 Mack Observers, Mack Geekab, Episode 898 for Monday, November 1st, 2021, and welcome to the Mack Observers, Mack Geekab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, all the things that you send in. We mix them with our own tips, cool stuff found in sometimes even our own questions. We mash them all together into an agenda. And then we find our way through that agenda, tangentializing when necessary or when desired or when the mood strikes all with the goal of every single one of us, me, John, you, us all learning at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include a few existing ones and a few new ones. TextExpander.com slash podcast where you can get 20% off your first year of TextExpander napjitsu.com slash MGG where you can save 30% off your first purchase. Coinbase.com slash MGG where you can get 10 bucks in free Bitcoin and imperfect foods where promo code MGG saves you 20% off your first four orders. We'll talk more about those later in a little while here. I guess later in a little while mean the same thing, don't they? For now, back here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here back from New York City or Manhattan, which is what it really is, right? No. This is John F. Brun. How are we today, Mr. John F. Brun? Good. Good. And it was good to see you. You and I got to see each other into a wacky a vaccinated event. And it actually, I think, I think they pulled it off. Yeah. See, it went, it went fairly well. I think any events in New York City are vaccinated by definition there, right? I'm not sure exactly if the laws or the rules or whatever it is, the guidelines, whatever it is, it seemed like pretty much any place that you were going to walk into in Manhattan required the facts. But yeah, you and I got to see each other. That was the first time you and I have seen each other in person in two years. I think yes. Well, just slightly less than two years because we were at CES together in January of 2020. And that was it, right? Prior to that or after that, this is the only time we've seen each other. So yeah. Yeah, it was good. And we got, we have some, I have a couple of things from PEPCOM to talk about, and there will be more things that we found at PEPCOM. It was interesting. It felt as much like old home week at PEPCOM as it did New Product Day. And a big part of that, of course, was that none of us had seen each other in person in a while. But the other part was people didn't really have a lot of the new things that they are announcing because of supply chain issues. So it was look at this cool thing that we will have in two weeks. Like it's almost here. And so yeah. Kenny in the, so it's interesting. Kenny in the chat room asked, did you prove your back status with an app or actual cards? I used a photocopy of my card just because it was the simplest thing in that specific moment for me. I saw everybody fumbling with the apps on their phone. And I was like, I can just give you my card. And they're like, yeah, that's much, much better. But you did use the app, right, John? Well, I used the, so you can get a Vax pass from Clear. Right. So you upload your license, you upload your card, and then they do something. And then you get a Vax pass that says, yep, he's okay, you know, and it shows the dates and all that, which I guess the OCR of the card or whatever. Or you in the, but I guess you upload the info and then they verify it. And then, yeah, so I just showed them that and they were like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had it. I had set it all up on my phone, but it was just in that, like I said, in that specific moment, I've done it a few times at concerts and other things. And so it's just like, oh yeah, I don't need to, like it wasn't in my wallet. I would have had to launch the app and tap and it was like, dude, here's my card. And they're like, thanks. Good to go. And then for CES, and I guess some of us are wondering if they're still gonna do the whole thing. But the Clear app has a venue section where you can say, okay, give me a pass for CES 2022. And it's like, okay. And like sports stadiums and all sorts of things. So yeah, I'm not sure about CES. I, you know, we don't like to spread rumors here on this show. And what I'm about to say definitely falls into that category. However, the various bits of information that I have heard are that CES is only the like expo space is only about 40% sold. And that I get this time of year that that is 100% on any, any other year. And they are, like I hear tell that that South Hall will not even be used for CES. They're consolidating a lot of things into the other halls. And I hear that CES is unveiled event, which is their this PEPCOM event that John and I go to, it's like speed dating for the press. It's kind of like going to a conference or a trade show, except nobody gets to build a big booth. Everybody gets a table of exactly the same size. And it's in one much smaller expo type hall. It's really just a conference hall kind of thing. And super efficient because like there's none of the glitz and none of the mayhem. It's super easy to get from one table to the other because you literally walk four feet and you're right there. And everybody in attendance is pressed. So there's no, even if I like, if I come in halfway through John's conversation with somebody, it's totally relevant for me or, or some random person's conversation. It's totally relevant because 100% of the attendees are pressed, right? So it's super efficient. And it's why I bothered to go down to New York and do this. And honestly, it's the reason we go to Vegas too for CES. We rarely go and get it. We rarely get a whole lot of value out of the show floor. It's like the bulk of the value comes from, right, comes from these, these events like PEPCOM. But there's PEPCOM showstoppers. And then there's this event that CES has called Unveiled. All of them are the same, similar in design, as I just explained. I have heard John that CES is not letting you, not giving you the opportunity to buy space at Unveiled unless you are already buying space on the show floor. And that is new for this year. So lots of factors telling us that CES is not a guarantee is what I'm, what I'm saying here. So we'll see. We'll see. So there you go. And I apologize if I am sharing incorrect information, but it all seems to, all of the things I just shared with you came from multiple different sources. And they all kind of seem to be sending the same general message like, we don't know. Like they're still trying to figure it out. I hope they can. I think this is an acceleration of what was naturally happening at CES anyway. So much of it over the last decade has moved like so much of the value of it has moved out of the expo halls into, you know, meeting rooms and like these press events I mentioned and, you know, events and things like that that happen because CES is in town and or a CES is happening, which, which is the gravity that brings everybody to town. I hope they can continue to provide that gravity for us all so that these other things can happen. And I'm sure I don't know this, but I'm going to guess that the pep comms and the showstoppers of the world kick some money up to CES in order to happen during that week. And so if they need to kick more up to allow these events to happen or whatever, you know, that calculus is, I hope that they can make an event like an in-person experience like this happen, even if the show floor is not the value that it used to be perceived to be. So because I think, I don't think this is just a COVID thing. I think this is an acceleration of it. We don't, what's the value? Like exhibitors asking the question, what's the value in being on the show floor? None. What's the value in being in Vegas when everybody else is there? Tons. So, you know, there you go. But we have a lot to talk about here, John. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on this or is it time to move on? No, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, Macworld, Expo kind of us that's relevance. And personally, when I went there, I never went to the booths of the big, big shots. Right. I wanted to find the small little nuggets of value. Like they had this place that, you know, something called Tiny Town. That was where I got most of the material that I would write about, because those were the, to me, the true innovators, the people that, you know, could scrape together enough money to get kind of a booth. You're right. It was almost like in retrospect, kind of putting it all together. It was almost like a little PEPCOM style thing in the middle of the Macworld show floor, because everybody had the same size booth and there was no glitz and glamour. You just moved around and could talk and it was great. Yeah, I agree with you. Tiny Town. Yeah, it was awesome. I loved it. All right. Quick, quick. We have quick tips now. So I, and we will talk about my new MacBook Pro, which the 14 inch, which arrived. I'll talk about that a little later in the show. But I needed to, I need to repurpose my M1 Air for my daughter. It's time for her to get a new computer. She's got a 2015 MacBook Pro that she has loved and has used, but it's time for, to upgrade things. And she's heading off on a trip to Europe in December and so to Italy. And so we figured we should do that before. So I thought, well, okay, my M1 Air, like, it's less than a year old. That's your new machine. Perfect. We've got it in the house. We don't have to wait for anything to arrive. We'll migrate it over. So I, of course, migrated everything from my M1 Air to my M1 MacBook Pro, my M1 Pro MacBook Pro. They're going to make this difficult on us. And, and then I needed to do the whole wipe the machine, nuke and pave, get it ready for a new user. And then I remembered that macOS Monterey has an erase all contents and settings option. And it's sort of hidden in system preferences. In fact, I had to go look up the knowledge base article to remember where to find it. But in Monterey, if you go into system preferences, and you go to the system preferences menu at the top of the screen, the one to the very right of the Apple menu, you will then see erase all contents and settings. And this is available in Monterey on all Macs that either have an M1 style chip and or or a T two security chip in there, right? So it's not in everything. But I will tell you, this made life so super simple. It, you know, I chose it, it asked me about 15 times in different ways. Are you sure? Because once we do this, you know, it's over. And, and it acted just like iOS does when you do the same thing, when you go to, you know, settings, general reset, erase all contents and settings. And it wiped it out. It rebooted the machine. It took all of about four minutes. And then, you know, it's at the startup screen showing me hello in all the different languages. And presumably I'll be able to just, you know, plow through, didn't have to do a nuke, didn't have to do a pave, didn't have to do a reinstall. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And I, I think a big part of, of why this works is because of the bifurcated system and user volumes, right, that make up what we think of as our main disk, because all you got to do is blow away the user volume, create a new one, the system volume stays the same. Maybe they clean out system extensions, I'm hoping they do, that have been moved over there. And then that's the end of that. And it just blow it away and become and there's no, nothing you got to worry about. You've got a clean system. And now you have a clean user volume. So I will follow up if there's any surprises when we migrate my daughter's MacBook Pro over to this with migration system, which is I think how we'll do it just in the interest of time. But but yeah, so that's my first quick tip of the day. I don't know. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I was pretty stoked about that was pretty stoked. I remembered I could do that because, you know, that's sort of how it goes. You got a quick tip from Scott, John. Yes, sir's a good one. So Scott says one of the most agitating aspects of iOS's mail app has been the difficulty in opening an individual email in a separate window. Given the small size of some screens like Dave's iPad mini, the ability to do this becomes really important. Now in iOS 15, it's as simple as doing a tap and hold on the message. So if you tap and hold it reveals a contextual menu that offers various reply reply all the blah but they have a new selection apparently now that says open in new window and it does just that. I've attached a screenshot to show what I mean, but trying it on any iPad updated iOS 15 will demonstrate the same thing. I use this a lot now as a maximizes the screen space allocated to a single email making it much easier to read. And just to clarify on this, so so when when this one came in, I had my iPhone and I'm like, Oh, let me try it on my iPhone. This is this is iPad OS only. It does not. The iPhone doesn't offer this option probably because the screen is so small, so it wouldn't really make any difference. Well, you get mail messages full screen on an iPhone. Yes. Anyway, right? You don't have behavior. So this is how to kind of coerce iPad OS to do the same thing for you. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea about this. So this is I mean, this is what we love about quick tips, right? That's how it's how it goes. All right. Let's see. Listener John has a quick tip about the new MacBook Quick Tips about the new MacBook Pros. He says, first, an interesting note that seems to have been glossed over in coverage on the new M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros, the number of Thunderbolt controllers. I just got my 14 inch via work and I was going through system reports only to find that unlike the previous generation, which had four T3 ports, two on each side, the new machines have three T4 ports. That's correct. Two on the left, one on the right. The most interesting part is that the old version had one Thunderbolt controller per side. So one Thunderbolt controller for the left two ports, one for the right two ports. Correct. And I think that's the case on like your 16 inch MacBook Pro, John. He says these new Mac these new machines have three controllers. Each of the three Thunderbolt four ports can do full 40 gigabits per second bandwidth. Yeah. I had no I this is the see this is why we do this show even though I have one of these machines. I just didn't notice that there's so many things. So that's one. Uh, he says this is the first time that I have migrated from from an M1 to an M1 machine. Okay, he had an M1 mini that he migrated to his MacBook Pro and it brought up two more quick tips that he was previously unaware of. Target Disk Mode has been eliminated on the M1 machines in favor of disk sharing. And he's right about this. Disk sharing is accessed from the recovery console tools menu. And it shares over the network. And I think I can go over a Thunderbolt network too, but and ethernet. But you know, it is it is it's not Target Disk Mode. It's not turning your Mac into a expensive hard and expensive hard disk case. It's turning it into an expensive file server. So yes, there's that. But that means like reformatting the disk is not doable like it was in Target Disk Mode, right? So there are some limitations, but it for what most of us use Target Disk Mode for most of the time, it's suffices. Number two, he says I was unable to use the new disk sharing mode for migration assistant. And I still don't know why it wouldn't see it. But I did find out that when you connect to M1 machines, or maybe it's just Mac OS 11 plus via a Thunderbolt cable and run migration assistant on both, it will automatically set up a 40 gigabit network connection between the machines and show that it's prioritizing the Thunderbolt connection over any other network connection because it'll say connected via Thunderbolt. This is very much a Thunderbolt Mac thing, not an M1 only thing. So and he says that of course made migration super simple. Yeah, when I did mine, I and this again is is not exclusive to the M1. I migrated from as I said from my M1 Air to my M1 Pro MacBook Pro and I started it over Wi-Fi because that was the easiest way to get migration assistant all synced up. And then I did two things. First of all, I plugged a Thunderbolt cable, a power cable into, actually I plugged a power cable into the MagSafe port on the on the MacBook Pro. And then I connected a Thunderbolt 3 cable between the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air and that allowed for two things, John. Number one was that I could, the transfer automatically jumped from it started on Wi-Fi, it jumped to Thunderbolt as soon as that connection was there. So it's seamless. And number two, it passed power along that. So I had MagSafe to my MacBook Pro, Thunderbolt from the MacBook Pro to the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro was passing power through keeping both machines charged, which is pretty cool. So yeah. And that again, that's not exclusive to the M1s. I've done that with the with the old ones too. So yeah. What did I do for my last migration? I think I did Thunderbolt. Yeah. And I used an adapter. Yeah, it goes fast. Oh, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And if you use, if you go from Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3, you have to use Apple's adapter. That's the only one that's bidirectional. So yeah. All right. You got a quick tip from David? David has something. So David is just wants to remind us that in reminders, you can not only set a date, time, but a geofence arriving and leaving remind me when, as well as when messaging a person remind me when I message a person in iMessage. And I've tried other task tools, but for me, I never really found that the one killer feature that reminders didn't provide. I also have a lot of notes, calendars and reminders shared amongst family members. And getting them to use anything when it comes with their phone just isn't going to happen. So it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. I like the geofencing. And of course, now with, I mean, that's, of course, on your iPhone. And we've had the ability to geofence and shortcuts for a while. But we do get shortcuts in macOS Monterey. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. We've got, we've got some of our own quick tips, Monterey specific quick tips, although seems like the quick tips today have included a few of those already, which is excellent. Yep. I got to say I'm tickled by the air tag, the new functionality in the air tag. So I have one in my car and I have one on my key chain. And I just get tickled because IOS 15 now with an air tag. So I got an alert basically saying, oh, you left your Saturn behind. Oh, yeah. Oh, thank you. Yeah. So they kind of do a geofencing thing, too. Right. Yeah. Proximity fencing, I guess is probably the way to look at it. Yeah. When I got to your house, I parked on the street. You weren't back yet because you were getting our sushi. And I walked to your back porch and I had left my iPad mini, the new iPad mini in the car. And I got a disconnection alert from that saying, you know, you've detached from your iPad mini. No air tag on it. That's just the iPad mini doing its thing all by itself, which is pretty great because it has GPS. No, it does not. I have a Wi-Fi only iPad mini. Really? That's what I'm saying. Like the air tags don't have GPS either, right? They have Bluetooth. That's it. Right. But same thing in the iPad mini. It's doing its own. It's essentially an air tag without. Yeah. Because we had someone write in a while ago saying that it didn't work or I've even looked by Wi-Fi only devices when they show up and find my it doesn't provide. It says not available for that. So wow. Huh. Yeah. Warren in the chat room is saying that it will say you left it behind if you put it in your car with you. That that was not my experience. I drove for three hours with it in my car with me and never got that notification. However, when and I stopped for gas once, but I was wasn't far from the car, right? It was all right there. But as soon as I went to your backyard, it the iPad mini started report or my phone started reporting that the iPad mini was detached. So maybe this was just an anomaly. But I don't think so. We'll have to do some testing. So there you go. Yeah. All right. Andrew has our final of the this segment of quick tips. I think we'll have more. He says, I've been having problems with my active window changing every few seconds since I updated to Mac OS Monterey. It was driving me crazy. And then I figured out what it was. It turns out that clean my Mac's menu bar app is apparently randomly crashing. If I quit it, everything is fine. And he says, I called support for clean my Mac. And they told me uninstall clean my Mac, reinstall it, and the problem will be fixed. He says they were correct. So if you are seeing that now that you've upgraded to Monterey, just uninstall and reinstall clean my Mac and you should be totally fine. So All right. Good stuff. Anything more on that or should we move on here? I'd like to tell them about our first two sponsors, if that works for you. Me too. All right. Hey, look, cryptocurrency might feel like a secret or exclusive club, right? Well, our sponsor Coinbase believes that everyone everywhere should be able to get in the door. So whether you've been trading for years or just getting started, Coinbase can help. Coinbase offers a trusted and easy to use platform to buy, sell and spend cryptocurrency. They support the most popular digital currencies on the market and make them accessible to everyone. They offer portfolio management and protection, learning resources, and even a mobile app so that you can trade securely and monitor your crypto all in one place. I've been using Coinbase for a very long time and they make it super easy, super simple. They explain everything. It's super secure. It's something I've trusted for a very long time and I feel very comfortable sharing this here with you. And it's not just me, millions of people in over 100 countries trust Coinbase with their digital assets. So whether you're looking to just diversify, just getting started, or searching for a better way to access crypto markets, start today with Coinbase. And for a limited time, new users can get $10 in free Bitcoin when you sign up today at Coinbase.com-MGG. Make sure to use our special URL. Sign up at Coinbase.com-MGG for $10 in free Bitcoin. This offer is for a limited time only, so be sure to sign up today. Again, our special URL, Coinbase.com-MGG, and our thanks to Coinbase for sponsoring this episode. All right Dave, holidays are right around the corner. If you want help prepping for your parties and your family get-togethers all while supporting a more sustainable local food system, check out Imperfect Foods. Imperfect Foods is a grocery delivery service offering an entire line of sustainable groceries that taste delicious and reduce waste. Make a difference in our food system. Embrace the natural imperfections and get your groceries delivered weekly with Imperfect Foods. Visit imperfectfoods.com to see if they deliver to your area. Once you sign up, you can personalize your weekly grocery order with fresh seasonal produce, pantry stables, and yummy snacks. Plus, your order will arrive on the same day each week. Imperfect Foods delivers weekly by neighborhood, a unique model that produces 25-75% fewer emissions than individual trips to the grocery store. And I gotta say Dave, my personal experience, I didn't get anything that wasn't perfect. Everything was fine, and it was a huge variety of stuff that I was able to get. Grass-fed beef, smoked salmon, salad kits, which I like, bacon, uncured bacon ends. We love bacon. Because I like bacon, because everybody loves bacon. Everybody loves bacon. And also, the snacks were really good too. So I stocked up on those. So you gotta check this out. Right now, Imperfect Foods is offering our listeners 20% off your first four orders when you go to imperfectfoods.com and use promo code MGG. Again, 20% off your first four orders, that's up to an $80 value at imperfectfoods.com when you use promo code MGG, imperfectfoods.com, and use MGG. Sweet. And our thanks to Imperfect Foods for sponsoring this episode. All right. Nicely done, Mr. John F. Braun. Let's go to some quick tips. You're welcome. Yeah, nice. Monterey. We'll see if we can focus on Monterey for a few minutes here. The quick note feature in Monterey is one that if I had not read the release notes, I don't think I would have remembered was there. Can we back up a bit? Yes. Did you have any issues? Because I want to mention some minor screw-ups, but some minor weird things. Though I must say the upgrade... Is this with the quick note thing? Because I just I want to make sure we finish that thought. Okay. All right. Go ahead. Yeah. With Monterey, you can move your mouse to the bottom right corner of your screen and it pops up a little note thing that you can just type a note into. It's super handy. And like I'm finding myself using notes more and more and Evernote less and less. In fact, I'm living in both worlds right now and it's kind of a weird because I have some things in Evernote. It's not just Makikeb. I have an Evernote. I have a lot of other stuff there, but I find myself using notes more and more because Apple makes it so convenient to just start typing a note, right? Like if you have an iPad with an Apple pencil, you just tap the Apple pencil on the screen and boom, you're typing a note. Like that. So like they're doing a good thing with this. I like it. So but you said you had some problems getting Monterey? Well, also, I think quick note you can bring up. Is it function Q? Oh, I don't know. I don't have Monterey on the studio. No, it's a function key. I think it's function Q will also bring up a quick note. Interesting. Interesting. Oh, all right. I'll verify that later. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see. Function Q. Absolutely correct, folks. I just tried it on my MacBook Pro here. Oh, very nice. Function. So I tried that too. Q. See, there you go. All right. Good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Yeah, I had, so I don't know if you had any problems, but I, you know, I wanted to start off with that, but the only weird things that happened, Dave, was I got legacy system extension warnings. Oh, sure. I mean, that's normal when you upgrade the OS, right? One was for Oracle, which is Java, of course. And the other was a Parallels component, so I may have to update parallels on this machine. Sure. The other thing is I got a weird Mac OS server warning, and it doesn't look like they've upgraded Mac OS server from Monterey yet. I wasn't able to find it. When I found it in the App Store and clicked on it, it's like, nope. Interesting. Just a warning for people. If you rely on server, I mean, server is a shadow of its former self right now. It only really does device management, so it may not be a big deal to you, but if it is, careful. Yeah. This is interesting to know. People in the developer forums are agreeing with you here that there is no server for Mac OS Monterey yet. I would assume it's coming, but I mean, it's possible it hasn't. It's interesting. Yeah. Oh, okay. Good job. All right. One minor thing that caught my eye. Time machine shows progress in a different format. It now says xx of x% done and the amount of data copied. That's different from what happened before, but I don't know why they changed it, but again, I just noticed that I'm like, wait, that's different. Yeah. Huh. That's interesting. It may make you feel better about the progress of the backup. Sometimes I found it just sits there for a long time grinding on something and I'm like, what's it doing? Right. Right. Right. Interesting. I'll have to check that out. Yeah. That's good. This whole shared with you thing in Monterey has been interesting. I launched photos and looked in the, if you look in the sidebar of photos, you will see a section called shared with you and it will list all of the things, albums and other such things that have been shared with you. It doesn't have to be just since you installed Monterey. Though, obviously people show new things too, but this showed old things and you can find this in other apps as well. So, you know, check out if people have shared, it's essentially things that people have shared with you with messages that are destined for other apps. So, of course, things like, you know, Apple TV shows and things like that can all sort of show up as the shared with you thing. So, we'd love to hear from you where you're finding this feedback at MackieCab.com. Obviously, you can send us anything, but that too. Yeah. You can send us a note or a photo or something. Feedback at MackieCab.com. Feedback at MackieCab.com. It is. What else did you notice, Mr. Braun, John F. Braun? I was really excited, Dave, when they showed this universal control feature where you could basically drag your, it's like Sidecar Plus. And that supposedly you're able to drag a window from your Mac over to your iDevice. And I was like, okay, let me try it. Nope. No. Not in Monterey. So, it's coming, folks. But here's the other disappointment. Remember when there was an explicit entry in the system preferences for Sidecar, Dave? It's not there anymore. I'm like, where did it go? Can I still do this? They buried it back into a display. Okay. So, if you go to display on your Mac, then there's a thing saying, oh, do you want to also send this stuff over to your iPad? Sure. Interesting. All right. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense, right? Because it's, it makes, it is a display feature. Like, I understand why when it was new. Well, that's why I looked there. I was like, you know, where would they put it if they put it? Or no, you know what I think I did? I think I went to, so there's a search feature in system preferences. And I think I typed in Sidecar and it highlighted display. So, it kind of gave me a hint. And it's like, yeah, look over here. Look there. That's one of the, that's a great quick tip in and of itself, using search and system preferences because it'll do exactly that if you're looking for something. Like, I was looking for PowerNap on my, on my M1 Air. Oh, well, that's an energy saver. Oh, well, you would think that. Energy saver. Well, even when there was enter energy saver, PowerNap does not exist as a toggleable function on the M, the M1 based machines and that. So, now if I search for PowerNap on my M1 MacBook Pro, which I have in front of me, it highlights battery. So, okay, great. I go to battery. There is nothing in there about PowerNap. I have zero options to control a feature called PowerNap. But somehow, it, the search is finding it and saying that it would be in battery if in fact you had a Mac that supported it. So, it's a little, little misleading. But, you know, there you go. The next one. So, this is a feature that I think a lot of people were looking for and we actually had a question in the past. I think our friend Scott asked this and it's like, how do you air play to your Mac? And here's the good news is that Monterey, it, it's just there. Yeah, you don't know third party stuff. They all got sure locked. That's right. Yeah. I basically, I took my iPhone, went to iTunes. I have some music on my iPhone, but not a lot. Sure. And then clicked on the, you know, the little icon, like little triangle. I don't know what they call it. Choose a speaker icon. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like it just showed Macbook Pro there and I'm like, okay. And then the music came flowing for my Macbook Pro. So, that's a feature that I think a lot of people will, will enjoy. And it's not just audio. You can air play video to your Mac, your Monterey Mac screen too, right? So if you've got a big, you know, 27 inch iMac or whatever, and you want to, you know, blast your video over to it, like it works just the same as it would with your TV. It's great. Yeah, it works really well. But also good for demos and things like that, right? Airplay to the screen and now everybody can see it. So, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty good. If you are a homebrew user and you have upgraded to Monterey, go to the terminal and type brew space upgrade to make sure you have all the latest packages. Now, any new packages it downloads, it will download the Monterey specific package if, if it's available. But for your existing packages, it will not change those. You will still have the, you know, the Big Sur package and which really shouldn't be a problem. I haven't run into a problem with any of those. But if you want to upgrade a package that's existing to the Monterey version, again, assuming a Monterey version exists for the package, type brew reinstall and then the package name and it will force a reinstallation of that. And of course, in the process, if a Monterey version is available, it'll download it. If not, it'll grab the Big Sur version and put that on there and you'll probably have no issues. But definitely, at the very least, go to your terminal and do a brew upgrade. And which is something that's good to do, honestly, like once a week, I have done brew upgrades where I do a brew upgrade. It takes, you know, whatever 10 minutes to go through and upgrade all the things. And then if I do it immediately afterwards, there will be yet another new package like things are updated in homebrew constantly. So I try to do it about once a week. I don't obsess over it, but I also don't like to let things get too far behind. So yeah, it is good. What else do we have here, John? We have, oh, on the privacy front, mail privacy protection and iCloud private relay are now features you can use in Monterey. I've been having a weird thing with email where it's not loading remote images on my MacBook Pro. And I guess maybe I just need to look at the email settings to do that. But it's been a little weird because... Now, both of these are in iCloud, right? So you have to go to your iCloud settings. Then I think private relay and mail privacy protection are two additional choices now, right? I think that private relay definitely is there. I don't know that mail's relay is there. I'm not seeing it. Oh, wait, no, there is hide my email. But that's different, right? Hide my email is the go get me a separate email address. Yeah, which is another privacy feature, which is great, right? But I think for the mail... Let's see. Where is that? Maybe somebody in the chat room will hip us to it. Oh, no, it's in the... It's in the private... It's in mail preferences privacy. And you have the protect mail activity. And then it explains that it works by hiding your IP address and loading remote content privately in the background. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that, yeah, you're right. iCloud private relay is in system preferences. iCloud mail's privacy protection is in mail system preferences. Oh, sorry, mail preferences privacy. And there you go. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not sure why it's not loading remote images, but it is, it is not. Yeah, it should be... Yeah, I noticed one thing in mail is that it now puts up... So when I was going through our queue, when I replied to somebody, it now shows a little reply arrow. I don't think it did that before. It did for me. I mean, it's else... You mean after you reply? Right. Yeah, it should. That's been there for a while, the reply arrow. Yeah. Yeah. It might... But the layout might be different. It might just be something that now is more obvious to you, just because it's in a different spot or something. Yeah. And then we get shortcuts, as we mentioned before, which is... I mean, I haven't messed around with shortcuts on macOS a ton, but they're there. Really, one of the big things for me is focus. Being able to have focus synced between my devices, if I set a focus mode on my phone manually or automatically, like my sleep focus comes up on my MacBook Pro now, comes up... Well, I assume it comes up in the Mac Mini in the office. I haven't been there. As I said before, that may very well be the reason that I wind up upgrading this machine in the studio to Monterey sooner rather than later so that I can have my podcasting focus that only lets messages from certain people in while I'm here doing the podcast. And I could even have that kick in automatically with a shortcut. And so there's some fun stuff. So anyway. All right. Shall we see if we can do a few cool stuffs found, my friend? Yes. And thanks to Gary, here's our first one, which is cool. I think... So this free web tool is a fast and easy way to remove objects from images. It's called... And it's called cleanup pictures. And that's the URL, right? And I went to the web page and looked at... And they show a little demo and basically have a picture. And then you scrub over what you want taken out of it. It takes it out. That's pretty cool. So it's nice that it's free. I'm pretty sure you like Pixelmator, right, Dave? I do. Yeah. I'm almost certain that that has a feature to do that as does probably Photoshop and most other high-end imaging programs. But hey, for something quick and dirty, that's kind of cool. That's pretty cool. Yeah. There's a bunch of iPhone apps, in fact, to... You know, that will do this for you. But yeah, and the URL is just cleanup.pictures. Like, that's it. And you just upload your image there and away you go. So I haven't looked at their privacy policy. Like, are they... They don't seem to talk about that. So I'm not sure if they're keeping your pictures and doing anything with it. Let's see. Cleanup pictures have been built by the engineering team at ClipDrop. And it is open source under the Apache license 2.0. It uses Lama LAMA, an open source model from Samsung's AI lab to automatically and accurately redraw the areas that you delete. Pretty cool. All right. I like it. Fun. John, I got a weird email this morning. Well, I was asleep when it came in, as I believe was my wife. Although, you know, anything could be possible. 301 AM, I got an email from Amazon saying, as requested, your HP LaserJet 3055 is now connected to the A-Lady. And this email confirms that your printer was connected... Oh, I see. It was connected on 1028. Okay. So I forced the A-Lady to do a devices scan. We were having problems with one of our smart plugs. And so I factory reset it. And it's all fine now. And I had to reintegrate it into the A-Lady. Okay. So this is just... This is an email that came in days later. But evidently, during that scan, it noticed my printer. And it says, with your printer connected to the A-Lady, you can print a variety of content, such as shopping lists and crossword puzzles with your voice. This will... You can also have it notify you when you are running low on Incortoner. And you can even set up smart reorders to automatically place an Incortoner order from Amazon. So you never run out. To manage your printer settings, go to the A-Lady app and find your printer under the devices menu. So there you go. I had no idea that this was even possible. And I'll have to look to see if my newer printer, my Lexmark here in the office is connected, because that's the old LaserJet I had in the office and moved to the house. But it's pretty amazing. Yeah. So I don't know. It's a cool stuff. I'm almost certain. Yeah, I'm looking through my email now. Yeah. But I thought I got something similar. Yeah. It was something about Alexa and my printer. And I'm like, why am I getting this? Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? Yeah. So anyway, check your A-Lady app and look in devices printers and see what's there. Kenny, speaking of Amazon products, Kenny alerts us that Eero 6.5 came out in October. And it adds a few things, one of which is very specific for Apple users and addresses an issue we were having. And that is it fixed an issue where Apple clients failed to connect with WPA3. If you'll remember, we tested WPA3 on Eero, I don't know, months, maybe even a year ago. And devices would not roam well. And that's being kind. That issue has now been fixed. So you can go into your Eero's and turn on WPA3 now and, you know, experience the luscious joy of WPA3 protection. So they also add, I mean, you know, they, as always, they're fixing stability or adding stability stuff. They added some roaming improvements with 802.11v and K, which may be part of that WPA3 fix. And then they also added DFS channel support on the Wi-Fi 6 Eero so that you can use those if you're in an area where you can use those. So yeah, it is good news. All right. Yeah. I switched that on a couple of weeks ago. And yeah, everything seems to work now. So excellence. Ah, nicely done. That's great. I'm glad to hear that. That's good. Yeah, it was, it was, it started rolling out the date on the release notes is October 4th. But Eero is weird. Like they don't roll out to everyone all at once. And I think that's to both manage server flow, but also customer support. If there is some issue, they don't just suddenly want everyone to have it, right? They want to be able to compartmentalize and A, B tests and be like, ah, wait, wait, wait, we're not getting calls from people in that group. We have a problem here. So it's good. I got a lot of toys last week, John. My AirPods Gen 3 showed up. They look very similar to my original AirPods, a little bit different. They work a whole lot differently though. These may become my new favorite AirPods, John. I have the AirPods. Oh, gee, the original ones that I mainly only use in the office for phone calls, but their batteries are getting so low that they're not even functional for that. I have the AirPods Pro, which I tend to travel with. But the, but, you know, they seal things out. So they are a very specific use case. The AirPods Gen 3 are essentially the AirPods Pro, but with, with the seal, the seal taken out of them. So you don't get noise cancellation or anything like that for obvious reasons. You would need seal to do those or at least to do those effectively. But the spatial audio with these is fantastic because you really can get a wonderful experience while still being connected to the outside world, which is, you know, for a lot of things, great. I really like phone calls better when I can hear the room that I'm in, as opposed to being sealed off from the room. Yes, the AirPods Pro have transparency and I, I leverage that greatly when I'm using them for phone calls, because otherwise I can't hear myself and that gets weird. But, but yeah, yeah, so I'm stoked about these. And of course they, they, you know, they have the MagSafe and all that stuff to charge with. So in fact, I will put them on the MagSafe charger behind me and it should light up. Yeah, there it goes. Not MagSafe, sorry, just Chi, not MagSafe. Chi, I get these things confused, John. I don't know why. That's okay. And as you reminded me, the Apple Watch is a proprietary charging surface, right? Yeah, I did not bring my Apple Watch charger down on my trip with me. So, and since you aren't an Apple Watch user, I had to manage my battery very, very carefully in order to make it home after two days with it. But yeah, it is Chi. I mean, there's some, like it's Chi at some level, but, but not at level. Like inductive. So it's inductive charging of some sort, but not compatible with the other. I've never been able to make it work on a, you know, a standard Chi surface, nor have I been able to make other Chi devices work on the Apple Watch, you know, Puck charger or whatever. So yeah, it's no bueno. But, you know, it's how it goes. The, I want to remind everybody of live.mackiekev.com, which is where you can go while we are recording this, these shows and chat with all the other Mackie Kev listeners. And the reason I remind you of that is I happen to glance at the chat room and I see a related but separate conversation happening, which is amazing. Like that's, that's what it's for. Certainly, you know, we, we keep a lazy eye on it to make sure that, you know, if, if we're missing something, you folks are there to catch us, which is awesome. But also it's just a place to hang out with other members of the Mackie Kev family and help each other and geek out and all that good stuff. It's great. John, I am, I had the, at PEPCOM, I had the opportunity to check out a few, well, over the last week, including at PEPCOM, PEPCOM, I've had the opportunity to check out a few different air tags cases. And the first one I want to talk about is from Catalyst and it is their air tag clippet case. And so you, it unscrews the case does and you drop an air tag into it. And then, you know, it just pops in. It's got a little rubber shield to keep it from getting scratched up. And then you and anybody that's watching the video will see this, but I'll explain it too. So it seals it. Well, it doesn't seal. It locks the air tag tightly in this little case that's about a piece of plastic that's about the size of the air tag. And then it has a clip that goes over the bottom of it that snaps shut. And you can hear it snap shut that allows it to go on, they say dog collars, they show a picture of it on a child's shoelaces. But of course, you could put it on like your backpack or something like that. And it, it, you know, I guess if you want to track your dog or your kid, this is a perfect way to do it. But also if you want to track your own stuff, if it's if it's got a strap, this is a way to do it. And and it like this lock is like, I got to work to open this thing. So so there you go. That's that's the clip it case for air tags from Catalyst. And then I got a goodie bag from the lovely folks at spec, who have also made a ton of different air tags things, carry cases and accessories, we will call them the the first one up is their carabiner, which your air tag fits in the middle of and it has a it's a metal case with obviously a plastic sleeve for your air tag to snap into. And then it's got a metal, you know, D kind of D style hook that you can clip on to just about anything you want, which is cool. They have these things, John, called the silly loops. S I l I loop. And it's built to put your air tag in at the bottom on one end. It's up. It's like a it's an oval, we'll call it. It's made of rubberized stretchy material. The air tag fits in the bottom circular part of the bottom. And there's this big oval loop that you can use to like loop on to your your devices or your backpack or anything like your you could you could use this with luggage, but I have something for you for that. So that's the silly loop. And that's I think a case, a box of them or a pack of them, I should say is like 45 bucks. Then they have and I'm looking at the name here so that I can tell you the silly ring, which this is the thing you might want for your keys, folks, because you you have this little plastic case that you pop your air tag into. And then it has a thin cable that would be thin enough to go through your keys or really anything else. And you could pop your keys on this. It's got a screw at the at the end, which I of course can't see because I have a light in my eyes so that you can see me nicely. But but suffice to say, it unscrews and you can put your keys on this thing. So that's that's the silly ring. And then as promised, the luggage tag pro for $29.95 as their website says, it's a it looks like a carbon fiber style case that you put your air tag in. And then it closes magnetically to keep things safe. And then the luggage tag does the rest by keeping it closed. But the nice part is, it's not metal in any way. So it does not block the signal of your air tag. So you can put it in a sort of a traditional luggage tag that would be on the outside of your luggage and giving you all the range that you would want. And so all those those last four things for from spec, the first one was from Catalyst. And of course, we'll have links to all these things in the show notes at mackeykeb.com. So that's what we got. All right. Were they at the show? No, spec wasn't at the show. They were at the online pepcom, which was okay. Yeah, a week before whatever. So yeah, yeah, yeah. But but they had those. So yeah. Okay. But love their cases. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I've got some cases to talk about too. We'll do that in a future show. We got we got lots of stuff to get through today. So you found you you came across a cool stuff. Well, not a cool stuff. It was a cool stuff found. But it's a cool stuff made because a mackey keb listener made it on John. From Allison. Oh, yes. Oh, sorry. Hold on. That's okay. Here we are. It's okay. No, it's right in front of me. Okay, so Allison, who does the Nassila cast podcast and sends in all sorts of great information says I was trying to get straight in my head all of the different configuration options for the new M1 Pro and Max Max and decided to make a diagram. I think this could be really helpful for people trying to sort through the options in a visual way. My final count, if you include color is 180 distinct combinations. These are the things I love Allison for. This is amazing. We will link to that article. The only thing that made me chuckle is I reflected on how remember in the battle days, remember the performance, Dave? Yes. I think they also had about 180 models of it. This was in the age where Apple had way too many models of Max. And then, you know, Steve came along and said, you know, we're going to have these four quadrants and they've kind of deviated from, I don't know if they've deviated much from that. I think you're, I don't know, man. Like, I think that's a stretch. This is, this is just the processor, right? I mean, it's not, I mean, I get, sure. And you're right. It is confusing. So in that sense, yes, it's like the performance days, but I think it's pretty straightforward what you're getting was with the performance. It was like, what's the difference between the 630 and the 650? And I was like, I think I'm having trouble hearing you. I need to hang up now. So yeah, I'm trying to pull this up, but maybe somebody else linked to Allison's article because her website's been super slow this morning, but I think it's coming up. Yeah. The tree of this, really it's, you know, you've got two CPU core options. You're either getting an eight core or 10 core and the only way you could get an eight core is with the M one pro on the lowest, lowest end. And then you've got GPUs going from 14 core through 16 and 24 core all the way up to 32 core. The last two being of course for the M one max and then ram from 16 to 64 power. And then there's the power adapter options and all that good stuff, of course, and then disc options to, if you want to go up to the eight terabyte drive. So yeah, it's a lot. It's interesting. Actually, a short story, but I was in line for customer support the other day at the store and the guy behind me saw my jacket and he's like, oh, you went to Macworld. I still have my jacket when I spoke at Macworld. Oh, nice. Decades ago. Yeah. And then he was like, so what do you think of the M one Mac? And I'm like, oh, wow. And he was like, and his comment was, you know, I'm a graphic designer and having more Ram is better, but he's still for what he does. It's still not enough. So that's all I'm going to say. It was good to get feedback from a literal man on the street. And he might be a little old informed man, uninformed man. I'm not. Well, you know, because you and I had this conversation about the differences in the architecture of the M one system on a chip versus Intel and comparing the two, especially in terms of the amount of RAM or the amount of VRAM as we used to call it, it starts to get to be really like there's not a whole lot of comparison there. It's not completely different, but it's also not not anywhere near the same, right? Because it is shared memory, right? It's unified memory. So there is no there's no movement between the CPU and the GPU, right? Right. So that which is huge. So yeah, I have a feeling that if that if the guy you talked to tried to use one of these M one, even just an M one Mac, he might find himself. I think he said he got one and the first generation, yeah, I guess wasn't entirely satisfied with the performance. Yeah, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the GPUs on these new ones are smoking. So yeah. Yeah, interesting. All right. We have more to talk about, including my new MacBook Pro, which we've talked about a little bit, but I'll sort of wrap that up. But the next thing I want to do is talk about our next two sponsors. If that works for you, Mr. Braun. Yes. All right. First up, TextExpander seven from Smile is now available for download. I've been using this latest update for a little bit. It brings a fresh new experience that makes TextExpander easier to navigate so that anyone and everybody can use it. And it's all wrapped up in this whole new streamlined look and feel. In this version, you'll discover a new interface that's easier to use more responsive and offers a few functional improvements to make TextExpander a more interactive and engaging product. TextExpander seven includes enhanced snippet suggestions, which is amazing. Improved conflict management, better accessibility, and more. You've got to, I've been, like I said, I've been using this, the interface, especially with the like the popups and stuff where you have, if you've got fields in there that you are entering as you're doing your snippet, like the interactive part of it, it works. Like it worked great before and now it's even more seamless. And you've got to go check this out. Go check out what's new in TextExpander seven by getting TextExpander today and being a show listener here to Mac GeekGab. You get 20% off your first year. Visit textexpander.com slash podcast to learn more and our thanks to TextExpander and Smile for sponsoring this episode. Hey, are you looking for a healthier energy option to help you power through that 2pm feeling? You know that 2pm feeling when it's like, Oh man, I know I have more to do, but I don't have the energy to do it. Well, Nap Jitsu, our sponsor here has natural time released ingredients that help keep you energized for hours without that crash because Nap Jitsu's natural supplements were made by people who know how it feels to be tired and busy. Their patent-bending formulas have natural ingredients like B vitamins, guarana, ginseng, those kinds of things to give you a boost of energy without that crash later. And each Nap Jitsu product provides brain-boosting nootropics to unlock steady energy right when you need it. The result? Your peak performance all day long. I've tried these things out. It actually, for me, it works. Nap Jitsu's supplements are packaged into these small little packets so you can take them wherever and whenever you need that little energy boost. And it's pretty cool. So whether you need to experience deeper sleep or unlock immediate lasting energy, each Nap Jitsu product is designed to help you achieve your optimal performance. Remember, the smart rest more, the wise rest better. Rest up and level up with Nap Jitsu and for a limited time receive 30% off your first purchase when you go to napjitsu.com.mgg. Go to napjitsu.com.mgg for 30% off your first purchase today. That's napjitsu.com.mgg. And our thanks to Nap Jitsu for sponsoring this episode. So I got this new M1 MacBook Pro. I ordered it on release day, John, your announcement day, I should say. And I opted, I chose the option on the right when you go to customize. I wanted a 14 inch and you can choose the option on the left, which is an eight core GPU, eight core CPU, 14 core GPU, 16 gig 512. That's where it starts. And the option on the right on Apple site is the 10 core CPU. I thought, oh, I want to let's go with the 10 core CPU, which meant because I chose the right path, the path on the right, not necessarily the correct path that I got the 16 core GPU. I didn't really care if I had the 14 core GPU or the 16 core GPU. I wanted the 10 core CPU. I could have, as per Allison's chart that we mentioned just before, I could have chosen the left path and upgraded only the CPU to 10 cores, leaving the GPU on 14 cores and saved myself 200 bucks. I did not take that path. Quite frankly, I didn't know that path existed. So maybe you're right. Maybe we are in the performer days of choosing your system on a chip with the M1. But I did go with the M1 pro, 10 core CPU, 16 core GPU, one terabyte storage, which is sort of the default for the right most path. And I went with 32 gigs of unified memory. And so because of that, even though I was ordering right away, as soon as I changed it, when I was at 16 gigs of memory, it's like it's going to be delivered on the 27th, which was release day. Great. As soon as I changed it to 32, it was like, yep, you're going to be a week later. Great. So that would mean it's coming. This show is coming out on Monday the first, so it was going to come on Tuesday the second. It came on Thursday, the 29th, thanks to the FedEx gods or whatever it was that caused this to happen. And I migrated over immediately and have been using it ever since, as I mentioned earlier in the show, because I wiped the other one. I brought this one down to your place when, you know, for this trip, that was my first little travel with it, obviously. Wait, no, it didn't come on Thursday because I left on Thursday. It came on Wednesday, the 28th, didn't it? Yeah. So it came six days early, which is great. It is fast. I, but for what I do, I cannot tell that it is, you know, twice as fast or more as my M1 air previously. It like it, it acts exactly the same because that machine is probably five times faster than I would normally notice anywhere normally need anyway. And so for this one to be 10 times faster than what I normally need doesn't really make any difference at all. It starts up super fast. It wakes up super fast. It's, it's just fast. How about the fans? Have not been able to get the fans to turn on even when running geek bench. So don't know what that's about. But I did run geek bench to prove to myself that, yes, it comes in with scores like, you know, 16,000 or something crazy like that. But so like it's so fast that I'm not sure I'm going to keep it. I will stay in the family. My son is a CS student at Reed, and he also needs a new machine. He's using a 2018 air, which is the dual core with, with hyperthreading, which is fine. But he's starting to see some of the limitations of that, especially when doing compiles and things like that. So it makes sense to get a new machine. We were going to get him a new M1 air. I may wind up, he hasn't heard this yet. I may wind up just gifting this to him and getting myself another M1 air since my M, my old M1 air is going to my daughter. So technically my kids will have hand me down computers, but this one would be a really nice hand me down for anybody to get right now. And it's certainly more than he needs to, but I think he'll get more use out of it than me. We'll see. I do like the screen on this. A, the screen is just gorgeous. And B, it's bigger, but, but it has a notch. As we mentioned in the last show, like the conceptually the notch really doesn't bother me. I like the fact that we're making use of that previously unused space, right? Because we, you know, the space that the camera occupies was unused across the entire horizon of the screen, right? And, and so now it just raises up. That would all be fine if the, if the things that would spill over into where the notch was could be used. But in, I am at a loss. The OS doesn't understand it yet. It sort of understands it, but what it does is it punts. And by that, I mean, if you have menu bar items that move into where the notch would be, you don't get to see them. Is it? No, nothing. Is they just, you know, man, we're just going to not show those to you ever. Thank goodness bartender. They haven't done an update specifically for, oh, they are working on notch supports. I literally just launched it and it says there's not, not support. So I don't know what that means because I haven't installed it yet and we're doing the show literally right now. But I did turn on an option in bartender at mac bartender.com saying use bartender bar to show hidden items. And so instead of it showing me the hidden items in the menu bar, it drops down a separate bar to see them so I can at least see all my overflow stuff if I manage things properly. So at least there's that I guarantee within a week, we will see an update from Apple that at least begins to address this because it happens from the other side too. If you have menu menus that spill over into where the notch is, it's just flabbergasting to me that this shipped this way. Like I don't get it. Like my wife said, and I don't know that I agree with this or not, but it was an apt sentiment. This would never have happened if Steve was in charge and she might be right about that. So yeah, it's a wonderful machine. I've been, you know, obviously very, very happy with it. I'm trying to pull up my notes for it here, which don't seem to be anywhere in it because I, but it is, you know, it is chunkier than the previous, you know, than my air. Technically, it's thinner than my air at my air's thickest point, but not by much. It's, it maxes out or it is 6.0.61 inches thick, whereas the air, you know, sort of fans up to a 0.63 inches. It is heavier than the air, obviously it's three and a half pounds versus 2.8, but it's not heavy by any stretch. It's very well balanced and it's, you know, it's no seven pound monster like we had. When I got it, I noticed two interesting things, John. The first was that it identified itself on my network as MBP 14 inch 2021. That was the DHCP client ID that it sent along when it grabbed its IP address for migration assistant to do its job on the network. The other thing which was a pleasant surprise is that my air was on 12.0.1 because that's how you upgrade to Monterey. Even though I was in the beta cycle, I got off of the beta cycle and just did the normal upgrade. And my MacBook Pro came with 12.0 on it, which is interesting. And it allowed the migration assistant migration to happen. No Rosetta apps would launch until I did the update to 12.01. Don't know what that's about, but if anybody finds themselves in that same scenario, make sure you're on 12.01. And then I should say no Intel apps would launch, but it's a really nice machine. The keyboard is like butter. That may be the reason that I keep it is that keyboard. Not that the M1 airs keyboard is bad, but this is definitely nicer. It's a little more spread out like I found myself initially typing the wrong letters because I was like was moving quickly like I would have on my air, but it's a wonderful machine, obviously. And it's pretty and does all the things that it does, but it's and it's got all those ports, which I think is great. I would love to have a USB-A port on it. I know I'm not going to get one, but if we're going to have ports, I would like USB-A because it's the thing that we all use the most when we're not using USB-C. Like HDMI is good, but I get why they put it on here. Totally makes sense for the graphics pros and all that stuff, like 100% understood. And for the same reason I agree with the SD card slot, like go talk to the photography folks. They want that. Great. But I would have loved, I think we all would have loved a USB-A port. Of course you can dongle it up, but that's how it is. Question is, will I keep it? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that, John. Yep. I thought I saw something about better touch tool offering some notch support. I can't find the article, but people are already recognizing the issue and updating their software. It's just crazy to me that we're still in this world. Like, I don't, it's just baffling to me that Apple shipped it this way. But again, I mean, it doesn't bother me on my phone because it understands how to deal with it. Correct, correct. Although initially there were some issues with that, right? So, yeah, they'll get there. All right. We have time for, we're going to make time for a question or two here. You want to take us to Gray, John, and we'll because we talked about iCloud Private Relay earlier in the episode, so I figure we'll stretch another minute or two and talk about this. There he is. All right. We got an experience here. I subscribe to a New York Times cooking newsletter which contains lists of recipes each week. The HTML emails contain links to the cooking section of the times containing details of the recipe. Cool. When I downloaded iOS 15, I activated Private Relay. I noticed that clicking on a newsletter recipe no longer took you to the times cooking section. It simply generated a Google search containing keywords for the recipe listing. After some head scratching, I remember Private Relay deactivated it and restarted by iPhone. The links work normally. The explanatory description of Private Relay does say that some websites may not work, and this is true. So here's my response. So that's a good data point, beta indeed. And then it was like, you know what? Now that Monterey is out, I'm wondering if Private Relay behaves the same way. And Apple has a support article explaining all of this stuff here. And there are various things you can fiddle with. And they also have a way where you can enable or disable Private Relay for each network. So if it's on Dave and then you go into your network and click on the little i, the little info, you can enable and disable it for both your Wi-Fi and your cellular network. So they're offering some level of granularity, but not enough, I think, for yet. Yeah, that's true, right? Yeah, yeah. But here's the kicker. Go ahead. So, yeah, so I suggested try it out on Monterey and guess what works fine on Monterey. For him as well? Yes. Because I think a lot of this is going to be location-based, too. Right. We're all going to have different experiences as this sort of settles in. Right. Well, their settings are, let me see. So iCloud Private Relay IP address location, you can you can select maintain general location or use country and time zone. Right. Right. So I'm wondering if that setting was different on Monterey and that's why it worked for him. Who knows. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. I mean, I tried it. It's, I mean. So we are getting reports here, John, about something that the folks in the chat room. So there's three people working on this for us. We've got Warren, we've got Dave Ginsburg and Paul Franz about, there's a knowledge base article that we will definitely put in the show notes. This is all late breaking here, at least as far as we're aware. The knowledge base article is how to adjust an app's settings to appear below the camera area on your 14-inch or 16-inch MacBook Pro. It goes on to say you can adjust an app's settings so that it uses the whole display or uses only the area below the camera housing. So this is essentially avoid the notch. Right. And yeah. So I'm going to quit a third-party app and the way you do this is you go in the finder to the app, you go to get info and then there is an option in the info panel that says scale to fit below built in camera. So I've checked that for, for Slack and of course we're not recording on an M1 machine so I can't show you this. And it doesn't seem to change anything. So the menu bar is still up where the menu bar is. I'm not sure what this is going to do. If you turn it on for an app and the app has menu bar items or windows that would appear behind the camera housing. Ah, so you need something that would go full width of the menu or more than half width. All open apps or apps that share the same space appear below the camera until you quit the app using the scaled setting. Okay. So this is doing this dynamically, but only if you turn it on and tell it to do so. I'm not sure that I've seen the only thing that I've seen spill into the menu bar is menu items, which are on the right side of the screen. And, and, but it's going to only happen dynamically if you have an app that would spill into that. So that's interesting. I'm not sure that's the most elegant solution to this. And of course, it doesn't appear to address the menu bar issues, but, but that's, you know, it's something, you know. Okay. So they, they call it, I mean, they will never call it a notch. Let's be fair. But, you know, when they say to fit below, what are they, the camera housing? Okay. Okay. So the notch is the camera housing. Thanks for that. Thanks for that, Apple. Nice. Right. I mean, you know, okay. Okay. I know we're spilling over a little bit here and, and of all of us, I'm the one that has the least amount of time here on recording day because we're actually recording on Halloween. I have a rehearsal this afternoon and a gig tonight, but I want to, I want to address Kathy's question here, John, about Ram, how much Ram to get new MacBook Pro? Because I think that's going to be relevant to folks sooner rather than later. So if you'll take us to Kathy, I would appreciate it. Okay. So Kathy says, I've read and received different opinions regarding whether or not it would be beneficial to upgrade the RAM and a new 14 inch MacBook Pro from the basic 16 to 32 gigabytes, especially for the purpose of future planning. I'm also wondering if it would be worthwhile to upgrade from 512 gigabytes to one terabyte, we'll assume for the hard drive, or SSD. This would not be for professional use. Could you please address these questions in your podcast? Sure. I'll give you my opinion, then you're going to give us your opinion, Dave. I don't know. Personally, I found that 16 gigabytes and the 16 gigabytes of RAM on a one terabyte SSD is what I have on both my machines here for day to day work, and I'm just fine. But I have heard from some friends that do heavy lifting that 16 gigabytes isn't quite enough. Some of them would get like 128 gigabytes for doing some really, you know, like mathematical simulations and heavy duty graphics and stuff. But you know, the newer chips now you can get either 32 or 64 gigabytes. So that may help. I mean, I think it'll be okay with 16 gigs, but get as much as you can afford. As for storage, same thing, get as much as you can afford. I found one terabyte for what I do is a good size. The largest thing that I have, Dave, is my photo library, which I like to store the full resolution of my machine. And it's about 150 gigabytes. So that takes a good chunk of the SSD. So I don't think I would be happy. And I feel bad for like, we've had some listeners write in and saying, you know, like I got a 256 gigabyte SSD and now I'm running out of space. And it's like, that's too small, in my opinion. Sure. Yeah, sure. Yeah. But yeah, your experience with, you know, with your machine, I'd like you to share. So yeah, I think 16 and one is is reasonable. But yeah, on on on storage size. So SSD size, it really is personal preference, right? Like I operate just fine with 512. I did mostly okay with 256 for a very long time. I store my photos only on one of my Macs, not on all of my Macs. So I'm happy to turn on the optimized storage, you know, on my portable and it's worked out totally fine without any issue. So doing that, and the same with my iCloud library, that has made it so that I can live in 512. As I noted, I got one terabyte with this one, but that was only because that's what I wound up with. If I really went through, I could like, you know, cherry pick my way, you know, to Allison's point through one of the whatever hundred and something options and get the 512 with the 10 core CPU and the only the 14 core GPU and, you know, all that stuff and probably save myself quite a bit of money as it turns out now that I'm thinking about it. But you know, I had to move quickly. In terms of her question, I think your answers are irrelevant because she's well, because she's asking about M1 and you're answering about Intel. And I think it's really important that we, you know, as we live in this bifurcated world for the next couple of years that we really add some intention to both the way we ask our questions, but also the way we answer our questions, because the two are so remarkably different. The architectures are so different that like what we know definitively works for Intel is, you know, just a sort of a footnote for what we're going to talk about with M1. And I have found it's been weird with M1. We've gotten lots of reports with from folks who had eight gigabyte M1 machines that if you open lots of browser tabs, that's the thing that for general purpose use is going to be the thing that runs you into a memory issue. And it's bizarre that, you know, we could do that with our web browsers, but that's, you know, web pages are super complex now. They can be, they aren't all. And so, you know, it makes sense. So I would say 16 with these M1 machines is where I would start, although there's plenty of people out there, including power users. You've got Warren in the chat room saying that, you know, his M1 Air has eight and he's doing fine with that. But, you know, he probably manages his tabs well. He uses probably Safari instead of Chrome, although we've heard about these reports with Safari specifically. So it is totally possible to, you know, gum up an M1 eight gigabyte Air with or M1 anything with lots of Safari tabs. You don't even need a third party browser. But, you know, like 16 is where I think I would recommend most people start. But I'm probably being, I'm probably overkill on that the way the M1 manages memory is remarkably different. Like I said, I opted for 32. I'm not sure I will need it. I'm not sure my son will ever need it or use it. And so, you know, our advice lands in the same spot for 16 gigs, you know. But again, as we find out more and just have more and more experience with the M1 family of chips, that's going to come into focus for all of us better. We don't really know. You know, what we have is a lot of anecdotal experience, which is all we've ever had with Intel. But enough of that. I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but the plural of enough anecdotes becomes data, right? You know, and or it becomes the best that we have. And like, we just don't have enough with the M1 yet, I think. So, and Dave Ginsberg, another power user here in the chat room is saying he's got an 8 gig M1 Mac mini, and it's perfectly fine for him. See, so it's just like, so we continue to share these tidbits of information and and please keep sharing yours with us because that's how we're going to get to a point where we actually understand what's the right answer here. Now, the thing is, if I recall properly, Dave, there is a return window. There is. Oh, I got I think I've got 14 days that I could return this machine. I'm not going to. It will, like I said, it'll either be mine or my son's. And so, yeah. Yeah. Right. So, you know, hey, you know, get one, you know, load it up, kick the chires for, you know, a week. Yeah. If it's not for you, then send it back. Send it back. That's what it's there for. That's right. And then you start filling up the refurb pipeline, which is, you know, something we'll all need down the road. So that's good. Right. You know, but because if I, well, whichever I will be buying an M1 Air, either for me or for my son, depending on the fate of the MacBook Pro I have, and I will, unless I can't, I will certainly be buying that on refurb. So, you know, it's good. All right. We went a little longer than usual. Thanks for bearing with us. Thanks for hanging out with us. This has been a fun one. Lots of stuff. We didn't get to half the things we wanted to get to. Yeah, no, I, Warren in the chat room is, is rooting for my son to get this MacBook Pro. And he's probably right. The question is, will I get too enamored with the screen to be able to go back? That's the question. So, yeah. Well, isn't this screen what mini LED they call it or something like that? Or is there some new technology or? Yeah, what is that? That's a good question. I have, I have the specs up here. Oh shoot. I had them up here by a 14 inch MacBook Pro. Here we are. I had them up. Where are the tech specs? Learn more tech specs. Yeah, what is that screen? The display is Apple's calling it a liquid retina screen 3024 by 1964 native. This is on the 14 inch. Thousand nit sustained 1600 peak brightness. I don't know. Yeah, I'm not sure they aren't talking about what the tech is. But yeah, you could be right about that. Yeah. The, um, the power, you take a look at the images folks on Apple site or anywhere of the keyboard, the, the touch ID sensor is in the same spot that it's been on the air, but it's not like this separate glass thing. It just sort of fits into the aesthetic of the keyboard now and it's, it's its own full key. So works well. I like it. It's all good. All right. Do we have anything else, John? It's time to get out of here. Yep. It's time to, uh, turn off the lights and get the garden hose. That's right. Recording that are going to be on my lawn. I think I suggest getting the full size candy bars and handing them out, uh, generously so that those little kids grow into big kids that don't want to like take my yard, egg your house. There you go. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. Thanks for hanging out. Uh, make sure to, uh, go check out all of our sponsors. You can visit at mackeykeb.com slash sponsors, of course. And then there were the sponsors we mentioned in the episode coinbase.com slash M G G, uh, where you get 10 bucks in free Bitcoin, promo code M G G at imperfect foods.com saves you 20% off your first four orders. Text expanded.com slash podcast saves you 20% off your first year subscription. And now Jitsu.com slash MGG saves you 30% off your first purchase today. And now you're free with Dave. Give out full size, not fun size, because you don't want to