636: Nose-Biting Territory
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I was wearing my beloved ATP Pixels shirt. So I'm a, are we live? I didn't hear you. Yes. I'm wearing a white undershirt because that's just, I'm an old man. That's what I do. And then I was wearing an ATP Pixels shirt. Don't slack on white undershirts or yourself. White undershirts are usually the correct undershirt color. Like occasionally you got to go with a gray, but usually white is like a great overall all arounder. Why would you get gray undershirts? You're just complicating your laundry.

So you get gray undershirts if in the context that you're wearing it, it might slightly become visible at the collar and that would look weird against what you're wearing. All my undershirts are visible to the collar. I don't care anymore. You don't get like the nice deep V-necks? Like, come on. No, I don't like V-neck first of all. And second of all, it's not the V-neck that's the problem. Even the V-necks have a non-V around the back of your neck and that's where it's visible.

Are you wearing your shirts backwards? I'm wearing them the right way. I know I should be in V-necks, but I don't care for them. And I'm sure I could get over it, but I don't currently care for them. And I'm wearing, what is this, crew neck or whatever it's called? I forget what the other option is. Yeah, just the circle. Circle hole. Yeah, circle hole. And that's what I prefer. And yeah, I know that's not very trendy, but that's okay. No, it's fine. I will tell you, though, if you ever want to switch to V-necks, like I switched to V-necks for my basic t-shirts and my undershirts.

few years ago it was like I lost a bunch of weight with keto and I've been working out and I felt really good I'm like I'm gonna look sexy with like my v-neck shirt and I wore I wore like you know one and tip was like who you look good I'm like okay now now I'm encouraged so I you know and I I

I was initially very irritated by, like, the feeling of where the V meets, the bottom of the V, but, like, the way that touches my chest. Mm-hmm. And I got over it in, like, a day. Like, it was a brief irritation. After that, now I am a shirt universalist.

after that one brief period of friction and noticing the V bottom, now I can wear any shaped collar, and I actually prefer the V most of the time. And, you know, for regular T-shirts, I think maybe it's a wash either way. But for undershirts, it's a clear winner because you are so much less likely to see the undershirt under whatever you're wearing, unless you are drawn and wear a giant neck for some reason. I feel like it's just a, for me, it would just be a chest hair display mechanism. LAUGHTER

I'm just going to get a little extra chest hair just to have the V go down long enough for it to poke out and say hello. Yeah, I guess I'm not particularly her suit, so maybe it's less of an issue for me. Different bodies, different choices. I was in Memphis last week. We were, myself and a few other people and friends were in Memphis to go to St. Jude, and that's why we recorded early last week. Well, anyways...

I made a terrible, terrible mistake. And I let Stephen Hackett show me the Ubiquity management interface for his whole Ubiquity setup. Mm-hmm.

I must have this in my life. I don't need it. I must have this in my life. And this is going to cause so many problems for me. I know it will. I know it will, but I needs it. And so I made a terrible mistake letting Steven show this to me. And Marco, this is a gift for future Marco, as I inevitably spend way too much money on ubiquity stuff that I don't need. And then somehow find a way to have some sort of problem with it. And you get to laugh and watch as I

fight through all these problems so no honestly so i'm going to talk a little bit more about ubiquity later but honestly i don't expect you to have any problems whatsoever you'll just have envy every time they release some awesome new switch with fun lighting you're like oh i want that switch like it's but like it's just there like once you go ubiquity you don't tend to go back i'll get again i'll get into more ubiquity stuff later but it's just good

Watching Steven blow through his network topology so you can see that this switch is connected to this switch is connected to this thing, and that's where the iPad is connected. I guess that wouldn't be a switch, but you know what I'm saying. You can walk down the actual topography of the network. Oh my God, it was so cool. You can see where the traffic is flowing. Oh my God. As someone who has display panels all over his house, this is my shit. God!

God, I love it. You can put the whole thing in your menu bar. I know, right? Oh my God, it would be so great. You're going to rip off your shirt and install a V-neck. I genuinely don't want to talk about it anymore right now. And I know we're going to talk about ubiquity broadly later. But over the next few months, I suspect that I will start poking and prodding Marco and getting some suggestions on what I should buy. Because Steven has opinions, which I trust and I agree with.

But I'd be curious to hear your two cents as well. So not today. This is not for today. This is another day down the road. I'd like to talk to you about it. So those are my problems. I'm going to be real hangry, potentially tired, and I've seen the promised land that is ubiquity, and now I can't go back. But you know what isn't a problem is I am going to remember to place an order in the ATP store, which is back, but not for long. It is going to end. Is it the evening of Monday, April 28, John? Is that right? Yeah.

I think I'm just saying it ends on the 28th and I leave it ambiguous so people feel nervous and they have to try to do the last minute. So just pretend it ends at midnight on the 27th. I don't actually know. I can look it up in the source code to see the actual date and time. But honestly, don't wait.

Until that amount of time is remaining. If you've waited and there's less than 24 hours left with time zones and everything and what day is it where I am versus what day is it where the ATP store is. That's why I removed that last day. It removes all ambiguity about time zones and worrying about the dateline and stuff and just

Yeah. Sale ends on the 28th. Order before then, before the 28th. If you look at the calendar and it says a number lower than 28, order. This is where I make my speech that, oh, every year, every sale, it's more than once a year, every sale, there's somebody in the audience who says, oh, I'm not going to be that person. There's no way I'm going to forget. And then, and

And then a week later, I get the toot or the tweet or the skeet or whatever we're calling it. And they say, oh, no, oh, no, I didn't think I could be that person. I'm that person. I've done it. I've missed the sale. Can you bring it back? Nope. What about nope? Are you sure? What about nope? I'm sorry. That's the deal. So please go to ATP.FM slash podcast.

store. Do so post-haste because you are running out of time. This is the last time you're going to be hearing about it on the show. I will very quickly start running down the merch until John interrupts me. We have M3 Ultra, the M3 Ultra Interposer, which I am definitely going to be getting one of. The Mac Pro Believe shirt is coming back in regular, in dark forms. We've got the Pro Max that's come back in light and dark forms. We've got my beloved, I mean that, ATP Performance shirt. This is sort of

I don't think it's literally Under Armour, but it's sort of in that direction. This is my favorite workout shirt. I love these things. I'm definitely going to be getting one or two of those to re-up. We've got ATP6 colors in a variety of different colors. We've got the classic ATP, the zip hoodie, the polo, another one of my personal favorites. The mug is still there, although we're running low, I think, John. Is that right? I wish. I wish we were running low. Never mind. No, John, you and me both messed up. Let's try this again. John, we're running low, right? Yeah.

Please buy mugs. Yes, Casey, we are running so low that if you don't order right now, you may not get one. That's what you were looking to say, John. I heard you. Supplies are, in fact, limited. And then finally, we do have the ATP hat. So please, ATP.FM slash store. This is your one and final chance.

John, what if you wanted to get a little bit of money off the store? How do you do that? Yeah, don't forget, if you are already an ATP member, you get 15% off. Go to your member page and get the code there and then paste it in the checkout process. If you are logged into ATP.FM, when you go to the store page at ATP.FM slash store, it should be added for you automatically. But if you don't see that automatically, don't click the purchase button. Go back to member page, copy and paste it. It'll work.

If you want to become a member to get the discount, it's probably worthwhile if you buy any significant amount of stuff because it's a good discount and one month of membership is not that expensive. So go to ATP.FM slash join to become a member, get the discount, and then you can buy whatever merch you want at 15% off. And I will add the surprise hit of this sale is actually the Pro Max Triumph shirt in black. Yeah. I told you it's a very popular shirt and we haven't sold it for a while. I think it's really good because, like I said, it looks...

It just looks like a nice design with nice colors on it from a distance. It does say Accidental Tech Podcast, so everyone doesn't have to ask you what your shirt's about because if they actually cared, they'll look at it and read and go, oh, it's a podcast shirt, whatever. And it's just an attractive shirt. And if people look closer and they're actual nerds, they'll see that those little shapes and colors aren't just shapes and colors, but are in fact the silhouettes of powerful Macs over time. So, yeah, that's a big hit. And I'm glad people are buying the Believe shirt still. So we'll see what we can do by manifesting that. And then, as I noted last time,

We don't sell the M shirts for the chips forever. We usually just sell them in the sale after when they are introduced. So if you ever want an M3 Ultra shirt, you probably don't want the chip, but maybe you want the shirt. If you ever want an M3 Ultra shirt, normal or joke version, now is the time to get it.

Indeed. So ATP.FM slash store. And let me remind you, if you do sign up at ATP.FM slash join, then you can go ahead and binge all the bootlegs if you wanted. You can binge the member specials. We actually need to, or I think we just did schedule one, didn't we, for this month. So there's plenty to listen to. We've got, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 hours with member specials at this point. So there's a lot there. Way more than that. No, look at that. So go to ATP.FM slash store or slash join to do your best.

All right. I wanted to briefly talk about a absolutely delightful bug reporting experience that I recently had. And I should tell you that it was not with Apple, which is why it was delightful. On the 5th of February, I finally got sick and tired of a ever so slightly esoteric bug that I found in the Slack iPad app.

So I use my iPad Pro. What year was it? It was like 22 or 23. It was before it got super duper thin. And I use it with the original smart keyboard or magic keyboard, whatever it's called, the cantilevered one. And that's typically how I use my iPad. And I noticed that if I was writing a multi-line message in Slack, so it's three or four lines long or something like that. If I use the arrow keys on the smart keyboard to perhaps go back a line or something like that,

Instead of arrowing within that text field, what it would do, it would select the prior message as though I was not in the midst of editing anything. That's a little difficult to describe verbally. But if I'm trying to arrow around within the message, instead of treating it as an editing operation, it's treated as a selection operation and it's going up and down the stack of prior messages. Right.

I reported this on the 5th of February. I don't have the bug report in front of me, but it was like two or three lines long and probably a little snarky because I was so fed up with this. Did you report it from within the app? Yes, I believe so. I think I did like help or something like that within the app. I mean, this was I've done it before. My recollection is like I was looking at how do you report a bug in Slack and somewhere in the actual Slack app itself, probably on the Mac where I was doing it. There's a way you find like, oh, help support something. And it leads you to the process from within the app to complain about the app itself.

So it's not like you have to go to a website and find a way to find their hidden support page or something. Yep, that's correct. So again, that was the 5th of February I reported it. It was the bare minimum amount of information to understand what I was saying. That was the 5th of February. I want to say it was afternoon or maybe even evening Eastern time.

But less than two hours later, let me repeat that for you. Less than two hours later, I got an acknowledgement of my bug report and they said, you're right. We've reproduced it. Less than two hours later, I got receipt and reproduction acknowledgement. Amazing.

Then they disappeared. Perfectly reasonable. I don't expect this to be fixed yesterday. It's not really that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. No worries. So 5th of February, there's a tiny bit of back and forth as they confirmed and so on and so forth. 21st of April, yesterday as I record this, they sent me a message that said, hey, it's fixed. Would you mind trying it out? And guess what? It was fixed and I tried it out and it was fixed and it was great. Two months, two and a half months, done. Imagine that. Imagine that. How cool.

Well done, Slack. I just wanted to share. One of the other major points here is that this was not a crash or data loss bug. No! It's not like a P1, like, this is destroying my data, the app doesn't work, I can't run it. It's like the lowest possible priority of a bug in a feature that is very obscure, that you have a workaround for, that's just kind of annoying, and still it got acknowledged and miraculously also fixed. And this gets back to our long discussion about ratios of, like,

How many users does Slack have? You know, how many support people do they hire? How many of all the users of Slack actually report bugs? How many of those bugs are actually real? And whatever the ratios are, Slack has arranged their money and time such that they can. And this is my experience, too. I've reported bugs to Slack. They can acknowledge the bugs.

and give you an idea of whether or not they're thinking of fixing them and then actually fix them. I didn't keep this kind of meticulous track of the various bugs that I reported, but in general, they have been either fixed or if they were like design bugs, they would say we have a feature in upcoming release that will address your concern in some way or whatever. So good communication, good finding and fixing of bugs and kudos to them for not throwing everything except for P1 bugs into a giant black hole. Yep. Couldn't agree more.

Uh, Jay Mullins writes with regard to third-party storage. I swapped out an M4 Mac minis, 512 gigabyte SSD for a two terabyte third-party SSD. And I haven't had any issues. I read and write is the same. I would have bought my Mac mini with a 256 gig SSD. Had I known at the time that a two terabyte third-party upgrade was a real thing.

So then apparently, John, you had asked which particular specimen Jay Mullins had gotten and Jay wrote back, I ended up rolling the dice with AliExpress and provided a link, which we will put in the show notes. As I load it right now, it is $130 for, I can't tell what size this is. Oh, a half terabyte SSD.

One terabyte is 160. Two terabyte is 280 and so on and so forth. Pretty, pretty good. Significantly cheaper than the Apple thing. So that's, you know, this is getting back to all of our things about like the French company that redid the circuit boards and that iBoff company we talked about last time and AliExpress has a whole bunch of these.

I agree that it's kind of rolling the dice because you're like, ah, you know, is this going to work? Is this company reputable or whatever? But I'm happy to hear someone have a success story because you just saved so much money. And again, I don't know what their return policy is or whatever. So it may just be rolling the dice. But there are an increasing number of options for storage. And this is really making me, like I said, consider this for whatever my next Mac may be. Some of these companies are still still haven't rolled out their Mac Studio products, but they're all promising them. But

Anyway, yeah, options seem to exist. Again, you can't vouch for their reliability and how well they're going to work over the long term or whether they work at all or what their return policy is. But I love it when I hear somebody save hundreds and hundreds of dollars by buying third party storage.

Couldn't agree more. Uh, Steven Merrill writes, I'm not sure why Marco said that the USB-C charging case for AirPods pro wouldn't work with AirPods pro mark one, or in my case, mark two. Uh, I've been using one with mine for more than a year now. And, uh, Steven provided a link to mag safe charging case, USB-C for AirPods pro second gen, which is $100, which is not cheap, but, uh, nevertheless, apparently it should work. Yep. My bad.

All right. Then I should put in a disclaimer. We're going to be talking about a Hacker News link to Reddit. So this is going to be grumps all the way down. But nevertheless, here on the Accidental Positivity podcast, we would never complain about anything. Touche. Touche. Cursor, the IDE, their support apparently has hallucinated some things and it caused a whole bunch of people to get upset. So Scared Pelican on Hacker News writes, summarizing a Reddit post,

Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE, started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines. Naturally, people thought this was a new policy, so they asked support. Support told everyone that this was quote-unquote expected behavior under their new login policy. One problem, there was no support team. It was an AI designed to mimic human responses. That answer, totally made up by the bot, spread like wildfire. Users assumed it was real because why wouldn't they? It's their own support system. And within hours, the community was in revolt.

Dozens of users publicly canceled their subscriptions, myself included. This is one of the most surreal product screw-ups I've ever seen, not because they made a mistake, but because the AI support system invented a lie and nobody caught it until the user base imploded. Whoopsie-dopsies.

So Cursor is one of these vibe coding. I don't know if they consider themselves a vibe coding product, but their name is always in the conversation when we discuss vibe coding, especially with people who are essentially non-coders or have limited coding experience but want to do something complicated. You can use AI to help you. These IDEs integrate it so you're not copying and pasting, but you're still just like talking to the LLM while your code is in an ID-like environment.

And cursor is one of those companies and companies like this, you would imagine are big on LMS and say, hey, we're a new company. We're a small company. We've got this LM based product. What else can we use? So maybe we can use them to answer easy support questions. Maybe they'll be at the other end of our support email so we don't have to answer them and just provide answers for us.

This being hacker news and Reddit, there is the conspiracy theory that actually there's no LLM involved and this was an actual policy change. And then they thought better of it when everybody canceled another blaming it on the LLM, which would be fun. Like throw the core technology of their entire business under the bus to save face when you make a bad policy decision. So we're not sure what the situation really is, but I just want to say that like this does work.

bring to mind the exact attitude I see in lots of companies that are very enthusiastic about LLMs. I feel like their enthusiasm rapidly has outrun the capabilities of LLMs. And so they will say, oh, why would we ever hire a support person? The LLMs can handle that. We'll train them on our knowledge base of our products, and then we'll just have them answer the emails, and they can do a great job of that. And

That's not how a lot of things work. I mean, you know, not to bash on Siri some more, but lots of people in the sport of bashing on Siri are asking it questions and leveraging Apple's supposed product knowledge. Like Gruber's done a couple of these where it's like, you know, Apple touted the fact that they have trained Siri on Siri.

Their products and so you can ask it. How do I do this with my iphone or whatever? Yeah, you can ask it and it just makes up stuff and tells you the wrong thing sometimes sometimes it doesn't sometimes it gets it right but you know other times it's just like do this do that go here or do that and like that doesn't exist and that's wrong, uh, and so I really question the value of something like this uh, because Uh, maybe it's valuable not to have to answer every support email But uh, how do you calculate the net value of giving wrong answers to people? Um

Uh, it could be small in which I guess they just write back and maybe they get through to a human and they're just slightly annoyed. Or it could be big and that the LM gives wrong answers and, uh, you know, and says that they are the right answers, uh, to something that causes a whole bunch of people to cancel their subscriptions to your service.

So I would say maybe this was a poor choice of where and how to deploy LLMs. We need some kind of a better framework for this. But basically, if, you know, as discussed with programming, if it's if it's deployed in a scenario where you were going to check its work anyway and you have an easy way to check its work, that's probably good. And you can tolerate mistakes.

If it's deployed in a place where you're not even paying attention to what it's doing and it could be lying to your customers, not so good. And if you think, well, we'll just get a better LLM that doesn't make mistakes, we'll let you know when someone makes one of those. But so far, it does not exist. All right. Then the New York Times had a post with regard to Elon Musk and leadership. And this post is titled America is Learning the Wrong Lesson from Elon Musk's Success. This is by Adam Grant, who is an organizational psychologist at UPenn.

Reading a few quotes from the article, uh, the evidence is clear. Leadership by intimidation and insult is a bad strategy. Belittling people doesn't boost their productivity, but diminishes it in a study of nearly 700 NBA players. Those who had an abusive coach perform worse for the rest of their careers, even after they left the team. Uh,

Disrespect doesn't just demotivate. It also disrupts focus, causing costly mistakes. In a medical simulation, professionals in neonatal intensive care teams had to diagnose a potentially life-threatening condition and then respond rapidly with the correct procedures. Right beforehand, some of them were randomly assigned to hear a visiting expert disparage their work. Briefly insulting physicians and nurses was enough to reduce the accuracy of their diagnoses by nearly 17% and the effectiveness of their procedures by 15%.

So you heard it here first. Be nice to your doctors. Take it from her review of over 400 studies across 36 countries with nearly 150,000 people. In the face of workplace aggression, people are less productive, less collaborative, and more inclined to shirk their responsibilities. Abusive bosses break confidence and breed resentment.

And ruthless haphazard downsizing can cause the highest performers, the ones who have the most and best opportunities elsewhere to jump ship. Denigrating people is not a path to accomplishing meaningful goals. It reflects a lack of self-control and a shortage of emotional intelligence here, here.

This is related to our recent discussions about leadership styles and yelling at the Siri team and Steve Jobs and, you know, mobile me and yelling at that team. And, you know, again, taking the wrong lessons from people who are successful and thinking everything they do is something that should be imitated and whether or not they succeed despite their things. This whole topic is.

very much on both sides, in fact, very much tempting. It causes people to view it based on how they feel about it. So on the yelling at people side, if you are a customer and you're using a product and it's bad, you feel like, boy, I wish someone would yell at the people who made this, like the satisfaction of feeling like I'm annoyed by this product and

How can I find the people responsible and make them feel bad? It's just, you know, revenge or like, you know, hoping that someone is held accountable or however you want to phrase it.

It emotionally feels good to think that this thing that is annoying you or doing a bad thing or has deleted your data or whatever your problem is, you feel like those people need to be punished. That desire to punish wrongdoing, right? That's an innate personal thing. If you are, in fact, a manager of people, very often you feel like...

uh people aren't doing a good job and they're not listening to me maybe i should yell at them to let them know that i'm serious uh to make them tough to toughen them up all sorts of you know sort of uh authoritarian uh instincts that we have when dealing with other people uh especially if you're in charge of them or fancy yourself as being in charge of them that's a form of leadership so leaders feel like they should do it because especially men leaders have to be tough and macho and there's all sorts of you know cultural and

Emotional things lead to that and then on the other side of it the people say oh you should be nice to people because being nice to people is nice and I feel like when I see people getting yelled at I feel empathy for them and I say please don't yell at those people. That's not nice. It's making them feel bad. That's how people view this issue on all sides. Every whatever your opinion is there is some emotionally fulfilling deeply rooted lizard brain motivation to support your opinion.

And that's why you need, you know, it's like, how do you tell? All right. So we have all these conflicting opinions and and different emotions. How do we tell which one is true? Science. That's how we try to tell whether things are true or not. And obviously, science is conducted by humans who have biases and emotions. But it's the best tool that we have, because if they make mistakes, future people can come up and show that they made mistakes and so on and so forth. Anyway, yeah.

If you, you know, rather than picking the answer that you think is the one that makes you feel better, whether you're predominantly an empathetic person who thinks people shouldn't be yelled at, or you're predominantly an authoritarian person who thinks people who do bad things should get yelled at.

We can study it and find out. And it's not close. Like, it's not sort of a hairline thing. Different realms, places where people would even the people who are strongly in favor of empathy would never have guessed things like that. If you're an NBA player and you had an abusive coach at any point in your career, it screws your whole career for years afterwards.

Like that is a surprising result. Doctors, like who cares if a visiting expert says something bad? Why would you get so measurably worse at your job because someone just said something mildly bad about like just it's really it's really fairly conclusive. And it's not to say that you should, you know.

Never hold people accountable or say whatever they do is fine or whatever. That's, again, that's the other side of the lizard blame saying, so you're saying I shouldn't yell at people and people should do whatever they want, right? All it's saying is that being abusive to people, although it might feel good in the moment or might seem cathartic from the outside, does not actually produce results. So do you care about...

the actual performance of results or do you just care about feeling good about the situation and again that goes on the flip side too do you care about just feeling good about being nice about people to people or do you care about results um it could be argued that if these studies went the other way people who are empathetic would still say okay well it gets better results but that's not worth destroying people for which is the point we've made uh on many past episodes that like

The end-all be-all is not the productivity of your employees and success of your company human lives actually matter and you shouldn't grind up humans as a process of doing that But anyway, you know the good thing is in this case You don't have to make that hard choice not being a jerk to your employees actually makes them perform better So, please do that

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In the show notes, in our internal show notes, there's a line item labeled Marco's new TV. But I have a real strong suspicion that this is John living vicariously through Marco and still trying to tell him what to buy. So, Marco, did you buy a new TV? Of course not. My restaurant opened this weekend. How am I going to buy a new TV? Yeah, I know. There's plenty of time to do this. We talked about it. When? When?

We covered it pretty well last week with a couple of follow-up items. I mean, in all fairness, you're right. There is time to buy a new TV. So yes, I could have placed an order on Amazon. But if I had done that, which I have not for this reason, it would just be sitting in a box for like a month. Like, what am I going to do? Plus, you're waiting for everyone to test the Bravia 2. Anyway. Yes, that was it. Yeah. I was considering the Bravia 2 2. Yeah.

I mean, it hasn't actually shipped to people so they can't test yet. So I last episode, I referenced Arting's new glare testing in this in this episode. I just want to put in the show notes the link to that video if you want to watch it to show there's so much more to deciding whether an anti glare coating actually works or what it actually does or whether you benefit from it at all.

And then the next one is a point I was trying to make last time but didn't do a very good job at, so I have a timestamp link to a video here. It's talking about brightness. And whenever we talk about this, you know, the upshot is always mini LED can get brighter than OLED, and Marco's concerned about that because he's got a bright room. And this is the point I was trying to make last time about brightness. When we say mini LED TVs are brighter than OLED TVs...

It's because OLED TVs cannot maintain the same brightness across the entire screen. So when they measure them during testing, they'll say, we'll make a little rectangle in the middle of the screen that is only 10% the size of the entire screen. They call that a 10% window. And they measure the brightness there. And sometimes maybe an OLED can get up to like 4000 nits, which is like really high. It's like the highest, you know, that's,

Plenty right, but then when they take that 10% window It's just a white rectangle is 10% of the screen and they make it a hundred percent of the screen The brightness doesn't go from like 4,000 down to 3,000. It goes from like 4,000 down to 300 It's a big big drop because of power and heat concerns That's a limitation of the OLED technology But unless you're watching that one scene in the matrix or neos there in the big white empty room Are you watching a Johnny I've video I guess most of the time your screen is not 100% white. I

And so that usually doesn't come up in actual viewing. On the flip side of that, mini LEDs, TVs because they have different backlight regions, when they have a scene that has a bunch of different things in it, but with like some bright highlights, even though mini LED TVs can get super, super bright, like if you do just a big white square over the whole screen, they can just blow your eyeballs out. If you have a bunch of highlights below an otherwise normal looking image, mini LED TVs generally don't create

up those highlights to the same brightness as they can at the full screen. And that's because if they did, you would get blooming halos around them because the highlight may be some shiny thing on the edge of someone's shoulder or something. But the backlight behind it is like a one and a half inch by one and a half inch square. So if you crank up

that tiny highlight to be 4,000 nits, you're going to see this giant bloom behind it because the LCD panel cannot stop that incredibly bright backlight from bleeding through. And all of these mini LED TVs have computers controlling them and sensing, oh, how high can I safely turn up this backlight to make the highlight highlighty but without causing blooming? And modern mini LED TVs are good at that.

in that they don't have a lot of blooming, but they sacrifice overall brightness. So this timestamp link to this video showing the LG G5 shows a situation in which a normal looking image is actually brighter on the OLED G5 than it is on a mini LED TV because the G5 is only being asked to crank up the brightness on a few highlighty areas and it can do that because it has per pixel lighting control. Whereas the mini LED TV showing the exact same image

has to tone down its backlight because otherwise it will have blooming and hails and stuff.

It's not to say every scene is going to be like that. Again, that scene in the Matrix where all the guns come flying in, that's going to be brighter on a mini LED TV. But all this is to say is that the LG G5, which is out now, and if Marco had to buy a TV right now, now, now, I would say that's the one he should get because he's had LG OLEDs and he's liked them. And the Sony one isn't. You can't actually buy it yet. So there you go. It's very bright for an OLED.

And in some situations, a very bright OLED is actually brighter than a very bright mini LED TV because it doesn't have to worry about blooming. So that's the point I would add. So Marco, if you're going to panic by something which doesn't sound like you are, get an LG G5. If you can hold out, please hold out until people test the LG G5 versus the Sony Bravia 8 Roman numeral 2. And once they do that test, then you'll know which one to get if you set an OLED which it seems like you are.

Yeah, because like and to be clear, like there's I there's two different TVs that are, you know, on the on the approval list to be replaced in the following year. One of them is at the beach where reflection and performance in a bright room is incredibly important.

The other one is, you know, back at home where that's almost not important at all. So there are actually different criteria for the two TVs. Both of them I want to be OLEDs around the 65-inch range. But, you know, it's – for the most part, the reflectivity is like the number one thing at the beach because that really does control a lot of when we can use that TV.

Yeah, the Samsung S95F is kind of still in the mix. I hate that TV because the lack of Dolby Vision and their bad processing, but it is the only one of the high-end TVs that even attempts to have a really fancy anti-glare coating. I personally am very against it, but depending on return policy, you could give that a try. I feel like it's just going to make it worse, not better. And I feel like getting the maximum brightness is really your go-to. So that's why I would pick for the Beach TV, whatever has the maximum brightness, which is why I'm leaning towards the G5. But anyway.

It's a tricky situation, but we'll find out if and when you ever get your head above water to consider stuff like that. Maybe in the fall. All right. With regard to Apple's self-service repair program, SkyValidi writes, I had an M1 MacBook Pro with water damage been there. Rather than paying $300 AppleCare accidental damage fee, I paid $13.20 plus sales tax with free shipping to have a replacement lid angle sensor sent to me.

with a potential for $5.72 of credit. After returning the defective lid angle sensor, the total cost to me was $8.56, with a maximum of $14.28 ever leaving my bank account. I was not required to pay a $1,000 deposit for a bulky Pelican case, which I then had to return to a post office. I was not required to purchase any screws, tools, or accessories.

Uh, the only packaging I received contained the lid angle sensor. I use my wife's. I fix it toolkit to perform the entirety of the repair. I didn't need to go to an Apple store or have my SSD erased total time to disassemble, reassemble and run the system configuration tool was 25 minutes. I would like to dispel the myth that the self-service repair program is user hostile. This is a fantastic program, literally the gold standard for ordering spare parts and

And I don't believe Apple has gotten anywhere near the amount of praise they deserve for it. Another example where the Mac has many advantages. Part of the reason they give you those giant Pelican cases and everything for the iPhone is because you can't just open an iPhone with a screwdriver. You need lots of tools. And if you want to do it without breaking the case or shattering the glass in the back, and then you have to reassemble it and put the adhesives in and, you know, yada, yada. MacBooks, much to our chagrin, are not waterproof. And so it's easier to open and close them.

If you have successfully diagnosed it and the lid angle sensor is the only thing you need, yeah, you can do a quick repair, provided you're comfortable opening the thing and closing it, and provided the part you need to replace doesn't require disassembling the entire thing, which can be the case depending on where the part is.

In the case of water damage, I do question whether that is the only part that needs to be replaced and how far the water has traveled and what other parts might be corroding in there. But, you know, that's true when you send it out for repair as well. But anyway, this is just a positive report where if you if you think that the self-repair program, you should just ignore it entirely because they always make you prepay for a thousand dollars worth of tools. If you have a Mac that can be open with a screwdriver, they don't make you do that.

All right, let's talk topics. And over the last week or so, maybe it was a little more than a week ago, there was a Mark Gurman report that, well, let me just read it. I'm told that iPadOS 19 will focus on productivity, multitasking, and app window management with an eye on the device operating more like a Mac. It's been a long time coming with iPad power users pleading with Apple to make the tablet more powerful.

Okay. I mean, that sounds great on the surface, but what does that really mean? Yeah, so this passage here is like, well, wasn't there more to it? Was there more detail? You would think so, based on the, like, multi-page length articles that this two-sentence description has spawned in the week since it came out. Every site's, like, going, you know, there are just...

back on their BS as they say about, oh, iPad, you know, what's their problems? They're going to fix it. This is going to be the year. Like there, there's more discussion in the German post about this, but it's mostly just him talking about the history of people being dissatisfied. Like there's not a lot of information here, but it's enough to get people's juices flowing on this. They're like, oh, iPad. Yes, it annoys me and it should be better and it should be more like the Mac and multitasking and window management. And there's no details.

And so everyone is just mapping their hopes and dreams onto it. But here's the thing. Like we know, well, we know we, we have heard the rumors that have been reiterated from multiple sources about the big OS redesign that we've just discussed on past shows. So it seems like if OS is going to change in some significant way, maybe it's not just, I mean, that's what the reports have said. We've been talking about the glass appearance or anything, but it's not just about, Oh, it works exactly the same, but everything looks different.

Every one of the room reports has been like, and also there's some rethinking of how the UI works, not just how it looks. And so this fits right in with it.

is this the year that everyone's hopes and dreams for iPadOS are fulfilled? Or is this just the, what, seventh time that there have been rumors that iPadOS is finally going to fix all the things that annoy people about it? And what we'll get instead will be like whatever the, you know, something equivalent to stage manager where it's like, good effort. I see what you're trying to do. But in the end, the people who are dissatisfied with it continue to be dissatisfied. What we have seen from iPadOS over the years is that

seemingly just a profound identity crisis. iPadOS tries to serve a bunch of different markets, has never really been able to break well out of its single-tasking, casual user market, and has tried a bunch of things to try to make it more productive. And

None of them have ever really had, you know, any kind of like follow through, you know, much refinement happening. It'll get a burst of attention in some, you know, some big update that will rethink multitasking or window management or file management. And then it won't be touched for like three years. And then the next thing will be tried.

The next method, oh, well, that was all wrong. Now we're going to do this. You know, we had, you know, slide over, then we had split screen, you know, then we, that now we have, you know, stage manager and we have all the different things that keep getting tried to make window management good or useful or usable on the iPad. And, you know,

Every single time the same thing happens. It confuses the crap out of casual users and they ask to turn it off. If you have anybody in your life where you're their tech person and they have an iPad as their main computer, usually you will hear, I got it into this weird state. How do I turn this off?

I personally, like I've run into problems where like I will accidentally have dragged a Safari tab on the iPad in the wrong way and now I have two Safari windows and I have no idea how to close. There's all these different, you know, accidental multitasking problems. Then the power users...

are super into it for about 30 seconds, then they hit all the friction with it that prevents it from being power useful the way they want. They're not super satisfied with it, but they're like, well, at least it's better than what we had before, but it's a little bit different, a little bit better in some ways, a little bit worse in other ways. And then a few years later, they're like, well, I'm going back to the Mac. We've seen this pattern over and over again. And we have no reason to believe this will be any different. We'll see. Maybe it will. But it seems like...

Apple has always wanted the iPad software-wise to be as capable as it is hardware-wise. And it just seems like they're not... I don't know if they're not willing to make the kind of changes and open up things in the kind of ways that would actually be necessary to achieve that, or if they're not able to in the sense that, like,

Maybe they've tried a lot of more advanced features and it has just been too confusing for casual users on the iPad because iPads aren't laptops. They don't work the way PCs and Macs do. They don't have the same input mechanisms. They don't have the same input precision. People use them differently and expect them to work differently. Maybe there just isn't a good way. In the same way that, as we talked about before, like

There really is no amazing text input mechanism on a tablet. Like you can kind of hack it with keyboards or on screen things or handwriting recognition or all these different ways to do it. But like tablets, fundamentally, they don't have amazing text input and text manipulation capabilities compared to laptops. It's just it's kind of a hindrance of the form factor. And they're a lot better at other things. You know, they're much better at like pen input and touch input and things like that. But like text inputs kind of rough on tablets and it always has been.

maybe multitasking is the same way like maybe productivity multitasking are just better in the pc form factor and maybe trying to make a tablet more into a laptop or you know a mac maybe that just really can't be done very well so far all the evidence we've seen so far is that not only has apple not ever done it no one else has either that just might be the reality of tablets but

If Apple's taking another crack at it, all right, cool. Let's see what happens. Let's see if it's good, if it doesn't confuse casual users, if it gives power users what they need, and if they actually have any kind of follow-through to refine it over time. So far, all three of those have failed every single time they've tried to do this on the iPad. But just because they've never done it before doesn't mean they can't do it. I just think it's much more likely they won't do it.

It's so tough, right? Because as we've said so many times over the years, and it's probably never been more true than now, the iPad hardware is phenomenal. I mean, it's basically the same guts as a MacBook Air if you just look at it broadly. And it's obviously capable of so much more than the software allows for. And on the one side, I would love to have better control over windowing and window management and so on.

Uh, while using the iPad and I would love to be able to do something that looks more like proper multitasking. You know, I would love to be able to run a Damon for some reason. I don't even know specifically why or what, what in particular I would like, but how about a clipboard manager?

Actually, that's a great example. Thank you. That's a great example, a clipboard manager. So it's got to be running always to sniff out what you put on your clipboard. But, you know, I would like to be able to opt into that. And iOS doesn't really have or excuse me, iPadOS doesn't really have an affordance for that right now, but it could. Maybe it will in June.

And another example, I think it was on Upgrade that I heard either Jason or Mike talking about how when you run Final Cut Pro or whatever it's called on iPad and do an export, you have to leave it foregrounded because eventually it'll get killed as you're doing the export if you don't.

which is kind of bananas, right? And so I would love for these things to be improved. I would love to have terminal access on my iPad, not even necessarily to mess with the iPad's file system or whatever, but just to have that tool set available to me. And yes, I'm aware of ISH and I can remote into other machines, but it'd still be nice if there was a first-party solution for all that. And again, window management would be great, particularly when I'm using the iPad with a mouse and keyboard, which is how I tend to typically use it. But

I don't know. I don't really see a lot of the things that I want, which is really just make it more like the Mac. I don't see a lot of those things that I want really happening. And I think that's probably for the best, even if selfishly it's a bummer, because then it's not really an iPad anymore. It's just a tablet version of macOS, which again, selfishly sounds amazing. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like what you want,

which I think I admit I also want, is make the Mac a little bit more hardware like the iPad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Leave it as Mac OS, but maybe add a pen input mechanism. Maybe add cellular, you know, like maybe make like a smaller than 13-inch model. You know, like they're...

I think what a lot of power users are asking for really is it might be easier to make the Mac closer to what they want iPad-wise than to make the iPad more like the Mac. Yeah, we agree. We're saying the same thing here. But, I mean, in principle, like you said a moment ago, heck yeah, let's see what they have to offer. I mean, it can't hurt, but how many times have we been burned by this? I mean, I'm not expecting much, but hey, if we could finally...

Finally, have iPadOS really flexing its muscles and really operating on the hardware that it's been blessed with. Like, that would be incredible. But I don't know. I don't expect it to happen. And the flip side of this is to argue with myself and argue against what I want.

One of the things that is great about iPadOS is its simplicity. And while that stinks for a power user or someone who has power user dreams, because I'm not even sure that I am an iPad power user. I just have dreams of being able to accomplish some things on it that I can't currently, but

That would make it that much worse for people who are not super-duper tech savvy. So is that juice worth the squeeze? I don't know. Yeah, I think that's part of what we've seen Apple struggle with, like that they haven't been willing to sacrifice the simplicity of iPadOS or the iPad product in service of power user needs.

Which is why I think they keep coming up with solutions for doing more than one thing at the same time on the iPad that are actually way more complicated than they are on the Mac. Even Marco getting into a situation where he's like, how do I get out of this situation? I didn't mean to do this. It's not immediately obvious. I didn't mean to split Safari into two things. Now I have two of them. How do I get one? That's what people ask to have those features turned off. Why is that a problem? It's a problem because Apple has thus far been unwilling to...

make the basic interface uh less simple um part of like even something as simple as like oh i i made this situation how do i undo it there's not closed boxes on the top of every window there's no like window ornamentation like that like there is on the mac and

That is a simplification that people who just do one thing at a time appreciate because it doesn't look like a computer with like a window zoom to full screen. There is no window borders. There's no window controls. There's no resizing handles that they like. It just it is very simplified. That's one of the reasons people like phones because it makes more sense there. It's a very small screen, but in tablets, it's a simplified interface, right?

But as soon as you want to do anything, like more, you know, have more than one thing running at the same time or whatever, Apple's like, can we come up with a way to let people do that? But without dirtying up the interface with stuff that people who want a simple interface don't care about.

And they keep trying, but they always refuse. They won't do the obvious thing so far, which is put freaking window controls on it. Because then when Marco makes two of those things, even if he doesn't know how he did it, he can just hit the little red, you know, close box on the one that he wants to close and it will go away. Or just like any kind of like standard language like we have on the Mac or any other windowing interface where people know how to close windows.

windows they know how to move them they know how to resize them they know what it means to close a window versus minimizing a window versus hiding a window like that vocabulary we have on the mac it's consistent across the whole thing closing window is not the same as hiding one hiding one is not the same as minimizing it resizing a window you can do from all the edges and like and scrolling like once you learn that every everything on the mac opens up to you now it's like okay well there's fancier things you can have all these keyboard commands to rearrange windows for you so you don't have to do them manually and you can have keyboard commands to

close all the windows with command option W or just even learning command. But the whole point is that's just like advanced ways to speak in the vocabulary that you've already learned. And it is a more complicated vocabulary than a simple non multitasking iPad. And thus far, Apple has not been willing to bring that set of

sort of complementary comprehensive operations to the ipad because the only way you can bring them in a way that works as well as the mac is to dedicate interface to them and i bet anytime anyone brings it up like you really want window controls on the top of every single rectangle on your ipad it's not an ipad anymore now why don't we just do mac os which is the point you two are getting at right and so they've just been holding the line but still they've been like but power users want to do stuff and it's like okay now it's just

It's like mystery meet gesture navigation. There's nothing visible on the screen telling me this. Maybe there's a three dot menu, but you're not sure what's going to be under there until you look at it. There's the little there's the dock. There's a little floating thumbnails. There's the split. There's slide over. And it's just it's a fairly extensive vocabulary, but it's not comprehensive and it is not obvious. And learning it is difficult. And even once you learn it,

it doesn't give you essentially, it's not composable. It doesn't say now that I've learned this basic vocabulary, the iPad, I can do anything. Nope. You can't, there's limits on everything. How many things, how many apps can you have open? How many things can you do at once? Which apps can run in the background? Uh, yeah, that's another point. I don't want to drags out much longer, but another point that I think, uh,

usually gets lost in this although youtube both touched on it as well is it's not just about uh how can i arrange things on screen to be doing stuff it's like setting all that aside pretend it's still there's no no quote-unquote multitasking it's just one thing on the screen at the same time what about the capabilities what about uh you know audio routing or like you said clipboard managers or file management simple capabilities what kind of apps are even possible to have what kind of apps can be on the ipad to enhance the experience of the ipad

setting aside the interface, setting aside multiple windows or rearranging things or doing power user stuff, because I would argue that like, even though Clipboard Manager seems like a power user-y feature, once it is standard across every platform, which I hope it will be sometime in my lifetime, it will no longer be viewed as a power user feature. I mean, I guess it used to be that copy and paste was a power user feature on the phone, but it didn't exist. People don't need copy and paste. That's a...

That's an advanced feature. No one's going to want to copy and paste on their phone. They totally will. They did. They do. Clipboard managers are similar, but like we'll never get to that point if we're

ipad os is constrained by not being allowed to do things like do a final cut export in the background because it doesn't have enough ram or whatever the limitation is or let even the most trivial completely sandbox completely constrained cannot connect to the network cannot talk to the file system cannot export like you can make a clipboard manager that is totally fenced in and absolutely secure because it only has to do a very simple job

You could end-to-end encrypt the contents of the clipboard so the app can't even see it. You could build it into the OS, but that's not what we're really asking for. Anyway, yeah, I'm the one with the Mac Pro shirt, so hope springs eternal. I'm not dying for advanced VINs in iPadOS because I'm not an iPadOS power user, but a lot of other people are, and I see Apple struggle. They can't bring themselves to sacrifice simplicity, and to Casey's point, maybe they're right not to sacrifice that simplicity, but

Like it's just it's painting itself into a narrower, narrower corner as a, you know, a fifteen hundred dollar device for artists. I'm sure it's amazing because it's extremely powerful, has a great screen, has great pen input. But that's not a huge market as a thing that is as powerful as a Mac in hardware. But is one eighteenth as powerful in software? It is unsatisfying.

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I wrote a post called Footguns. And what kind of started this post was some news about Synology, which we'll talk about in a minute. But it occurred to me that a lot of the things that I really enjoy, like the technology things that I really enjoy in my life, I have been a vocal advocate for or evangelist of.

And then sometimes it's taken a turn. The examples I went into in this post are Eero, which is a former sponsor. As far as I know, they're not a future sponsor. I am still, as we sit right now, I am talking to you via an Eero home network. I still use it. I still...

pretty much like it actually quite a bit. But over the years, um, it's been getting, uh, junkified or, uh, I will try not to use this word. So Marco doesn't have to bleep it every three seconds, but it's been in shitified, uh, which if you're not familiar, there's a link we'll put in the, in the show notes where, uh, this is a,

term coined by Cory Doctorow, which is basically everything gets crappier over time, usually for reasons that are not good for users. And that's kind of what it boils down to. So Eero, they've decided that they would really like this thing. Let me know if you two have heard of this before.

services revenue and they really want that and so they've been pushing their Eero Plus which is a subscription service that I do think is good but it's it solves problems that I don't personally have it has like ad blocking and one password and things that I take care of on my own right

And actually I didn't talk about one password in my blog post, former sponsor. Uh, I could not have been a bigger one password fan. Uh, and then it seemed like they decided they wanted to concentrate more on enterprise users and less on home users like myself. Uh,

And I'm still running 1Password7 because the last time I tried 1Password8, which admittedly was like a year ago now, it was a mess. It went to be an Electron app, which it doesn't immediately disqualify it as good, but close. And last I'd used it, it was a disaster. I bet it's better now, but it was a mess. Also, I'm seeing 1Password on, I forget who it is, but on somebody's F1 car.

And I feel like if the software I'm using is also featured on a Formula One race car, then maybe our needs and wants are not aligned as they once were. But nevertheless, going back to my blog post, Sonos is another great example. We've talked about that on and off over the last couple of years. I could not be a bigger fan of Sonos in April of 2024. And in the same way as with Eero, where I'll say, well, if somebody will ask me, oh, which Wi-Fi router should I get?

but you need to know that they're going to try to upsell you a lot. Well, what speakers should I get? Sonos, uh,

But you need to be aware that their app has been a little up and down over the last year. And generally speaking, my Sonos stuff does work great. And I know I've said it six times on the show. I said it in my blog post. I'll say it again. Taking a portable speaker in your hand and walking from one corner of my house to the other all the way outside where that portable speaker is perfect.

perfectly in sync with the three other speakers that it comes in contact with during that, you know, 30 second journey. It's incredible. I don't know how they do it. I really don't get it.

But the thing is, Eero, Sonos, they used to be the recommendation. What Wi-Fi router should I get? Eero, next question. What speaker should I get? Unless you're John. Sonos, next question. And it just, it's not that case. It's not the case anymore. It's, well, Eero, but it was Sonos. And then what really set me off was my beloved Synology.

And if you recall, in 2013, Synology was kind enough to send each of us a DS1813+, which is basically an 8-bay network-attached storage system.

They filled mine. I'm pretty sure they filled your guys' as well with like three terabyte hard drives. Somehow, I think John's are all still working. Is that still true, John? Yep, they're spinning right now. 12 years on. I still, I cannot believe that you have them. 12-year-old hard drives have never been turned off on all the time and a UPS in my basement still going strong. I cannot believe. I mean, I do believe you, but I cannot believe that. But anyway, if you're the kind of person that needs or wants network-attached storage in your life, which admittedly is a very small subset of people,

It used to be, in my personal opinion, what network attached storage should I get? Synology. Next question. Well, this week they decided to make a change. And we had been hearing rumblings about this for like a year or two. But they decided to make a change. So I'm going to read from Ars Technica. Actually, we discussed it on the show probably more than a year ago. And it wasn't just that they were thinking of doing it. They had done it, but it's cut there.

As you describe what they did in a second, this has been a program that they've been rolling out in pieces. Like, I think they did it in a limited capacity, then they're doing more of it. So it's not actually a news story, but it's coming up again because they are expanding the scope of this decision. And at the time we discussed it, we discussed it as a bad decision that we didn't like.

But it was like, well, but it only affects X, Y, and Z, and maybe it won't be that bad, or maybe they'll change their mind. But here we are, I think, at least over a year later, and they are continuing to move in that direction. Right. So reading from Ars Technica, Synology has confirmed and slightly clarified a policy that appeared on its German website earlier this week.

It's plus tier devices starting with the 2025 series will require, require Synology branded hard drives for full compatibility. At least at first quote, Synology branded drives will be needed for use in the newly announced plus series with plans to update the product compatibility list as additional drives can be thoroughly vetted in Synology systems. A Synology representative told ours by email that,

Again, quoting, extensive internal testing has shown that drives that follow a rigorous validation process when paired with Synology systems are less at risk of drive failure and ongoing compatibility issues, quote.

I have some thoughts on this. Let me keep plowing through, though. Without a Synology branded or approved drive in a device that requires it, NAS devices could fail to create storage pools and lose volume-wide deduplication and lifespan analysis, Synology's German press release stated. Similar drive restrictions are already in place for the XS Plus and rack-mounted Synology models, though workarounds exist. Synology also says it will later add a, quote, carefully curated drive compatibility framework, quote, for third-party drives that users can submit drives for testing and documentation.

Uh, drives that meet Synology stringent standards may be validated for use offering flexibility while maintaining system integrity. They said Synology plus models purchased prior to the 2025 series will continue to support third-party drives at their current level. Devices in the J and value series are also not affected. Third-party drives using systems prior to the 2025 model models can be migrated into newer models without restrictions. All right. That really pisses me off. I'll come back to that. Um,

What they're saying is that, hey, Synology drives, branded Synology drives work best. Okay, fair, fair.

But everything else could be crap and we're going to, and we're going to neuter it because of it. All right, let's pump the brakes here like that. I don't get that at all. And then the best part of all is let me read that last sentence again. Third party drives using systems prior to the 2025 models can be migrated into newer models without restrictions. So which one is it then? Is it that they don't work or that they do work? This smells to me and maybe I'm misunderstanding. It could be a misunderstanding, but,

But this smells to me like we would like more revenue, please. And then they pull the lever. And that is their right. They are a business. They are a group of people that are together to make money. I get that.

But here it is. They're taking something that I would not, as you three, or you two, excuse me, I'm the third, as you two well know, as all three of us know, I would not and do not shut up about how much I love my sonology because it's true. And yet now, hand on heart,

I have already started thinking about, all right, when my year old Synology, maybe it's two years old, one or two year old Synology eventually dies, hopefully in 10 plus years, what am I going to do to replace it? And it occurred to me that I think the only thing that would really stink for me is trying to replace Synology drive, which we've talked about over the last couple of months, or excuse me, a couple of weeks as a replacement sort of kind of for Dropbox, but everything else is

I can just get, let's say, I don't know, Marco, a ubiquity. What is it? You nap. I forget the name of their network attached storage, but I can get one of those and that would be just fine. I could move my Docker containers to some other dry or some other device somewhere. That would be just fine. The only thing I'd miss is Synology drive and I'm sure I could find a workaround. So sitting here today, me, the most enthusiastic Synology person that I know is

I'm telling you that the one I bought a year or two ago is likely to be my last. And that, that just feels crappy. And I feel like,

Their search for more revenue, and I don't know if I really made this point as eloquently as I should have on the blog post, but that's neither here nor there. This company that had other devout fans, not unlike myself, has shot themselves in the foot because they just want to eke out a little bit more revenue. And what are these bespoke Synology drives from everything that I've been able to dig up, and I haven't looked too hard? They're like Western Digital or whatever drives that have been relabeled and mailed

have custom firmware that's knowledge rights but they're basically the same as everything else so i just i don't get it and it's so frustrating because all of these things are companies i loved so much dropbox is another great example i gave up on dropbox forever ago but they used to be the darling of nerds like us and then they just got crappier and crappier and crappier and don't make me bring up the e-word i'll do it evernote everyone loved evernote for a solid 10 minutes and

And then it got awful. It got so bad. And it's just foot guns upon foot guns upon foot guns. It's in shitification on in shitification on in shitification. It's so bad. And it doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. And it makes me so mad. I'm not sure if you're applying Cory Darkstorm accurately here, but it's clear that you're upset about what they did. But like,

It reads to me as someone who's spent a lot of my career dealing with enterprise stuff is that they've essentially decided that the Casey market, home nerds who want to do cool things with its analogies, is not where they want to concentrate. Instead, they want to concentrate on the enterprise market. And I can tell you in the enterprise market, what they're doing is so incredibly mild. Yeah.

Anyone who's in the enterprise market would say they're doing it wrong. It's like, why are you letting people use any drives? Why is this like a multi-year rollout strategy? Why are you allowing existing products to keep using their drives? Why are you doing that? If you want to be in the enterprise market, you have to make them buy the stuff from you. And in the enterprise world, it's exactly like you said. Oh, if you buy our storage solution, you have to buy the storage from us. Obviously, it's not just like a plug and play where you find the cheapest price for your

you know, solid state storage or your spinning disks and you plug them into our things. Companies that do that do exist to try to have a competitive advantage, but the enterprise companies are like, this is small potatoes for an enterprise. And if you buy from us, we guarantee it. And it's part of our $50,000 a year support contract and yada, yada.

and yeah Synology does not manufacture hard drives this is some other company that manufactures hard drives that they buy put a big sticker on and like you said maybe do some firmware tweaking or whatever and or have a validation procedure and Synology has been trying to walk that line of like okay but we'll we'll also certify third-party drives and we'll have a compatibility list I think last time we talked about this we pulled up the compatibility list web page and depending on which Synology sort of you

you know, machine that you're talking about, its compatibility list may contain lots of third-party drives or no third-party drives or some, um, having a validation procedure and sort of drives that are, you know, uh,

is certified to work or whatever all of that is good the problem comes down when you say okay but also the other drives we're going to like not let you use and how are we going to not let you use them we're going to remove features if feature x in our product senses that you don't have a certified drive we're not going to enable that feature it's like if you're gonna if you're gonna like that's an uncomfortable middle ground either you go full enterprise and there's no such thing as third-party storage

or you say, well, here are certified drives. But then if you're a hobbyist, you know, go nuts, do whatever you want, but you're on your own. That's what, you know, hobbyists would probably say, fine, let me do that because it's been the case in the past and I've been fine with it. Like, so just let me, you know, enable all the features, right? If they're able to work at all, which they probably are, like the duplication doesn't depend on the hard drive mechanism, just let me use them. Don't try to coerce me into duplication.

Buying your drives. And of course, you know, on the revenue front, why do enterprise companies act like that? You can make a lot more money from enterprises than from individuals because enterprises are less sensitive to the massive markup that they put on their quote Synology branded drives. If you peel off that sticker and see what drive it is and go buy that drive from another retailer, it's way cheaper.

and of course that's a place to get higher margins we see that in all our businesses why does apple charge so much for the ssds because you know they're soldered into the computer and you have no choice to buy it from them so they can put huge markups on them and so synology is trying to make it so you have no choice or little choice than to buy synology branded stuff from them um and your other your other choices are actually it's kind of similar in that like

Your needs and tastes as a hobbyist have diverged from the products for different reasons. So Eero is an interesting case where you noted that the services they're offering with Eero Plus, you do yourself with other things that you do as a hobby. Most people, even home users, which I feel like are Eero's target market,

aren't going to run a pile in their house. And the reason we recommend Eero is like, recommend Eero and the come-ons are annoying, but you can just ignore them. I can tell you as a very happy Eero customer, I had forgotten this program exists until you complained about it because I'd never have to see it. Why would I ever see it? I'd see it when I launched the Eero app. Do I ever launch the Eero app? No. Casey's launching the Eero app because he wants to see the Ubiquity app

that shows them all the diagrams and stuff. But I'm not doing that. I don't care about that. All I care is does the Wi-Fi work and is it fast? And so the Plus program actually, I feel like, is a plus, huh, for me recommending Eero because I'll recommend an Eero. I would never recommend that you do the Plus thing. But sometimes they say, I keep getting ads and it's annoying. I'm running an ad blocker on my Mac, but it doesn't exist on my iPad. Is there a thing or whatever? And it's like, you know,

If you like if you're paying for an ad blocker for your Mac and you're paying for an ad blocker on your phone or iPad and then people in the house have PCs and you don't know what to do about ad blocking there or whatever, you could just buy an AeroPlus subscription and ad block for your whole house. Here's how much it costs. Does that appeal to you? And if they say yes, it's so easy for them to do. But it's just like, boop.

Now, you know, it's a lot easier than setting up a pie hole and dealing with all those problems. Right. And if they don't want to deal with it, do you think normal people are launching the arrow app to look at it like ever? No, that's fair. Once Wi-Fi works, it's fine. And Sonos is a similar situation where if you had if you had just bought your very first Sonos when they screwed up the app, would you have noticed that they screwed up the app?

maybe because it was really screwed up, but like a lot of the time when it's like, Oh, they haven't restored the features that used to exist. If you don't know what features used to exist, you just think this is what Sonos is. And, and maybe you didn't notice that, that, uh, the app had lost 50% of the features because you're just happy that the speakers sound good and they play audio when you play through them and you're done. Uh,

Uh, that's the difficulty with, uh, running any kind of company and having customers, especially if you spent a lot of your history trying to satisfy, satisfy a certain class of customers. And then you decide to move on to a different class of customers because it can make you more money. Um,

Or for whatever reason, like, again, just Eero moving more towards the sort of, you know, I don't know if they're moving more towards, but like very concentrated on the non-tech nerd audience. You don't want to deal with this stuff. We'll do it for you. I think in that sense, it makes sense for them to come out with a service of like, well, what if people want to do like whole house ad blocking and security stuff?

Yeah, you don't need to do that through Eero. There's a million other ways you can do that, but no one is going to figure that out. It's better to have one thing that does it all. If Apple made a Wi-Fi router, I would want Apple to have an equivalent of Eero Plus as part of their services thing, maybe as part of Apple One or as I call it Plus, because that's exactly why you want a company to do this. You don't want to say, okay, we'll set up this device and connect it to this and set up that, and then when you have a problem with this, then you run your own DNS server, and it's like, ugh.

Like, just do it all for me and make the parts that I don't need optional. That's the best we can hope for. But that's not the same market as people who want to see the traffic flow through their network and, you know, potentially run fiber in their house one day or whatever. And it seems like from, you know, Marco, we'll talk about this later, that ubiquity is actually moving in the other direction where it used to be. Oh, you need to be super tech nerd to set this up. I think they see a market opportunity to say, well,

You know, we're our tech and our products are so good now that if we just put the right interface on them, we can start grabbing customers from Euro because actually it's not that much more complicated to set up our stuff. So maybe a little bit more and even just knowing what to buy is more complicated or whatever. But like I always say is that you you listed this as like foot guns as in these companies are shooting themselves in the foot.

I think they're shooting your foot. I'm not sure if they're shooting themselves in the foot because I look at this and I see this is competition. This is people moving where the money is, where the market is. And when one company makes one move...

like Eero running out the plus thing that's annoying the tech nerds, Ubiquity is there to say, this is actually a competitive market. There are other choices. Can we steal some of those customers by shoring up some of our weaknesses to get Casey to come over to our side? Because he's close. He doesn't want to deal with all the Ubiquity stuff, but now Eero is annoying him and doesn't give him enough things and doesn't want to pay for plus. Can we get Casey over here? And I feel like in the NAS, I mean, get ready for the email. In the NAS market, as Synology tries to move more enterprise and says, you got to buy our storage at a massive markup,

Believe me, there are other NAS companies out there like, aha, these people who were stuck on Synology for so long. We're like, you didn't want to buy us before because we were a little bit too nerdy. But now we sense weakness and Synology is betraying people like Casey. Can we get him? And Ubiquity again, you know, they had a NAS type product. If it can do what Synology did for Casey, they can steal him away. And so even though this is a story of frustration and annoyance and feelings of betrayal, I think it's also a story of

The good things about having markets that are actually competitive and most of these are competitive markets, NAS, Wi-Fi routers, Wi-Fi,

uh in-home speakers maybe less so there but none of these have like a giant gatekeeper that is controlling everything about them and so uh as you know there's turmoil and uh we are get our hearts broken by companies that we love but i feel like it's an opportunity for other companies to become the new companies that we love and also to remember like i said like i i love euro i don't think i'm ever going to get ubiquity unless you're into something really terrible um

Just because the product isn't for you doesn't mean it's not for other people. So I will continue to definitely recommend Eero to everybody. I'll continue to not recommend Sonos because my experience with them has been terrible, but that's how we all recommend things on our personal experiences. You know, what works for you may not work for everybody else.

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I think it's not that big of a deal that Synology is requiring their own drives now. And here's why. So first of all, I did some quick research to try to figure out, okay, well, how much more expensive are the Synology drives? Or what different options are there? How bad is this really if you're buying new? If you're getting a new Synology and you need to figure out what you're going to put into it, what are we talking about here? Basically thinking like,

Maybe for you, since you are so in love with everything else about Synology, maybe the solution is to spend the extra $30 on the drives or whatever. Because you love everything else. Is it really worth... Maybe this is a foot gun of your own. Maybe...

Is it really worth biting off your nose to spite your face, whatever that thing is? Is it really worth giving up everything else you like about Synology to avoid spending a small amount more per drive when you replace them? Yeah, depending on how much it is. Although, to your point, I forgot to make this point earlier.

This has not dissuaded me from buying a Synology as my next NAS. If my everyone ever dies, I'm almost certainly going to pay for the stupid proprietary Synology drives, which are really just remastered drives. Because from my perspective, it does everything that I wanted it to do already, and I'm

I mean, I'm an Apple customer. I buy their computers despite the fact that everything in them is marked up so high. I mean, again, looking at their price, right? And so like, it really just depends on

you know, where you are in relation to where they are. And I don't like the fact that they're requiring these drives, but honestly, it does actually save me a step, which is, oh, now I got to research drives and figure out what the, what the best price performance and reliability is for the storage that I want on my new Synology. Uh, and again, I'm, I don't endorse the move, but it has not dissuaded me from getting a Synology with my next NAS.

And the thing is, like, when you look at the pricing, so I just did some quick Amazon searches, like, you know, what are Synology charging? And then, you know, what are equivalent, like, you know, WD Red Pros or, you know, whatever. And it's hard to figure out, like, you know, what exact drive are they using? Yeah, that's the problem. You have to find out the actual mechanism they're using because even though you get the same storage, sure, and it's not that much more expensive, but they might be using worse drives under that sticker. Yeah.

yeah but whatever it is like when you look when you compare like so i can't find a good comparison for their higher end enterprise series but their plus series like they're kind of like you know mid-range price drives they look a lot like wd red pros but maybe you know maybe it's something else but the pricing when you look at wd red pro it's almost the same it's maybe like 10 or 20 bucks more in some cases some of them are exactly the same um and it's funny uh

I just bought a Ubiquiti storage device, the big camera NVR, the recorder for the security cameras, which is basically a four-bay enclosure that runs some software. And Ubiquiti has their own drives, too. Oh, really? I don't think you have to use them.

But I did buy their drives because when you look at the prices, compare them to, again, WD Red Pros or whatever your brand of choice is for NAS drives, it was about the same price. Or it was like $10 or $20 more. And it saves you a research step. Now you don't have to worry you're getting the wrong drives. Right. And I see from their perspective, like from the company's perspective, I actually see why they would do this. Because...

It is probably a headache when you have a customer who's like, you know, they buy your thing and then they buy a whole bunch of like crappy consumer grade drives and then maybe some of them die or they don't perform quite right or they don't, or maybe the vibrations in the enclosure like kind of tweak them or whatever. Like you can kind of see why from a company's perspective, like supporting all that actually is messier and actually is more expensive. And if you look at the price of these drives, it's,

I don't think they're making that much on them. Like, they might be making a little bit. Maybe the higher-end ones... Again, I wasn't able to find a direct comparison for, like, their Enterprise series, which do look like they might have fatter margins. But their regular Plus series looks about the same pricing as consumer drives from, you know, directly from the brands. So I don't...

think it's necessarily all about revenue here. It might just be about support and control and, you know, controlling that service area. Because like, you know, I think most people who are going to buy a brand new Synology are not trying to bring in a whole bunch of old four terabyte drives to work with it. They're probably looking also to buy drives at the same time. So for them to offer this, I definitely think they should offer it.

But then to have them make it the only choice, I don't think is as destructive as you might think. And, you know, because the reality is like hard drives, like, you know, Synology has lasted a long time, as we know. By the time you're ready to replace your Synology, you're

It's probably no longer worth occupying bays with some old, you know, four or eight terabyte drive and you can get 24 terabyte drives today. You know, you're better off buying a smaller Synology and just putting two new 24 terabyte drives in it if you wanted to, or, you know, get a bigger one, leave some empty bays and just, you know, get the big drives that are available today.

And most customers who are buying them are probably buying storage at the same time. So if you see like, well, the Synology official drive is only 10 or 20 bucks more than a WD Red or whatever, like, it's like, okay, then that's not that bad of a situation.

Yeah, you're convincing me. And just very quickly, when I did get the new Synology, which again was I think a year or two ago, it's a 1621 plus, I believe. So it's two fewer bays. And that's exactly what I did was I bought bigger drives and fewer of them. And I actually have one or maybe even two bays open right now. It's exactly what you said. No, you're both convincing me that maybe the sky isn't falling as bad as I thought it was. It's still disheartening. And I stand by that. But I do take both of your points that maybe...

Maybe this isn't, this is not a hundred percent bad and maybe there is some upside to it. And I wanted to briefly come back to my blog post cause I got myself sidetracked and didn't mention that. I feel like the opposite of this, the opposite of the, well, you know, Sonos, eh, but Eero, eh, uh, the opposite of that is the M4 MacBook Air.

It used to be, well, what Mac should I buy or even what computer should I buy? Well, I strongly recommend a Mac, but depending on what you're doing with it, well, you might want to get the MacBook Air, the M3 MacBook Air, whatever it was, M2, I forget. It doesn't matter. You might want to get the MacBook Air, but well, if you really want a better screen, and now...

unless you have some really weird needs or use cases, what computer do I get, Casey? The $1,000 M4 MacBook Air. And if you have a little extra money, get a little more RAM. If you have even more extra money, get a little bigger SSD. But honestly, the $1,000 MacBook Air is the answer. And that, to me, is...

the opposite of all these other foot guns, even though I do take your points that maybe they're not so foot gunny after all, but this is the opposite, right? I don't know what the opposite of foot gun is. It's fit for market because when we're recommending people, we're like, oh, you are a person who doesn't have computers as a hobby. You just need a computer to do basic things. And we like to have

a product that is a good fit for that market because that's the question we mostly get asked because most customers are not you know computer enthusiasts they just need a computer to do stuff with it's so great to have one that we feel like is a good fit for that market we can you know unequivocally recommend although i would quibble i would say it's more important to get more ssc space than more ramps i think 16 is plenty but anyway um

We've talked about that over the years, like when Apple has had products that are a good fit for the mass market that we can recommend as tech nerds that we can recommend. People ask us, you know about computers, what computer should I get? We love to be able to have a product that exists that is a good fit. And your whole post is about a bunch of products that are no longer as good a fit for you as they used to be. And sometimes it's in crappy ways, right? You know, like...

I think you put in this thing about, you know, a sentence about them being greedy and everything. As people who sell products, we have all heard all of our products be condemned because we are greedy for asking for too much money for them. It's impossible to sell something without having people yell at you and say that you're greedy. As you noted, they're just trying to be a business and be successful. But it does not feel good when a business, you know, drifts away from you. And Synology has such a long history of that. And like the price differences, it's not just the price thing. Like if you're a hobbyist,

Part of your hobby is the excitement of carefully researching hard drive mechanisms to find the best bang for the buck based on what your specific needs are. Are you running a video recorder that's going to constantly be writing huge amounts of data? Or are these disks mostly idle and it's got lots of tiny files?

Is there a sale on a particular drive? Is there some mechanism that is, you know, in the world of hard drives? If you go to storage review.com, it's like, is there some hard drive spinning hard drive mechanism that is like, wow, this is the sweet spot. It's an amazing performer. The price is low. The reliability has been great. This is like,

you know, a drive for all time. It'll be on the leaderboard for a while and we'll all remember those days. Like that's part of the hobby is finding that drive, which will be significantly better performing or significantly cheaper or both than what Synology offers. But if that's not your hobby, then,

It saves you a decision like Marco wasn't didn't really have the time or didn't want to research exactly which drives would be best for his ubiquity video recording station. Just just get whatever ubiquity says, because presumably it will work, you know, and you just you offer that decision to them in exchange for money.

People do that with Macs all the time. We do that with Macs sometimes grudgingly because we know that we could get cheaper storage if we were allowed to. Oh, there's no sometimes about it. Every time I have to upgrade a spec on Apple's website on a computer I'm buying, it's grudgingly.

Like every time it's with a heavy heart. Well, I mean, sometimes it's like, well, the SOC, it's like, well, it's not like I can buy that anywhere else. Apple is the only company that makes this SOC and it's amazing SOC. Like if you were trying to do local models and you need 96 gigs of unified memory and Apple's prices are insane, it's like, well, what are your alternatives? There's that NVIDIA thing or whatever. But yeah, because we are tech nerds,

We know that there are better options, sometimes obvious better options. But from the perspective of a non-tech nerd, they're like, thank goodness I don't have to think about that. Thank goodness this decision has been made for me, presumably in a way that the company vouches for and, you know, it'll support all the features or whatever. But like, but if you are a hobbyist, they're taking away part of your hobby by saying you don't get to do that activity where you get to save money, feel smart, have fun and have a better product in the end.

because we're requiring you to use our drives if you want all the features that's what they're taking away from hobbyists so i don't think it's exactly the same as and poopification which is a nice way of saying that and poopification is more like let's just make it worse for everybody so we can extract all the money from the world i feel like this is just more of a changing what your target market is maybe changing to a target market that is more lucrative and uh you know that we generally frown upon because we say like it's just you know you're fleecing big companies for lots of money but there are some

okay reasons for why that market is like that because what companies mostly care about is you know cynically having someone to blame when something goes wrong but really the reason they pay the you know a hundred thousand dollars a year for the support contracts or whatever is because the business is not about storage and so you have to pay ridiculous you know money to emc to deal with your storage things that you're running on prem but abs would say just don't do that anymore and pay us to do it which will cost you even more but anyway um

It's worth it for the company to throw money at that problem because they don't care about the minutia of storage. They just want it to work. And when it doesn't work, they want someone they can call 24 hours a day to fix it. And if they have to pay 10 times as much as what that storage is, quote unquote, really worth, if you were to assemble it yourself and had a team of people like that,

the math works for them. And, you know, you'll have to decide, Casey, when the time, if and when the time comes, which again, I don't think should be any time soon. You just bought a new Synology. Does the math work for you at that time? This kind of like the situation you're going to be in with ubiquity.

you seem attracted to it because it's cool and that is a big plus in the plus column and so when it comes time like do you when it comes time to change you need to change your network at all no but i want to because this is cool and it's your hobby and so suddenly ubiquity is looking good even though your existing system is nothing technically wrong with it and it's not like euro is punching you in the face about the plus thing but every time you launch that app there's the come on

And it's like, well, if you're launching the app at all, maybe Ubiquiti is for you. So I feel like this is a great post because it really just does outline the path we all travel as tech enthusiasts trying to find the product that is the right fit for us. And it's an emotional roller coaster. Like I think you've demonstrated that like...

You could be so enthusiastic and so excited whether it's a great product for you or whether it's a great product for all the people who ask you about it. And when that changes, it feels like betrayal. But like I said, I'm heartened by the fact that a lot of these products have competitors and I relish them competing with each other to try to, you know, wherever there's a hole left in the market, someone should swoop in and try to fill that hole and take that money that some other company doesn't want to take. Yeah, but I think it's important, though, to try to like...

Try to make sure that when you are, you know, like, you know, not biting off your nose, just bite your face, whatever that... I know I'm getting it wrong. He's cutting off. There you go. But, like, I feel like it's... You know, when you're making these kind of decisions, it can be so easy to get wrapped up in something that you just can't bear. It's like, oh, I just can't bear to, you know, to spend Apple storage prices or whatever. And, you know...

For everything we buy, there are potential risks for that kind of feeling and resistance. Some people reach that point with the things that appear in settings on their phone that are commons for Apple TV. They just can't bear that and they switch to Android. Everyone has their own line, you know what I mean? Right, and no company is immune to

to giving us those kind of things. Like, there's a whole bunch, you know, about being an Apple fan, for instance. There's a whole bunch that you kind of have to suck up. With Sonos, Sonos stuff, you know, even before the app debacle and everything...

Sono stuff was great, but God, is it expensive. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So you have to get over that. And there are certain features or priorities like people who are like true audiophiles mostly don't go for Sonos. No, they turn their nose up at it because they have a whole different hobby. And they have different priorities and different needs and different things that they just can't stomach. I just can't get past X, Y, Z. Right. And so...

Every one of these things that we're a fan of and that we use has that kind of list. And I think it's as tech people, we do ourselves a disservice the more of those things we can't bear because a lot of times that can prevent us from actually accepting the product that's best for us. And that would give us a better day-to-day ownership. Like, you know, if you think about, for instance, like if you really hated Apple storage prices,

But one solution you could do when buying a new MacBook is you can just get an external drive and like Velcro it to the back of the thing and just plug it in and leave it there all the time. Like you can do that. We have done that. Like we had a laptop in our house that was like that for a long time. Like and one of the reasons you can do that is you literally can't afford Apple's pricing. And that's understandable. If you're in that situation, I totally get it.

But another reason you might do that is you could afford it. You just don't want to pay because it's like ideologically, you know, that's too much to pay for X terabytes of storage or whatever to have it built in. That's some nose biting territory. Right. And again, that's because it's like, well, OK, if you did just pay Apple for the terabyte or whatever, that is brief pain. But if you can otherwise afford it.

A month after you buy it, you're not going to think about that anymore. But you would always have that hard drive velcro to your laptop lid. So if it comes time for you to buy a new Synology and you've got to pay an extra $20 for the hard drives in it,

Okay, you're going to grumble and you're going to hate that for one day. And then the entire next 10 years that Synology runs, you will not think about that. But if you instead bid off that Synology to replace it with something that was different, a different product that would take your hard drives or that would save you $40...

you might like that my that product might be worse for you in most other ways in its lifetime but you you would have forgotten about the hard drive purchase is like you know a month in whereas that product will be worse forever and so you have to ideally as a tech person you have to be able to look at things as objectively as you can and be like look is it really going to be worth me having a worse experience for the next x years of owning this product than

in exchange for swallowing some pride or some grumbling about something being too expensive or too proprietary or too locked in up front. And for many people, they might make a different choice. But

If it's something that you use every day and it otherwise fits your needs very well, a lot of times it can be worth it to just say, you know what? I'm just going to suck it up. And I'm just going to pay the stupid Apple price or I'm just going to buy the stupid Synology drive because the overall product experience is better having done that for my actual – for my ongoing needs and preferences. You told a story on this show.

A long time ago. And it was about you RVing with friends. Yeah, when I rented the RV and depleted the resources on my planet in like two seconds. Well, there's that. But no, that's not exactly where I'm going with this. You recounted an exchange. I don't recall if you had the exchange privately with Gray, and maybe that's why I didn't remember it or it didn't register with me until you told the story. But when you told the story, it blew my mind.

And what you said was, I think you were talking privately with Gray, but one way or another. And jump in if you want to interrupt. That's totally fine. But you were talking to Gray about how, oh, it's going to be like $50 or $100 for them to clean the wastewater tank or empty the wastewater tank when you're done with the RV. Yeah, it's like you can clean, you can empty it yourself. And if you don't, there's like a $100 fine. Right. And Gray said to you, is it something along the lines of, is that really a fine or is that just what it costs? Yeah, he's like, a fine is just a price. Yeah.

Right. And that blew your mind, or at least it did at the time. And that blew my mind. And I think about that more often than I should probably publicly admit, because that really does change your perspective. And I think one of you, I don't recall which one of you was, might've been Marco, a few minutes ago, basically said the same thing about the Synology drives, that ultimately it's just that

the price is the, is a little bit more expensive than it was. Stop thinking of it as a punishment. You know, I'm talking to myself now, you know, stop thinking of it as a punishment. Stop thinking of it as a regression and just understand that you're going to be buying new drives anyway, like you did say Marco and those drives are just going to be a touch more expensive than they were. And that's just the fee for getting the thing you like. And again,

I got myself wrapped around the axle. I mean, I stand by the blog post, although I certainly didn't think of it very differently now after talking to the two of you than I did a couple of days ago. But ultimately, I need to reframe my perspective such that if and when I do choose to replace the Synology, which presumably won't be for a long time, and maybe I will go ahead and get one anyway, I need to reframe my perspective not as, oh, I'm being punished, but rather this is the fee now. That's just the way it is. Yeah, this is just the price.

You can think, I mean, I think it is proper to frame it as either a punishment or a regression. What you should not think of it as is a betrayal because that makes it seem like personal. You know what I mean? And it feels like a betrayal. Like I, like it's not, that's what it feels like. I'm not saying it doesn't feel like, cause it absolutely does, but that's a way to frame it. Kind of like the thing before about, uh, should I yell at my employees or not? Like basing it on, on your feelings versus, uh, you know, let's say, uh, some more, uh,

uh concrete measurable things besides just how you feel about it feels like a betrayal and it is a regression in in the things that you care about and it and it can also feel like a punishment it is kind of like a punishment but it's it just it isn't actually a betrayal that there was actually the relationship that you imagined between you and the company's technology did not actually exist and it was just a matter of you being a fit for their market at a certain point and the whole thing like a fine is a price it's kind of like the uh this reminds me of the uh

it's, it's like the, the rich dude equivalent of self care, which is a, you know, which is a thing, a useful positive thing of like learning how to take care of yourself and not just like, you know, putting your nose to the grindstone and never taking a second thought about, uh, how am I doing? Am I getting enough sleep? Is it okay for me to occasionally do something nice for myself or whatever? And like anything, uh, especially things that are trends on, uh, social media or whatever, you can take that to the extreme. And, you know, it, it,

self-care can become a way of life where all you ever do is buy little treats for yourself and give yourself vacations and breaks and always tell yourself that whatever you're doing is perfect. Uh, the correct strategy is probably somewhere in the middle. You don't want to constantly be beating yourself up and never rewarding yourself and never taking a moment to care for yourself. On the other hand, you don't want to excuse everything you ever do and just spend your entire life doing little treats. And it's the same thing with like a fine is a price. Uh,

If you follow that to its logical conclusion and you're not fabulously wealthy, you will run out of money. So don't do that. Like, actually do be smart about buying things. Oh, well, you know, the Porsche's, you know, little black badge on the back costs $15,000 extra. But, you know, I'll treat myself. No.

Really have to, you know, it's it's both of those sides have have pulls to them that can pull you in either of those directions and finding the right balance is tricky. Right. And so maybe, Casey, we're trying to pull you more in the direction of like like Marco said, momentary pain that hopefully you can afford 10 years from now when you replace your technology in exchange for a lifetime of ownership that you find more satisfying. Right.

against your feeling of betrayal and your need to retaliate and say, well, that's, you know, you put an ad for Apple TV Plus in settings, I'm never using an iPhone again. Yeah, yeah. That's not a line I would draw, even though that ad annoys me, just like it annoys everybody else.

you do have to kind of take that measurement and the same thing of like well it costs a little bit more but treat yourself i i just bought a macbook air with 32 gigs of ram right like that's i'm prone to it as well but you know when it comes time to spec up my next replacement for my computer like i kind of did that with my mac pro uh but i didn't go whole hog with it i didn't get the super expensive video card because i just you know but i had my old computer for 10 years so it's

It's always that push and pull. But I'm sure people hear this like, oh, treat yourself. That's a great attitude to have for people who have tons of money. Doesn't matter how much money you have. You should always keep that impulse under some kind of control and make a decision that makes sense for you because, you know.

Like I always say, any amount you don't spend on your extra Synology drives that are taking you away from your hobby you enjoy, you can put into something else like replacing your error with Ubiquiti system because it makes you happy. So hopefully Casey will come to conclusions, come to decisions that make him happy, not just in the short term, but also in the long term. And thankfully, I think he has many options here. I do not envy the amount of NAS based email we're about to get. But, you know, Casey, you asked for it.

And also, before we move on from the fee being the price kind of thinking, it is also worth disclaiming that kind of thinking is not always the entire picture. So, for instance... Like if you're putting mercury into a river, don't have that attitude, please. As you were saying, when rich people start thinking, it's like, okay, well, parking in a handicapped spot, you're going to be fined for that. There's other reasons you shouldn't... You're also doing a terrible thing. Right. Sometimes...

There's other factor in like, but getting a Synology branded drives is not as bad as parking in the handicap spot. Let's not throw away all value judgments and think everything is just an exchange of value and price price up. But like, but paying someone else to clean the tank from your RV like that, I don't even understand why that's a fine. I feel like should just be an option of like, do you want to pay us to clean it yourself? It's $100. I'm like, yes, please. $100 clean the tank.

out. Yeah, or like when you know if you return a rental car and you don't fill it up with gas. They'll just charge you for 10 times the price of the gas. Yeah, they'll charge you and yeah, and it's probably it's not the best value in the world. Like they usually will charge you much more than it would cost you to do it yourself. And if you're in a rush, you're like, okay, well look now if my alternative is possibly missing this flight, okay, I'll pay the 25 bucks or whatever, you know, like so there are there's a lot of situations in life where like

Obviously, sometimes a fine is because you're doing something terrible that has external... And the fine should probably be higher for putting mercury in the river.

the river right like if you have like you know external factors that are awful that like you know you're parking a handicap spot or you're polluting the world like yes that needs to be more of a deterrent not just rich people being able to buy their way out of problems but if it's a situation of you just need to pay too much money for an extra terabyte in your laptop okay that's just that's just a price at that point it's okay well now you can decide like that might be worth it to me or not yep

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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-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A. It's accidental. They did it.

So long.

Before we get to the after show, if you're still here, I just want to make one last plea. This is the last show you're going to hear about the store. You made it through the whole episode. You heard us talk about all this stuff. You made it all the way to the after show. You might be the kind of person who might be interested in buying something from the store, but maybe you didn't get around to it. This is the last time for the store. We're recording on a weird day. So maybe like this, you know, you might not think this, but this is it. After this, no more store. So please, atp.fm slash store.

Now, speaking of stores, Marco, this was opening weekend for the restaurant. Is that right? It was indeed. Full service, full food, kitchen staff, everyone back. Full two days of regular operation. Including Easter? No, Friday and Saturday. Ah, okay. I got you. Well, how did it go? What are your results from opening weekend? It went great. It was like...

I was able to really enjoy it, and it went great. I had to move two cables. One of the kitchen guys was like, this printer is kind of bad in this spot. We need to move it over to this spot. Okay. So I came in between the two days and moved it and re-zip tied all the cables and everything. But it was great. Nothing really went wrong. It was just a very smooth operation, and that, again, speaks to the amazing staff knowing what to do and us kind of just being...

you know, enablers, like just getting out of the way, like making sure the staff is happy and is getting what they need. And we enable them to do their jobs and we trust them to do their jobs. And it just worked great. Not to derail you, but I actually have a question about this, like in the category of, so you did a bunch of quote unquote improvements, um,

We all know that when you make technology-based improvements, sometimes people don't see them as improvements. How is that going? For example, not having a bunch of receipts wrapped up in rubber bands, but instead using a ScanSnap seems like a great win to us. Does everyone else agree? Yes. That's actually on my list of things to recommend is a ScanSnap. Yeah.

Like the people who actually have to do this, they're like, oh, this is great. I love it. It's so much better than the rubber band or they're just like a weird technology. In almost every case, the improvements that we've made have been seen as improvements or have been not noticed, which I think is fine. You know, like things like when you when you like one of the things I did was I

I changed all of the fluorescent tube lights in the kitchen to all be, first of all, modern LED fluorescent replacements from Waveform Lighting, my favorite LED company. So they are now flicker-free.

All of them are the same brightness and all of them are the same color temperature, which was not the case before. Before, like, you know, a third of them have just burned out and never been replaced. You know, they were two different color temperatures. And, you know, as fluorescent lights age, they tend to shift more.

more into pink or other colors. So like fluorescent lights really don't stay color stable over their lifetimes. So now they are all LED replacements. So we're saving energy. We're saving money. All of the light is uniform. It's all bright and it's all the same color.

and this is something that almost no one noticed but i did and one one of the cooks did i was like great that's that's i i made it um i also using waveform lighting this is part of my promo here for for them it's i just i love them so much they're a little pricey but they are very very good quality light it's you know high cri it's very high quality led light um and

What's great is that the same company offers a bunch of different lighting form factors. So they have things, you know, in the kitchen I have fluorescent tube replacements. I have regular kind of, you know, bulb-shaped bulbs in a few areas, like over the fryer there's like a bulb. And I installed some new strip lighting under the pass in the kitchen, like the shelves that they put the plates on when they're going out so everybody can see better. And what's great about this company, because the same company offers all these different products, they're

they're also all the same exact color temperature. So when you say, like, all the ones in the kitchen, I did 4000K for the color temperature. Everything, the fluorescent replacements, the incandescent replacements, and the strip lights, the colors are all exactly the same, which is nice. So, you know, you're just kind of...

you're able to make everything look cleaner more professional more uniform easier to see things you know less you know less like annoying variance between like oh well the light over the fryer is warm white but the light over the stove is daylight and then the light on the ceiling is cool it's like no it's all just the same and that's one of the very many nice things i've i've uh i've done that most people don't notice but occasionally someone does and that that matters to me

So what's good? What have you been using that you feel like is a full-on win? All right. So I wanted to kind of do this probably ongoing segment here and there for my restaurant tech MVPs, the best of the best that I have found while doing the restaurant that might be relevant to other people. What does MVP stand for, Marco? Okay.

Most valuable player product? I'm going to go with product. You got it. I just wanted to check. I know you're not a sports guy. Yeah. Restaurant tech MVP. So number one has got to be Ubiquiti. And we'll talk about Ubiquiti a lot. We already have. I'm not going to say too, too much about it now. But over the course of modernizing and setting up the restaurant, I first started out doing all the networking stuff. That's all Ubiquiti.

I later went on to replace the phone system. That's now all Ubiquiti. I went on to replace the security cameras. Those are all Ubiquiti. And, you know, people in our business often say, we wish Apple would get back into the network router, Wi-Fi router game.

After using all this Ubiquiti stuff, I don't. Ooh, hot take. I actually hope Apple doesn't get back into the game because Apple would do a far worse job than Ubiquiti is doing for two reasons. Number one, it would be kind of a side gig for Apple. It would be a hobby, the way they sometimes describe things. We know how Apple treats their hobbies. They're half-assed.

They treat them... They might release one or two things here and there. Like, you know, look at the HomePod or the Apple TV. You know, like... It's like you can release a product here and there and then it's kind of... It's maybe good for when it's released, maybe. But it's limited. And then it never gets updates. And it gets neglected. And the competition passes it by. Like, we know how Apple would be if they did networking equipment. That's how they would be. And Ubiquiti...

This is all they do. It's like how we were talking about back Sonos versus HomePods. As many problems as Sonos has, that's all they do. So they tend to focus a lot on it. To them, if they mess up their speakers, this is existential to them. If Apple messes up the HomePod, which they have constantly, it doesn't matter. It doesn't affect the rest of the company at all. They don't really care. So Ubiquiti...

is all about their core, the products, their networking products. They also now, I mean, honestly, I think they do very well in the security camera market as well. I think the phone system is probably more of a side gig, but it's still very good even despite that. And we have very low needs for it. So, you know, we don't need some other professional phone system. So Ubiquiti products are so good that not only is it good because it's their focus, but also

I don't think Apple would do a better job than Ubiquiti is already doing. Once you see Ubiquiti gear, and once you try it, and once you set it up, and once you have to change a setting or change some gear around, it's so easy. It's so well integrated. It already is extremely Apple-like, but it combines that with incredible performance and

huge market coverage. Like whatever your needs are, they probably cover them somehow with one or more of their products. Aggressive updates. Like there's constantly new products that are even better than what came before them. Like it's so good and it's so easy now. Like, you know, before...

five, ten years ago, Ubiquiti was still great then, but their stuff was way nerdier, way harder to set up. Now, even their high-end stuff is really easy to deal with. It's surprisingly consumer-friendly. It is surprisingly Apple-like in many, many ways. The way you, when you get a new pair of AirPods, the little thing pops up and says, you want to pair your AirPods to your phone? Yeah.

That happens with Ubiquiti networking gear. When you plug in a new switch or a new camera to your Ubiquiti network...

You open up that app and one of those things slides up. One of those white ovals, round rocks, slides up and says, you want to add this switch to your system? You're not helping me, Marco. You're not helping. It's so Apple-like. In many ways, it's better than Apple-like. So I cannot say enough good things about Ubiquity and their modern stuff being just great.

So incredibly good. So capable. So friendly to set up. Like, yeah, it's still networking gear, so you still need to be a little bit of a nerd. But for the nerds, it's so much faster and easier than you think it'll be. It's so simple. It's so nice. Like, the feeling you get when you are configuring and setting up ubiquity stuff, it's just nice.

everything is solid. It's well built. It's reliable. The UI for it is all super nice. It's well designed. Like I'm telling you, Casey, you're going to see this. Apple couldn't do a better job than what Ubiquiti is already doing. I have a homework assignment for you here, Marco, because there actually was a question probably still in Ask ATP of someone saying, hey, I'm looking into Ubiquiti stuff, but I can't figure out which products to buy. And I feel like this is

current area of improvement, let's say, for Ubiquiti because they have so many products and because they're improving them all the time, you land on the Ubiquiti site and you're like, I have, you know, I want Wi-Fi for my house. What should I buy? So that is an Ask ATP question that's been lurking in there. So maybe in some future show, maybe for the purposes of Casey, maybe for the purposes of Ask ATP, you should come and say,

For, like, say you are a person who lives in a house and you currently have Eero and you want to replace it with Ubiquiti stuff, what should you get as of X, Y, Z date? Not to talk about that now, but for the future, that is your homework assignment. Yeah, no, I definitely want to know. Honestly, I'll tell you right now. It's very, very simple. Go to UI.com. Just know that cloud gateways is their term for routers. That's it.

You just need routers. That's it. So you can click on Cloud Gateways and go look at what they have. They have some fancier rack mount ones. They have some little compact ones. They have the Wi-Fi integrated ones. So you just need a router.

And you need one or more Wi-Fi access points. Some of the routers have a built-in Wi-Fi access point, like most consumer routers would. Most of them don't. And so you get a router, and then you plug in an access point. The only other thing you have to know is that most of the Ubiquiti products, including every access point, is powered via PoE, power over Ethernet.

So you either have to have a PoE adapter on each one that basically takes power in, Ethernet in, PoE out. Or you have to have your switch they're all plugging into has to be a PoE switch that provides power to each port. That's it. That's all you need to know. So you need to have a router, which they call Cloud Gateway, one or more Wi-Fi access points, which may or may not be built into your router, and some kind of way to power the access points. In the best case, that's a PoE switch.

That's it. So yeah, Ubiquiti, I cannot say enough good things about them. Every part of what I've used from them, from the networking stuff mostly, but also the protect stuff, which is their security camera thing, and the talk protocol, which is their office phone system, it's all been so nice. And when you compare it to everything else in those categories...

night and day difference in how nice it is to administer to set up and to use like their graphic design and usability stuff is top notch it doesn't have to be this good this is enterprise stuff most enterprise stuff you go to the web control panel and it's garbage and it's terrible and you know we've all seen those panels

This is Apple quality UI design being applied to pro networking gear and stuff. Like it's so cool. It's so good. It's so easy. And I, I just, I cannot say enough good things about how awesome UI stuff is. Yeah. Unify stuff. It's, it's just, it's so, so good. So sorry, Casey, you're going to spend some money here and it's, and you're going to love every minute of it. And you are like,

Similar to our hard drive discussion earlier, like you're going to want to like

Yes, you can save some money if you keep some of your existing switches. You won't want to. You're going to want every switch in your house to be a unified switch. I know it. And the good thing is most of their low-end stuff, if you just want to switch below your TV cabinet where a few things will plug in, that switch is like $30. That isn't expensive. You will probably be spending $400 on your main switch for your network. Just prepare for that ahead of time. Mm-hmm.

because you're going to want the ones with the cool lighting and stuff. I'll tell you right now, you're going to want the Pro Max 16, or the Pro Max 16 PoE, rather, the PoE version, which is $400. That is, I think, their current best kind of medium-sized main switch. And over time, their lineup changes. They're about to release a whole bunch of new 10-gig switches. There's all sorts of stuff being added all the time as technology improves and as they improve.

I cannot say enough good things about Ubiquity. If I had to pick one MVP for my restaurant stuff that I've done, it is not even a question. It's definitely Ubiquity. I think that's also kind of fun and interesting because I know you're listening to a tech podcast, but like it's a restaurant. Why? Why is this? Why is networking part of the discussion of you serve people food and you charge them money for it? What the heck does it have to do with networking? I think this just goes to show that.

It's just the march of technology, like saying, what does a restaurant have to do with telephone service? You know, decades ago, there is a baseline level of technology you need to run any kind of business.

You accept money in exchange for goods. How do you accept that money? Computers is the answer. Like it used to be a cash register and then it was a trunk machine for credit cards. And like, what does networking have to do with the restaurant? What does networking have to do with literally any business? I can't think of any in-person business where you like people come in, you have customers...

they're all running computer systems and networks. And we don't think about it because we just walk up to the register and there's a person and we boop our phone or whatever. But like, how do you think that all happens? Like there is some sort of mechanism for the back office and then setting aside, like what about security cameras?

Computers. Like that's the answer. And how did the computers get the information that they look at? How does the video get somewhere? Computers and networking. Like there is no escaping computers and networking. And it is an advantage you have as a business that you don't have to pay some massively overpriced consultant to mark up all of like random Cisco gear and slap it together. Like it would cost you so much more money to pay someone to do what you have done. And you'd end up with a worse solution with worse equipment and worse

Probably worse reliability, but you would have someone to blame on other than yourself when it breaks. So this is the strange advantages that tech nerds have in literally any business. They may not know anything about running a restaurant, but they'll save you money on the networking. And if you think your restaurant doesn't need networking, you're wrong.

Yeah, everything needs networking. And I know because a lot of what, as I was rewiring, a lot of what I was replacing was older systems that either didn't use networking or used very basic networking. You know, the previous point-of-sale system, you know, this is like the...

You know, tablets that run the cash registers and the order entry things. They're all tablets. Like the previous one, the outgoing one was iPads in special custom mounts. This company called Breadcrumb that later became Upserve, I think. And who knows what it is now. And by the way, if anybody has any ideas for how I can use, I think, five iPads.

old 2017 ipads let me know like i took them all out of that system when we were throwing it away so i i harvested the old ipads out of it which still worked totally fine um you should put them on the table like you get crayons so the kids menu you can draw and just have the old ipads locked into some game for you in kids mode it's not a bad idea yeah because like there's i don't know what else to do with them they they run up to uh see if they last more than a week yeah i know they run up to ios 16 which is pretty recent

and they're like, they're the 2017, like, you know, they have the home button with Touch ID on the home button, you know, that style iPad. So anyway, I gotta figure out something to do with them or if I can find somewhere to donate them. Apple will recycle them for you. I'm sure they will, but that seems so wasteful because, again, they work totally fine. Like, I booted them all up. They work fine. I'm sure the battery life is,

hell but you know they they work fine for you know something give them away to some kind of uh charity or something that will take uh old computer equipment that works yeah i figured it was a school or thrift store or something i don't know anyway so all these pos systems that's all that was all old ipads running on crappy wi-fi through some kind of old cisco thing that had terrible reception um you know now it's all hardwired ethernet directly to the new toast terminals i

We have the walk-around handhelds for if you want to pay with Apple Pay. We can bring that to the table, and you can beep it in and pay with Apple Pay at your table. All the cameras, those were all coax. The entire old system, there were 16 cameras around the premises, and each one had a thick coaxial cable coming out of it that did a home run all the way back to the office.

So out of the office and stretching across the entire back of the restaurant was this huge bundle of 16 coax cables all like running through everything, snaking through everything. And with networking, that can be, in my case now, it's three cables because they go three different places throughout. I have like my main switch and I have those trunk cables that go to like the three sub switches and what used to be 16 camera cables plus four network cables plus three phone cables.

is now total of three network cables. The phone system now also, like, that runs over networking. So...

We just have like, you know, switches and you can have one cable that now carries all of those video feeds and the phone line and the networking all to where it has to be in the restaurant. You can use switching and IP. It's amazing. Now that all of those things run over the Internet where we can also do things like get a backup Internet connection so that now when the Verizon service goes out at the restaurant, which happens at least a few times every summer,

I can have one backup internet provider and plug it into the second port on the router, whether that's cellular or whatever, and...

everything then falls over to that. So the phone system doesn't go out either. We can still get phone calls. We can still charge credit cards. Our cameras are still working. We can still watch TV. All of that is then going on the backup connection. So there's all sorts of advantages to moving all this to networking. And again, my one top, top MVP for this entire project is Ubiquity. My God, they made everything so easy and so great. It's awesome. I'm so, so happy. So that'll be all for this time. I'll save...

all the other MVP stuff for future segments because I just had so much to say about Ubiquity. But my God, what an amazing set of products this company makes. I cannot say enough good things about them. And if you have never checked them out or if you haven't checked them out recently, give them a look if you have any needs for any networking, anything. It's so, so good.

You're not helping me at all. I'm glad it's working out, but you're not helping me at all. Just be prepared. You're going to want to spend like a thousand bucks because you're going to want to get all the good stuff. Just be prepared. Going into it, that's what's going to happen.

Yeah, I've started. So Stephen Hackett has been threatening, I think seriously, to come up sometime in the fall and like wire the house with me, which we'll see if that actually ends up happening or not. But looking at it, you know, I had already picked out the under his tutelage. I should add, I'd picked out the Pro Max 16 PoE, as you as you had said. Perfect. Yep. He was he was saying that he was using the cloud gateway fiber for reasons that we're not going to get into right now. So that's between the two of those. That's seven hundred dollars already.

So, well, that's no switches. That's no cameras because I'd like to add a couple of cameras because we don't really have any at the moment. I feel like it's appropriate to add them. So you can tell if your garage door is open with image recognition? Yes, you can. Yeah, that's exactly it.

It could do so much. But no, I think this is going to be expensive. And I haven't exactly run this through the family CFO yet, so we'll see what happens. I'm telling you, budget for $1,000. You're going to be all in. Oh, it'll be more than that. Still cheaper than buying a new car you don't need. That's true. That's very true. You can use that to try to sell it in the family. I'm not buying the Porsche I shouldn't be buying. Listen, I'm not looking at electric Porsches anymore. Seems cheap now, doesn't it?