615: A Mildly Brisk Walk

here in the show document that we use just internally. We have a section for pre-show, and it says in here, all John's apes gone. I don't know what that means, but I'm assuming you've had a real bad like NFT related loss or something like that. You know what it means then?

You got it. Wait, what? Are you being serious? All my apes gone.

No, I don't know what I mean, NFTs, but it's close. Did you at any time have any NFTs? I never had any. I still don't.

It's a funny meme. I'm not sure I ever even knew like where, even if I wanted to buy one which I never did, I don't even know how to buy an NFT. Like where do you go? You didn't miss out on anything.

Yeah, probably. I'm being scammed a lot probably. Well, but I know your memes link in there. I think it's like some person who tweeted about losing all their ape NFTs.

All my apes gone. Oh, look at that. I just better than I expected. Look at me go.

As usual, Marko isn't it? Anyway, all my apes are gone. All my apes are gone. Not all gone.

So what does this mean? You lost all of your zero NFTs that you had? Yeah, so I've never done NFTs and I've never done it to cryptocurrency because it's just not been my thing and there's many bad things about it. But a decade ago, there was some cryptocurrency thing that was like, okay, sign up for our website.

We'll give you 10 imaginary crypto coin things or whatever. And I signed up and I got 10 imaginary crypto coin things. Wait, I'm sorry. Isn't it imaginary crypto?

Isn't that redundant? Yeah, whatever. Like it's just I don't even know if it was a proof of work one. It might have been a proof of stake one or something or it might not even have been crypto.

I don't even understand it. It was like someone just said, hey, sign up for this thing. It's free. You get free.

Whatever is that I did and I got free. Whatever is and they were worthless and I ignored them. And then around 2021, Coinbase was popular and there's all these websites that are like come here and manage your cryptocurrency. And I was like, I should get rid of this stuff.

Can I just like sell it and get whatever meager amount of money it's worth or something? So I transferred all of my crypto, whatever stuff to Coinbase. And it was just so worthless and the transaction fees were high enough. And I was like, I don't want to deal with this.

I ignored it again. And then in 2022, I think like the people who ran Coinbase were like under investigation for crimes or something. I'm shocked. And I was like, I don't know if I want my should I just get my stuff out of its Coinbase because that's what's going on with it.

And so anyway, I just I transferred it back out of Coinbase and back on to wherever it came from originally. And then I ignored it some more. You're probably committing some kind of tax fraud here. Like when you got your free whatever, did you report their value of nothing to the IRS?

In fact, I did. It was so small. I really told it to my accountant and it's been accounted for. And it is, you know, worth so little that it doesn't matter.

Yes, in fact, I did. That's awesome. See, that's why I thought this was my fault is because last I heard you were using the same tax accountant that I am. And I thought maybe it was because of her that you had to like divest and it created all sorts of problems, but it sounds like it's not my fault yet.

No, she just wanted to know what I had and I gave her all the accounting of the worthless stuff that I have and all I've been doing is moving it around like no things are happening. And so with the with the upcoming change in presidential administration in our country, the crypto folks are all going wild. It's like, whoo, we'll be no laws. We can do anything we want.

And so all the crypto currencies going up and value my card. So this is a good time. I really just need to get rid of this. Like I know it's annoying and taxes.

They do anything with it. But just like I just want to not have it anymore. So let me just get it and cash out whatever amount it's worth just so I don't have to keep like reporting it or whatever. And so I went to do that and it's all gone.

But. And I was like, did I lose track of where I put it? Because I hadn't looked at it in a while. Like maybe I just don't know.

Was it in Coinbase? No, I'm pretty sure I removed it from Coinbase. Should be back in the thing. I looked at it and of course the good thing about the blockchain is it records all the transactions.

And yeah, no, it's all gone. And not only is it all gone, it was all gone two years ago. Wait, so where did it go? How did it go?

Two years ago, someone stole it all. I noticed for two years. That's special. How do they steal it?

I mean, I'm pretty sure we don't know the specifics. Yeah, no. So how do they steal it? Most likely, what you're supposed to actually do with this stuff is have it in some place like Coinbase or have it in a hardware wallet where you have multi-factor authentication and all that other stuff.

And I never wanted to have a crypto hardware wallet. And when it was in Coinbase, it was probably the safest place that it has ever been because at least there they have a multi-factor login and everything. But where I originally came from, the only thing there was was your public address, which is a big long string of crap. And your super secret key that you're supposed to sell nobody, which is a big long string of crap.

And their website was like, hey, do you want to see what your balance is? You should really have your money on one of these wallets or these things or whatever. But if you don't have it on any of these wallets, you can just look at your balance by putting your super-secret string in here. And then there's always scary warnings like, you should never actually do this.

Never paste your secret key into a web page. This is bad. You should use a wallet. And for the past 10 years, I've been like, that's fine.

That's been the past thing my super-secret key in my text field on web pages. And at some point in the past 10 years, I must have pasted that secret key into the wrong web page at the wrong time or one of these websites was compromised or something. And then someone just harvested that thing and took all my money two years ago. And they didn't know this.

Oh my god. So yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, that ends my cryptocurrency adventure. 10 years of owning a bunch of worthless coins that I was hoping to cash out for, maybe $100 or something.

And it turns out I can't even do it. The only good thing is that the person cashed out two years ago when it was worth even less than it is now. So they got nothing for me. But they did still account that got stuff, stole money from lots of people and they cashed out for $400,000 or something.

Oh, yeah. It was a tiny amount. A tiny drop in that bucket was my coins. Well, how much would it have been worth?

Did you do that computation? It would have been a couple hundred bucks. But it was never real money. I got it for free.

It was just a burden. I probably paid more and having my accountant keep track of it over these years. Absolutely. I don't know.

I think it just reported that you have it and then it's the end of it. Who knows? Anyway, thus ends my barely voluntary cryptocurrency adventure. It ends with it all getting stolen because I pasted my super-seer key into web pages.

So I'd like to be less important for you. Don't do that. I mean, something tells me you are neither the first person to have all your cryptocurrency stolen, nor the first person to have lost money with cryptocurrency. So I think there's a whole lot of time.

That's the whole All My Apes Gone thing. How do people lose their apes? Like, it's so easy. Like, your security practices have to be better than ignoring all the warnings, which is what I was doing.

And it's a very attractive target because if someone can steal it from you, there's no recourse. It's like, well, they've got it now. They're totally on a miss. You don't know who they are.

They've all taken it and transferred it and cashed it out. And so it's like, you know, it's not there's none of the things that are in our current financial systems like the IC or like credit card charge backs or all those other things that give you some kind of out or like, you know, a large transfer, stringering fraud notices and all that stuff. But none of that stuff exists in the crypto world. So if they can, if someone can find a way to steal it from you, it's free and clear to them.

So kudos to the person who stole my cryptocurrency and cashed out when the price was much less than it is now. Yeah, it says all the security of a giant pile of cash and with no way to free to protect it really from anybody on the entire internet. Like, that's great. I think I would have noticed if a giant pile of cash was stolen two years ago, but the fact that I didn't even notice this for two years and the thing is it was stolen in November.

So I'm like, oh, it just happened two days ago. It's the prices are like, they don't know. Twenty, twenty-two. Never mind.

That's amazing. Just to be clear, we appreciate those of you writing emails and tweets and whatnot to correct any of the things we just said. We don't care. Oh, just to be clear, we don't really appreciate it.

I didn't even appreciate those emails. Like, you could like, if you're writing to tell us how awesome crypto is, like, you can save your time. Sorry. It's not for me.

Maybe you can send them all a case. Because he appreciates it. No, it's not for me either. And yes, that was a bless your heart kind of we appreciate.

Bless your heart for writing that email, but don't send it. I don't think the reason I was keeping it for all those years is because it just seemed like turning into real money seemed like it was just like had more consequences. And it's like, the only way I care about this is if it's like, as people putting in the chat room, like that person who bought a pizza for a 10,000 Bitcoin and it would be worth like a billion dollars now or whatever, like, I'll just keep it the rest of my life and maybe when I'm 80, it'll be worth a billion dollars or it'll just disappear. And it turns out it was the second one.

Just disappear. All right, let's do some follow up. And we have a decent amount of follow up with regard to my adventures in remote television. Where we last left our heroes, if I'm not mistaken, was that my friend in Southwestern Connecticut had nothing for TV service over the RTV service at his house.

And so we were trying to figure out some ways to get around this problem, mitigate it, etc. So the first step that my friend was kind enough to take was to go visit his parents, his parents live in New Milford, which was right next to where I grew up. And he took the antenna over there in the H.D. Home Run and had the H.D.

Home Run scan, have the antenna and the H.D. Home Run working concert to scan and see what over the air channels they got in New Milford rather than in the town in which my friend lives. And would either of you like to guess how many channels we were able to receive in New Milford? The same number?

Oh, no. Literally zero. Literally zero. And Connecticut is not known for its amazing radio signal reception.

Indeed. So that was a no-go. So the next thought we had was, all right, what if we used TV everywhere? And I could have my friend Sean sign into his cable account on my channel server, and hopefully that would give us his local channels.

And when you do this, we have internet TV everywhere. I remember movies everywhere or movies anywhere, whatever it was called, where you would buy physical media and then you can plug in a code and you will get license, if you will, to the same movie on Apple TV or whatever it is to be. And this doesn't matter. You get the idea.

TV everywhere is kind of in a spiritual, similar sense. You sign in with your cable providers' credentials and you get access to all the, or at least a subset of, if not all of the channels that you subscribe to. And so I thought this is going to work out great for both of us. He enters his credentials on the online portal.

Like, I am not involved with this whatsoever. He doesn't have to make me a child account, so to speak, or even literally perhaps. Everyone will be happy to work out great. And we did that, and it worked, and the channels goes and tries to find the lineup of what, what, I love that it's all channels.

I hate those all channels. The channels app tries to, it's Apple TV plus playing Apple TV on the Apple TV. So it goes to figure out what television channels are accessible or available to it. And the good news is it found hundreds, the bad news is none of the local channels were included.

So no good there either. So, Margot, at this point, you should start to get a cold sweat because at this point in our story, hardware was coming to your house, baby. You didn't know it yet, but it was. I know it fair to say I did offer because that does seem like it would make the most sense.

You did, and you were very kind about it. And even came back and asked me or gave a suggestion or something, I got a couple of days later. So that was very kind of you. But a handful of us reached out and Stephen was the first person, not Hack, a different Stephen.

Was the first person that I saw reach out and say, hey, you know, if you were to enter the internet at a place in the New York metro area, say, my friend, Sean's house in Western Southwestern Connecticut, you might find that if you go to say CBS's website and just try to watch their programming, you might find that you get the local, the local football game, which might still happen to be the New York Giants. I don't know why I didn't think of this, but yes, that's exactly what I should have been doing this whole day of time. I didn't need the antenna. All I needed was this little knock, you know, this little baby PC up at Sean's house.

And that's what I can do. And thanks to the magic of tail sale, who's not sponsoring this show, but I love it so damn much. I turned my iPad on to the, I used the Connecticut PC as what the exit note is what tail scale calls like, you know, when you're routing all of your traffic through a different computer. So I got on the internet by way of Connecticut, went to CBS.com or actually, I think I use the app on my iPad, but it doesn't matter.

And sure enough, it wanted to play me a perfectly crispy of New York Giants. And so hypothetically, they should work for CBS. I mean, it just did. I understood that it works for Fox and we'll see about ABC and NBC, but this makes way more sense than anything I was trying so far.

And I feel like a dunce for not having thought of it. So thank you to Stephen and handful of others who reached out as well to point that out to me. I have a couple other options, but any thoughts or comments or any of this point? This is kind of amazing.

Like that, you know, just like the answer basically just use a VPN. Yeah. No one no one thought of that last week. Like we didn't think of it.

You didn't think of it. I know. I know. It's ridiculous.

People in the chat room talked about VPNs last week. They'll just like you want to just pay for this case, but whatever. Well, and so with that in mind, there are some options if you want to pay for it. I wonder to people, Europeans or people who are American expats in Europe reached out to point out there's a service.

I think it's called Bayzen. I don't really know, but it's D A Z N. This is a service that is not available to Americans, but perhaps if you had a VPN where you were exiting the internet in Europe, you might be able to sign up for it. And I don't know how much it costs, but this is a way to give that company, which in turn gives NFL your money so that you can stream the NFL games from the internet.

This is a questionable legality, obviously, on account of the fact that, you know, you're you're masquerading in Europe, but hey, I'm also masquerading in Connecticut. So who might have throw stones? I haven't really looked into this much because I don't think it's necessary now. Look, if you're going to pirate it, don't pay someone else to help you pirate it.

Just pirate it. Or you're going to pay for it, pay for the real thing. Right. Right.

So anyway, that's an option. Then Chris H pointed out to me that there are there is a package that exists through the NFL in America that will let you watch replays of the games. And I guess they're not that they were put online for you to watch, not too long after the game ends. So you can do that.

And that is the far more affordable $100 a season instead of the like several hundred dollars it is for full Sunday ticket. I tend to want to watch them live, but this is a genuinely very good option if you're willing to give up on watching live, which I really appreciate. Then there are a couple of things with regard to YouTube TV. I was under the impression that you must have a full on YouTube TV subscription in order to get something to get that is incorrect.

That is a misunderstanding on my part. You do not need a full on YouTube TV sub to get some ticket. You can do that separately. Additionally, some really nice season towards noting that Sunday ticket is just 90 bucks for the next couple weeks until the season is basically over.

Which is something that's interesting to me, but still I feel like that's a temporary band aid on a larger problem. And then finally, I was also very perturbed because this past Sunday you were supposed to get an FL Sunday ticket for free just for one day. So you know, you can get a taste of it or whatever. And if you recall my parents are YouTube TV subscribers.

That is legitimately how they get their television. And so I have a child account off of their family and every every every great once in a while, I will tune into YouTube TV for some reason or another. It's extremely rare though. But I thought, OK, this is my moment.

I will turn on YouTube TV and I will go and I will go to watch the Giants and they said no. And they did work on the Apple TV. So I thought, OK, I'll do my iPad. Didn't work.

Couldn't figure out. Couldn't figure out. Couldn't figure out. It kept saying I need to buy it.

And I'm looking at an email that says, oh, it's free on this past Sunday. Turns out it was free on this past Sunday as long as you're not on any Apple or mobile device. Well, I think it's like, what the hell is the point then? I guess if I had installed it on my TV, you know, like my smart TV, my LG OLED, whatever, I guess maybe it would have worked.

But such an odd restriction. Like, yes, you can watch Sunday ticket as long as you're not using any of the things that you desire to use to watch it. Yeah, that's right. So yeah, that is my adventures in television.

We'll see what happens. I guess I don't even know what the next time I'm playing and they are so abysmally bad this year. It's I don't even know why I'm going through these efforts. It's just a project at this point.

But nevertheless, that is my update. And I know you both are very relieved to have received it. Sports, sport, small baby. All right, Marco, I have assigned you this is two consecutive weeks of assigned you vision pro homework and sorry, not sorry.

Did you did you or did you not do your homework? I did indeed do my homework. I am very proud of you. So the homework this week was concert for one ray.

That's our a YE. She's a singer artist, et cetera from London. And this is a nine-ish minute video in the spirit of the Alicia Keys thing. What are the Alicia Keys thing?

I think it's like half an hour, four minutes or something like that was like I said, nine minutes. But it's nine minutes performance in a studio. I think it was recorded in London, if not mistaken. And it was Ray and a backing band, including strings and backup singers and a traditional instrument.

You expect a band and I was curious to hear your thoughts. Or if you prefer me to start, I can start doesn't matter to me. You go ahead. I'm curious to hear your first.

All right. So this, like I said, eight, nine minutes. I had heard of Ray before, but had never heard any of their music. And so I didn't know what to expect.

And this is yet another instance where I feel like this happens a lot or maybe I'm making it up. But I feel like a lot of times when you see Apple immersive video, one of the first shots, if not the first shot is like an extreme close up of somebody's face. We saw this in not shrinking, excuse me, in submerged. And we see this here and maybe over time I will get used to it.

I don't like it. I feel like I'm infringing on somebody's personal space by being that close. It's kind of dramatic here, but no, you're not. I have the exact same point.

You are not being over dramatic. It's weird. Like it gives me the key to you. Yeah, like it feels like you are like these shots start out so close that you can like see the person's pores on their face.

You can see the stubble where they shave. Like it's just it's too close. Like it is it is way closer than anybody would ever stand. And because you have the VR 180 format, the immersive format, you are seeing it in 3D, huge life size right in front of you.

It looks like you are there. And therefore it looks and feels like you are standing way too close to the stranger. Like if you and like as I mean, look, as middle aged men who try to be conscientious of the realities of the world, I take extra precautions to try to make sure I'm not creeping anybody out. Like I don't I would never in a million years, stand that close to a stranger.

Like that would that's never anything I would do. And so it feels really like off putting. And I think they are they're obviously doing it to show off like they're they're doing it to allow you so that you will say, Oh my God, look how sharp it is. It feels like I'm here.

And I think it's one of these things that they will grow out of. I hope if this if this platform gets a chance to mature, I think that's one of the first things that will change as it matures is like they will stop getting so damn close to everyone's like faces and necks and bodies because it's just weird. You think it might be like the train coming out of the movie screen when people first saw movies and worry the train was going to run them over. Do you feel like you're that audience in the movie theater with the train coming out them or no?

No, it's not as much like scared. It's just it's like I am infringing on somebody's personal space. I know I'm not saying the feeling I'm saying the idea that when the people first experience that so the story goes, they thought all the trains going to come out of the movie screen and hit me. But obviously as a stick to movie where we grew up with movies, we never had that experience.

We didn't we didn't think the train was going to hit us. Is it because you're all bloody duddies and future generations will not be bothered because they will they will understand at a more instinctive level that there is not actually a person there, right? Like you're not actually saying to a couple of people, some of you recorded video and you're watching it in the same way that we're not worried about it. I'm not saying this is the case.

I'm saying have you thought about that angle? Do you think that it's the type of thing where maybe you yourself will never get used to it, but people who grew up with it won't have the same hang ups or do you think it's like this is going to be bothersome no matter what? I think it could be either way. I'm leaning toward it.

Maybe if you are a child of the vision pro, then I presume it wouldn't be as bothersome. But for anyone that has any amount of life experience before strapping this thing to your head, I think it'll be a little bit uncomfortable. On the plus side, Marco, you touched on this briefly earlier, that the fidelity in this headset is just unbelievable. I mean, you can see pores, you can see stubble.

It is incredibly crisp, just astonishingly crisp, or at least to me anyway. And so I really do appreciate the fidelity of it. I do think that this was kind of fun in this particular video because basically imagine that the camera did move a little bit forward and backward. It did not move laterally at all.

And the way the musicians were arranged was that to the left and the right of the camera when it was positioned as far back as possible, there's a fair bit of space to the left and the right. And then the musicians start angled toward the center of the frame. I don't know if I'm doing a great job describing this. But suffice to say, as you got closer to the back of the stage, as you're watching it, the musicians were getting closer and closer to you just by virtue of the way they're standing or sitting.

And that left this big kind of aisle, if you will, where Ray could move forward and backward. And I feel like delivered or otherwise, she did a little bit of playing with that. She would walk forward and again, the camera occasionally moved forward and backward. And I thought that was kind of neat because I feel like depth means a little bit more in this context than it does in 2D, moving making and granted, it still means something there.

But I don't know, it just hits different, I feel, when you've got this immersive and 3D environment. I watched it with the audio pods or whatever they're calling the strap. I did not have air pods in when I watched it. And unlike the weekend music video that we talked about last week, I didn't feel like the audio pods did a very good job with this.

I don't know what it was specifically. It just sounded awfully tinny in a way that the weekends didn't, which is funny because I would argue the weekend music is inherently more basic than Ray's. But nevertheless, this is the first time I think ever that I've watched Something on the Vision Pro that I've thought I really should put in air pods. Because it is the audio pods and forgetting from calling them the wrong name are astonishingly good at broadcasting into the open air, but kind of pointed at your ears.

And they sound really good. I've watched movies with them. I've watched other short features like this and I've never felt it's a problem until this one performance. I don't know what it was, which was weird.

But that being said, I'm not a musician. The only thing I can play with efficacy is stereo. And I don't know what it's like to perform music, but I do know what it's like to be around live music. And I've been around enough live music, not an overwhelming amount, but I've been around enough that to me anyway, and I don't think this is unique to me, there's something special when a group of musicians, when they're just cooking, you know, you can just tell that they're in it and they're in it and they're all, I don't know if vibing isn't the right word and I probably sound like a mama anyway, but it's like they're all in the moment and everything's clicking and everything's firing and it's just good.

And the second song that she performed, I feel like toward like the tail end of that song, you could tell everyone was just cooking and being able to like look around and focus on the instruments that you want to focus on, I know we've talked about this before, but that is so fun and so cool. And God help me. I want to watch every piece of music content in this immersive environment because it's just so cool. And I came away from it going from, I don't know who Ray is to, wow, she's really good and I should explore more of her stuff.

So I really, really enjoyed it and I thought it was really good. So Marco, what did you think? Musically, she's obviously very talented. It wasn't quite what I would normally choose to do, but I enjoyed the performance.

I like that, you know, from the technical point of view, you mentioned that the camera really was not moving much. It basically would switch between fixed shots. Like, you said you thought it moved during so much? I didn't notice that.

I thought it did a little bit toward the back of the frame and then backward, you know, toward where you would expect to be sitting. I don't know how to describe it otherwise, but maybe I made that up, but I could swear that I saw it move a couple of feet a couple of times. Like, I don't think it was very much. It was very slowly, not like that crash, like dolly zoom that you saw in submerged.

That kind of made you go, oh, yeah, or the weekend video where it's like, there's a lot of motion in the weekends. But yeah, this one, yeah, it was basically switching between a small number of like fixed shots. I think that's the way to do it. If you want to, like this one, I had zero problems with motion, like, like it was totally fine.

I'm kind of learning as a viewer that a better way, like I'm tempted because the 180 degree field of view is so novel. I'm always tempted to look around. It's like, what's on the edges of this frame? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's in the shot technically. I'm like, look around, like, what's on the edges? But the problem is the edges are never in focus for lots of reasons. I've kind of learned that, like, in order to prevent weird, like, eye strain and focus issues with my eyes, I'm better off just looking in the middle of the frame the whole time.

Like, just let, you know, let the camera framing show me where to look instead of trying to like look around and get every single edge of every single frame, like to figure out what's going on around me. Um, so that I'm kind of learning how to watch it better. And so I didn't have many problems with focus here. The only weird thing about that is like, there are moments where, like when it would, you know, the way it was staged was, you know, the artist was in the middle and then she had like her backup instruments on one side and her backup singers on the other side, like left and right, kind of like in a line.

And the problem is that when, when they would show either the instruments or the backup singers, only one of them would really be in focus. And so, and I'd want to be like, Oh, that's, that singer sounds pretty good. Cool. But like, I kind of want to look at the one behind her too.

And I kind of can't like, so there were kind of weird issues with, you know, what's again, selective focus is weird in this form because we think with our eyes, we think we can just focus on anything on the frame, like, because it looks like we are there. And if we were actually there, that's how our eyes would work. But it's shot more in that cinematic style where like, you know, the backgrounds, all blurry and only, only the subject is in focus. But I don't expect that from 3D.

Like my eyes don't expect that. My eyes expect I can focus on anything I want to because it feels like I'm actually in that room. So the immersion is working in the sense that it is tricking me into thinking that I can, that my eyes will work the way they work in real life. Yeah.

And that's another one of those kind of technical decisions that I think immersive video might have to reconsider as it matures. Like I think having very shallow depth of field is probably not the right call a lot of the time. If you're trying to show a whole scene, I really think filmmakers should probably have very narrow approach to get very big depth of field because that's what we actually expect our eyes to be able to do when we're watching it. So anyway, all that being said, the idea of this, this series of apples putting out there where there's basically like five minute mini concerts being put on there, especially film just for this in a special room, that's fine.

I don't think it's ideal, but it's fine. I think in an ideal form, we would get a lot more of these. It would be an actual concert with an actual audience and it would, and they would be like a little more complete shows. Like, you know, give me a whole set.

Give me, you know, at least, you know, at least an album worth, you know, give me 45 minutes or something, like just instead of like, basically, here's a little snack of content. I feel like all we're getting on the vision pro is little snacks. What that does, first of all, it's, you know, it's obviously, I keep harboring on this. Like, we need more content on the vision pro.

You can still go through all of it the first night you have it. But more than that, if you if you try to capture like, you know, full concerts, it's easier. It's cheaper. You can just film a concert that's already happening.

Just stick a VR camera in a good seat in the middle, like, or even like, like for the soundboard is like, you know, usually that's kind of central, kind of midway into the audience. Like stick a VR camera on the front of that thing. Like, so people can just see like just a fixed view. Because like one thing I did think about with this, like because they were mostly just switching between a small number of fixed camera positions, I realized like, I actually, I would be fine if there was literally just one.

Because whenever they would switch to one of the other ones, I wasn't really gaining anything. I was just getting too close to her pores. But like, I would be totally fine to just like have a fixed position where I just were just like, you have a really good seat to a concert. And again, I do think having an audience, I think would really add to it.

Because that's part of the live music experience is there being an audience there and the audience energy and musicians perform differently when there's an audience present than when there isn't. Now, obviously there's two very different art contexts and some people can be better than one than the other. But if what you want is the experience of being in a concert, which I think this can probably very well deliver if it's if it's capture that way, if what you want is that experience of being a concert. This isn't that.

This feels like you are in a room while they're performing a demo for you. And that's interesting. And the music can be interesting, but it's not a concert experience really. A concert is other people in the audience and the musicians playing two of those people in the audience, not playing to a camera person with nothing else.

So this is a fun experiment, but there is so much more they could do. And I hope someday, some time they actually just give us concerts. I like the snacks, but I do agree that a concert would be incredible. And all I can think about is, you know, imagine, maybe this is just me, but imagine MTV Unplugged being brought back as far as I know everyone in years.

But can you imagine unplugged in this kind of environment? Like it would be amazing. And I can imagine that, you know, if Fisher, whomever that you're into Marco, even if they did exactly what we just saw for eight or 10 minutes, I mean, that would be one tenth of one fish song, but nevertheless, that literally would be a snack. But anyway, imagine how amazing that would be.

Like I would kill to see like, you know, Dave, Matthew, spandered or someone else that I really enjoy in this kind of a format. So that doesn't mean you're wrong. I mean, I think more would be better for sure. But I'm really digging the idea.

Just please, Apple, just pump the brakes a little bit on the extreme closeups. Also, like, you know, like it doesn't even have to mean, look, I would love from actually record full concerts that are in full size venues that are actually happening with real audience members, but it can even be something a little smaller scale. They want to do like a halfway point between this and what I'm actually asking for. Look at things like the NPR, 10 desk concerts.

No, it's one of the great gifts to music. Like I love them. Oh, 100%. Like they get such great artists there.

And they are and it's such a cool recording environment where for those who don't just look up YouTube for 10 desk concerts and look for any artist that you've even heard of, even ones you haven't, it's totally worth seeing because they literally just like host artists in like a part of the NPR office. And it's full of like carpets and bookshelves that are full of books and everything. So the acoustics are great. It's very absorbent acoustic.

Like there's no echo. Everything sounds very warm. And it's usually just surrounded by a ring of like all the people who work there just like kind of standing around the boundaries of like a big square of desks, I guess, listening and clapping. And so it's like a small audience, small club feel with amazing acoustics and they get top tier acts like the really good acts to play these.

And yeah, they play five, six songs, maybe they're playing for like a half hour. That's a great format. And that kind of thing would also, I think, be a good inspiration of like, what can music look like in VR? That give us that make it seem like we are there listening to that.

That would be wonderful as well. If you want to have something that's a little bit closer than a full concert arena, but there's so much potential here for just take events that are literally already happening and just put us there, bring us there through a fixed camera. Please, more. Yeah.

Yeah. I would love tiny desk concerts in this format. And yeah, I think that's I don't want to bring it up because I adore tiny those concerts and they are, I think the modern version of MTV unplugged. I mean, they're not literally all the times, but I think this is the spiritual success or MTV unplugged.

And coincidentally, Ray has a tiny desk, which I actually preferred the songs that she performed in concert for one, but it's still very good. So you can check that out if you wanted to get a taste for her music. But yeah, I really, really dig this idea. I don't think they've perfected it, but it's off to a great start.

It's all like, I think what I'm hoping for, what we're seeing so far with what Apple's producing content wise is it kind of has, I would say, the same problem that Apple's keynote videos now have where they're just kind of dripping with too much money. You know what I mean? Like production wise, like it's like everything is like too amped up. It's too perfect.

It's too high budget. It's too corporate. I don't know if they have the capability to pull back and that a little bit or to give it a little bit. I'm not saying like spend less money.

I'm saying make it look like it wasn't so corporate. It seems almost synthetic at a point, as opposed to just, you know, natural for lack of a better way of describing it. And I would call it overproduced, especially. Yeah.

Like it doesn't. It starts losing its humanity and organicness. And when you're, you know, talking about what the specs of the new iPhone are, fine, you can do that. But when you're trying to show it like a performance of music, there should be some humanity still left in there.

And I feel like Apple's current style, it squeezes a lot of that. It makes it very high polished, very high production, very high budget, very corporate feeling. And part of why I love live music is because that's how studio albums sound, that studio albums sound now, very high budget, very production, you know, that's it. But live music usually is much more human.

That's part of why I like it. And again, like this is such a great format to make you feel like you are really there. That's what this is great at. You feel like you're really there.

And I think what I want to feel like is I am really in a little bit more human environment and a little bit less produced environment. Yeah, you don't want to be in Johnny Ives White World. No, that's right. That's the bad place.

We are sponsored this week by Aura Frames. So here's the thing. In the past, you have surely gotten or perhaps purchased a quote unquote smart photo frame that was a piece of trash that you needed to connect via an ancient USB cable, or maybe you needed to provide your own SD card or something like that. And it was not very intuitive to use and it looked like garbage.

This is not that or frames. They have a variety of different frames available and they are all great. And they don't require any USB connections to anything. They don't need SD cards or anything like that.

You just get on your phone and upload photos to the frame. It works via Wi-Fi and freakin' magic as far as I'm concerned. Or since myself, a couple of these long before they were even thinking everything about sponsoring, they just did to be nice and genuinely. These things are really great.

And we have one in our house on the wall and we gave one to my parents put in their house and they, especially my mom, freaking love this thing. They, my mom uses it all the time to upload photos of her grandkids. I can upload photos of her grandkids to her frame from here. It really, really is great.

And if you're giving this as a gift, most of their frames, as far as I know, you can actually get them most of the way set up without opening the box. It's very, very clever and very well done. And that honestly is indicative of these products as a whole. They're very pretty.

The Stream Resolution is really great. They support live photos. You can tap on a little pad and you can see where pictures were taken for some of their frames. Genuinely, these things are really, really great.

So for a limited time, you can visit auroframes.com and get $45 off or as best selling Carver matte frames by using promo code ATP at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-F-R-A-M-M-E-S.com, promo code ATP. This exclusive Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deal is their best of the year. So don't miss out.

Terms and conditions apply. Thank you to Auro for sponsoring the show. John, welcome back to the show. Can you tell me about using large external drives with Mac OS, please?

We've been talking about this topic since discussing storage prices and the new Mac minis and the fact that on the laptops, it's not incredibly inconvenient to use external storage, but how do you deal with that? How do you divide up your stuff between your internal drive and your external drive and where the limitations, one of the things that came up on past episodes was what about my photo library? That's big. And we discussed it in vague terms because none of us had a personal experience with moving the photo library to an external drive.

Turns out Apple has a support document on it, which we will link in the show notes. As Apple says, to save storage space on your Mac, you can move your photo's library to a different storage device. But there are some caveats, though. There's much more in the document, but just a little taste.

You can't store your library on a storage device, use your time machine backups, and to avoid possible data loss, you don't store your library on a removable storage device like an SD card or USB flash drive or on a device shared over your network or the internet, including over a cloud-based storage service. So as always, there are caveats, but Apple says it's officially supported and I can explain to you how. But Mark Wicken has wrote in with some personal experiences that show, even though it's officially supported, there are other things that might be worth you, Mark says, I have my photos library and a cheap external SSD. It's great, except occasionally the SSD will randomly unmount itself and I'll have to kill the photos cloud sync process to get syncing working again after re-mounting or I could just reboot.

But it happens about once a month, so it's bearable and worth it to keep my faster internal SSD reserved for day to day work. I can say that OneDrive did not like syncing to its folder in an external SSD. It coincided with various sleep issues and stuck processes. That was over a year ago now, so it might be fixed, but I have a risk of trying it.

This is part of the experience of having stuff and external drives. Everything should be fine, especially if they say it's officially supported, but you kind of have to make sure that external drive stays mounted all the time, just like your internal drive would, and some programs inexplicably get angry about having their stuff over there. And so you kind of have to go on a case by case basis to see which ones like it. I still continue to think that booting from the external drive quote unquote booting from the external drive, see past episodes that was really happening.

But anyway, booting from an external drive simplifies things greatly because at least your stuff is on the boot drive. But speaking of that, when I was experimenting with Apple intelligence in the beta versions of Mac OS, I was using an external drive on my wife's Mac Studio to boot that thing to boot from that beta OS. But it wouldn't let me use Apple intelligence. I got through all the waiting lists that were never in it said, sorry, Apple intelligence doesn't work on an external drive.

And I was booting from that external drive. And I hope that was just a beta thing. Remember, we discussed on the showcase. I don't know if you were there.

No, I guess not. But anyway, I hope that was just like a beta thing or whatever. I didn't really pay much attention to it. But since we've been having discussion, many, many people have said, I would consider booting from an external drive, except if I do that, I don't get Apple intelligence.

So apparently that's still a thing in the released versions of Mac OS. Why? I don't know. It seems like a weird limitation to me.

But that's a thing. So if you care about Apple intelligence, apparently you're booting from that internal drive until Apple changes that. So keep that in mind. And finally on this topic, there's another thing that came up frequently that I think we alluded to vaguely in past episodes.

We have more concrete details to try to save space on whatever SSD you're booted from. Like if you're booted from the internal one, but you want to put stuff somewhere else in 15.1, a Mac OS, 16.1, there is an option in the Mac App Store. If you just go to Settings, checkbox it says download and install large apps to a separate disk. And the subtext is apps larger than one gigabyte will download and install to the disk that you choose.

And then you can pick a disk. It's kind of weird. They don't let you put all the apps over there, just the big ones. And you don't get to pick that threshold size.

But if you've got some really big apps, like I can imagine maybe games have a lot of content or other big creative apps. Yeah, try that setting in the App Store to see if you can get your files over. And I think that's for downloading, like for future downloads, I don't think it moves any of your existing applications over. But I guess you could just try copying them there or just deleting them and re-download them if you wanted, although if they're large, they might be kind of onerous.

But yeah, part of dealing with an external drive, even if you were booted from it is working out all of these issues. Honestly, like, this sounds like a lot of scary limitations. Like, oh, I don't want to do that. I'll just pay the Apple price for how to big internal thing.

That's simplified stuff. But as someone who has had a series of tower Mac computers, where they have had multiple drives installed in them, I know they're not external drives. Technically, they're internal. But from the OS's perspective, I wonder, I haven't actually tried this because I can't use Apple and Taung to tell me anyway.

I've been able to freely boot for many of them. And it has not made any difference in my life. But of course, I'm still in the Intel world. So things are definitely different when it comes to booting on Apple Silicon.

And by the time I finally go over to Apple Silicon, hopefully they'll have some of these limitations worked out. But we'll see. Do you honestly think that your first Apple Silicon Mac is going to have internal driveways? Who knows?

Who knows? What if they come out with an M4 extreme? And it comes in the big tower case, and I somehow decided to buy it. The answer against it.

But you know, could happen? This is the time where anything could happen. It would be like $8,000. No, I'm not going to be a big one.

Do you remember what he spent on? His current one is as much as a damn Civic, or was anyway. Now it's worth as much as a Hugo. But that's right.

I was like, someone sent us some feedback about someone who was benchmarking one of the dual GPU cards that you could get for my Mac Pro, and how amazingly fast it was, even compared to modern video cards or whatever. And they were like, oh, and I bought this on eBay, or whatever. So I did an eBay search to see how much these go for. It's like the, what is it?

6800X Duo. It's got two Radeon, 6800 GPUs on a single card. And you could put two of those cards inside my computer. They still go for $3,000 on eBay.

It's like, for each card. So I'm anxious. Yeah. So I even think the price would be dropping rapidly.

Because who wants this? It's old. It's obviously like, someone might need it, I guess. But like, still, the original retail price was 5,000.

And you can find them on eBay for $4,000, $3,000 in that range. And yeah, that's well above the threshold of me wanting to buy one to experiment with it. I think it's only like almost as fast as an NVA 49. You'll get two of them.

You'd be faster than a 49. Anyway, yeah. Don't recommend. But there's a lot of cool technology.

And for whatever reason, it's still not dirt cheap. One other eBay search I have, by the way, is for the bent piece of metal I have holding my internal drives. It was like $400, because they made you buy a hard drive with it or whatever. I have an eBay search on that.

I just see, surely the bent piece of metal that has no electronics in it. Surely the price of that will come down for a few hundred bucks and answers. No, still, if you find it on eBay. They're selling, they're being sold for, not just being listed for, but being sold for multiple hundreds of dollars for a bent piece of metal.

It's a wild world out there. By the way, for the record, my estimate of $8,000 is definitely wrong, because right now, the current Mac Pro, with the M2 Ultra, is $7,000 if you want some of the GPU cores disabled. Or if you actually want the entire GPU power of the M2 Ultra, it's $8,000 for the machine. So there is no way that if they did an extreme with two Ultra's next to each other, no way that's less than $12, like there's at least, and possibly more than that.

Maybe 15 grand to start. Like, it would be ridiculous. They're gonna set, but we'll say. I can't.

I can't. I am genuinely very curious and excited to see what is the final straw that breaks the camel's back that gets you to buy a new Mac, because I feel like I'm not even convinced that being locked out of new versions of Mac OS is going to be enough to get you to upgrade. No, the real question is, what will be the straw that breaks this back to get them to buy a gaming PC? That's the real question.

That's true. That's true. I just want a PS5 Pro. I'm not going to go gaming PC.

My PS5 Pro is great. Unless Hudack writes, regarding the speculated quote quote, low price of $299 for Apple's home device with a screen. Well, brand new iPad is only $50 more right now. I bought it a few years ago and stuck it to my fridge.

It's always on with an all widget homepage that shows photosized shows, calendar, and weather, and has some home controls. It also controls the multi-room Sonos system. That's Apple's competition. You know, if they're going to make a home thing that's kind of like an iPad, but is much more limited, doesn't have an app store.

Hopefully it won't cost as much as the low end iPad. That would be a weird, I mean, not that Apple has it sometimes had really weird pricing arrangements. We're like, why would anyone buy this one? They can get this other better thing from a product line for less money.

They've done that sometimes. But I feel like it really does put a ceiling on the potential same price for a home thing with a screen, unless it has features that Apple's iPad doesn't like. For example, if it comes with very fancy high-fidelity speakers that are better than the ones that come with a $350 iPad. But we'll say they keep lowering the price of the bottom end iPad.

And I can't imagine that the hardware in their home device is going to be much more powerful than the low end iPad. So hopefully it's put the ceiling on the price. So a few weeks ago, I think it was there were some very, very funny Apple intelligence notification summaries that I think John had collected. And we will put links to these in the show notes.

But we wanted to take a quick nickel tour of all of them. A friend of the show, Steve Transmith, wrote, sometimes the summary is less helpful than the subject line. So the summary reads, Netflix is sending an email to remind you about a new movie coming out on Wednesday. And what was summarized?

The subject is coming Wednesday, November 13th, hot frosty. So the subject actually specified the movie, but the summary does not. Well, the problem with summaries, we talk about subject lines versus summaries and how subject lines can lie to you and be incomplete and people don't write good subjects. But in the case where there is information in the subject line, the summary is trying to summarize not just the subject line but the entire email.

And it is missed out on the thing you might want to know about. If you're going to get me one line description about a movie that's coming out soon and they name the movie, name the movie. But there's, it's not a person doing this. It's just a big bucket of numbers and it didn't come up with the useful thing.

And so in this case, it would have been better just to show the subject line. And this, by the way, speaking of intelligence, doesn't work on external drives, doesn't work on my Intel Mac, all this other stuff. I would be more bummed about that if I was more jazzed about the Apple intelligence features. Like I tried them on my life, I tried them on my phone and my iPad.

Right now, for me personally, the Apple intelligence features are mostly technical curiosity. I think I'm interested in looking at it for the purposes of the show. But in my day to day life, they're not exactly wowing me. So I don't think so far the lack of Apple intelligence is going to be a thing that drags me to a new Mac sooner.

I actually think that the notification summaries of this whole follow up topic notwithstanding, I think they're generally pretty good. They definitely miss from time to time. But by and large, I've actually been pretty pleased with them. But with that said, Chris Hancock had tweeted whatever, poor summary of the fight theory.

So the summary is there were apparently 44 notifications from New York Times, which were summarized to be, my Tyson defeated Jake Paul, Israeli AIDS under investigation for leaks and record doctrine. The three most recent notifications that it appears that Apple intelligence summarized read as follows. October 7 leak investigation, AIDS Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel are being investigated or accusations of leaks and record doctrine related to the Hamas war. From the Atlantic, Jake Paul defeated Mike Tyson, not the other way around, via unanimous decision in Netflix's high profile boxing showcase.

And then finally, from the Atlantic, Mike Tyson, the former World Heavyweight Champion will soon fight Jake Paul, the YouTuber, Turnboxer, follow along live. Exactly what I was talking about was sports results. They can't get much simpler than a fight. Two people, one of them is the winner.

And it got it wrong. And if you read that summary, you could be forgiven for swiping it away because you're not that into it. And just the next day, when talking with friends, like I can't believe Mike Tyson beat Jake Paul. They're like, what are you talking about?

Because you didn't watch it. You didn't care. You just read the notification. That's a pretty important thing to get, right?

Don't trust notification summaries. If you see that little icon, which looks like two little lines and then like a little arrow swooping down, and you actually care about what it says, tap through. We are brought to you this episode by Uncommon Goods. Spark something uncommon this holiday season with incredible hand-picked gifts from Uncommon Goods.

They make your holiday shopping stress-free by scouring the globe for original, handmade, and truly remarkable gifts for everyone on your list. They spark joy, wonder, and delight for their recipients. So whether you're shopping for like a single secret Santa or your entire family, Uncommon Goods knows exactly what they want. So I found a bunch of really fun stuff there.

You know, I thought when we first one, I look at the side, I'm like, well, you know, what could they possibly have? It's different from like, you know, the big retailers. And I was very surprised. They have everything they have is different from the big retailers.

It's amazing. They have really nice stuff. A lot of it is handmade from small artists, small independent businesses, you know, made in small batches. And so this is an actually important thing.

If you want some of the stuff, you gotta shop now, because because it's made in small batches, oftentimes by artists, it sells out fast for the holiday season. So shop now. These are really high quality, unique, and often handmade are made in the US products. And these are really meaningful gifts.

They're out of the ordinary. It's not gonna be the same stuff you see everywhere else. You can even personalize some of them. So it's a great site to check out from holiday hosts and hostess gifts, to gift for kids, to hits from everyone from book lovers to sports fans, uncommon goods has something for everyone.

And with every purchase you make, they give back a dollar to a nonprofit partner of your choice. So to get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com slash ATP. That's uncommongoods.com slash ATP for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited time offer.

Uncommon goods, we're all out of the ordinary. Thank you to UncommonGoods for sponsoring our show. The Department of Justice says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search monopoly. So reading from the verge, there's kind of a lot here, but forgive me because I think it's all fairly important.