776: Tech That Worked in 2024
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Hello and welcome to Mac Power Users. My name is Stephen Hackett. I'm joined by my friend and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, Stephen. How are you today? I am good. How are you? I'm making it, man. I'm making it. Good. We got a lot going on, but keeping busy and everybody's doing well.

This is headed towards the end of the year, so I thought today a fun topic would be looking back at what worked in the last year, what didn't, maybe a little bit. Before we get started, though, any announcements? You know, it's the end of the year. I got nothing. I'm tapped out for announcements. Me either. That's good.

Yeah. I guess my announcement would be everybody make sure to have a good time on the holidays. There you go. I've got a video going out in the labs on this topic. But, you know, the FBI just did a big announcement about the AI voice generation stuff is getting so good that they expect that people are going to start scamming you by calling. It's going to sound just like your wife or your husband or whatever. Yeah.

So when you're with your family this holiday, come up with a secret word. Figure out a secret word. There you go. You know, I think that's my announcement. We have one for our home security system, right? So if it gets set off...

uh you know you have to tell the company whatever this is the word i i can never remember it and so i actually have it i have it in one password so like if uh we open a door and set it off which is normally what happens um then i'm like scrambling with my phone trying to find it so funny to me that you can't remember your secret word you should change it to something i know steven friendly like you know i don't know it's very mary friendly she picked it yeah yeah um

And then I'm just living in her world, you know? Yeah. All right. Well, get a secret word this holiday with your family gang. More power users today. Steven made the big move to just one Mac. This is fascinating to me. Seems like everybody on the internet is following you now. And I thought we could check in on that.

Yes. When thinking about tech that worked this year, my MacBook Pro experiment came to mind, and I got a little news on that front, so that'll be for members at the end of the show. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, man.

All right. So we both came up with a list of different things that we thought worked good and kind of transformed in the last year. So AI is at the top. I feel like AI is this is the year that AI became something that I could actually use as opposed to a toy.

And I didn't really know that that would be the case at the beginning of the year. You know, AI, I didn't know if it was like another like hype thing. But no, this year, the large language models got to a point where they actually became useful. We did a whole show on it. So, you know, we don't need to like go in on the gory details. But I just wanted to acknowledge to begin with that, yeah, this stuff is actually useful now.

Yeah, I think there are bubbly parts of it. You know, I think not all these AI companies will be standing in a year. But I do think there are some useful things. And I will readily admit I am not as sold on this as some other people. But...

The thing that you put in the document that really grabbed my attention, because Federico has also been looking at this, is Notebook LM, which is this project by Google where you can upload a bunch of documents and you kind of build your own...

large language model based on what you upload? Is that how it works? Yeah, yeah. It's really impressive. I did a labs video on this. So I'm making an update to the productivity field guide. It did really well, and there's a lot of questions, and I have a lot to add to it. But when I've been working on it, I wanted a good resource. And I have written down so much on this. Between my research notes, I wrote a book on it last year.

I did, I don't know, a bunch of hours worth of video. So I had the transcripts of all those videos. And then I had like 12 different webinars we did. So ended up like 13 and a half hours of webinar content. So I have all this stuff and I just threw it all in Notebook LM.

And it's kind of like my research assistant. Like as I'm working on the new edition, I say, well, what were the most common questions in the webinars? And it'll tell me, or like, I'm looking at this new idea there, there's a new, there's another Greek term in addition to RTA that I'm interested in. And I want to tie this into the stuff I've already written, you

you know, where are the natural points to do that? And like, just like asking it, it's just like having an assistant really. And it's only being fed stuff that I've written or said, but you know, I know what I've written and said, but I don't have it at the tip of my tongue as well as notebook LM does. And it's just been a really useful thing I've been doing. And I, that to me was one of the best uses of AI this year.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting when you can apply this technology to your own data, right? That's the promise of...

future Apple intelligence powered Siri as well as like, Oh, I can ask a question and knows about this stuff in my apps and on my phone. Um, I think that's where it really becomes potentially more useful. I think things like notebook LM have a lot of potential projects like yours, uh, research projects. Um, I can see it also being really useful in business, right? Like, Oh, we have, I don't know, like we have this category of products that our company sells, um,

put all the data sheets in here and then let me, you know, search for things and query things against it. I think that's very promising. And I think that there's a lot of opportunity here to take these models and this technology and apply it kind of at the ground level, not just like we scraped the whole internet and we can answer your questions, but no, here's my data set. Here's what I care about. Let's work on this together. And I think that's really compelling.

Well, I mean, like another kind of tying it together is I figured out that ChatGPT can transcribe my handwriting, which is the only thing I've ever seen do it. Because I write in block text. Mm-hmm.

And any transcription software, for whatever reason, can't do that. But I made an engine in ChatGPT. I said, I write like an architect in block text in all caps. Can you please transcribe this? And it did it flawlessly, like from the beginning. So as I go through and do, because a lot of the productivity stuff,

It goes back to old Greeks, like Hellenistic philosophy stuff that kind of ties into modern. It's a thing. We'll talk about it some other day. But so I write these things out by hand because I just find that that helps me kind of think through it longer. But then I just throw that at ChatGPT to do the transcription. Then I dump the text into Notebook LM, and then I've got it.

like folded into my research. So it's actually been like at the beginning of the year, I never would have guessed that I'd be using it as much as I am. I'm still not like using it to write for me and you know,

There's a lot of other things I'm not doing with it. But, you know, this year we got kind of the evolution of things like Notebook LM. We also got search-based large language models, you know, like Perplexity and ChatGPT is doing it. So you can, like, say, you know, in the old days, you'd say go, you know,

Ask a question to Google and you get 10 links. Well, now these engines will go and read the 10 links and then try and answer the question for you, which has all sorts of weird consequences for those of us that publish on the web, but...

But it's also quite useful if you're a, somebody just wants to get an information pretty quickly. So there's like, I'm just finding little uses for it. You know, fixing grammar is another good example. This year is the year that the whisper memos workflow really landed for me. Whisper memos is an app. You get it for your phone, but it has a watch version. And on the Apple watch ultra, I've tied my little orange action button to it. So anytime I want, I can just press that and start talking.

And then it takes my recording and runs it through an artificial intelligence transcription machine and then drops it in drafts, which is very useful. But once in a while, for whatever reason, it just abandons grammar. It'll put all of my...

Texting and this isn't often it's like once every 50 times I do it, but like there'll be no periods or capitalization It's just a just word salad and it's shocking to me how I can just say okay chat GPT Here's some text that I wrote that didn't get grammar Can you please gramify it and it does that and it figures out where the sentences would have been in the paragraphs and everything? So, you know just overall

I think this is a useful tool. It's not changing the world. It's not replacing me, but it is something that makes parts of my work easier. And I didn't see that coming in January. I think that speaks to how quickly this corner of technology is moving. You know, it's, it's absolutely wild.

For me, the most interesting use case so far has been the chat GPT search, which is pretty new. And I think as of this recording, it's like starting to roll out to more people. And it is really compelling because I can search for something kind of in different ways than you can on Google. And it gives you the sources, little links. You can go check on it. You know, you said this, you know, I think on our AI episode earlier this year, like,

you cannot trust this stuff at face value. Like you've got to go, you got to go make sure that it's not doing the wrong thing. And the chat GPT search makes that pretty easy to do. And honestly, I find it more compelling and interesting and useful than the AI summarized results. So the top of Google searches, I've had, you know, kind of mixed luck with those. And again, none of it's perfect, but it's compelling and it's interesting. And something like web search is,

is I think really ripe for disruption like Google has basically run away with the ball on that and so to have a new player doing new interesting things I think is is good for everybody yeah I mean it was so weird back in the day when Google just overnight took over a web search because it wasn't like that I mean remember there was AltaVista there were a bunch of different search engines and then Google just like owned it like overnight and that was it and

And now that's not the case anymore. And I think Google is going to get a lot better at it. Their Gemini engine is very good. I'm sure they're going to figure out how to combine that with their search. But the fact is they will no longer be the only game in town. Mm-hmm.

Even if they get good, you know, it's just which, which, which will be good for the market overall and us consumers. But yeah. So I guess what I would say about AI is the same thing I've been saying all year is don't turn it into the boogeyman. It's not, you know, going to in the world, at least I hope not, but also don't look at it as like the answer to all our prayers either. But we're at a space right now where there are parts of it that are useful. And my advice is,

If you have areas where it can be useful, explore it a bit and figure out where it makes sense. And always, always, always treat it like a dumb intern. Like if you listen carefully to the stuff I've been using it for very little of it, is it giving me information? I'm mainly using as a utility to fix text or to transcribe something or to, you know, help me dig through my own texts.

I feel like it still is, is always gets these hallucinations and it still makes a lot of mistakes. So be careful, but, but there are uses for it. Another thing you put on the list is the AirPods pro, which is interesting because it's not a new product, but Apple has really made them much more interesting and useful. I think this year.

Yeah, it's like they ascended this year somehow. They didn't update the product, but they made it like a new product with all the software updates to it. And I'm hearing increasingly from friends that are just buying them now and just getting really into these AirPods Pro.

It's such an interesting product. I mean, one of the nice things about it is if you walk around, they're kind of earplugs as well as being AirPods, but they can also be filtering earplugs. So you can walk around and hear what you need to, but not other stuff. And it just seems like they've really kind of found their groove this year. And then to cap it all off, Apple said, oh, and by the way, we're also turning them into hearing aids, which they did just recently. So yeah,

This is like, you know, I've always felt like the AirPods are like Apple, one of the Apple star products that nobody ever talks about. But I feel like this year in particular, the AirPods pro really jumped, jumped a level.

And it is really interesting that the AirPods Pro 2 have been out a while, but Apple continues to make them better and I think more valuable to people. I mean, they are basically the top of my list. If I were to lose them or they, you know, were died or something like I would go replace them. Like I would just go to my local Apple store and buy a pair the same day because I use them all the time.

And the hearing health features really are, I think, really important. You know, being able to do a basic listening test at home is really, really exciting and important because, you know, there are going to be people who may not know they have hearing loss and like just do this because it's a new feature or their insurance may not cover it or maybe expensive or they don't live someplace where they can easily get a hearing test and

Yeah, you need to go see a doctor. Something serious is going on. But as a peace of mind thing or as a spur you to go see a professional kind of thing, I think it's really great that they've added these hearing test things. Yeah. So I went through the whole process. I'm of the age. I've got tinnitus where I hear notes in my ears. Mm-hmm.

Interesting. You know, the way what happens there is I understand it is like you lose hearing. So your brain generates a tone like in the loss area. So the reason you're hearing the ringing isn't because, you know, obviously there's nothing ringing that your brain is like faking a noise.

But it gets in the way, right? You can't really hear because of that. Anyway, long story. So I've always been kind of on borderline. But the last time I was properly test was about five years ago. And they said, yeah, you probably could get them, but you're not, you don't have to get them just yet.

And, uh, but I've been noticing it's been getting worse later. So I went through the whole thing. I did the test and they said, I have like moderate hearing loss and, and they set up the thing. And when you put those AirPods in, you do hear better. I mean, it doesn't solve tinnitus, but it does, um, uh, you know, it turns up the volume on, on people's voices enough that you get past it. And I guess that's what the hearing aid experience would be. I've never actually worn hearing aids before until I put these on.

But I kind of feel like these are good enough for me for now. When I want to use them, I can put them in. And when I don't care, I don't have to put them in. I don't think they're actual hearing aid replacements, though. When I hear about people saying that, it's like, wouldn't you want a proper pair of small ones? You don't want to carry these things in your ear all day. Yeah, I think so. My dad was a war veteran, and so he had a lot of hearing loss. And I remember...

He had the ones he wore back in the day that had a little like dial on them. And I used to always laugh because we'd go to church and I'd see him turn it down in church. But the, but yeah, I think it's, it, this is a great solution for people like kind of like where I'm at, where,

probably don't really need full-time hearing aids but you do also have trouble hearing people like like a good example would be like when we have a big family gathering i probably would want to use them because i would i would hear better um but just for like walking around day to day i don't think i would use them for that but yeah yeah if you if you're in that gray area and you've got an pair of airpods pro it just takes minutes to set it up i would strongly recommend trying it out at least

And I think there is something interesting going on here where hearing aids have also become more AirPods-like. Like my dad wears hearing aids and they are Bluetooth enabled. So on his phone, he has an app called

and his phone calls and music can go to him, but also he can change how they work, like really focus on the person in front of me or tune out more background noise. And these things have been on a collision course for a while. I agree with you that AirPods are not a replacement for medical-grade hearing aids, but I think you said it exactly right. Someone who's kind of in your situation where it would be helpful to have some assistance, sometimes this can really unlock that. And

I will be curious over time to see how the social aspect of that works. Right. Because maybe this is just me, but like, I feel like if I'm talking to somebody and they have AirPods in, I kind of get that. Like, are you actually listening to me? Like, you know, I think that will decrease over time. It will become more normal to see people with these things in. But that's another angle of this that I think some people are going to have to wrestle through.

Like an area where I struggle to hear people is clerks. Like when I go to the store, there's always a lot of noise in stores. And when they talk to me across from the cash register, sometimes I'm not sure what they say. And I don't want to accidentally like get the warranty or something, you know? So I always ask them to repeat themselves and it's very odd. And I have been using them in those situations. Like I went to Home Depot the other day and I had them in and

And I didn't say anything. I had, I had them in both ears. The person talked to me and I felt weird. I'm not sure she did, but I did definitely feel really weird wearing them while I was talking to some, but, but it did help me kind of communicate with them better. So like you said, we're in a weird spot right now. Yeah, I think so. But either way, AirPods and AirPods pro man. And then this year we got new AirPods for, which are great, but the, the pros are,

If you haven't looked at them in a while, they're really good. They are good, yeah. Every time it comes up, we hear from some listeners saying, yeah, but they don't really fit me. And I would say, take a look around. There are so many third-party inserts for those. You want memory foam, you want rubber, whatever it is you want.

There's a bunch of different companies making the little snap-on inserts for the AirPods Pro. So I think you've got a better chance of making those fit in just about any ear than any other AirPod because you just got to find the right, you know, inserts. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by ZocDoc.

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When we did the show on Obsidian, what, two, three years ago, I said, just wait. This is going to become a thing. And I feel like this is the year that the thing started paying off. We did a whole show on NotePlan, which is really kind of a Goldilocks middle point between something like Obsidian and something like Apple Notes. A lot of listeners picked up NotePlan, by the way. We keep hearing from you guys that are using it. But I just feel like this is the year that we got realistic ideas

good linked note applications that seem like they're going to be around for a while. And, um, you can start like investing in some of these apps. Obsidian has been around long enough. I think we know that one's good. And, um,

I don't really have a whole lot to say on this, except that we saw it coming, and I think it happened this year. And if you want to switch over to a link-to-note system, the natural suspects are there. I think you're looking at Dev & Think, NotePlan, Obsidian. There's just three or four apps now that are just solid and you know are going to be around, and you're going to get your link notes. Even Apple kind of got in the act a little bit. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, in Apple Notes, it's pretty simple, right? It doesn't have a lot of the sort of more advanced features you have in something like Obsidian. But if you have a note and it's like, hey, I need to link to this other one, it's easy to do. And some people have taken that and run with it and have used it to build structure within Apple Notes, sort of like a table of contents or something like that to other parts of the app. Yeah.

I'm using it a little bit, not a ton in Apple Notes, but it is really cool that it's there. And we're going to talk about default apps in a little while, but it's an example of Apple, I think, looking at what others are doing and what people want in these sorts of applications and getting on board with it. Yeah. But for me, the news item of this or the good news of 2024 is Apple.

A few years ago, I would have told you, yeah, I think this is going to become a thing, but I'm not sure what app to tell you to use because I don't know which one is going to be a fly by night that like maybe it looks really good. And in six months, the developer gets bored or doesn't make enough money and they shut it down. But now we've got like solid apps that are doing link notes that I think are going to be here a long time. And, and that's the, that's kind of the new thing that arrived this year. And yeah,

I'm sure there'll be new entries into this category, but we've now got solid apps we can recommend. Yeah. Yeah, it's settled down a good bit from what it was, which I think is good. I mean, I think that it shows maturity in this part of the market of apps and the sort of maybe two to three years ago, like

Like Rome, Obsidian, all these different, like that's all settled down, right? People have found the tools that work for them and those tools continue to mature and grow. And I'm glad for that. I mean, I wasn't sure when we did a show on Obsidian, I wasn't sure it would be around in a few years.

But I really liked the app, so I wanted to cover it. But now I feel like, oh, yeah, Obsidian's going to be here for the long time. I mean, so many people are using it. They built a business model that makes sense. And then when you look at other apps like NotePlan, the one we did the show on this year, it's the same thing. It's a small development expense, one developer team.

they actually charge you money and you pay them and they give you an app and you know that this thing is, is doing well enough that it's going to be around. So it's just like, it's just good to know that like, yeah, you can, you can go up in complexity with a note plan or a obsidian or Devon think and know that they're going to be there for you. And you can get all those cool linked note features that, that kind of showed up a few years ago. Yeah. Yeah.

Every time I say this, I get at least one email saying, hey, buddy, they didn't show up a few years ago. Wikis have been around forever. I know. I know. I know. But it feels like this was something different the way it emerged two or three years ago. Yeah. What was the – gosh, let me see if I can pull this out of my brain. What was like the personal wiki app on the Mac but like 15 years ago? Yojimbo. Yeah. No, it started with an S. Yojimbo is right. Yeah.

Maybe it'll come to me. But yes, these things have been around for a long time, but it is easier now. And a lot of those older apps didn't make the jump to mobile or didn't do it very well. And a lot of these tools now are pretty good across the platforms, which is great. Yeah. So default apps. Yeah, default apps. We've spoken a lot about this over the last couple of years, that Apple's

productivity suite of software has gotten better, gotten more power user features and

For me, this was really a year where I settled into those apps in a bigger way. So there was a pretty long period of time where, let's take notes, for instance. I would have Apple Notes for some sorts of things and then other things in craft or else, you know, other places. And this is the year that basically all that sort of folded back into Apple Notes for me. Got 500 something notes in there and it was,

really has been excellent the syncing is really good i love the highlighting that was added this year uh makes it easy to sort of visually distinguish uh kind of what's going on in an apple note in addition to all the the headings and you can now uh minimize the heading you know with a little like disclosure triangle and and uh collapse them if you will all that stuff has made notes uh

just really, really great for my, for my uses. And I'm basically living out of it and using notion for collaboration, but notes is, is my home base. Yeah. I, I agree with you. I have more in notes than ever. I still do use obsidian for kind of my like thinking machine stuff, but for what people call PKM, you know, personal knowledge management, like a list of the vet visits or whatever, um,

I feel like Apple Notes is just so superior for that. Like as an example, the dog note, you know, I have one note for the dog and I've got like PDFs of test results and a list of all the vet visits and the groomer's name and everything else. We had a bit of a family thing last week where I was very busy and the dog at the same time got sick and my daughter said, I'll take care of it.

So I just shared that one note with her and she had everything she needed to take care of it, to make the vet appointment, to know the history that, you know, all that stuff. And, and just Apple notes is so good for that stuff. And, and,

I agree with you. I feel like it's come a long way over the last few years. They've got linking now. I feel like backlinking should be there eventually. Like if I do create a link, I should have a way to see all the backlinks to that note. And I think they probably have got that data. They just need to turn it on somehow. So there's a couple of things I like to see them do. I think that there's superior notes applications that,

But for the day-to-day stuff, Apple Notes is the best when you compare the fact that it accepts multimedia, you can handwrite into it, you can share it. It's got great shortcut support. It's a really good app. Yeah, they're taking it really seriously over there. And no longer is it just the marker felt dumpster fire, right? It's really good. I think maybe that's their best app right now. I think so too.

What about Reminders for you? We're going to do a task management show here pretty soon. But for me, at least Reminders has really stepped up its game. Yeah. And we're deep in the outline on that show already. But I'll tell you, I have done extensive testing in Reminders.

And I really thought about adopting it, but I didn't. But we'll get into it deeper on that show because I have a lot of thoughts on this. But for most people, I think Reminders is just fine. And there are some things it does better than any other app and other things that it's just not quite there for me yet. But again, it's made progress. I feel like it's a little bit behind Notes in terms of

its usability in comparison to some of the other apps on the market. But I think anybody who tells me they're using reminders and they're happy with it, I think they're doing great. That's just fine. Like the Siri stuff with reminders still blows me away how good it is. Because Siri is so bad at everything else, it seems like. Yeah.

Yeah, it's great. And I love the grocery list feature where it will sort things based on category. So like if you're in the grocery store and you're in the produce section, all your produce is together on your phone. It's really cool. How about the browser, Safari? Yeah. You've gone back and forth on this, I know. I have. And what has...

really kept me in Safari on the Mac, at least. On the iPhone, it's never been a contest. Safari is just the best browser ever.

on the iPhone. But it really is the, the plugin structure where you, you've can really do some like good, interesting tasks through plugins while Chrome has limited that over time, especially in the ad blocking arena or content blockers. I think those are just better on Safari. I'm not using a ton of the new features this year. Like the, you can have it summarize a webpage or,

Um, I do like the hide this annoying aspect of a webpage, uh, cause there are some things right that a content blocker may not grab like, uh, uh, one of my local news papers here, their website has this, this banner across the bottom, even when you're logged in, it's like, no, I can't pay you. Like, I don't want to see this like thing about, about,

And so I just told Safari, like, hide this. And it's great. It doesn't break the page. The page just kind of reflows around where it was. It syncs with all my devices. And I think Safari really is much better than people give it credit for. There are still weirdnesses out there, right? There are occasional things that I need to do that Chrome is just better for. Like, I have this monster Google Sheet

for work and like Safari just chokes on it sometimes. Like I'll tab out of it and tab back to it and the whole thing's blurry and I got to refresh it and whatever change I was making is lost. Like that's not great. Now, is that Google's problem or is that Safari's problem? I don't know. So there are some things I'm still using Chrome for.

But overall, I think Safari is taken really seriously by Apple. And I think it is totally usable as a daily driver browser for really just about anybody. And I think that their Apple's being okay with content blockers in a way that Google is kind of moving away from that sort of thing is a bonus for Safari. Yeah.

Yeah. I've always been a Safari fan, especially on mobile because it, it saves so much battery life compared to the competitors. I don't think you can make Safari exclusive, but it's primary for me. What do you use as your backup? Is it Chrome? Chrome. Yeah. I've been using arc for my backup. Yeah. It's just cause it's weird. And you know, we did a show on it and it's kind of fun, but I don't need it very often to be honest. Yeah.

Yeah, I was using Arc for some stuff and settled that into Chrome. One thing I really like about Chrome is the profiles. And you can do that now in Safari, but there's something about the way Safari does it that just doesn't click with me. Like, I really like the way Chrome does it, and you can have a different theme for the browser. So, like, if my Chrome window is bright blue, like, I know I'm working, I'm logged into all my stuff with David. Or if it's red, that's the 512 YouTube account. Yeah.

That visual theming, I think, is really nice in Chrome. And for me, the profiles in Safari just haven't clicked in the same way. Well, it feels like they got to level one, but they never sought to go to level two with it. Yeah, that's fair. And I would like to see them take it to level three. So yeah, I'm with you. I just don't find myself using it much because I just don't think it's deep enough for me. But yeah.

Or even just automating them isn't easy. There's no shortcut trigger to trigger one of them. That seems so obvious. I got all sorts of automation problems with Safari because they're doing it differently on mobile versus a Mac. There's some problems there. There's definitely room for improvement, Apple. So we're both using Safari as our primary browser. What about for your calendar app?

I'm using calendar. I'm using Apple's app. Um, fantastic. Cal is great. Um, but the features it gives me above calendar, I just, I just don't need them. Um, the way some people do. And I don't care about calendar sets. I want to see basically everything all the time because that's how life is, right? I don't, I can't like turn off part of my life and then turn it back on. And so I kind of feel the same way about, um,

about calendars. And I got a bunch of accounts signed in. Like I've got my iCloud, which is my personal main calendar. And then I've got four Google accounts signed in and they all just sync and get along and work. And it's enough for me. The thing that I'm not sure was added this year, maybe a couple of years ago, but something that I've really come to like in calendar and it was in Fantasticale

First is that a location can be a video call. So if I set up a meeting or just like have, or like my record MPU, I have our Zoom link as a location and I can just hit the little button and it jumps right to it. This is something that Apple didn't invent. They took it from other players, but it's very useful for those of us who work remotely. And, you know, because we've all gotten those invites, right? We're like,

The zoom invite is in the, is in the, like the details or like the description of it. And it's like a wallet text. It's like, no, like just put it in the location field. It all just populates and works. And it's something that I use absolutely all the time. Yeah. I, you know, I've looked at it because, um, you're always trying to save money on subscriptions, but I use a lot of the features in fantastic hell and I don't, we don't need to go down that rabbit hole now. That's not what the show's about, but,

suffice it to say i get my money's worth out of it so yeah no it's great i think a lot of people do another one that uh has emerged for me this year not fully but i'm using it increasingly is freeform and um you know i still like my node for like mind mapping stuff like they came out with a new version we should cover that at some point but the um

But Freeform has also got a place in my heart, and I've been using it. I hope that it gets continued updates. It still needs some work. But I can see Freeform kind of also ascending up like reminders and notes where it becomes a really useful application. And that's something I wasn't doing at the beginning of this year. Yeah, I mean, Freeform is only two years old. I just looked it up. It came out basically exactly two years ago. And so having...

Having it already kind of like moving up your stack as a new app is really, I think, impressive. And I think we said it at the time we covered it. It feels like Freeform is an app that Apple was using or wanted. And so they built it and gave it to the rest of us.

Yeah. And it, of course, is cross-platform, which is fantastic. And even on the Vision Pro, where like reminders and calendar are stuck in iPad compatibility mode. So Freeform, I think, is, I think, really kind of putting itself out there and I think will continue to grow and improve over time. It's new. It's the newest of these, but I think Apple's done a good job with it so far.

Are you using Apple Mail? I'm not. So I'm all MimeStream on the Mac. We've covered MimeStream here. And actually, as of iOS 18, I've been using, mostly using the Gmail app on the iPhone. All my email accounts are Gmail or Google Workspace based. I don't use iCloud email. And the Mail app on iOS 18 is,

First of all, I turned off all of the categorization stuff. Like I have that off in my Gmail accounts. I have it off in mail where it's like priority and newsletters. Like, first of all, I prefer SaneBox for all that stuff anyways, current sponsor of MPU. But I really like it. And I just feel like I'm checking multiple inboxes when they're divided up like that. So I have all that off, but even with it off, and I've seen people talk about this on social media and in some of the forums and

The badge on mail or like the state that it's in, it seems to get confused about do I have any unread messages or not? Or I've had issues with it marking unread messages as read and vice versa. And so I'm kind of giving I'm kind of giving mail on on iOS and iPad. I was a break and using the Gmail app.

With my fingers crossed that 2025 is the year that MimeStream comes to iOS because I will switch to it immediately. I love MimeStream on the Mac and cannot wait for it to show up on the iPhone and iPad.

Yeah. I wish they would cover fast mail because I don't use Gmail. And so I, my stream is forbidden fruit to me, but I, you know, I make it work with Apple mail. And this is such a bit on the show about me looking at other mail apps and I keep coming back to Apple mail. It's not because I love Apple mail, but it's because it's, it's stable. You know, it does. When you say send, it sends an email and, and I'm a, my relationship with email is,

is is complicated but the uh but i'm using apple mail i also find i use a lot the fast mail web interface which is very good and um so like for the work stuff i do a lot of that in there the this year apple mail the was for the first time in my history of working with apple mail flags got consistent like if you flag something on the phone the flag shows up on the mac and

And that has never been a case. So it allows you to use flags to, you know, to kind of triage mail off your phone. But to tell you the truth, I do most all of my email at my desktop Mac. I try not to do it on other devices. I mean, if things are...

You shouldn't email me, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a work in progress, but I'm still using it. And honestly, I'm curious about this category categorization stuff. I could see it being useful. You know, do I keep paying for SaneBox or do I do this?

Um, but at this point in time, they still only have it on the iPhone and I honestly need to see it on my Mac to really judge it. And it's not in the Mac version of Apple mill yet. Yeah. And my guess is, you know, it'll be there soon. They're going through these betas pretty fast, but I can't imagine that we aren't going to get it with one of these point updates this year.

Yeah, it is weird that categories are only on the phone and may or may not be part of Apple intelligence because the mail categories work on devices that don't support Apple intelligence, but mail categories are not available in the EU. I don't know how Apple thinks about this feature, but it is weird that it's only on the iPhone. And like, if you really like it, and a lot of people do, like this is a popular feature that's in a lot of email clients. If you really like it,

Like it's just on your phone and not on the, I don't, I don't understand why it's not there, but I think you're right. I think it'll come to the iPad and the, and the Mac shortly, but for now it's just a little bit, a little bit weird. Yeah. It, I guess it's not in betas anymore. It's in the public release. It is for the phone. Yep. Yeah. It feels to me like they probably haven't got it all, all the wrinkles ironed out yet. Another Apple native app that's relatively new that didn't get on our list was journal.

Yeah. I don't think neither of us are using journal, right? Are you using it? No, not at all. Um, it's I, again, iPhone only. And I have years and years of history and day one. And so, uh, I'm glad they're doing it.

But it's not something that has really registered with me as something that I would want to switch to, especially given that day one supports all that. All the cool stuff journal does like this is the music you listen to today. This is where you were like that user activity stuff.

Apple built an API for that. So day one supports it. And so I'm getting kind of the benefits of the journal app while using an app that is, I think, more powerful and easier to use and cross platform. So this one is not. I mean, we talked about it on episode 726. And I think that's the last time I looked at it was in preparation for that episode a year ago.

Well, I think that overall, the thing about 2024 and Apple apps is this is just kind of another big move towards the fact of

Apple wants their productivity suite to be useful. Like for the longest time, it felt like Apple was just going to mail in the, you know, the least common denominator type apps and just kind of hope that the app market would fill in with the better notes apps and tasks apps. But now they're kind of in it. And, and,

I still don't think they're aiming for like the top of the market, but I think they're trying to hit the center of the market where if you get a Mac and you don't want to buy any apps, the stuff that's on there is pretty good. And every year they move the ball forward on that. Some apps more than others, but I feel like there's something afoot here and I'm really interested in it. And I do think that you can absolutely get by with the Apple productivity suite.

I wouldn't have said that a few years ago. Yeah. I, I think so too. I think they're taking it seriously. And, um, I think you're totally right. Like you can unbox a Mac, you can get your life done with this stuff. And even like pages, numbers, and keynotes, we didn't talk about, um, they've all there. They've also really come into their own for years now, really where you don't necessarily need office and the things you used to need. Um,

Those things are still available, right? Like OmniFocus and Obsidian and Chrome and FantasCal. They're all doing fine, right? But Apple is trying to address more people with their own first party apps. And that's good for users. I think it also provides third party developers with opportunity to continue to grow and push sort of the upper boundaries of what can be done with these tools.

And I think all of it's in a really good place. Yeah, I think the part of the market that gets hurt most by Apple taking this serious is not the apps you named. It's the middle of the road apps. Like there are a lot of apps that have a reminders like set of features, but they want you to pay for them.

And a few years ago, that might have made sense. Maybe you didn't want the top tier app, but you wanted more than the basics. Well, now like reminders is coming up to like a 60, 70% level and all the apps in that space. I'm not sure how they continue. If you can get the free app from Apple, that's going to be better integrated and do all this stuff without costing anything. Yeah. I think it's well said.

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I think this was also a year where collaboration tools for each of us have really sort of stepped up. Notion is top of mind for me here. Yeah. We've moved Mac Power users into it. I've moved connected into it. You have a lot of stuff in it. I think both of us have complicated feelings about Notion, but I think it's really become sort of central to a lot of my work. And I think that's true for you too.

Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, there's no accident here. I realized coming last year, this time I realized that I was working way too hard on things that weren't as important to what I do. Like I spent a lot of time answering customers, a board email and doing things that didn't really move the needle on me making new stuff.

So I decided to throw money at the problem. I hired somebody to help me out with some of the backend pieces, admin and, and video edits. And then all of a sudden I needed a collaboration tool, right? You know, because I used to run the whole thing out of an obsidian database and it was just fine when it was just me. But when you've got another person with you, it doesn't work. And notion became the tool we gravitated toward. And, and,

And I get, you know, it's just so weird. Right. So they are sometimes a sponsor. We should say that. I don't think they have been for a while, but they used to be. But I really, I mean, what they do, I think they're the best at it, you know?

You put together a database, you share it with people. Everybody can go in there. Like one of the things I love in it is like when you have a record for any piece of content, like I guess I should back up anything I make for Mac Sparky isn't starts at some point in its life is a notion record that whether it's a video for the Mac Sparky labs, a blog post, a newsletter, a, a podcast, everything eventually ends up in notion and,

I don't do all of the like research and writing of a blog post in Notion, but

Once I get to a point where I'm like, okay, this is getting good enough that it can go on the internet, then I put it up in Notion as a record. And then because Notion does such a good job of tables, you can put a bunch of metadata up to it. And then the person who helps me out can see that that lands on their table. Oh, he just finished this. He wants to post it. Well, then they can go through and proofread it and get it in WordPress and do all the things that I used to do.

And Notion is perfect for that. And like one of the things it does is it has thread. You can have like threaded conversations on the record. So like if he has a question about something, he can write it there. I get a little flag on my system tells me, oh, he's got a question on that blog post. Go answer his question so he can do his job. And like all of that stuff, Notion is the best of that of any tool I've ever used. Would you agree? I would agree. I mean, it lets us.

organize information in ways that are just really difficult to do with other types of tools. Right. Think about the way we used to do our episode planning, right? We had a Google sheet with a date and the topics and then a separate Google doc for every single episode. And we had template Google docs. We had like copy and paste and inevitably one of us would, you know, like start editing over Reddit. Yeah. I was like, no, God is copy and paste. Right. It's such a pain.

And now we just have this database, right? And we have all of the episodes. Like, we built it out for the whole next year. They all have associated metadata. It's very easy to understand what's going on. It's very easy to move in between episodes because we are always working on multiple outlines. I think I've been in, like, four this week, just, like, putting little thoughts in and, you know, working on things and –

It makes it so easy to do that, not just for me or you, but for me and you. And we can be doing things simultaneously across these pages and we can search across them. It really has been, I think, a big benefit to my podcasting to have a tool like this. Surely it's not perfect. We have some cons to it, but the organizational tools it gives us

And the fact that we can be working alongside each other, like in a database is pretty cool and not, yeah.

So much collaboration for so long was document centric, right? It's like, Oh, like we can share a Google doc or we can share, you know, a pages document and Dropbox. Like, Oh, be careful. This is a full blown like database with records and metadata. And we're just like bebopping around like it's nothing. And the sync is really good. And we can see where like, like right now I can say, I can see where your cursor is and I know what you're looking at. And all of that is, um,

is very useful and very good. No, I agree. And like other things I like about it is the AI they added this year. So I went ahead and paid for AI for the Mac Sparky labs one or the, you know, kind of Mac Sparky media thing. And we found a bunch of uses for it. Like the one thing we're doing is we're using Mac whisper, which is another AI tool to everything that I publish. We transcribe things.

And we put it into the system. Now the transcriptions aren't perfect, but now I can search everything. Like I do a little podcast every Friday in the labs. It's like,

It's like the anti-MPU. It's like 10 minutes. It's just like, it's only like news and rumors. Like it's the thing we never talk about here, but I figure, Hey, people in the labs every Friday might want to know what's going on in the Mac ecosystem. But then I always, at the end, I pick a media pick. Like it may be like a John Coltrane album, or it may be a Christmas movie or a book or whatever. Yeah.

But I forget. I've been doing it for years, and I forget what all I've recommended. Well, now I just type it in to Notion, and it searches all of those for me using the AI engine. And when I was working on the shortcuts field guide, I would import my outlines into shortcuts into the record for that video. And on the ones where I felt like iffy, like I did a whole video on using AI with shortcuts,

I gave it my whole outline. I said, well, this is my outline. Do you think I missed anything? And it gave me a couple ideas that I went and researched and added to the outline. So like I'm finding uses for the AI stuff they put into it. We have now been doing it. How long is it a year now? We're close to a year. Yeah. So,

In fact, I think it was like last year on January that we started it, but the, but we've had a bunch of guests on the show. We share an ocean link. They don't have a problem. You know, we were worried that our guests wouldn't be able to see the outline. That has not been an issue. It's all great. Except there's an except here. This is why my feelings are complicated. It's not a Mac app, you know? And I just wish it was more Mac friendly.

Yeah, me too. The thing that bugs me the most about it is that the text handling is not what you're used to as a Mac user. Like some of the shortcuts don't work or it just sort of behaves oddly.

One way I've gotten around some of that is actually with PopClip. So things like the spell checker, which sometimes just doesn't, it just like disappears for me in Notion until I restart Notion. I was like, well, I've got it in PopClip so I can just keep working, you know, to swap out a word or something. But it doesn't tie into a bunch of macOS services and, you know, things that I would want it to. Now,

That is a con, but we also didn't have that with the previous Google Drive setup, really. So it's okay, but I do wish it were more native, for sure. Yeah. I mean, the one that kills me is mail links. Because a lot of times when I'm working on an outline, maybe somebody wrote me an email that inspired me to add something to the outline, and I want to source the email.

And on a Mac, Apple Notes, for example, very easy to create a link to a mail message. But those external links in Notion don't work. I mean, it will do a web link, but it really won't do anything else. And there's kind of ways around it. Like PopClip can help you because the link tool in PopClip opens it as a native link in essence. Or you can use a shortener. But mail links don't work that way. So it's just...

It's just there are friction points. Like I am not. I'll tell you one thing. When we get to the task manager show in a few weeks, I'm not going to tell you that I put all my tasks in Notion. Right.

I thought about it, but I'm like, oh, no. It's just so like there's a bit of sandpaper to the interface because of the fact that it's not a native app. Yeah. And so I find it great for the production stuff. We've got this under the collaboration category, and there's no way out. I mean, I'm in with this tool. It's the one. And I'll still be using it for collaboration a year from now.

But it's not like the be everything tool that some people make it out to be, in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, there are people out there who are like building their whole lives into it. And, you know, we're using it in some way for a pretty narrow scope. Like we are planning a podcast. You have your content stuff in there. Yeah. I agree with you. It's not the task manager that I want or need. It's not the personal calendar I want or need. But...

I do find it useful to have those tools available, right? So if we have a special episode, we can make a little checklist associated with it. Yeah.

Oh, I need to upload this image to make sure that we have it. I can just drag it in. I can drag it back out. Something, mind-blowingly, extremely difficult to do with Google Docs is to get an image out of a document. You know what I do most of the time? Taking a dang screenshot. Because exporting an image out of a Google Doc, the hardest problem known to computer scientists in the world. And so they do a lot of that stuff well. Not exceedingly well. It's not, for me, going to replace those other tools, but...

Having those bits of functionality alongside everything else, it works for what we want to do with it. And I've been very happy that we moved to it. I think I sprung it on you as a surprise. Yeah, you did. And then you came in, you're like, whoa, you did some crazy stuff. Let's fix all this. Yeah. But I think it's working really well for us.

Yeah, I agree. And I also love that the company is leaning into what they're good at. I mean, they're constantly adding new features and systems to it. They're taking out the friction points. I mean, I feel like I sound like I'm really negative on it. I'm not. I just really love native Mac apps. And this isn't one.

But it's so darn useful to me. And it's so good at what it is there for. Like, if I was working alone, I probably would not be using it. Yeah. But to the extent I need collaboration, I couldn't imagine working without it. And that'll make JF feel really good. Because every time we go on a show and I start talking about Obsidian and how I loved using it, he's like, hey, um...

You don't want to go back to that, right? We're still staying with Notion, right? Because, I mean, it's so easy. Just the other day, he'll put in a note, say, hey, I need a voiceover on this one little clip, drops the video clip in there. I can see it. I can record in the VO. I can give it back to him. We could literally do all of that in one Notion record. And the full record is there. If I go back and look at it in six months, I'll be able to see exactly what happened on that thing. Yeah.

Like it's just so useful. And as I, as I've been using it now more than a year, I am finding myself going back and looking at old, like, how did I do a black Friday sale last year? And like all that stuff's in there. And with the AI features they've got now, it makes it really easy to surface it because like the Apple AI, it's looking at your words. So it knows exactly what, you know, you want. Yeah.

Yeah, and I agree with you. So the last section I talked about, you know, I had some stuff in various places and then ended up going back into Notes. I was using Notion for some personal stuff with no collaboration. I was like, Notes is fine for this. Like, the collaboration is when it sort of crosses the threshold for me, too. So I think we're on the same page there. Yeah. Yeah.

The other thing I wanted to mention in sort of collaboration is this is like, it's one of those features that I don't even think got mentioned at WWDC, but it may be the most important thing Apple did this year. You can tell a folder in iCloud Drive to stay downloaded. This took way too long. In Dropbox and OneDrive and everything else,

You can tell like, Hey, keep these things local on my desk. And iCloud drive was like, I'm going to do what I want. And it was so frustrating. Um, yeah. And so they have done this on the Mac iPhone, iPad, you right click on it or do the little more button and say, uh, I'm going to get the exact language, right. So I'm going to iCloud drive as I talk. Um,

uh keep downloaded and you get a little downward arrow next to it uh which really clutters up the view and finder i think because it also is like added by me added by david like yeah i don't need all of that visible all the time but that's okay um but if you're using icloud drive and i do with my wife like all of our shared sort of family documents are on icloud drive now and i really like that i know that i have all that stuff offline and it syncs just like it would

on Dropbox. And I think that's a huge, huge addition. Yeah, it's late, but I'm still going to celebrate it. Yeah, yeah. You're doing a lot of stuff in iCloud Drive, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, I store all my personal stuff in it. I try to use Dropbox primarily for collaboration.

But, you know, I'm using all the services. Let's just face it. You know, basically for being a Mac Sparky, I kind of need to have an idea what's going on in all of them. Yeah. But iCloud, I think I've been more into it than others. And I've never got bit by it. And it generally does what I need it to do. But Dropbox is better at some of the sharing stuff, even with this additional button. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh yeah, I agree. And most of my stuff is still in Dropbox, but like with our family folder, it was literally the only thing Mary was using in Dropbox. I was like, well, we already pay for a bunch of iCloud storage. It was too much for her to have a free Dropbox account. So I was paying for like Dropbox for families. Like it was way overkill. And so I, I did this move over a year ago, but then, you know, it's kind of annoying not knowing where those files are in terms of local or on the cloud. And,

And it's been great. Like I, I have been slowly moving towards Dropboxes for collaboration only and like stuff just for me.

Not storing it on Dropbox anymore, mostly because I'm back down to one computer, as we'll talk about in more power users. But they are still different. I think Apple is still behind some of these other players. But this to me was like the most important thing for them to fix. And so I am super glad they did. And it works great. Like it does. It does exactly what it's supposed to do. And I am thankful for it.

Yeah, I have a challenge right now because I'm getting it from a different direction. We just got done talking about Notion. Well, with the paid Notion account, they have unlimited storage, according to their website. I don't know if it throttles at some point or whatever. So I've been paying for a Dropbox account for myself and for my collaborator so we can move files. Like when you're making screencasts, you have these big files and

I push it to his inbox, he pushes it back to mine. But we've been experimenting in Notion, and that works. We can put the files there, and the advantage is when I come back in a year, the files are there, right? As opposed to being in some nebulous Dropbox. And we would save $200 or $300 a year if we didn't pay for Dropbox, right?

And so we're looking at that right now. And I haven't made a decision yet, but it is interesting to me. Steve Jobs famously called Dropbox a disservice. It's not an app. It's a feature. It's a feature. But there's some truth to that because if you and I are both looking at the same feature from other vendors or we already have it, we don't need it anymore, it may go away. Yeah. I don't know. Hmm.

Have you, have you started a lot of stuff in notion like files, like big files, not big files. I mean, I have been importing our show notes as HTML, like from the website. Um, I have been slowly working on transcribing Mac power users and uploading it. Um, yeah. Uploading in bulk notion will kind of just fall over sometimes. Uh, like, okay, I just want you to upload like a hundred text files. Like they're all, they're all tiny, um,

And their import thing is just kind of buggy sometimes. But I have not done it for like big files, like moving audio or video around. But I'm glad to hear that it's working for y'all.

Yeah, I put some in. I'm not sure it's working yet, but it hasn't been terrible. So I don't know. It's just something I'm looking at. Yeah. I do wish Notion was better with PDFs. That's one thing I think Apple Notes really shines on. You get a really nice view, and you can mark them up and stuff.

And Notion is like, especially on mobile, it's a PDF. I'm just going to open it in a tab. I don't know what to do with it. You should know what to do with PDFs more than you do.

Yeah. Well, I mean, like you had said earlier, I didn't follow up on it, but I also did the experiment where I put some notes in Notion and the only notes I've got in Notion are ones that need to be seen and collaborated on. Yeah. And that experiment lasted like a week. And I'm like, no, this isn't. And they're harder to get to and everything. It's just, you know, it's not a native Mac app and Apple Notes is fine for that kind of stuff.

And it doesn't, you know, they, I know they talk about like they're trying to compete with Rome and obsidian, but it really scratches a different itch. And I think they should kind of lean into what they're good at, but that's just me. This episode of Mac power users is made possible by one password.

One password is the app that David and I both use and trust to keep our accounts secure. We can create strong, unique passwords that are all different, right? You don't want to share a password between multiple accounts. You also want to make it easy to access those passwords on the go. And so one password supports touch ID, face ID, uh,

It does all the autofill stuff and not just in Safari because 1Password has browser extensions for a whole bunch of browsers. So it's easy to get to your passwords wherever you are. I'm using 1Password at work and at home. With 1Password for families, I can share login information with my spouse so we have access to our shared accounts. And if one of us makes a change or resets a password...

Both of us see it. None of that, hey, did you change this? Oh, hey, send me that two-factor code. It's all within one password. And at work, we run one password. That means I have fine-grained control over my vaults for different coworkers, and I can manage access to critical information that is just so easy to manage this stuff. Look, I run kind of more

complicated team software than I would like these days. But 1Password for Teams makes it really easy. And of course, it works across devices and browsers, like I said. That means I can stay secure with all of my accounts wherever I am. And it's not just logins. 1Password has these really awesome templates for all sorts of information. So I have driver's license information, bank routing information, secure notes, and more all in 1Password.

Head on over to 1password.com slash MPU to learn more and to sign up for a free 30-day trial. And when you do, you'll get 20% off. That's 1password.com slash MPU. Something that got sorted for me this year, I don't know, this is a personal thing, but

I have always struggled, if you go back and listen to our old shows on journaling, about the mix between analog and digital journaling and just generally handwritten notes. I do find there is something to writing down with pen and paper as opposed to doing everything digital. It gets you away from that space. Your brain works a little differently. I do think there's benefit to it. Not that I want to write everything out longhand, but there are things that I think make sense to me.

And I've always struggled with like trying to find a tool set that does that. You know, the notebooks, there's a ton of great notebooks out there, but you know, when you journal, sometimes you have different things you want to write about and the pages get kind of jumbled because the pages are all glued into a book. And this year I found that, that Japanese plotter stuff it's, which is a ring system, uh,

for a journal, which I guess is way more popular in Japan than it is here. But a ring system means you can move the pages, you know, and the way plotters work is that it's a really nice little pad. You can write it. The hole's already punched. You tear it out. You put it in your ring where it belongs. And that to me, I guess was the missing piece because now journaling for me between, um, you know, using day one plus a handwritten journal system is suddenly easy.

And that took me years to figure that out. Another nice thing about the ring system is you can just lay it on your desk and take a picture of it to scan it. You know, there's great apps now. So, so as opposed to where a book, you got to try and flatten it. And you know, the book always rolls a little bit. I just, I don't know. I, this is a me problem. I don't think most people listening are at all interested in analog journaling, but if you are, uh,

This was a great solution for me. And I've talked to a few people that have picked it up and are doing it as well. I just think it's like, it gives you the best of both worlds.

Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. Um, and the scanning a page is definitely something that is a field notes user is a little more difficult because it's, it is like a tiny little, little notebook. And so it's, it doesn't really lay flat very well. Um, I scan mine when I fill them just on a flatbed scanner, uh, for archival purposes, but like getting a picture of a single page into day one, uh,

uh, not definitely not as easy cause it doesn't, it doesn't lay flat, but I just use the day one tool. Day one has a scanning button in it. And if you've got a flat page, it's really easy. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Um, yeah, I'm glad that's worked out for you. Cause I know we've talked about a lot. You've talked about other places. Um, but there, there is, there is a lot of room for these analog tools in our, even in our current like fancy digital, digital workplaces. And so I'm glad you've gotten that ironed out.

Yeah, it's really nice. I like it. I'm happy. And I suspect for the foreseeable future, this will not be something that I struggle with anymore because you know how it is. You find the right tool and it just clicks and you're like, okay, good. Yeah, absolutely. And that's what we want, right? It is fun to bounce around between things and we do a lot of it as nerdy people, but it's also nice to be like, this thing works for me and I can rely on it into the future. Yeah. Okay, the big one.

Big one. Yeah. Here's the, here's the big one. Here's the last thing. And I'm going to put a question mark in the chapter name. Vision Pro came out this year. Did it work? Did, did the Vision Pro work for us in 2024? Yeah. Did it? The year of the Vision Pro question mark. Question mark. This is an interesting product from Apple. I think that, um,

You know, normally they don't release stuff like at this phase, but I, you know, the, the analogy, a lot of people are using is the Apple watch, right? The Apple watch came out and they had all these explanations of what you do with it.

And then it turns out it's a health and notification device. And it took them a couple of years of users feedback to really figure out, oh, that's it. People want to use this thing to get healthy. They want to get their notifications, maybe a few apps. And so then like you saw the Apple watch evolved toward that, you know, and now they can't put enough sensors in it. And they're really like leaning into the things people want to do with it. I feel like this is that first year for vision pro where they're still trying to figure that out.

Yeah, I think that's really fair to say. I think it's easy to dunk on it because of the cost, right? Like when it's a $400 Apple watch, like, yes, Apple should know what it's for, but especially when it's a $3,500 face computer. Yeah. But that's just, that just is where it is. I think, I think that's really fair to say.

I think very much like the Apple watch, um, Apple pitch this thing as a full blown computer. Like you can do your work on it. You can do entertainment on it. You can do communication with it. And I think that is getting sorted out kind of very slowly in the market where it will find people will find, I think, I think for me, it is not a general use computer. It is really good at media, uh,

And I think it's really good at communication. I love the FaceTime persona calls. It feels real in a way that I've never experienced virtually before. Is that worth my $3,500? Honestly, probably no. But I think the price will come down and I think the use cases will get sorted out. It's just going to take longer than anything we've seen from Apple, maybe ever. And that's weird, right? It's unusual to have an Apple product like this.

But it is also what makes it really interesting. And I don't think Apple's giving up on it. I think it will evolve and change. I don't think the long-term solution to AR computing is cameras and really high resolution screens. I think eventually we will see the world around us and have things overlaid on that. I think other companies are working towards that as well, but this is where it is right now. And yeah,

It's probably not for most people and it may never be for most people, but I think over time it will find its footing. There's a lot of ways to look at it. Like it is a great multimedia consumption device. Yeah.

Like there's a new episode of silo out. You got me hooked. Steven. Yes. Came out on Friday. I haven't watched it yet because I haven't had time to sit down with vision pro and that's where I watched silo. Yeah. Anything I watched that my, my kids and wife don't care about. I watch in, in vision pro. It's such, it's so, so superior. I mean,

And I've never owned like a fancy, you know, home theater, but this feels like my home theater. So yeah, it's that, is that really a face Mac? It's a face. I Mac, I'm sorry. It's a face iPad. Yes. In a lot of ways where it feels very iPad, like the most recent software update that gave you a much better version of your Mac screen makes it more useful for productivity stuff. So, you know, we, we did a show on it not long ago, just kind of a check-in on episode seven 51 and,

So we don't need to restate all the stuff we did there, but kind of looking at it on the big picture level, this was not the year of Vision Pro. This was a thing that they did on the side, and some people are really into it, but most people don't care. And it's really up to Apple to turn this into something over time. Like one of the things we said in that show is there's not enough specialized content for it.

But we keep hearing news items that they're making moves, like they're trying to get stadium rights for a soccer slash football stadium in Europe where they can build the stadium with the proper cameras in it to really give you a Vision Pro immersive experience while you're watching a game. I mean, honestly, that should have been happening two years ago. But they're getting there. And I think they're definitely leaning into it as a media consumption device when you hear stories like that.

Yeah. The productivity end of it, I'd feel like has been pretty quiet from Apple. We haven't really seen a lot. Like reminders is still not a native app on vision pro after almost a year. So I, I don't know. I mean, I don't know what, what all the decisions are being made up there, you know, but it, this year it did not like take the world by storm the way some Apple products have over the years. Yeah. I think that that's totally fair. And on the content side, like,

I do think Apple needs to lead that charge because no one else is going to. But even just this week, Blackmagic Design announced pre-orders for that camera they showed off where it's got like two lenses and it does the 3D immersive video stuff natively. I got a link in the show notes. The camera looks wild because it's got these two lenses kind of spaced out a little bit, just like the eyes on your head. And this will take some time for this content to become available.

more accessible and more mainstream. The Vision Pro is maybe the biggest example in technology recently that I can think of that has the chicken and egg problem. Like there's no content because no one has a Vision Pro and no one has a Vision Pro because there's no content. Like something's got to change in that equation or the Vision Pro will tread water forever. But I think that Apple is very slowly putting the pieces together to that. 2024, not the year of the Vision Pro, but...

25, 26, 27. Like I think they, they want to continue to push it and I don't think they're giving up on it. I know some people say that I do not believe that.

Yeah, and they're a trillion-dollar company. I mean, your chicken and egg problem is easily enough solved if Apple just starts paying people. And you're seeing that. I mean, that's actually happening. We're getting new content, not at the cadence that I would like. All of us that put money in it feel like chumps a bit, right? Because we spent all this money, and we're not getting that much content for it.

But I actually would buy mine again. You know, if someone said you can, you know, we'll give you a refund or you can keep it. I would keep it because I do actually use it for work. I find the immersive environments very beneficial to, to writing. And so I've got some things I do there. Again, we all, we talked about all this in episode seven 51, not long ago. So just go listen to it. But, but I I've actually, I'm more, uh,

up on it than most of my podcast runs. And I kind of see there's some real potential here. Like I, I do believe that you're right. One day it'll be a pair of glasses. You stick on your face and you'll see the rest of the world. But I also think there is room into the foreseeable future for this immersive thing where I can feel like I'm in Yosemite and be immersed in it. And even better, you know, just imagine in 10 or 20 years how much better it will be. And, and,

I think it'll fork it someday. They'll be both two different kinds of products, and I'll probably buy them both. But I like it, and I'm glad they made it. I'm glad they put it out early, and I'm happy to be part of the experiment, but that's just me.

But, but yeah, I think there's use for this thing, but this isn't my favorite technology of the year. I mean, you know, I still use my Mac a lot more. It's like, I couldn't like just be a vision pro guy. I couldn't do that. No. What a year. What a year, man. What a year. What a year.

You think next year will be as exciting? It always seems like they are. We don't know what it's going to be going in, but it always gets exciting. Yeah. I mean, I'm just looking over like the links I've been putting in the show notes as we talk, like didn't see a lot of this stuff coming. And, you know, I think, I think 2025 will be a lot of, a lot of AI, a lot of,

computers helping us do things. I hope that, you know, areas like automation and other things catch up with that. Hope that Vision Pro has a good year next year, but we'll see. And we'll be here the whole time talking about it. So that's the best part. Yeah. I think one of the big AI stories will be the agency stuff where, you know,

It's not just a text field that you're working with AI, but it can actually download software and create an Excel spreadsheet for you and stuff like that. And that's already in the works and kind of on the fringe, but I feel like probably next year you're going to see a bunch of that. There'll be a whole lot of disruption with all this stuff happening, and we will be covering it here on the old Mac Power Users. That's right. That's what we're talking about. All right. We are the Mac Power Users. You can find us at relay.fm.com.

Go check it out. You can sign up for membership there, get the ad-free extended version of the show. We're going to be talking today about Steven's MacBook Pro experiment. And thanks to our sponsors, ZocDoc, NetSuite, and 1Password. And we'll see you next week.