785: First of All, I'm David Sparks
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Welcome to the Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks and joined by your friend and mine, Mr. Stephen Hackett. How are you doing today, Stephen? I'm good, David. How are you?

Oh, I'm always excited to do a feedback episode. It gives us a chance to kind of stretch our legs, cover a bunch of different topics. And for me, that's always a good thing. We've had a lot of good content on Mac Power Users the last few months. So the feedback bucket is full. And some of our favorite and not favorite hardware manufacturers are doing things to give us subjects to talk about. We got a lot going on here. Yeah, I have this mental picture when you said that. You know, like if you go to a splash pad website

I did a lot more when my kids were little. And the bucket fills up with water and then it actually tips over and everyone gets covered in water. That is kind of how our feedback is. I really like this mental image you've given me. Well, there you go. Did you know that I am a master slide splasher? What does that mean? Good splashing?

Yeah, you know, like when you go down a slide and you hit the water, how some people make a big splash and some people make a little splash. When my kids were little, there was a water park down the street we used to go to all the time. And I mastered the art of just soaking everyone. I love it. You know, I'm going to share this real quick. This is important. Get your notebook out.

As you're going down the slide and you know, you know, you've got some velocity. So like, like if you wear a water shirt, take it off on a slide cause you go much faster, you know, the more skin. And then as you're about to hit the water, lift your legs about, I don't know, 10 degrees North of straight, you know, like lift your, your, your lift them up like six or seven inches as you're just about to hit the water.

And then with the velocity in your legs lifted, you create a fanning effect of the water. And it's awesome. My kids love it to this day. I will like, you know, like when we go to like a fancy place and they've got a big slide and there's all the people with their drinks and stuff. I soak all of them every time.

That's great. So that one's for free. That one's for free. Okay. Well, we will get to the show in a minute. What about cannonballs? Are you a good cannonballer? Cannonball, you don't have the same physics in play. Right. Yeah. So I don't know that I'm particularly good at a cannonball, but I can tell you when you go down the slide and you hit the water, just lift your legs a bit at the end. Just wait and see what happens. It's good to know.

I mean, every time I do it, everybody gets soaked. It's kind of great. There's always some people very annoyed with me. They're like, man, that guy is super fat. He like splashes all. It has nothing to do with your weight. It's all physics, baby. It's all physics. You know, where's the good doctor? You know?

If he were right now, he could write an equation on it for us. There you go. Well, this has been a great start to our – honestly, the best start to an NPU in some time, I think. There we go. You're welcome. Really, really good. Completely unhinged. If you like Mac Power Users, and honestly, why wouldn't you? You should check out more Power Users, which is our longer ad-free version of the show we do each and every week. That money goes to David and I to support the show. It means a huge deal to us.

And this week on More Power Users, I have an update. I'm crossing the streams. Truck update and 3D printing update. Oh boy. Oh boy. Same thing. So we're going to talk about that. But first, we got to talk about something that has taken 25 years to happen.

you can migrate purchases between Apple IDs, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk. A lot of fine print here. You want to talk a little bit about this? I'm not sure if I'm the one who should talk about it because you said 25 years and for me it's 25 years and counting. Yeah. Okay. So we'll get to your, we'll get to your heartache. So

A lot of people, including me until recently. And if you listen to my other show connected, I've talked about that over there where I just went through this process of unwinding my two Apple account system where I had one for purchasing and one for iCloud. I ran into an issue where I needed to undo that and it was very messy. And then after I finished it, Apple said, Oh, now you can just migrate content. And so I,

A lot of people think have this where you have an Apple ID, maybe it was an email you don't use anymore, or maybe you, you know, before iCloud family sharing, maybe you shared an Apple ID with your spouse to purchase things, which is definitely what we did. And you have sort of content. So apps, music, TV shows, whatever, kind of on a, on an Apple ID on its own. And then you have your primary Apple ID or Apple account for things like iCloud syncing.

And Apple supports that. Yeah, I mean, the way I got caught in this trap is I had an iPod long before there was a thing called MobileMe, you know, whatever. And like a lot of people, we bought those early Apple iPods and you created an Apple account to buy your music on. Yeah. And you never thought it was going to be...

Like your, your one ID to rule them all. Right. Yeah. Some people have them before they were actual email addresses. Like it's a very old system. Yeah. And now Apple has set up where you can migrate content from an old Apple account to a new one. There's a couple of support documents in the links. And look, I know, I know dear listener, not everyone clicks the support links. I like having them there as a resource for people who need them.

Go look at these support documents because the fine print that the hoops you have to jump through to make this work pretty wild. And it includes things like family sharing being, you know, in the right state. And, oh, if you have any music on, you know, both accounts, that's a problem. By the way, every Apple account of a certain age has music in it because Apple gave away a YouTube album.

to everybody. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah. You know, that's a gift that keeps on giving, you know, a decade later. But if you wanted to have all of your stuff under one account and you can jump through all these hoops, I have heard from people that it does work, but I've heard from a lot more people, including the other half of this podcast, where it hasn't worked. So I think that brings us to you and what you went through.

Yeah. So like Steven said, there are a lot of details on Apple's website and, you know, I'm shocked that this is at all possible, right? Because I always felt like there was a bunch of contracts that said, you know, once the person buys it, you don't have the right to transfer it. Right. That's probably all these different artists and, and, you know, labels and everything. So it was shocking to me that this was ever possible.

As a little background, a couple years ago, I gave up on this whole nonsense of two accounts. I mean, Apple does have support for it where it says media and purchases. So you have your Apple ID, and then in your Apple ID, you can use a different account for media and purchases, which I call the legacy account, you know, the old one I had. And I bought, like, all the Star Wars movies. I bought, like, you know, Barbie princess movies because my kids were little back then. Sure.

bought a ton of music, you know, all the stuff we were doing back in the early days of the iPod. And I realized that most of the stuff, movies I watch are available and streaming at this point anyway. And all the music that I bought is available and streaming. And my kids don't care about Barbie princess anymore, at least not enough to watch it.

So what I did was I just turned all that off. I just used my main Apple ID for purchases in Media 2, which meant that if I went in my Movies tab, it was a lot skinnier. And there was a couple of things where content disappeared. The other thing it means is that when I go to download apps, I still occasionally get a note that says, oh, you need to put in the ID for the other account to download this app, which I ignore. And then I just go download it again under my main account.

And after doing that for a couple of years, it's kind of like life is easier, right? You just have one account for purchases and everything works. And I lost some content.

And so we got the note that, hey, Apple has made it possible to transfer all that old content to new. And I'm like, well, I might as well. I mean, there's hundreds of dollars worth of content in there. And why shouldn't I get access to that stuff? Yeah, why not? That's kind of a theme today by the time we get into the show. It's like you buy stuff, you think you own it, and sometimes you don't. Yeah. If people sometimes complain our show costs them money, we're going to set a record later in this episode. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. But the, uh, either way. Um, so I, I, um, so I went through the checklist and I did everything. Uh, one of the requirements was cause I had that legacy account as a family member for family sharing. A lot of people have done that. That's how I fixed my problem. I brought legacy Steven into my iCloud family.

Yeah. But it said, you can't do that. This won't work if you do this. I took, I took legacy David out. Oh no. Which was fine. Whatever. Legacy David is out there. He's gone. Yeah. He's homeless now. But the, but I also, I really made an effort. Like I logged into the old account. I checked that there was a $0 balance, but I gave an active credit card to it because that's one of the requirements. It's got to have an active credit card, even though I haven't bought anything with it in years.

So I like, I really went through it all. And what really got me in trouble is in the Max Markey labs every Friday, I do a little podcast. It's like 10 minutes where I just tell all the Apple news from the week in 10 minutes. You know, it's like just like an update of the news for people who don't want to like obsess over this stuff. And I, in that podcast, I said, well, I'm going to be your canary in the coal mine and I'm going to go down and give you guys a video next week to show you how it all works. And so I thought, Oh, I've got to do this for the lab zoomers. So, so I was really careful and I,

I hit the button. So once you get it done, you go on your device, you log in to your primary account as your iCloud and that legacy account as your media account. And then if you go into the account details, it shows you a button that says migrate my purchases, something like that. So I did everything, got the button. I'm like, oh, this is easy. Got it.

Hit the migrate button spins and spins and spins. And then it says, okay, give me the password for your new account. Give me the password for your old account spins and spins and spins. You don't qualify. When, when, when are both of your accounts don't qualify? No further detail, you know, Apple at its worst, you know, when they do that thing where he said, sorry, this didn't work. We're not going to really tell you why. And I'm like, damn, you know, I don't know what it was. Right. So I, I ran it a couple of times and,

And it didn't work. And like the fourth time I ran it, the, the migrate accounts button disappeared. Like, yeah. And I, you know, and I probably would have let it go right at that point to say, well, this wasn't for me. You know how sometimes you get a feeling when you're on the edge with one of these Apple things, you're like,

I think my number might come up today, you know, right. Yeah. You just kind of feel it in your bones. Well, I did that day and I went forward anyway. So I said, well, you know, I'm doing the thing for the labs. I want to like explain more. So I called Apple support and I went to the text message and went through kind of level one and go to level two. And like, I'm going through the support levels. And at one point somebody says, well, I think your primary account needs to be off of family sharing too.

And I'm like, well, but my primary account is the founder of the family. If I leave, the whole thing blows apart. He's like, well, I think that's what you have to do to make this work. I feel like Apple support wasn't really, you know, nobody really knew what was going on, you know? I don't really blame the guy, you know? It's just whatever. So I do that. So now there's a real cost because my whole family is

Doesn't have family share anymore, which has consequences I'll explain in a minute. But that doesn't do it either. In fact, that little migration button just never comes back. And then at some point, the guy says, well, you had iCloud Plus,

So, or no, yeah. I, what is it? Uh, Apple plus. Oh, he says, well, that's it. Apple plus. If you have Apple plus, you can't do it. And I'm like, well, that seems crazy. I'm paying extra for something. And that prohibits me from getting my purchases transferred. Yeah. You know, and, um, actually wrote somebody at Apple because I didn't want to like write a big blog post. And, you know, I mean, I felt like, you know, let me give them a chance. And, and he says, no, it's not really the way it works. I, if they share, uh,

space with a Apple Plus account. It doesn't work, which I'm not even sure I understand what that means, but I definitely did share space. I mean, you buy the extra space, so everybody has room for all their photos, but I think that was what screwed me, but I never really got clarification on it, and it never got resolved, but

At some point, I'm just like, this really wasn't worth it. For a couple old Star Wars movies and Barbie Princess, I really wish I hadn't gone down this rabbit hole. So I put the family sharing back together, but now none of that's working right. My wife has all her music, but my daughter lost all her playlists. No idea why.

She we're sitting down tonight to look at it together and I'm going to get those, you know, adult child judgment eyes that you get. Some people who are listening, know what I'm talking about.

I have two iPads and on one of them, my iCloud account just refuses to connect. I don't know why. It just doesn't connect. And I tried hard resetting it, didn't fix it. I tried erasing all content and it doesn't successfully erase. I think I have to go in and like wire the iPad to a Mac and like restore the operating. So I don't know what's going on, but one of my iPads is just

not coming back and it's not gonna it works fine but it has no iCloud connection so all my cloud stuff is gone I mean the whole thing is just turned into a big mess for me so buyer beware now now that being said I did make a video for the labs told everybody what happened and several people wrote and said well I use iCloud plus and it worked fine for me you know and it's like

I just feel like it was one of those things where, you know, my number was up. I stuck my head out of the foxhole at the wrong moment or whatever. And that was it, you know? Oh, man. I'm sorry. That's terrible. Yeah. It kind of comes with living on the edge. So I'm not even really that upset with Apple over it. I feel like.

This was kind of crazy that they pulled this thing off, but I don't think it's a universal thing. And I think they'll probably, I think we'll hear from plenty of listeners that had similar difficulties getting it. And my, my honestly, maybe I've got Stockholm syndrome here, but my biggest problem was I went that step further to blow the family sharing apart. I should have just stopped when it didn't work. Yeah. But I just, I just wanted to get to the bottom of it, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

That's really unfortunate. Yeah, I am not going to pursue this. I mean, I just went through the process that you did years ago. Now I had a lot more content purchased because I've been using that purchase, that legacy for purchasing until about a month ago. But I brought legacy Steven into the iCloud family recently.

That the sharing stuff didn't work instantly. It works now, but even now on my Mac, if I try to update an app like half the time, it wants me to sign into that other app. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Like it's shared. You should just be able to see it. And, you know, there's still some, some rough edges there, but I'm not going near this with a 10 foot pole. Like,

Legacy Steven is in the family. He's just hanging out with my other kids and I'm just using the sharing of purchases. And from now on purchasing things on my new, you know, my primary account and that's good enough for me. I don't think I don't first, the only thing I could foresee is,

pushing me towards this is that now my iCloud family is full. I've now reached the limit of the number of people you can have in there. And we're not having any more kids, but like if I wanted to bring one of my parents on or something, I would need to jettison legacy Steven. And then maybe I would look at this, but even then I think I'd be more likely just to like,

Send my parents some credit for their Apple account to pay for iCloud space or something, you know? Yeah. I think it's, yeah, this is fraught with peril. Yeah. I mean, I'm looking at my iPad right now and I'm on the iCloud screen and it's just like, it's got a spinning wheel that will just spin for hours. Gosh.

And even like I tried like erase all content and settings, and it won't. It just hangs up. It's like there's something going on with my iCloud account where it's like got one foot in the door and one foot out the door. Yep, because that process requires your iCloud to be authenticated to turn off Find My.

And so if it's like in some sort of middle state, you probably can't erase it. You may have to like plug it into a Mac and restore it with configurator, like in the, yeah, that whole song and dance. That's going to be next. But first I've got to pray to God that I can get my daughter's Apple music playlist back. Yeah.

I haven't even like told her exactly what happened. I said, Oh, there was something weird with, uh, with family. So I've got to like, you know, we've got to rebuild. I didn't tell her that I like intentionally blew it apart because I, I can't handle that judgment. If any of you are friends with my daughter, please don't turn me in. I can't, I can't deal with it. Cone of secrecy. Well, she does have friends that listen. So now I've, now I have put myself at your mercy. So please. That's right. Uh, but the, but yeah, it wasn't good. And, uh,

I guess my advice would be if you want to try it, do everything, push the button. If it doesn't work on the first time, then step away. I think that's, I think that's fair.

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Justin sent in a link about AppleCare+. They are moving to subscriptions with it. I mean, they've always had the ability to pay monthly or yearly, but there was also originally a thing where you could pay a little less and get like two or three years to pay on the device. And that's no longer a thing. Now you just get it. You subscribe to AppleCare+.

Do you feel strongly about that? I mean, I think it's interesting because for years you just bought it and you got like two years or three years or whatever it was. They introduced this subscription thing a few years ago when we had our AppleCare episode. Like, shoot, it's probably been a year and a half now, two years. You know, we talked about this. I'm not shocked by it. And honestly, and I'm going to say something that may be a little...

a little spicy other than the price increase, which we're going to talk about in a second, because it's a little more expensive in the U S now, I think really, this is actually a better model for something like Apple care plus. And I've got kind of two points here. First of all, for people like me and you, and probably some of our listeners, uh,

I never keep a phone for three years, right? Like, in fact, most of my phones are, I keep for a year. And then if I give it to a family member on the rare occasion that I sell it outright, which happens, you know, every three or four years, I look around, no one needs a phone. Okay, I'll just sell this one off. I've paid for AppleCare that is now no longer mine, right? It goes with the device. And so if you take the, you know, whatever it was, $149 or whatever it was,

And it split in half. It's like, okay, like that money's gone now. So for someone like me, who I tend to go through my devices a little bit faster, at least on the phone side of things, I'm only paying for the time that it's mine or it's in my household. And if I give it to my brother-in-law or somebody like that, it's up to him if he wants to carry that forward.

Uh, but it is also beneficial, I think, to people who keep devices longer than the two years or the three years. Um,

A lot of people do that on the Mac in particular. And I still, to this day, don't have a good answer for how long can you pay for AppleCare Plus for? You know, we asked the audience that. I asked people at Apple that. And the closest thing I got to an answer was no one really knows the upper limit. I was like, okay. So if you keep a machine for four years, right, then you could keep it under AppleCare the whole time. So I honestly think that

The subscription model makes a lot of sense for a product like this. Now it's in the news because they got rid of the other option. I'm not a fan of that. I think you should give people the option, especially on something like a phone. And it is 50 cents more for all models in the U S but that makes it 10 49 a month for the iPhone 16 up from nine 99 a month. Um,

And it includes both the regular plan and the theft and loss plan. So if you lose a phone or it's stolen, you've got protection against that. So yeah, it's a bummer that it's 50 cents more a month. But I think overall, I think a subscription like this makes sense for a lot of people. Yeah, agreed. But it's also just a sign of the times. Apple is into subscription model. I mean, that's a thing. I mean...

I worry about it sometimes because we always knew them as a hardware company. We became avid fans when they just sold great hardware and they weren't looking for so much per month out of us. But then you look at their quarterly returns and a huge percentage of their income is services. Yep. And that's where AppleCare shows up as far as I know is the services industry.

So they're going to be twisting those dials as much as they can. That's right. And it makes me sad, but it's also just kind of, and I don't really feel like they're really putting the screws to us. I mean, it's just, no, that's what they're going to do now. Yeah. Hey, a live update. You know, if you plug your iPad into your Mac and hit restore iPad, it still wants you to turn off. Find my, Oh no. Maybe you've got to put the iPad in DFU mode, which I think bypasses that.

Yeah. I'm going to have to like go deep on this. I like that you're doing this in the background as we record. That's no, no longer. I thought if I just push one button and let it go, it'd be cool. But now, now it's like gone to the next level. I'm, uh, I'm opening next week's outline, uh, which we have a guest for and I'm putting in housekeeping, uh, what happened to David's iPad slash iCloud account.

Maybe I'll report that it flew brilliantly through my window. So I thought this would be a good time to check in on what we have AppleCare on. What about you?

I have drifted away from AppleCare. One time my insurance lady told me that they love covering lawyers because we buy the most insurance, you know, because we always see things going wrong. But on Apple stuff, I have really kind of gotten away from it. Historically, I would always buy the AppleCare. But when I got the Mac Studio, I didn't because I felt like it's, you know, it's going to be sitting on one desk all the time.

I lift it actually an inch off the desk. So if I spilled water, that's never going to get into it. And it's like, you know, with a desktop Mac, it's not really getting the stress of a computer that gets like folded up and stuck in a bag and carried around every day. So I just feel like with the desktops, I'm not sure it's necessary. Sure. And so I don't get it for that. And the same thing with the iPads, you know, um,

They seem to last forever. I've never had one break on me. And I'm pretty careful with them. I don't drop them and stuff. So I just don't feel like getting it. But I do get it on the phone because the phone does get thrown around a lot. And so the only device I have it on is currently the phone. But historically, that wasn't the case. I used to get a lot of AppleCare.

Uh, so for me, uh, I'm paying, yes, I have it on my iPhone. I'm paying a monthly because this phone will go somewhere else in the fall. Um, I was paying for it on my iPad mini, but actually in prepping for this, I was like, I had the same thought process you did. It was like,

I'm careful with my iPad. It rarely leaves the house. Like most of the time it lives its life on my nightstand. Like I read in bed or something on it. Uh, so I actually dropped it on my iPad. Um, and I do have it on my 14 inch MacBook pro that I bought at the end of the year. Um, and I paid the whole thing in advance. So I have coverage until December, 2027, um,

And, uh, you know, like you, like my calculus is actually pretty similar to yours. It was like, this is a laptop, even though it's mostly on the desk, I do take it out into the world sometimes. And it was a really expensive computer. Like I got basically a loaded 14 inch MacBook pro. So, you know what? Uh,

compared to what I've just spent the AppleCare for three years and not that much more. And so I did it there. And yeah, you know, people have all sorts of different opinions about this, people all over the place. And I got friends who always get it, friends who never get it. And it's just kind of a personal decision. But for me, I think it makes the most sense on the phone, particularly the

theft and loss plan. So if you're, you know, if you travel or something like that, you know, if your phone gets left behind a cab or stolen out of your bag or something, you've got, you've got that protection. I didn't mention, I own a MacBook Air. It's like my kind of my laptop, but it's like the lowest spec MacBook.

of a MacBook Air, I don't expect that it's going to fail on me. And I guess if it, if I, if it got run over by a truck, I would just go buy a new one. I, I didn't put Apple care on that, but if I were to do like you and go like the full loaded MacBook pro, I would buy Apple care. So you and I have very similar preferences. Yeah. It turns out.

Okay. Apple watch backups. This was a really interesting note from listener Steve who wrote in, I know that when you unpair an Apple watch with an iPhone, it creates a backup of the watch in like in the iPhone app. But what about at other times? The only time people typically unpair an Apple watch is when you're about to upgrade and

But is there any kind of regular automatic backup of the Apple Watch? Is there a way to mainly trigger a backup without full-blown unpairing and repairing?

This is a great question because if you say hypothetically, totally made up story, you're sliding down a waterfall with your niece on a family vacation and you bang your arm into a rock and you shatter your Apple Watch. Yeah. Or you, again, hypothetically are on a bike ride and you have an accident and you smash your Apple Watch.

Or you're at the gym and you take a shower and you drop your Apple watch out of your locker and break it on the tile floor. Again, all hypotheticals. They're not specific to me in any way. Then what happens, right? Because like, is your watch getting backed up? So again,

I learned about this because I was under the impression that Steve was, that it only got backed up at these certain times. And I think to be fair, that's how it used to be. But at some point that changed. And so now your Apple watch data, so the apps on it, your watch faces, which are the thing that really bothers me, like rebuilding a watch face is so fiddly, all that data is

uh, is backed up to the iPhone that it's paired with automatically. So you don't, you don't need to do anything to keep your watch backed up. It's kind of automatically getting backed up to your phone. And when your phone backs up either to iCloud or if you plug it in and, you know, back up to Finder or iTunes or whatever, your iPhone backup inside of it includes your Apple watch backup. Right.

So worst case scenario, you lose or have to replace your watch and your phone, but your phone is backed up to iCloud. You have your watch backup as well. This is fantastic. I think this is honestly about as good of a system as I would want from Apple. I have just realized something, Stephen. I know you're updating your website.

Yeah. You need five, 12 pixels. Is it net? It's net, right? It is net. Five, 12 pixels, five, 12 pixels.net slash obituaries. And I want you to like make a page and like list every Apple device that you've broken and write it up with your journalism skills. Like a fun story of the death of every Apple device you've owned.

Okay. I'm putting this in my app. I want you to do it. I want you to do that. Yeah, I think it'd be awesome. And it would be so funny. And Apple would read it and they'd be like, we got to start sending this guy stuff to test. Because clearly, you know, they have the room that sprays the water hose at the phone and stuff, but they don't send one to hack it. They got to send one to hack it. Yeah. Okay. I've made a task for myself.

All right. That's really good. So yeah, Steve, no, no, no need to worry. It's all, it's all happening. It's funny. I never even thought of this, right? You know, every time I get a new watch, I just go from the back of the old one, but I never even stopped to think like, when is this happening? I assumed it was more frequent. Like, you know, I thought that it was happening more than when you just unpair it, but, but Steve knew.

Yeah. He's new. He didn't. If only there was an Apple support article we could link that tells you all of this stuff. It'll be in the, it'll be in the show notes. This episode of the Mac power users is brought to you by Google Gemini.

Supercharge your creativity and productivity at gemini.google.com. I've been using Gemini lately, and one of the most impressive things is just talking to it. You go live with it, and then it's just like you're having a conversation. You can talk about your day or have it explain something to you or start brainstorming ideas.

I'll give you an example. I pretended I had a job interview coming up and asked it to help me prep for the interview. It immediately started asking common questions I might get asked. Then I started talking through my answers out loud, and it would give me feedback, and it all happened in real time. And I'm talking to a career coach.

And that's what I tried, but you can talk to Google Gemini about anything. And that's the magic of it, how you can have this back and forth and it's all seamless. If you haven't tried it yet, it's definitely worth checking out. Go to Gemini. Google.com and see for yourself. And our thanks to Google Gemini for their support of the Mac power users and all of relay. We did show notifications a month or so ago, and we got a lot of feedback on that. We did. Um,

Just a little inside baseball. I am really bad at predicting what shows will generate feedback. Like sometimes I think, oh gosh, we're going to so much about this. And then it's like one or two. And then something, uh, what I think will be relatively simple. We get a lot of feedback. I figured we get notification feedback because it's such a complicated system.

And I included this one just honestly because it made me feel good and I enjoyed it. So John wrote in, thank you so much for talking about scheduled notification summaries. I had no idea this feature even existed and apparently it has for almost three years.

It's such a fantastic way to catch up on non-urgent things at the end of my day. It's almost, this is the part I love. It's almost like a personally curated feed with stuff that's relevant for me. Fantastic feature. And I'm not sure why it's more popular. Yeah. I didn't think about that. Like a social media feed of your notifications. Yeah. Get your TikTok urges out reading your notifications at 5 p.m.

No, I think that's great. And, you know, like I said, I use it very heavily on my phone. I wish that the Mac had it. The Mac does not. Because I've got some notifications on my Mac that like, I don't necessarily need these in my face when they go off.

But then the downside of the Mac is like we talked about notification center is so useless on the Mac. It's like those things just pile up. I got to open mine. It's, it's terrible in here. Like there's a lot of stuff in here that is, you know, days and days old. So it's not a good place on the Mac for things to kind of queue and notification. Uh, the scheduled notification summaries could, could be that, but it's not on the Mac.

We had a family friend over a few weeks ago, and she's sitting on our couch, and her phone keeps beeping. You're hearing all these notifications come in. And I said, hey, do you...

do you need all those notifications? And she's like, I'm so sorry. You know? And, and it's like, rarely do I tell people to go like listen or watch something I've made. That just feels like weird. Right. Yeah. Well, if you just listen to my podcast, you know, but I actually gave her a link to the show and she wrote back and said, she's, she's, she's much better now, but I do feel like that's a good sharing episode. Like if there's someone in your family who's like struggling with notifications, send them to that episode and hopefully they'll,

That'll get it done. Although I think a lot of our non-nerd friends, you've just got to grab their phone from them and just take it into your own hands. I think so too. I think so too.

Over on the forums, Andy wrote, I might be completely missing something, but as someone who primarily works from home, I have my three core devices always in front of me throughout the day, iPhone, Mac, and iPad. I find myself getting frustrated due to the lack of notifications syncing across those devices. I'll get an iMessage and it will ping all of my devices. I'll read the message on my Mac, but it still shows us a new message on my other devices and vice versa. Is there a way to ensure notifications and their state are synced so

So that if I read a message on my Mac, it will appear as a new notification. It won't appear as a new notification on my phone, et cetera. Yeah, this is sort of, sort of. So best I can tell Apple tries, you know, the system tries to understand what device is active at the moment and,

But it's not bulletproof. Like I'll give you the example that bothers me because I'm in the same boat Andy is right now. My Mac, my phone is on my desk. I'm wearing a watch and a Slack notification will come into the Mac and

And basically instantly it's, you know, trying to go off of my phone and my watch before I just turn Slack off on my watch. It's like, no, I'm at my Mac. Just like, give me a second to get to it. Now Slack may be a bad example because it has its own like subsystem of notification settings. Like we talked about on the show, but generally I do think Apple could do a better job of that presence awareness, but also just, you know, optionally like, um,

I want all of, you know, I want my devices to act differently from each other. That's something we talked about on the show. Like the Mac is wide open. The phone is less, the watch is even less. But, uh, so I personally don't want to sync like top level notification settings. Maybe some people do, but,

But the read, you know, read, unread state and like the the bad sticking around the message, like lots of edge cases where it is frustrating. And I agree with Andy, like it can be it can be kind of tiring. I feel like there's an opportunity for Apple there. Like if you are actively like Andy situation, you've got your phone, your iPad and your Mac on your desk and you're working actively on your Mac.

A notification comes in and they know which device you're on at that moment because you're typing or you're mousing or doing something. Why not just deliver the notification on the Mac and deliver it marked as red on the other devices? Yeah. I feel like that's actually within Apple's stack. They could do that.

Uh, maybe it's on their list. I don't know, but that, that like the messages is a good example, right? Because we talked to that show about, you know, pick your messages, your notification hierarchy and say, well, I'm only going to get them on my watch or my phone or whatever. But sometimes the, the currently used device should play a role in that. And, and it doesn't. So Tim, you know, get off the treadmill, call somebody.

do that. Yeah. It's, uh, I mean, we talked about it a lot. It is complicated. Um, but having have like, there's so much built into these systems to like, like handoff, right. And a good example, right? Like you have an app open on your phone, it shows up in your dock. If it's on the Mac, all that stuff, like a lot of the plumbing is there for more of this.

I would basically, if I'm at my Mac, my phone should never send me a notification if that app is allowed to send both places. There just needs to be more logic behind the scenes on that. Yeah, and they do have awareness because you can move the keyboard and the mouse to different devices. I feel like this is probably within reach.

And you're right. It wouldn't be just notifications for messages and be like, well, he's on this device. So silence all the other ones, but it'd be more than silence. It go. What you don't want to do is then pick up your phone and get all those notifications all over again. They need to be silenced and, and killed on the device. Yeah, it could be better.

Yeah, agreed. Agreed. But we did get a lot of positive feedback in the episode. And I feel like a lot of listeners did take our advice and spend a little time getting notifications wrangled and

And guess what? That was several weeks ago. I bet you got some new weeds in your garden since then. So keep up with it, gang. I'm doing the same. I had that feeling just this morning. I installed a new app on my phone. And of course, it's like, hey, you want notifications? It's like, nope. No, I don't. I don't need them for this. I can come over to you if I need it. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, we need to talk about what's going on with Amazon and changes with the Kindle. Last week, we had Michael on and we were talking about some use cases for Kindle books for him that I think are going to come to a screeching halt. Well, he was talking about how he likes to take, you know, when he builds his chat GPT engines, he'll throw a whole book at it.

And he was very clear, you know, these are books he's paid for, you know, and I'm not endorsing anything illegal here. I don't, you know, I don't, if somebody is downloading torrents of books, whether you're a single person or a multinational corporation, that's not good. But, but when you do buy a book and I have bought many from Amazon, they have historically had the ability for you to download the book, the, the file. So you've got it. And there's a lot of reasons people do this. Like, um,

Sometimes they change the books. They change the contents of the books later and you want the original version you bought. Or like Amazon did that Wheel of Time series on their television channel. And those are like some famous books. People are really into them. And they had these classic covers on them. And people kind of get...

personal about that. I read this book. It had this cover when I was a kid. I bought the e-book. It's still got the same cover. Well, when they made the TV show, they took the cover off, the classic cover, and replaced it with the TV show advertisement. There's just stuff like that happening all the time, and people don't like that. There's a lot of reasons people download books, including, like Michael explained, to be able to use the text to train an AI to do something for him. There's a lot of good reasons for it.

And another one, frankly, is you still want to be locked into a platform just because I buy this from Amazon. What if I don't want to use a Kindle in a couple of years? And so what they announced was on February 26th, which is not very long after this show airs,

They're taking away the ability to download the book. I mean, and the way they do it is you go on the website and you go to your content and you have to download each one individually. You can't even like say, download all my books. You have to download each one. So it's like, you know, they do make it kind of, they add friction, I think to the process. And I mean, from the outside, it doesn't seem to me like they're doing this because it would cost them a bunch of money to keep that feature. I think they're doing it because my opinion is,

I think they're doing it because they don't want you to download the books anymore. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And they want you to kind of be tied to the Kindle. Like if you buy it and you want to read it, great. Get another Kindle or get the Kindle app. But stay in our ecosystem. Yeah. I think this was already true, but it's definitely more true after February 26th when this change takes place.

Out of all consumer technology, the Kindle might be the most vertically integrated. Like you can buy an iPhone and you're in the app store, right? But you can use like Google for all of your services, right? Like you're not locked into iCloud and you can swap out iMessage for something else, right? Like a lot of people do in non-American countries.

But the Kindle, like you're buying an ebook from Amazon, from the Kindle store, either on the web or on the Kindle itself. And you read it on your Kindle and you archive it on your Kindle. And like there's a Kindle app elsewhere, like on the phone, the iPad. But it is the hardware and software is very tightly linked. And downloading ebooks was the one sort of release valve for this. Yeah.

You could download them to back them up. You could download them if you wanted to, to take the DRM off and do various things with them. Put them on another reader, right? Just have them in Apple Books or on a Kobo or something else. And shutting the door to this, I think...

I think the vast majority of Kindle users would never notice because it's never crossed their mind that you could take a Kindle book and take it somewhere else. But those people who did do that or care about the optionality of that, it stinks to have that door slam closed. And I think it's honestly, I think it's kind of a bad look because I can't I mean, Amazon knows, but I can't imagine many people actually doing this.

And, you know, maybe they would say it's about piracy or something else. And like, I fully believe that writers should be paid. But if you're downloading it to back it up or you're buying from Amazon to read on a Kobo, like who cares? It's kind of gross. Yeah. And so the Internet has reacted and people who care about this are madly scrambling to get all their stuff downloaded.

Uh, my advice is you've got a few days. If you have a lot of, um, Kindle books, download them anyway. You never know. Right. Even if you love Kindle, maybe there'll be a day in the future where you want to get those books on some other platform. And, um, yeah, if you don't download them now, I'm not sure you'll be able to in the future. So yeah. Public tours. That's why I put it up. I put a blog post up on it and we actually, I write my blog posts.

pretty far in advance and they get, you know, edited and kind of listed. They go out over the course of a week and I'm like, hold the presses. This one's going out, you know, because I felt like, um, you know, people need time to do this, especially if a lot of books, like I had like 200 books in there. Yeah. I've got a ton of books. I mean, I, I've been in the Kindle ecosystem for a really long time. Like, yeah, I got, I got the first one with that terrible keyboard. Oh man. Yeah.

I'm glad they got out of that phase, you know, but I've got a paper white and I really like it. Like it's great. Um, I had an Oasis, which was the last one with page turn buttons and I left it on the airplane. And to this day, it hurts me because it was a pretty expensive Kindle, but, uh, I am in this ecosystem and yeah, I'm, uh, I'm disappointed in this. And,

If you are looking at other things, like maybe you're kind of in the e-book world, definitely go check out Jason Snell's post over on Six Colors. He has written a lot about Kobo and other e-ink products and other e-book ecosystems. You can go search through his archives. There's a lot of stuff there. Yeah. I can tell you, I am...

This is like the push I needed. Like I am getting all my stuff off Kindle and I don't know what I'm going to do. Like maybe I'll stay with Kindle, but I mean, it's, I don't want to buy from them going forward because of this. I do like the idea of portability and I understand if Amazon was here, they'd be saying, well, Hey, you're not buying the book. You're buying a license to use the book on our platform.

And that's, I guess, an argument. But it's like it costs just as much to buy the book. It's not like it's discounted. Kindle books cost a good amount of money. So I don't know. I would like to buy books that can be more portable if I decide to move. So I think I'm going to start buying digital books from Kobo.

I have been buying more physical books anyway, but there's a lot of books I read that I don't want as physical books. I only have so much room for books. And the other thing is I've had glaucoma since in my 20s. I've managed it well, but I feel like at some point my eyes are going to get a lot worse.

And I want the ability to bump the font up when I need to. And so I don't know, there's, there's, there's reasons why I want digital books, but I don't want to be that locked in. So I'm actually looking to maybe make a move. Like I might buy a Kobo. I, I, I texted Jason about it for, and you know, he says, this isn't a great time to pick. And, and,

We're going to have Matt Gemmel back on the show, and he's a big fan of Supernote, which is more of an e-ink device for taking notes, but also reading books. There's a bunch of options, and I'm now kind of looking at the field. I guess another option for me is to just not do e-books anymore and just buy books, but I don't have that much room for them. A lot of books I read aren't worthy of taking up space in the house for the rest of my life.

Like a lot of these self-help books, you know, they're good for a read and you move on. Yeah. But anyway, there's a whole thing going on. And the action item here for you is download all your Amazon Kindle books. Yeah, that's probably true. You don't have to do anything with it if you don't want to, but just download them and keep them. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just going to have an archive, I think. Yeah.

You know, I do think if you're going to do something other than a Kindle, I do think the Kobo ecosystem, pretty good. They have their own bookstore. That's really pretty comprehensive. Like I looked at a Kobo Sage a couple of years ago. I ended up never writing about it. It was kind of one of those, like, I'm going to get around to this. And I never did. But I was kind of hard pressed to find something that wasn't, you know, anything mainstream that wasn't in their,

Now, if you're reading a lot of like really indie stuff, people in like the Kindle, the Kindle has like a publishing program for like small writers without agencies and stuff. If you're reading a lot of that stuff, you may be in trouble. But the other thing I'll add to that is if you're reading a lot of like really independent writers, sometimes you can find e-books online.

like e-pubs on their websites or, uh, or online elsewhere through, you know, there's a couple other bookstores and then you could get that e-pub on, on a Kobo really easily actually. And so it is a little more work, but the hardware is great. And again, like I've got Jason's, uh, e-reader archive linked in the show notes for people to go check out. He's covered a lot of them over the years.

Yeah. And with small independent writers, if you can buy it from them directly, they get more money. So that's another reason. Like whenever I get like an indie thing, I always go and buy it from them directly. And usually they'll give it to you DRM free. You know, I mean all the, you know, like I've got a book in my productivity field guide is DRM free. I'm not going to like, if people pay me for this, I'm not going to like make it hard for them to read it on different devices. Sure. Yeah.

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Oh boy. Oh boy. Here we go. So I got, I'm just scrolling through our text message history. Sometimes I get texts from you that are surprising. A lot of times texts from you are like this like beautiful bookshelf you're building or something like that. But you, you shot me a text and you were like, I'm thinking about a car. What's going on?

Yeah. Okay. So I feel like I'm on the witness stand again. Yep. A little bit. So Daisy and I, when my youngest daughter got her license, we gave her our car. And then, so we only had one car at that point. And that was eight, nine years ago. In the meantime, the car that we shared died and we got a new car. And now that car is two or three years old.

But my wife and I have shared a car now for a very long time and she goes to work every day. I work from home. It was generally working out, but now things are getting much harder. Both of our kids have like full-time jobs. They're not here as much. And you know, when I need to do things, it's very difficult. And her commitment at work is much longer now. So it's just often I was getting more and more times where I would get a lift or something and,

And, you know, Lyft is great, except when you get a driver that has a death wish and or they just decide to not show up or whatever. And I just I just got to the point where I can know what I need a car. And so that was that was kind of a decision we made a few months ago. And I started looking into it. And part of me is just kind of cheap. And I'm like, get a car. Then I got to, like, pay for the tires and the oil changes and all that stuff again. And.

But I do need a car. So my initial plan was to get a, like a beater Toyota something or other. I was thinking like a RAV4, you know, and my daughter has a RAV4. It's a great car. And I thought I'd get a used one. And that would be that. Yeah. The RAV4 is a great choice. It's actually surpassed the F-150 recently as the best selling car in America. According to a link, my dad sent me not fact checked. So take it with a grain of salt. Yeah.

But you stayed in the SUV world, but you went with something a little more electrifying. Yeah. Well, my wife says, well, why don't you get something bigger? And she's like, you go to the lumberyard all the time. And I rent the trucks from Home Depot because it's not that expensive. You go to the lumber. I don't buy my lumber from Home Depot. I'm not an animal. But when I go to the good lumberyard,

I get, I usually rent a truck because the stuff I buy doesn't fit in a car. You know, she's like, well, you know, and then also, you know, the kids are older. Now they have boyfriends when we want to go somewhere. We always got to take a fleet of cars to go there. Why don't you look into something bigger where we can like, you know, you can do all that stuff, you know, you know, all the stuff we do with the big car. And we had a family member that had a big car that we would always borrow, you

And they moved. So like, you know, she's like, what about something bigger? And so I started looking around and, and I stumbled into Rivian. Yeah. Yes, you did. Yeah.

ah rivian well my they're such nice cars and um and i was talking to a bunch of friends who were like total enablers because i have some friends that that drive them and they're like ah it's the best car ever and uh yeah you know and they've got a smaller one they're gonna release in a year or two and i'm like well maybe i'll just wait for that they're like no you need the big one talk to leona lehua you know occasional guests on the show she's like get the big one

And I started looking into it and I can't afford a rear view. They're expensive cars. But their lease deals are pretty aggressive right now. Like, I don't know, maybe they've got extra ones or something, but you can lease one for a pretty reasonable price. But the whole lease thing goes against my entire being. Like I'm nearly 60. I've never leased a car in my life. Right. I always buy cars. You pay them. And then when you're done, you own them. And that just seemed to me like the easy way to go.

But, you know, when you want something, how you can justify it, well, at least a Rivian. Yeah. No, that's – congratulations, first of all. I figured when you and I started talking about this, I didn't think you were going to go Rivian, but I was a little surprised you were considering –

uh, a gas vehicle, given that, that you already have an EV in the house. And, um, you know, maybe on the show, but definitely offline, we've talked about like how great it is not, you know, not to go to a gas station. Like you just don't think about it. Um, and so I wasn't, you know, I was thinking, well, if he goes electric, you know, there's like that Volkswagen, the ID four, and there's a bunch of Kias and like, which you already have a Kia. Um,

But yeah, the Rivian is really nice. I love the R1S. I love the way it looks. I have not driven a Rivian. I've driven lots of other things. I've driven several Teslas, different models. I've never driven a Rivian and I've never leased anything either, which is, you know, it's not something that I've, I've come across. But when I, when I think about Rivian, I think about Apple, like they, the companies kind of seem sort of similar, right?

In a way, like I, you know, I don't know much about him personally. So like whatever, but what I've seen the Rivian CEO, I really like, he seems super smart. Like they have their aesthetic and their, and their like the outdoorsy ness, which I think both you and I are both attracted to, like they've got that dialed in. Um, it seems very like if someone's really into like Apple stuff, being really into Rivian makes a lot of sense to me.

Yeah. It is very much the Apple experience. Like when you buy it or lease it, I've never had it go so easy. Like they totally manage everything for you. And like, I had one question about the contract and they fixed it in 30 minutes. And like, I just never had people be so responsive. Yeah. That's great. And it was great. And when you pick it up, uh, Daisy and I went to pick it up together and you know, a little inside baseball, they're an orange County company. They're

Their headquarters isn't far from my house. And like, I kind of liked the idea of supporting that, you know, I mean, local California company, they're trying to make a go of it.

Um, they're not, you know, entirely out of the woods yet, but they, you know, they have made some big deals with Volkswagen and they've got a, you know, they seem to be doing well now, but you know, it's not like starting a car company is a guarantee to success, which is one of the reasons, frankly, I leased it. I mean, I guess, let me just talk about the lease for a second. I just need to justify it because I feel guilty about this whole thing to tell you the truth.

I, at first I was like, do I even say it on a show? It seems like, Oh, look at me, fancy Rivian, man. I drug you into this a little bit. I'll, I'll take some credit for that. But you know, it's like electronic cars, they lose their value very fast. I mean, we bought the Kia and it's almost paid off and I don't begrudge that the value has gone down cause we're going to drive it into the, into the ground, you know? And that's fine.

But if you plan on like selling it, because the electronic cars are, the electric cars are, they're evolving so fast. Like the internal combustion engine isn't changing much anymore. But like where, you know, now you get a maximum 400 mile range, maybe in three years, there's a 600 mile range. You just don't know what, how it's going to change. And that changes the value of the vehicle. So I thought, well, I'll let Rivian take that. You know, if I lease it and it really drops value, then I'll just give it back to them.

But I haven't given up on the idea of buying this car somehow. Like in my head, I hope Ravine's not listening, but if the values drop that much in three years, maybe I can make like a deal and just pay it off, you know? Maybe. So that was part of it. And part of it was, well, it's not a hundred percent guaranteed. This company is going to be there in three years. So that's the thing too. Right. But either way I rented it. I mean, I leased it and we go to pick it up and they like walk us through the whole operating system. And like,

your phone is your key. Yeah. They don't give you a car key. You just walk up to the car and it pairs with the app and it unlocks and you get in. I mean, everything is so seamless.

But we also got Daisy all like up to speed on how it works because one of the weird things is it doesn't have CarPlay. It's got its own infotainment system. So there's just a lot about it that, you know, sounds anti-Apple because they don't do it, but it also sounds like the most Apple thing in the world that they're like, no, we want to control the whole experience. Yeah. So the CarPlay thing would be, it would be hard for me to overcome that. You know, there's a lot of market research that Apple loves to quote about, you know, whatever it is, 90 something percent of, uh,

U.S. car buyers at least say that CarPlay, which is really CarPlay and or Android Auto, are on their must-have list. And like for me, my red Tacoma, rest in peace, you know, I retrofitted with CarPlay. My current Tacoma has CarPlay in it. Like I, you know, our van has CarPlay in it. Like I...

I would really struggle to let go of that. You know, maybe it's a little bit different since y'all have shared a car and like you haven't had something of your own in a long time. But, you know, I know this is like early impressions or whatever, but how is Rivian's stack? How is their software when it comes to the multimedia and the mapping and those sorts of things?

All right. Let me, let me put a pin in that. Cause I just want to talk a little bit about the car in general, because it's, it's amazing. I mean, like it is, it was a car that was designed by obsessive nerds. I'm, you know, I'm just convinced like every little detail of this car, as you go through it, like makes sense. Like somebody thought about it. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, I mean, an example that I, this is the thing that I get, like there's a, there's an SOS button in it. Like, you know, when you, when you, when you lease a car, I didn't realize this, you get free roadside. Like, so for the next three years, if I have a problem, there's a little button that says SOS and I press it and they'll come and change a tire, give me an emergency charge or whatever, whatever problem I have, they come rescue me, but you hit the SOS button. But yeah,

In the Rivian, it's up over your head. You know, like often those cars have those buttons kind of up near the rearview mirror. If you hit the SOS button...

It's a, it's a hinged button that drops down and there's another button underneath it. This is SOS. Ooh, like a fighter jet. Yes. I was thinking, sir, do you want to fire the missiles? You know, it's like, yes, I do hit the button and then hit the button again. Like, like stuff like that. There's like little touches in this cart everywhere like that. Like,

And it's in the software and it's in the hardware and it's in the overall design of the car. It's an SUV. It's kind of tall. When you put it in park, it lowers itself down as low as possible. It calls it Neil mode. So like my wife, who's a very attractive, stunning, short Filipino lady can get in and out of this car without trouble, you know? So,

So it's just like all that stuff. Just, I don't know. I just really appreciate the, all of the little touches, both software and hardware in this car. So overall, I love it. Like another example is the soundscape. It's all like natural sounds. Yeah. When you hit the blinker, it's like two wood sticks knocking together. Yeah.

You know, all this stuff is like when you at in the, during the day, when you lock it, it chirps like a bird, but at night it hoots like an owl. Oh, come on. That's I didn't, I didn't know that. That's so good. Daisy's like, I think we got an owl in the neighborhood. I'm like, no, it's my car. So it's just like stuff like that is, is really remarkable. Oh, you know, another like little touch. Cause like it used to always bug me.

When I would be at a stop sign and I'd hit the blinker and you, how you can see the reflection of your car in front of you. It used to always bug me how the blinker would be ticking, but the lights would not, the light blinker would be just going at a different pace. So they were not in sync. Yeah. And like, as a musician, I'd like always try to count a rhythm into it to like, at what point do they sink? But of course they're completely random. Um,

On a Rivian, you hit the blinker and you see the car. It's completely in sync with the noise. I mean, just like this is all crazy stuff that sounds nuts. But I like all of that stuff about this car. And, you know, the kids are both out of college. Daddy leased himself a fancy car. So there we go.

It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's an obsessively designed car. I will just say that out front now, infotainment system. Yes. Okay. So it's not CarPlay. It's a very more, the UI is much more subtle than CarPlay. Yeah.

And for the car stuff, it's really well done. Like, you know, they've got a screen that shows you, you know, your compass bearing and what battery energy you're using and like just all the details you need on it.

I think it's well done. The screen design is really good. They do monthly software updates. I've only had it a couple of weeks, but they've already done one software update where they improve something. And they're actually in that they're very kind of public about what they're doing. They did an interview with our pal Quinn recently.

where they talked about some future off software updates they want to do. So they're just like constantly adding features to the car via software update, which is, I've never had a car that did that. I mean, the Kia is an electric car. It does get an update like once or twice a year, but it's always just kind of bug fixes. They've never added new features that way. Um, so that's really cool. And I, I do like the look of it, but there are parts of it that aren't as good as CarPlay. Um,

You know, there's no integration with the Apple ecosystem. If I want to save a reminder, you know, there's not really a good way to do that. I really like in CarPlay the shared ETA mechanism. And I do that all the time when I'm driving somewhere to pick my wife up. I'll send her an ETA or meet a friend. And that's really, I think, kind of handy. And there's really no mechanism for that.

Um, it does have Apple music built in as a native app. So you can just connect your Apple music account. It does have audible. So like the two things I listened to most in the car or there does not have a podcast app, which is really weird. Right. Um,

Sharing from your phone is not hard. Your phone is one source. So if you're playing a podcast, it shows up there. Anything you're playing from your phone will come through just fine. And the phone sync is okay. The voice assistant they chose to use is Alexa, the Amazon voice assistant. And it's only a few weeks.

but it's, it's comically bad. I mean, we make fun of Siri so much here and this thing is terrible. It's just terrible. I can't get it to call anybody in my family. Like I'll say, call Daisy sparks and said, okay, calling David sparks. And I'll say, call Samantha sparks. Okay. Calling David sparks. I'm like, first of all, I'm David sparks. Why are you calling me? You know,

But Samantha sounds nothing like David. I don't even know. Like, same thing. Get directions home. I don't know what you're talking about. What's home? Even though I've saved home as a favorite. Like, it is just...

I really appreciate Siri more having used this. So it's pretty bad. So what I have to do is if I'm going to, I can't really change directions while I'm driving. If I want to go somewhere else, I have to pull over and fiddle it out, you know? Yeah. And that's no fun. So, and on their software roadmap is improved, uh,

artificial intelligence voice assistant, which my guess means is they're going to, they're going to dump Alexa and come up with their own thing. Yeah. But what they've got there now isn't great. So overall, I actually like the look of it and the stuff it does that's integrated with the car is very good. Oh, I meant, I forgot to mention the maps in general. It's very kind of refined. And I think the cartoonish look of Apple maps actually works better because the

it's easier to see when you're driving. Yeah. You know, like, like for traffic, it's a thin red line, whereas an Apple maps, it's a big thick red line and you just, you know, at a glance, you know, what's, what's going on. But it is integrated with the car, which kind of makes it nice in terms of a lot of things. So, you know, our friend Marco had a Rivian. And when I told him I was doing this, he says, you're going to need a, an adapter to put your phone, you know, up on the dashboard. It's like, you know, he's like,

And, um, and so now I'm like resisting that I haven't bought one. Um, I'm keeping the phone plugged in and it has a little magnetic thing to charge your phone, but I keep it plugged in cause that's what I do. And I keep it like on the, on the center console. And, um, and I just, I'm trying to just get by with their system, but I'm only two weeks in, I guess we should check back next feedback episode and see if I've caved or not.

Yeah. But the, uh, it's not as good as car play. It's better in some ways, but overall I do still miss car play a lot. Yeah. And to be fair, I have not had the experience of a good first party solution. Like all I do is drive Toyotas and Toyota's maps and navigation are

are true garbage. Like even the new one, really bad. Uh, the new system they have, um, they don't have, you know, older Toyota is like the ones we drive don't have Apple music built in. Again, I think the new ones do. So I have not had the experience of like a modern EV where the software is made by people who care about software because no one, uh,

And at most traditional automakers cares about software, right? Like that's one reason GM's move away from car play in their EV line is kind of laughable because it's one thing for Rivian or Tesla to do it and do a pretty good job. But like who would, you know, and GM even hired a guy from Apple to like try to make it happen and it's not working. And so it takes more than one guy. It does take more than one guy. It turns out.

Um, but with Rivian, like they've hired people who care about those things. And, uh, so I am glad that the experience is, is good. Um, I think like you, like having Apple music built in would be a huge win, you know, for me, the next thing would be podcast, but if the Bluetooth is good and syncs up and is reliable, like that's, that's probably good enough if the maps and stuff are good too.

Yeah, the map routing is fine. I mean, like I, so long as I put the destination before I leave, because I can't fiddle with it when I'm driving, then I'm fine. Right. But if I were in the middle of a trip to change destination on the phone, that's quite easy. You know, with Apple CarPlay, I mean, you can yell anything out and it generally finds it for you. Whereas with this, I don't feel comfortable doing that yet.

I think they need to replace that voice assistant. I think that's kind of the root of that problem. Yeah. And in terms of the way it renders the maps, it looks prettier, but I think it's not quite as user-friendly. Like another little thing, like it gives you directions on the dash console as well as on the big screen. And that's great, except it just says take a left in 0.2 miles. It doesn't say take a left in 0.2 miles on Main Street. And I'm like, well, you know that. How come that's not there?

So I started sending them feedback already about stuff like that. So I feel like there's some evolution that needs to happen with it, but I think I might be okay with it. You know, I think I can probably pull it off as I kind of figure it out. So it's not the same, but I understand what they're going for, but there's some, there's some features there that are missing and some implementation stuff. That's, that's not good, but yeah,

Yeah, I almost have more respect for Siri now that I've used Alexa in a car. Because I don't know if I'm doing it wrong or whatever. Maybe somebody will write in as a Rivian and say that they love it. But I cannot get that thing to do hardly anything right. I just I'm tempted to just turn it off because it's just so useless.

Honestly, I think a bad voice assistant is worse than no voice assistant, especially when you're driving. Like I want the thing to work. Rivian and Amazon, of course, have a lengthy partnership. So I don't know what the future of that holds. But I do have a couple of random questions for you, if you'll permit me. Sure. Yeah.

The Rivian doesn't, like a lot of EVs for some reason, doesn't have a glove box. Why? Like where do you put stuff? I don't get that either. It does have a lot of storage though. You've got like a thing under the driver's seat. The well under the armrest is massive. And then there's a drawer underneath that. And then there's storage underneath that. Yeah, because there's no engine and transmission tunnel. So you can put stuff down there.

Yeah. And you can 3d print stuff for those things to further kind of like, um, you know, so I don't really have a storage problem with the other thing it does is it doesn't have a spare tire, which like worried me. Right. I'm like, I've always had a car with a spare tire. If I, I know how to change a tire. Right. Yeah. And when I went to pick it up, I'm like, well, they said, well, you can buy a tire for it if you want. I'm thinking, well, I'm leasing this car. I don't want to buy a tire. And yeah.

And they said, but we have free roadside service. And I said, so you're telling me if I push the SOS button, somebody will show up with a tire. And they said, yes. And I said, okay, that's good enough for me. You know? And, and, and what that means is underneath the, the,

the back space of it, there's like a false bottom and there's this massive hole for a tire. And I have like completely loaded that with like my survival gear, my urban survival gear. So I'm ready for anything when I'm in that thing. And I guess you have the front trunk as well to put bigger things. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if you'd call it a truck or a car. Cause it seems like it feels like a truck when you drive it. Yeah. I don't know what you call it. I would say truck. All right.

Um, a couple other, just, just quick things. You have a, a gen one R1S. Is that correct? Cause the gen two is like just now coming out. I got the gen two. Gen two. Okay. All right. That's all they have. Yeah. Well, it's good to know. I thought you had the gen one. Um, and then we've talked about this in the past, uh, with your, uh, with y'all's other EV, but you're just charging at home.

Yeah. I mean, I haven't had it long enough, but yeah, we just, we share a charger. I don't, I won't be charging mine as often as she'll be charging hers because she drives more than me, but yeah, I mean, plug it in and charge it up. And so it has the, it does not have the Tesla style charger yet that is coming to Rivian, but not, but not yet. Right.

Yeah. But I do have the converter. So if I got a jam, I could charge off a Tesla charger, but yeah. Yeah. Honestly, I think you picked a pretty good time to do this because I would imagine using the adapter at home would get annoying. And like eventually, at least in North America, everyone's going to use NACS or, you know, the Tesla standard adapter.

But that's a process to move. And it was just announced maybe like a year ago that all these companies were doing it. So I think if you already have an EV, like having them the same, I would imagine would make life a little bit, just a little bit easier. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, congratulations. Um, I'm a little jealous. It looks awesome. And I think you're, I think you're going to enjoy it. I'm looking forward to hearing about it over the next few years, because like you said, these things get software updates, like they change over time, right? Like my Tacoma is not changing over time unless I put bigger tires on it. But, uh, you know, uh, the software will change and evolve. And that's, that's pretty exciting.

I got to say a few more things. Please. Okay. Yes. I'm in love with this car. First of all, if you go online, people complain about it, that it makes noises. Like when you start it up, it's got like a heat pump in the front and it's got, you know, the wheel, the car can move up and down depending on what you're using it for.

I love all the sounds it makes. It feels like the Millennium Falcon spinning up when I get it. So I love that. Okay, so I'm not a luxury car guy. So the more industrial it feels, the better to me. And I just really love the design, the way it looks on the outside and the inside. I'm very happy with it, even though I didn't buy it. So it's just weird. You know, it's just weird for me. I know I'm sure folks lease cars all the time, but it's new for me.

Um, another thing is the climate is amazing. Like it, it cools a car off or heats it up very fast. Um, but the controls are digital and I hate that. Like you, you have to go to a screen to move event, which is dumb. Yeah. I mean, I don't understand why they do that.

Um, the other thing is it has an app and the app is really well built. I mean, uh, the buttons that you want on the app, like lock, unlock, you know, open the trunk or whatever, all that stuff is very easy to get to, but then there's more depth to the app as you get in and it has shortcut support. My car has shortcut support. I'm just going to say that. So I can write shortcuts for my car. So I love that. And, uh, it's a great car.

what can you do with shortcuts with it? Pretty much anything that you can control from the app, you can get a shortcuts action for. So, you know, start it up, heat it up. Like I could write a shortcut that like turns out the lights in the house, locks the doors and heats up the car, you know, like that's awesome. Yeah. Um, so it's just real nice. And, um,

uh like i said it i'm a little guilty about it but i keep justifying on it as we got the last one through college and yeah here we go i've already broken it in it's been to the lumberyard we've taken a trip with seven people i mean it's it's already like um kind of proving the idea of a big car was kind of handy for us and i used to make fun of people that drove the big suvs around southern california and now i'm one of them but there you go

oh one other thing is rivian's a local company something i've discovered maybe this is just an orange county thing but rivian people wave at each other that's cool like you had a stop sign other rivian guy gives you a nod it's it reminds me of the old days when i used to go to like airport with my macbook and i'd be like the only one in the terminal except one other person and that person would run up to me and ask about my mac yeah it's kind of like that that's um i'm

I said something spicy about AppleCare subscriptions, and I'm going to say something spicy about a certain part of car culture. Yeah. Just behind the scenes, we're recording this like eight hours later than we normally do. It's like 830. This is not our normal energy. Jeep people do like the rubber ducky thing. Have you seen this? No. It happened to me in Colorado a few years ago. I rented a Wrangler, and I came out, and someone had put a

rubber ducky on the fender. It's like, okay, just pay attention. Jeep people like trade little rubber duckies. It's, I find it very confusing and kind of annoying, but the wave, the wave's pretty good. And I like that the Rivian people are doing it. That's, that's good. Yeah. I love it. I love it. It's, it's a really fun car. Nicest car I've ever had. And

I'm having so much fun loading it out. And yeah, it's just great. I just love climbing into it and going places. That's awesome. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by Incogni. Go to incogni.com slash Mac Power Users and take your personal data back. Use code Mac Power Users with this link and get 60% off an annual plan.

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Okay. It is a feedback episode. So we, uh, we get to end off with stuff we're playing with and you and I have, uh, you prompted me to do this. Um, but you and I both have launched, uh, now pages. So max sparky.com slash now five, 12 pixels.net slash now, uh, tell me a little bit about why you did it and, and kind of what you went out of it. And then I've got some, some thoughts as well.

Yeah, I am a fan of Derek Sivers. I think he's just a really smart guy and really genuine. So I've read several of his books and kind of follow him off and on.

And he put a now page together. And the idea was that like, he's not very good at social media like me and he wanted to make a page. And the way he described it was, you know, what would you tell an old friend if you were catching up with them? And I'm just going to put it on, on my website. So it's, you know, whatever your homepage is slash now mine is max sparky.com slash now. And, and,

And I thought, well, you know, I'm not good at social media, so I'm going to start doing this. I started it about six months ago. And I go in there every week or two, and I just update it with what I'm working on now or what I'm thinking about or personal projects or whatever. Like an old friend. If I saw an old friend, what would I tell them about what's going on? And I like the idea of it.

And so I started doing it and I get a lot of nice feedback from people who like read something on a now page and they'll write me an email about it. And, you know, so credit to Derek Sivers, but there's a whole bunch of people on the internet have picked up this habit. And in fact, he has a website where he's combined them all. You'll have to send yours to him so he can add your link. And it's just kind of a nice thing. It's like the old school web. And when you were doing your update to 512 pixels, I said, Stephen, you should do a now page.

Yep. And I did the next day. I apparently am very susceptible to you telling me to do things on my blog because I made a task to do the obituary page. Yeah, I like it. And it came at a time for me where I have really made a distinct decision to dial back my social media use. Like the apps are all off of my phone now.

I just sold something on Facebook marketplace. So I had Facebook installed again. I was like, I don't, I don't want this. Like, this is gross. But I wanted a place to, again, exactly like what you said, like if someone just wants to catch up with what I'm doing, what would I say? And, and so I spent, you know, a little while the day after we spoke, getting it, getting it set up. And my plan is updated every couple of weeks. I have a recurring task and

One thing you and I went back and forth on a little bit over text was like, how do we what is our approach about the history of this page? Right. Like if you just go and update it, there's no history like you and I would have a history in WordPress or whatever, but no public history.

And I ended up setting up like a page on GitHub where I just am pasting in the markdown and you can like diff it and see the changes. I think that's kind of interesting in its own right. But what are your thoughts on sort of the history of it? Does that matter to you?

Yeah, you know, I would like to hear from people on this because there aren't many people doing now pages. But my thought was I'm only going to make it current, you know, because I could have set it up as a blog page, you know, like a blog, you know, where you would just add new posts and you could go back and read the now page iterations over time. And I'm open to that if people think that's what I should do.

But the way I've done it is I just go in and edit the page and there is no history. Like the stuff I had written on it six months ago is just gone. And, but I kind of like the idea of just making it a temporary thing where you go in and you can see what I'm up to now. And it doesn't always all change every two weeks. Like some stuff on there that I'm working on will still be there in two weeks and other stuff will be gone, you know?

Um, so I don't really know what the right answer to that is, but I've, I've been doing it as an iterative page with no history. Yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, I think that's, that's part of the fun of this. Like if you turn it, so one thought I had when I was talking to Mike and Federico about it on connected was like, I can make it a category on five, 12 pixels, uh,

I don't show my categories anywhere, but like every post over the last 16 years is in at least one category. I can make a category and I could hide it from the homepage or take it out of the RSS feed, but if you, or make its own RSS feed, and if you wanted to read this over time, you could stick it in your RSS reader. But if part of my feeling right now about my life on the internet is getting away from short form text-based social media, I,

Like, am I just recreating that even though I own it and it's on my own domain and you get through it via RSS, all of which are important to me, somebody who makes their living on RSS, like that's all important to me. But there's something I have found very charming about it so far. That is just a page. Like I've got it in the navigation and if you know about it, you can check it out. And if you're interested in the history, you can click the link at the bottom and

But that's all it is, that it's so basic and simple. I'm kind of in love with that. Yeah, I'm enjoying it too. I like it so much that I've added it to my email signature. It just says, what am I doing now with a hyperlink to that page? And I don't know. I am enjoying it as well. I think, like you, it harkens back to more innocent time on the internet. Mm-hmm.

And, but it does really kind of give you an update on what's going on in my life as if you were an old friend. And, and, uh, that's kind of nice. And it also, I like a couple other benefits. This number one is I am terrible at social media. I don't have a Facebook account. I haven't logged into Twitter in years. I haven't, I think I got an account on that, um, Facebook version of Twitter. I don't remember what it's called, but I don't know if I've ever posted to it. Threads. Um, threads. Yeah. And, um,

And, you know, I'm really making an effort to do more because we have a Discord with the labs and I don't do much with that. It's like it's really hard for me to do that stuff. I'm somebody that gets really zoned in on a thing and social media has never been like a problem for me. Yeah. You know, to the extent it's a problem –

For someone that does what I do, I should probably be doing it more. But that's, you know, that's the thing. But I felt like this kind of scratches that itch in a way that doesn't feel intrusive to me. The other thing is, it's a great way to justify a no. Like somebody asked me to speak at their thing and I said, I can't. And I just sent them this page, you know, and they wrote back, oh, I see you're busy. Yeah, you know.

And so it's like, I like that. And it's kind of fun just going in and updating it and thinking about, well, what's going on that I can share right now? Like I always say in the opening line where I'm updating it from,

And usually it's from indoor studios, but like I did an update from Edinburgh during the fringe fast. When I went to see my daughter, it's like updating from Edinburgh. You know, it's like, that's kind of fun, right? That's cool. Yeah. You know, so I don't know. I would encourage anybody that has a website and, and to want to experiment this, just give it a try. Let us know if you do, maybe we'll put our own directory in the, in the forums for people that want to do these pages. But yeah,

I find it kind of delightful and I'm really happy that you're doing it too. Yeah, it's fun. And it comes at a time again where I'm wrestling with all these things, but like I've had five, 12 pixels for 16 years, it'll be 17 years and just a few months. Like why wouldn't this just be on five, 12 pixels? And so that's, that's fun. And I am curious people's feedback about like turning it into an RSS feed or some sort of category, like turning it basically into a,

uh, like a small blog inside the blog. That's actually not hard to do in WordPress. I actually have all the plumbing basically already together. I could just turn it on. Um, but I do like it just being a page. Uh, it kind of reminded maybe, maybe listeners remember this, maybe you will, David, I had a, a page on five, 12 pixels is still there called the, um,

Called the Mac pro log. Um, that was just a running. A list of things I did to my Mac pro. I loved that when you did that. Yeah. Please don't add up the money that I spent on that computer. Uh, I certainly don't want to, but it was kind of a mix of these things where it, I treated it like a blog, like each entry has a date, um,

But it was just a page in WordPress. Like it's just a markdown page. And so it was kind of like a mix of both. And I don't think I want to do that with the now page, but it is potentially kind of an interesting middle ground. So yeah, there's lots of options out there, but it is fun to be experimenting with some blog stuff again for the first time in a long time.

Yeah, I tell you, my gut on this thing is just to leave it as I'm doing it with no history. But part of me is like, oh, I would kind of like to go back and read that. Yeah. I mean, you can do what I'm doing on the GitHub thing, but keep it private. You know, there's an option in there when you create a gist to not share it. And that might be interesting just for you. Or, you know, here's what you do. I've solved it for you. I know it's going to be hard for you, but create an additional journal in day one.

Yeah. And then just anytime there's a change, just paste the new version in there. No, I was thinking the same thing as you were speaking. Like, yeah, I could just put it in day one as an entry and I could go back and read them. Yeah. That might be the answer for me. But I mean, who really, it seems kind of egotistical too. It's like, well, do you want to see what I was doing six months ago? And like, I don't really want it to be that. I want it to be a friendly, friendly update from your pal Sparky. I don't want it to be like, look how fancy I am kind of thing. Sure.

And so, yeah, I think that's what I'll do. I'm going to just save it to day one every time I update it. Then go back when I'm old and drooling on myself.

Look at this thing. I 3d printed from my Rivian, you know? Yes. Yes. Oh, I didn't even get into that, but we'll save that for another day. Okay. I have lots of questions. The other stuff we've been playing with, we've both been experimenting with some apps and this comes after we did a home screen episode a while back. Yeah. I've got kind of two changes and they're, they're big changes, honestly.

The first one is I have swapped in GoodTask on my iPhone and Mac. GoodTask is an app that basically sits on top of the Reminders database. So Reminders has all the same information. It's a superset, though, of features on there. I mentioned this at some point that I was having syncing issues with it last time I used it.

And to their full credit, the developer emailed me after hearing that and we got it sorted out. Turns out in good tasks, there's actually a lot of options like reset your sync data. That fixed it for me. The power of this app and the reason I'm really loving it, particularly on the iPhone, is that you can build what they call quick actions, but they're kind of like shortcuts just within the app. So you could have just one button that makes the selected task do nothing.

next Monday which is something I do all the time like I set tasks or even emails or slack messages to the next Monday if it's like I need to follow up with that person early next week just like push it past the weekend but you can have it to move things between lists or set tags the options really are almost endless and the sync has been rock solid since I went through the reset process

I've been using it now for several weeks and it has been, it has been really good and I'm, I'm really happy with it. Yeah. And you also made a change with your RSS app. I did. So I spoke on that episode about using reader classic. The new reader just doesn't really work for me and I'm still using reader classic on the Mac, but what I was afraid of is starting to come true where it feels like the iOS app is

starting to struggle a little bit. I was getting blank pages. The app was hanging. I spoke to some of our friends about this. Some people are experiencing this as well. And so I

I'm using... Actually, John Voorhees was one of the people who suggested I revisit it. Unread, which is an RSS client that's been around for a long time now. Unread just made it to the Mac in the last six months or so. But it really shines, I think, because it has this whole gesture-based system on the iPhone. It signs into Feedbin. So using Unread on the phone and have been, again, really happy with that as well. So still using Reader Classic on the Mac. I do think...

It is the best RSS app on the Mac. It's a lot nicer than the others. I think more full feature than the others, although NetNewsWire and Unread and others are making up ground. So I'm kind of split, but that's the beauty of using a service like Feedbin or Feedly or a bunch of others as your sync services. I can kind of use a bunch of different apps and my articles are all there, which is nice.

Yeah, I mean, that's the one I've been using now for a long time. And I don't know that it's the best. I mean, I think there's a lot of great RSS apps, but the design aesthetic jives with me so much. I just, I like the way it looks. I like the way it works. It makes sense to me and everything.

And it's been hard for me to like move off of it. So that's fair. I'm glad you thought you're using it. Well, I'll tell you what I'm doing. So I have a made no secret in the max Sparky labs. I am working on for, for the fall of this year, I'm going to do a field guide called the Apple productivity suite or something like that. I don't even know what the name is going to be, but I want to make a field guide on how to get the most out of just using Apple apps. A recurring theme on our show in the last few years has been how much they've improved. And I think that,

But for a lot of people, maybe most people, that's all you need. And so I have been going really hard at the Apple apps. And all my precious apps that I usually use are shelved right now. And I'm putting everything in reminders and calendar and notes.

and just kind of making it work. And I'm building a whole bunch of new workflows in the process, you know, like when you force yourself to do it. I know this title is a long time away. I haven't even started recording it yet. But this is one that needs a lot of research time.

And I'm having a lot of fun just using the Apple apps. It's just, it's really fun. They're, they're great apps and there are limitations, but there are also kind of delightful things about them too. And yeah, and that's something I'm working on now. And, and so I'm, I'm really going hard at those and having a really fun time doing it. Good. I'm really looking forward to that, that field guide from you. We, we spoke, I feel like a couple of years ago, we had a whole theme on the show for like a year of like,

Y'all, Apple's default apps are kind of getting really good. And that has just continued. In fact, I busted open Freeform today for something. It's like, oh, this is hanging out in there. So yeah, I'm looking forward to that because I agree with you. I mean, I'm using GoodTask for some of the automation stuff, but I used Reminders for six months. And I could go back to Reminders at any point and be...

That'd be fine. Well, I mean, using good tasks is really still using reminders. It is. It is. It is. Yeah. But like, so hand on heart yesterday, a friend of mine texted me, she was like, Hey, I'm using Evernote.

uh what should i use instead i was like what year is it um and i told her i was like i was like honestly like she's on the apple ecosystem it's like honestly apple notes is really good and you can do just about everything you're doing in evernote probably uh in apple notes because you know she had poked around notion of some others i was like look at those tools if you need more but

Notes is really all you need for 90% of people. And I think she's going to run with that, which is good. All right. Well, this was, like I said, a moment to show a lot of licensing. We licensed books. We licensed video. And we licensed a car. So...

Thank you, everybody, for listening. We're the Mac Power Users. You can find us at relay.fm. Thank you to our sponsors, 1Password, Google Gemini, Ecamm, and Incogni. You can find out more about us at relay.fm. That's where you can sign up for the ad-free extended version of our show, More Power Users. And otherwise, we'll see you next time.