there is no chance that Aaron would be comfortable with it. And actually John is writing something in our internal show notes as we speak, which reminded me of the one thing I meant to say, which I've forgotten to say, um,

Aaron, the other day, when it started to get cold by our standards, which at this point I will concede is not cold by Northeastern standards. This was like maybe a month ago. Aaron gets in the car and is like, is something wrong with my car? And I was like, oh, God, what? Why? She said, well, it's not saying I have 30 plus miles range. It says like 28, 29, 27, something like that. I forget what it was. And I was like, huh. And then I stepped outside. Oh, okay.

Yep. Yep. That's the thing. She said, what are you talking about? I was like, oh yeah, it's cold outside. Yeah. Well, the battery doesn't work as well as it's cold when it's cold.

what? Now, let me be clear. Erin is not a dumb woman. I would say she's brighter than me in almost every capacity, but she's not as knowledgeable as me about cars and that sort of thing. And she had no idea that she would take a hit for range during the winter. And yeah, the 32-ish miles that we were getting in the summer, it's now like 27-ish usually when we pull out of the garage in the morning. Yeah. But again, like,

Yes, that is a thing that happens, but that's less about inherent shortcomings of EVs and more just about lack of familiarity. I always think that... Yeah, I agree. There was that one blog post that we linked to a thousand years ago. It was written from the perspective of somebody who's just discovering gas cars for the first time after having EVs. Oh, yes. That was very good. I forget. I don't think we could find it, but that was very good. I'll have to dig it up. But yeah, but it was...

I love that perspective. It's like a lot of what people consider downsides of EVs are not considering similar downsides of gas cars. It's like comparing it against a perfect ideal that doesn't exist rather than looking at what actually is. There's downsides with everything and there's different trade-offs. Part of the reason why EVs have to make their own heat in the winter, which is somewhat inefficient and uses more range, is

is because there isn't a giant inefficient heat reaction happening as it operates to drive itself forward the way it is in gas. Like, gas cars can heat the cabin basically for free because there is just so much waste heat coming out of the engine. Right, exactly. And you're like, okay, well, that's great. That's free. But then you're like, well, hmm, you mean we're wasting energy?

all of that energy all the rest of the time and it's it's heating up the world all the rest of the time like like that that isn't without downside either you know so like there is you know there's there's a lot of of kind of you know just

you know, gas car, you know, bias in our minds. Cause it's like, that's, we've accepted that as normal. We, we have internalized like, yeah, well this was just how quote normal cars operate. So then when EVs come around, like we see all the differences without realizing like there's a lot of downsides to gas cars too. Oh, definitely. Definitely. And, and again, like I'm not, I'm, I will never say that EVs are better at everything. I will say that they are better at most things. And, and again, like the ways, the ways they are worse is,

are not as much worse for most people as they might think. But in almost every other way, they're better. Yeah. And again, I think we could absolutely make an EV work. And I say that as though it would be some immense burden. It wouldn't be. It wouldn't be. And intellectually, I know that, but I just wasn't there yet. And again, if I'm not there yet, I don't think Aaron was either. But I suspect what's going to happen is whenever my car gets replaced, and I don't know if that's tomorrow or 10 years from now,

But whenever my car gets replaced, I'll get some sort of full electric car. And once we live with that, I think it'll be, it'll quickly become very clear to us that, oh, we could make this work and it wouldn't be as burdensome as we fear. Oh, it'll be, it'll be better than that. You won't just be making it work. You'll love it. Like give it, give it like two months or less and you'll be like, oh my God, why do we wait this long? Well, and that's, that's true too, because Aaron's car went in full battery mode, either because it's in the quote unquote pure or because we just haven't kicked on the gasoline yet. Yeah.

It's sufficiently quick, but it is not quick. I mean, it is a very heavy car and it is not a tremendous motor that's driving it. And so it is not fast by any means. It's actually surprisingly peppy once you've got the both of them working together because the gasoline, I believe only drives the front axle and the battery only drives the rear. But,

Generally speaking, when we drive it, like I said, it's sufficiently quick, but it is not quick. Whereas even slow EVs that I've driven, like my parents have a Chevy Bolt. I always get it Bolt and Volt wrong. I forget which one it is. But whatever one is the one that they were producing up until like a year ago. Maybe it's a Volt. Crap. I don't remember. It doesn't matter. Anyways. Molt.

Fair. Yeah, it sheds. It sheds every couple of seasons. It's very weird. But anyways, whatever their piece of crap Chevy electric is, it is a piece of crap Chevy electric, and yet...

it's actually delightful. And from zero to 30 miles an hour, pretty damn fast. You'd be surprised. And that's not a performance car by any stretch of the imagination. So I am looking forward to whenever we get a full battery electric to have, you know, that instant torque in more than just a small helping of it from zero RPM.