 Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the No Silicast podcast, hosted at podfeat.com, a technology podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, October 8th, 2023, and this is show number 961. Well before we dig into the show, I would let you know that there will be no live show next Sunday, October 15th. Steve and I are off to Utah to see the annular eclipse with our good friends Dean and Suzanne. Now because the No Silicast ways are awesome, I already have the content for the show next week, so yet again you'll be getting the episode early. But if you're someone who doesn't open their presents till the actual day of celebration, I hope you enjoy the new show on Sunday or Monday wherever you listen. Two years ago, on October 5th, I stopped using any services from the company Meta, that is Facebook and Instagram. Now I didn't technically quit these services, I just quit going into them and I removed them from my devices. I made this change after Frances Haugen, former data scientist at Facebook, testified before Congress. While working at Facebook, she was tasked with studying how the company's algorithms affects users. The algorithm does things we not only didn't know it was doing, Facebook didn't even know it was doing. Her team studied the results and presented them to leadership, and as a result, her team was shut down. When she left the company, she copied thousands of confidential documents and gave them to government officials. Two specific things stood out, examples she showed, stood out to me most as I watched those congressional hearings. One was an ad targeting teenage girls for pro-antirexia websites. Let that sink in for a minute. The second one was an ad campaign for a Skittles party. Since many had not heard of a Skittles party, she went on to explain that this is where kids go into their parents' medicine cabinets, dump all of their pills into a pillowcase. They shake it up and they grab some to take. Now, while neither one of these ads ever ran because they were actually honeypots done by some watchdog groups, the Facebook algorithm approved both of them. There was a lot more in the hearings, but that was really the final straw for me. I knew a lot of stuff was going on, but I didn't. It wasn't in black and white right out there in front of it for me, and I felt like I had to take a stand. So I left Facebook and Instagram two years ago. Now I was never a big fan of Instagram, but I missed Facebook quite a bit. The habit was a big part of it, so for the first few months, the temptation was really great to go back. But after a while, I got used to not wasting time scrolling through the service. I also realized how little I really missed. I shared connections with a lot of people I don't know, but maybe know me through the podcast, or we're friends of friends, or acquaintances of acquaintances, or maybe we're people I knew a long time ago and we don't really need to stay connected. So as a result, there was a lot of glop to scroll through before I got to content I actually cared about. But there was a big side effect I did not anticipate. It was actually harder for me to communicate in real life with my real life friends. They'd say, what's going on, Allison? And I'd say, hey, Forbes did this really cute thing on Saturday. And my friend would say, I know, I saw it on Facebook. OK, they didn't say it that way, but that's what it sounded like to me. They just go, you know, I know, I saw it on Facebook. But that made me incredibly sad because it's like, OK, I don't know what I can tell you because I don't know what you've already seen. And it just made me sad. It also made me sad when Steve Wood mentioned something adorable Kennedy did in Texas. And I didn't know about it because it was on an Instagram story. I talked to my friends and family about how sad this made me. And they've tried over the last two years to accommodate my choice to not participate in meta services. My friends simply listen to my stories of my adorable grandchildren and they try to pretend they don't already know about it. My kids post pictures to our family threads in Instagram to try to keep me up to date. But it's still hard. I'm missing my own family events. During this last two years, Twitter has become a dumpster fire as everybody knows. So I've slowed down my usage there quite a bit and I've moved to mast it on for my non-family fun interactions. Twitter is so awful now that it started to make Facebook not look all that bad. And I'm kind of reminded of my father once said he wouldn't allow us to watch the TV show MASH because it was so sexually explicit. Many years later, I caught him watching MASH. I pointed out the inconsistency and he said, yeah, but you know what? Now everything else is so awful. MASH doesn't seem all that bad. You can probably tell whether this is going. I've decided to go back on Facebook and Instagram so I can enjoy my own family's posts again. My plan is to dramatically reduce the number of people I follow in both services and maybe even cut it down to only my own family. If you're one of these people who pay attention to who stops following you, please don't be sad if you see me disappear. Instead, follow me over on mast it on. Now I've started to pile through all of these lists of names and I spent about an hour on Facebook and I cut it from 562 people down to 450 people. So it's gonna be a long time before I can get that scraped down to people that my family and maybe my closest friends. I've done a lot with Instagram and that one was even more interesting. I went through and it's like three or four taps to get rid of one person and so I'm like tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Okay, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. I did it, went all the way down to the bottom and it went out and I had only got rid of about a fifth of the people. So I went back in and there was a whole new list of people I had to scroll through. So it is gonna take me a while to really pull this back but I really wanna isolate this down to the people I really wanna follow. Anyway, and it plays again, don't take any offense if I erase you, if I turn you off because I'm just trying to survive like everybody else. Now I may even join threads but I'm just not sure about that. While a lot of the tech nerds I enjoy are on mast it on, there are a fair number of well-known people I enjoy reading who are calling out their threads handles now. I may give it a poke and see if it brings me joy and I may jump in there from time to time. Now I do feel like I may have disappointed some of my champions who applauded my move to leave all things meta and for that I apologize. I'm definitely not leaving mast it on and I'm deliriously happy with the Slack community we built at podfeed.com slash Slack but Kennedy, Parker, Teddy, Forbes and Sienna are calling me over on Instagram and Facebook. I told my family that I was gonna go back on Facebook and Instagram and my daughter-in-law instantly said thank you. So that was really cool. Anyway, I'm fully aware that this has been a lot of rationalization but the important thing is that I think Mark Zuckerberg has learned his lesson. One of the great joys of Mac OS is how many apps come pre-installed on your Mac. Now these aren't bloatware, they're actually quite useful apps. When you first get your Mac or after you nuke a Mac or racing everything and reinstalling the OS it's really easy to see which apps the Mac comes with. But if what if you wanna know which apps came pre-installed but it's after you've loaded all of your third party apps how do you tell them apart? I kinda recently figured out how to do just that. Open your applications folder and set it to list view. You could do this either by going to view and choosing as list or you can hit command two. But if you have any grouping chosen such as group by size or group by date disable that so you have just the plain list view. If we can sort the list by date added we know the oldest ones will be the ones that were added first which will of course be the pre-installed apps. With the application window open in Finder go to the view menu and choose view options or use command J to then open those same options. In the window that pops up check the box next to date added and then close that floating window. You can also add columns to your view by right clicking where you see the existing column options and you could choose date added. So there's kinda two ways to go at that. Once you can see the date added column select the chevron and the date added heading until it's pointed up. You should see the utilities folder at the top because that's the first thing Apple installs. Utilities should be followed by the rest of the pre-installed Apple apps. As you scroll through the list you will eventually find a non-Apple app and that'll be the end of the pre-installed apps. In Ventura where I first tested this I had 16 apps in the utilities folder and another 40 non-utility apps for a total of 56 pre-installed apps. Now I know this tiny tip is a life changing but it's kinda fun to look through all of the apps that Apple pre-installed for us. One of the greatest sources of content for the NoCillicast is the adventures I go through each time I do a Nuke and Pave on a Mac. Now by Nuke and Pave again I mean a clean install of the operating system and not doing any migration of any apps or settings for my previous installation. Now the process I follow has evolved over the years and I find that interesting. The last time I did a Nuke and Pave was just a year ago in September of 2022. That particular Nuke was because things had simply gotten fiddly. This year's Nuke and Pave is because of the battery problems that continue to plague my 2021 14 inch MacBook Pro. It's kind of a nice time to do it anyway though since back when Sonoma has just been released. Now the backbone of my Nuke and Pave process is a massive mind map created and maintained in my thoughts from Toketaware. I started maintaining this mind map of Doom, trademark Donald Burr, many years ago. The right side of the mind map is for app installations while the left is all of the configurations I need to do for various tools. Both the apps and the configurations are sorted into mission critical, high priority and low priority. I've become more rigorous about keeping the mind map up to date during the year when I had a particularly complex application. So that makes the paving part of the process much easier. When it's time to do the migration or I should say Pave, I do another pass through the mind map to remove apps I no longer use and to compare the list to the new apps I've installed. I certainly do not add every new app from my Mac. One of the joys of the Nuke and Pave is having a system with only the apps I actually use, not every app I've ever evaluated. One of the great enhancements I added to the mind map in 2022 is a section called Prep. This is a list of the apps that require a little bit of tender loving care before the migration. Often it's because they don't sync settings through iCloud or they don't have an obvious migration path. Some require an export of settings and an import on the other side, for example. It turns out in iThoughts, you can create links between nodes. This allows me to have a prep section of nodes that are simply the name of each app that needs special handling and then each of those linked to the complex configuration instructions over on the left hand side. Now one of the more annoying steps in the prep section says two days before Nuke start a carbon copy cloner clone of the backup drive to the Synology. So the problem to be solved here is a backup isn't a backup unless there are two copies. So as soon as the drive gets wiped, that would no longer be a backup. So I need to backup the backup drive. Now I ran into this two days before Nonsense the day I wanted to start the Nuke and Pave. I started trying to remember how I do it and then I bug Steven Getz asking him for advice. While waiting for him to respond, I reread my 2022 edition of my Nuke and Pave post only to discover that every single year I do the same thing. I try to figure out how to do this backup to the backup and then I bug Steven Getz. So anyway, I started following the steps from the 2022 edition. The process I follow is to create a sparse disk image, I'm sorry, sparse bundle image that'll be on the Synology and I create it using Disks Utility and then I run carbon copy cloner to clone from my external SSD to the Synology. The problem I ran into and I run into every year is that it takes forever. Remember I said I have to start this two days early? Well I ran carbon copy cloner overnight and it had only moved 250 gigabytes so far out of 1.76 terabytes. Worse yet it was transferring data over gigabit ethernet from my Mac to the Synology at only about 200 kilobytes per second at that point. Not megabytes, kilobytes. All right, I figured a way around this problem of how long it was taking to backup my backup to the Synology. I dusted off an older one terabyte Samsung T3 SSD and I connected it over USB-C to my Mac. I created a 900 gigabyte sparse bundle on that drive. I then told carbon copy cloner to clone from my two terabytes Samsung T5 real backup to that smaller SSD. Now the brilliant part was I told it, don't clone my original photos library, don't clone Dropbox and don't clone Google Drive. That way the sparse bundle only ended up being 745 gigabytes and it fit easily on that disk. So the best part was I had two fast SSDs both direct connected to the MacBook Pro so the clone took less than an hour. Now I had two copies of the backup of what I really needed but I wanted to make sure I still got that copy for cold storage over onto the Synology. I tried connecting it over USB-C to USB-A to the Synology but it kept disconnect or connecting and reconnecting. I swapped out the cable but at that point which did fix the problem but then Synology said, I can't read this disk. Turns out I didn't reformat the drive to XFAT before doing the clone so it didn't know how to read it. No problem, I plugged the drive into the Mac mini I have sitting right next to the Synology and I let it do the copy over to the Synology while I slept all over Ethernet. Okay, now I have three copies of my data not including my back plays offsite backup. Oh and my Synology backs up to another Synology at my buddy Ron's house so that's actually three local one a mile away and one online. That should be enough backups. Time to start the process of erasing and installing macOS Sonoma from scratch. I first started by looking at some instructions on Mac rumors about how to do a clean install of macOS Sonoma on an Apple Silicon Mac or earlier models with a T2 chip. Instructions were very tempting because they said to first do the upgrade to macOS Sonoma on the Mac and then use the new erase all contents and settings option to start fresh migrating your data and installing apps. Sound like more fun than downloading the installer and making a bootable drive. I also found instructions on MacPaw for a clean install of macOS Sonoma and they recommended the tried and true create a thumb drive installer method. It's still said to use the handy dandy erase all contents and settings method and I felt a bit more comfortable though that this was really a clean install. I probably could have done with the update first and then erase all contents and settings path but I would really hate to have Margot from Apple tell me that engineering said I had to do it all again because I did it wrong. When I created the installer on the thumb drive I felt more confident that I was truly burning it to the ground because when I was creating the installer it said it was copying the macOS recovery OS to the thumb drive. That felt real, you know, that's burning it to the ground if you're starting over there. Now as an aside, the fun thing about erase all contents and settings is that it's supposed to be very fast. Since your data is encrypted it's really just erasing the encryption key instantly makes all of the data on the disk unreadable so it's not like it has to write ones and zeros all over everything. Now in reality for me, erase all contents and settings didn't run quite as smoothly as they promised. First it asked me to sign out and asked me for my Apple ID password, which I gave it. Then I got a nasty red error that said unregister HTTP status from token service response. Okay, what the heck does that mean? My only option at that point was to type my password again or select continue. Nothing changed when I entered my password again so I selected continue. This time it asked me to enter the Apple ID password for null. Okay, why is it null? I don't know what it's talking about. Anyway, it offered to let me put in an Apple ID and password so I put in my Apple ID and password and this time I got a new nasty red error that said the operation couldn't be completed, aka authentication error-7003. Okay, this point my only option was continue so I chose it again and this time it had the sign out screen with a happy blue cloud icon on it and a big white blank box sitting on top of it. No continue, no back, no nothing. I figured I'd give it some time so I gave it 15 minutes and it hadn't changed so I had to force quit the process and start over. I started the whole Erase Hall contents and settings dance again and this time when I entered my Apple ID password it said I was locked out of my account. So that was really fun. It asked me for the phone number associated with my Apple ID and gave me a hint of the number by showing me the last two digits. I entered the right phone number and this triggered an alert to every one of my devices asking for authorization to unlock my Apple ID. I tried it on my MacBook Air and it failed which made me kind of nervous. I triggered it again and this time my iPhone was able to unlock my Apple ID. After that I was rewarded with a final warning telling me I was about to erase all contents and settings from this back and did I truly want to do that? Yes, already. Alright, the Mac did some of the usual stuff showing an Apple logo and a progress bar for short time and then it restarted with a screen I'd never seen before. It was all black and the upper left it said Recovery Assistant. In the middle it said Activate Mac and below that it said Select a Wi-Fi network from the menu or attach a network cable to proceed. I was curious. I connected an Ethernet cable because I wanted the Mac to not know the Wi-Fi network yet and anyway when I connected the Ethernet cable it said Your Mac is activated. It will restart in 22 seconds. This Activate Mac screen was curious to me because while it seemed pretty obviously related to activation lock it wasn't asking to unlock activation lock. It was asking to activate the Mac. I did some searching online and I found what I think is the right explanation for the way this screen is written. On Reddit a user was asking about it and one person responded with this. Activate Mac checks the iCloud status with Apple servers. It will only let you activate instantly if it is not connected to any account as it should be when you buy a used Mac. If it were connected to an iCloud account it would show parts of the email address and ask for the iCloud account password. This makes sense because after it checked the activation status by connecting to the net it was satisfied that it wasn't activation lock. It activated it which let me set up the Mac like it was new. I think what made this non-obvious to me was I thought I was still in the erase everything phase but I had evidently crossed over into the set up a new Mac phase without actually realizing it. Alright, we now have a fully nuked machine. Now as you may recall from my article just last week how's that MacBook Pro battery problem going? The purpose of this year's nuke and pave is to definitively discern whether it's one or more of my third party apps that are causing my MacBook Pro to have such poor battery life. If a clean install with no third party apps installed still has the battery problems then it's back to engineering to figure out what's wrong. If the Mac doesn't have problems without the third party apps then engineering wants me to test them one by one to figure out which one's causing the problem. I'd like to thank everyone who weighed in on the problem after I published that article last week. Jill if Kent wrote me an email suggesting it might be faster to install half of my apps, run the battery test and if it doesn't drain install another half until I find the pile that includes the app that causes the problem and then start cutting that piece in half. This is a great way to diagnose problems and I use this method often but it's not very practical in this case. If I installed half the apps and the problem occurred I'd have to do another wipe of the machine and then add back all this Sonoma from scratch and then add in half of the first half of the apps very time-consuming and tedious. Several people including Dan, Weeder, Sandy, David Price and Ray Robinson were all in my camp thinking Apple should give me a new MacBook Pro. It was really nice to have friends back me up like that. Peter McGregor felt I could push maybe for a lemon law on this one and explained it would unquestionably qualify if I was in the European Union. While I love having these champions on my side I'm still not convinced that this is a hardware problem. Steve Davidson gave me lots of cool ideas on ways to watch for battery hogs using Unix under the hood and that was really fun. We went back and forth quite a bit on what could be causing the problem. George from Tulsa chimed in with some interesting ideas including asking me whether I was running any catalyst apps that is apps written for iOS but run on Apple Silicon apps. I do run some of those but let's pick up the story after the reinstall. As soon as I had macOS Sonoma installed I created a clean admin account. I did not give it access to any network. I simply put it to sleep for two hours. In my previous tests sleeping with Wi-Fi off always had zero battery drain and this test revealed the same results. Next I gave it access to Wi-Fi and I put it to sleep for another two hours. Without being logged into iCloud and no third party apps but with Wi-Fi access it again slept like a baby and lost zero percent. Finally I logged into iCloud. The only app I opened was Notes and I saw that it had started syncing. I did not open photos for fear that it would trigger the download of my 100,000 photos. In 10.5 hours the macOS 14% battery was the same loss I was seeing before nuking all of my apps and settings. The best part of this is that if I select the battery in the menu bar the little dropdown says no apps using significant energy. So now we have a clean install of macOS Sonoma with iCloud logged in and it loses 14% in 10 hours but logged out it does not. Well that would definitively suggest this has to be iCloud not hardware. I decided to re-run a previous test and that was with the MacBook Air not the MacBook Pro. I installed a new macOS Sonoma volume on my MacBook Air I logged into iCloud and put it to sleep. Normalized to 10 hours it lost a grand total of 3%. One could argue it should not even lose that much while still asleep but 3% is a darn better than say 14% or 15%. On both the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro when I tested right after logging into iCloud I did not open my photos library. From my observations it appears you have to open Apple apps to initiate syncing to iCloud. For example opening notes right after turning on iCloud reveals an empty list and only after a little while do you see it bringing down your notes. If you open up Apple photos it shows you welcome to photos but it doesn't show any of your photos coming in. So I'm pretty sure that both the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro were not loading my 100,000 image photos library when I ran the battery test. I also looked back at a battery test I did in August, August 2nd I think it was where I created a clean account on a new volume I created a clean volume I should say installed wasn't Sonoma then it was Ventura and I did not log into let's say I had iCloud set to optimized images so it wasn't the giant photos and the MacBook Pro lost 15% overnight so I can definitively say that it's something with this MacBook Pro but as I wait for word back from Apple engineering I can't help but ponder what have we learned since it only happens on one device does that mean it's a hardware problem what hardware problem would only surface when I'm logged into iCloud and wouldn't surface with Wi-Fi turned on but no iCloud so that makes me think it's got to be something iCloud that's awakening the Mac if that's the case why doesn't that same road cause wake up the MacBook Air if you have any ideas please let me know you know I'll keep you posted as this never ending saga continues anyway I originally thought I would tell you all the nuking and paving parts of this story but I think that's long enough and I'll come back with some of my thoughts on what it's been like to pave in 2023 one of the sweetest things about the sport I get from the podcast through Patreon or PayPal is when I get a message explaining why someone has lowered a pledge it's certainly not a requirement that people explain why and I don't pay any attention at all and when people leave or lower their pledges I mean that's just that's just seeking out lack of joy why would I do that but it means something to me that people sometimes feel that they want to tell me why I never want anyone to support the show financially if it causes them the tiniest lick of hardship but it does warm my heart that people write these nice messages explaining their situation and saying sorry I can't keep doing it so if you can contribute to the show without causing yourself hardship and you want to help pay for the apps and services I need to make the show it would be really swell if you did you can go to podfeed.com Patreon or podfeed.com PayPal for a one time donation to help pick up the slack for those who no longer can afford to help out well I don't know what time of the week it is it is time to chat with Bart I just realized it is not chit chat across the pond and it is not security bits Bart is coming on to tell me something fun yeah I mean I propose it to you as a chit chat across the pond light and you said no I need content for something else so I don't know what I'm doing either but I wrote the content so let's talk about it I have been since the Apple watch series zero a user of the bigger of the two normal sized Apple watches and they have changed a little bit and I've always enjoyed my upgrades I think I went from a zero to a two to a four to a seven and then I did a big change this week or the week before this week I have gone from a normal Apple watch to an ultra two oh okay definitely the biggest change I have made in my Apple watching ever because they are very different watches to each other yeah you know I'm jealous of the ultra because I really think the form factor is cool and I would love to have it in a size that didn't look like I had strapped an amateur radio to my arm or something it's big yeah I've always had the bigger watches and I was very surprised so first thing I will say is this is one of Apple's new completely carbon neutral products and the box is completely plastic free and it was actually a real joy to unbox it because of the nice cardboard box it's actually easier to unbox it's arguably a little bit less pretty but I found the paper material much easier to work with than all the old stuff it was a lot less faffing about to get out my watch so that's kind of interesting so it doesn't even have a little green tab plastic sticky thing it does have those so I guess it's not zero plastic but that is the only plastic on it listeners can't see but basically I'm showing Alison the video so it's a big box looks like an Apple watch box except it's square yeah two pull tabs at the back and then it opens up to give you two smaller boxes and audio unboxing and now he's holding up another part yeah but it's it's all the things you're used to but there is it's all just cardboard it's just and not shiny slick cardboard there is a tiny bit of shiny on some surfaces but it's very sort of it's deployed in such a way that at first you think it is and then you realize it's only on the one thing and they've just sort of used it to make it look a little bit pristy you know a little bit prestigious but most of it is very very matte cardboard and I really like that and like I say it was actually easier to get into than the old stuff so on the one hand it doesn't look as shiny as I'm used to but hey I much prefer the environmentally friendly one so anyway on the carbon neutral thing I was going to write a letter to Tim Cook explaining to him that since I have solar panels and a whole home battery he doesn't need to carbon offset mine it'd be okay just the charging part because they said that they were going to carbon offset the charging by building renewable energy but I mine is going to be okay so there's a twig of a branch he doesn't have to plant somewhere exactly I was actually in a shop today and the lady asked me would you like a paper bag and I said no let's save a twig she laughed you know I think we have enough trash already oh good point in California they made it where you have to pay for them so they don't yeah we did that too I love it oh they still ask us here they ask you before they ring up your tool yeah do you want a bag with us? I always feel bad when I forget my bag in the car but anyway okay so we're all over the box so you take it out and wasn't it huge and heavy yeah the very very first reaction was oh no I've made a colossal mistake because the watch on its own without a strap is way thicker than what I was used to it's obviously the same it takes the same size of lug so the edges where the strap is as wide but it sticks out further you have the rim around the scroll wheel at the stop you accidentally scrolling while you're out hiking which makes it look even bigger than it is the rim goes around the button and then you have of course the action button on the other side so that makes it look even bigger than it is the back is made of ceramic not the normal aluminium which gives it another chunkier feel so it's ceramic on the back and titanium on the front mine isn't aluminum on the back well actually I don't know what it is it's shiny I always thought it was glass you know the way you have the pebble of shiny oh yeah okay so it's some sort of glass covered plastic yeah but that mine is ceramic back there oh that feels nice the circle is still the circle it does actually but at first it makes it look and feel so basically without the straps on it feels obviously heavier now I presume it is heavier if you put on a weighing scale it is heavier but once the strap is on the weight is actually distributed like you would wear a watch it doesn't feel heavy anymore I put it on my arm and it felt no different to what I had been used to and I was like that's really interesting I'm not saying you're not telling me what you experienced I can't imagine yeah I was very relieved because now one strange thing I did notice today so I have been wearing all different straps now the really nice thing is my absolute favourite strap the Tefica is really wide and so it looks perfect on the pro but I've been wearing any old strap just to see what it's like and today I have a plain old pride strap on and it looks fine it doesn't look silly it looks really good so even the normal straps are fine and what I notice is that the only strap that makes it feel heavy is the plastic the apple sports band and I think it's because it doesn't hold the watch tight to your arm as tight to your arm and so because it's sticking up a little bit that seems to make it feel heavier because none of the rest of them felt heavier but yesterday morning I put on the sports band and I was like oh you feel different I was fine I got over it in a few minutes but it was noticeable I do want to mention the weight it is kind of surprising that you are saying that it doesn't feel heavier because it's 59% heavier I think it's the low of small numbers neither of them are rocks on your arm so it's ok that it's half a rock extra it's like 25 grams though people are talking about being able to tell the difference between the iPhone 15 pro and the 14 pro and that was less than 10 grams I think wasn't it but the theory on that is that because it's a change in distribution it's at the moment of inertia so the moment is tiny I always wanted to have a stainless steel watch and I never bought it because I was afraid it would be too heavy on my arm but yeah well as I say I was worried for the first bit but no I've had it now for a week and a half maybe even two weeks at this stage and it's fine it's actually really nice I'm completely happy with it relieved and any brief moment of oh my god kind of vanished and then I got used to the screen because yes it's big it's a very big screen but it's also really high resolution and it's really crisp and when they said it does 3000 nits I didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing it sounded like a big number it's very bright so we've had actual sunny days it is so clear on a sunny day it's also the first time I've had a sapphire screen instead of a glass screen and it has a clarity that it's hard to put into words but it looks clearer and it doesn't seem to reflect in the same way it doesn't seem to have glare problems in quite the same way it doesn't catch the light the same as the glass one does it's very hard to put my to describe it but it looks different better well I could see how if it's not refracting light too inside you know if the light is coming out collimated and not refracting on the surfaces on the inside that would make it be clearer and also brighter yeah there's a different quality to it that I really like and it's also completely flat because it has the rim to stop you scratching it because it's an outdoor watch that's what I want I want a flat display I think that would be nifty so I think part of the lack of reflections must be the flatness because a curved surface is always going to catch the light right because it's everything is at a tangent to a curved surface but the other thing that's amazing is this thing has a much longer battery life than my Series 7 had and it has a bigger screen and there are times particularly in the kind of lighting you have indoors so in the office I really noticed it I thought for a moment my watch wasn't going to sleep it absolutely is it's just that it's powered off mode is so bright that you can hardly tell if you're not outside so indoors it's as if my watch is always full brightness the only difference is the seconds vanish so you know the way the complications become simpler so the complications simplify and if you really pay attention it's a little bit dimmer but it feels like it dims to like 75% not to like 25% like the other one did and when I'm cycling it is such a difference like it is so clear whether the watch is awake or asleep it's so clear oh it's so pleasing now part of that is just that it's bigger but it is when people say oh no it has a better quality screen it is eye opening to me how much better this screen is I'm genuinely very very impressed now Bart let's be honest this audience knows you're never out in sunshine no it never lasts for long we have sunshine and showers it's very common here if you don't like the weather wait 30 minutes the other thing of course the big screen provides you with is the ability to have the new watch face with the extra stuff around the edges so I always use the modular face because it lets you have the most possible complications so now I have the ultra modular face which gives me the time and big writing six small complications one giant big complication which I used to show me the rain for the next five hours yeah one two three four five and it has the thing around the side where you can either have seconds or the altitude now I'll be honest that's a gimmick but it does look pretty so I left it on so I can tell you that I am 62 meters above sea level I think that would actually be pretty fun I can also tell you that when the watch lost its connection to apple weather the altitude went nuts because it's barometric so if it doesn't know the weather it can't estimate your altitude wait why does it have to know the weather in order to know your altitude that doesn't make any sense because it measures your altitude by a barometric pressure so if it doesn't know what sea level pressure is today how can it know how different you are from sea level it's like on an airplane you have to set the you have to set the altimeter before you take off or you're going to crash yeah I'm not talking about it doesn't know the altitude no but what what's weather an altitude got to do with anything okay so the sensor that empowers this is an air pressure sensor okay okay that's what's telling it the altitude that's how it's figuring it out yeah so it changed you change air pressure by a certain amount then you go up or down but in order to be able to give you an actual number instead of a difference it has to know what the air pressure at sea level is but your phone it doesn't know that has nothing to do with you that's where the weather comes into it right that's where the weather comes into it the weather tells it what zero is it measures what you are you take the two numbers away from each other and then it tells you that I'm at 62 meters so this is interesting I think I see where you're going now but if nobody else has experienced this there's been a big problem with people not having the weather complications showing the weather on the watch but if I tap into it it always knew so it the watch knew it just wasn't showing on the complication right so the altitude would jump around from at one point I was 50 meters below water which I thought was interesting it was raining but I still was pretty sure I was 50 meters below sea level then I was 105 meters above sea level and then I was back at 62 which is what I know to be correct and it seems that when I tapped on the rain complication it would bring me to the sunshine it wasn't even when I was tapping on it to get information it was never quite right because when you tap on the rain complication it should jump you straight to the rain screen when you tap to the temperature complication it should jump you straight to the temperature screen but it wasn't I just thought that that was I got all excited that I could see Bart needs to see the temperature and the rain I need to see the temperature in the UV index to know how much sunscreen to put on or whether I need it at all and I thought it was just poorly done this was the first time I ever tried to put both on the watch at the same time and I thought oh that'd be cool and I thought oh they implemented it badly it's always going to show me the same thing whichever one I choose is the same for both complications but I only got my day and sure enough I'm allowed to see the UV index and the weather at one glance yeah and if you tap on one it should bring you straight to that screen in the weather app you would think and when you tap on the other I'm afraid to touch it though Bart I'm afraid to touch it I just got it working today I wanted to see if Apple would ever just fix it and no they're not fixing it you have to go in and do it yourself now so the ultra I love the ultra watch face because of how much I can see it once and it's just amazing also one of the things you can have now I don't know if this has been around in other Apple Watches but I have a complication that is a real compass that actually tells me the direction as I move my arm it actually updates in real time with the compass which is so cool I actually forget I know I've had it I love the compass to use your location well that would make sense compass can be affected by magnetic materials and watch bands pay attention okay don't walk over cliff yeah that's on the other watches too that's pretty cool says I'm at 123 feet it does that while it's a teeny tiny complication and because the screen is so good you can read it just fine actually I'm glad you showed me that I thought that only the ultra had this backtrack thing where you could go hiking you could tap on backtrack and that way you can find your own way back if you get lost in the woods I thought that was only on the ultra but it's actually on my series 9 oh that's good so great I don't know if it's series 9 only either it might be back further than that too further than that oh one point when we were talking about the screen resolution was higher I did the math just now it's only 4% higher so I think it's perception not reality higher than what though the ultra 2 is okay I was comparing to the series 9 okay I know that the series 8 had a nice screen change because my darling beloved is on an 8 and I was on a 7 and his screen was much nicer is that what it got bigger too it got a little bit bigger too basically the bezel shrank that little bit bigger that was really noticeable to me yeah I noticed that but look at his watch and be all jealous alright keep going I'm gonna go do math on the series 7 while you're off the other nice thing that the modular 2 face has that I've never seen before is it has automatic night mode so when I go out in the dark I get an astronomer red for my entire watch face and when I come in it goes back to normal which is so nice for outdoorsy stuff but it's even cleverer because it's only the watch face so when I'm cycling in the dark the Workouts app continues to be all nice and bright so I can still see all my workouts and stuff it's really cool yeah I really like that the battery life is really impressive so with the series 7 I have everywhere little charge stands which are now great because I use them on iOS 17 to put my phone into that mode where it's a little heads up display but I had them everywhere because my watch and my phone would not last a day so all of my desks my work desk, my work from home desk and the kitchen all have these little I think there are belkin ones that do there are three in one where you can put your AirPods, your Apple Watch and your iPhone on them I had them everywhere because I used to have to top up my Apple Watch twice a day because I I track two walks, one cycle and the house work every day so there's a lot of workouts and I would need to top it up between my walks basically only ever I only ever top it up for 20 minutes or whatever but I had to top it up every day well I'm still me and it is now 15 minutes past 11 at night and I am still at 40% and because it was weekend I did a 3 hour cycle instead of a 2 hour cycle and it's still at 40% so it's very very comfortably gets me through the day and that's what the really bright screen that's always on right so it's like wow well I know how they made it really thick but still yeah the other thing I'm really relieved about is that the action button is genuinely useful I thought it might be a gimmick but I have it set to be workout and that's pretty perfect for the usage I'm describing to you there the other thing is that the titanium is I wasn't sure what it would look like it looks really nice actually and I'm rather hoping it will be because I went with natural titanium from my iPhone when it arrives I'm hoping it will match perfectly with the watch oh that'll be cool from here it looks very pretty yeah I mean it's not like the stainless steel it's not blingy it just looks nice so it's yeah the other thing then is I already owned some Apple Watch some bands that were technically speaking the Apple Watch Ultra the underwater band I have in bright yellow because it's my favourite band for getting rained on and so this time I figured I'd buy a different band with the watch because you get one and you get a band with the watch so I went for my first ever Alpine Loop I went for it in khaki I was in a very boring mood well it'll go well with the titanium and it's a really pleasing band because it has multiple notches I prefer an infinite adjustment but it's also springy so it's kind of like the best of both worlds it's really really secure because of the way it hooks in but I can wear it comfortably on hook 3 or hook 4 it's that springy oh wow like stretchy yeah so it feels like an infinitely adjustable band even though it has specific notches that you hook very very securely into that thing is not coming out like that nice I don't know what kind of hike you'd need to go on to get that thing to fall off your arm but it ain't coming off okay this just in I just checked the Ultra 2 pixel density of versus the series 7 31% higher density so that is definitely noticeable that you'll notice I will now grant you that I certainly noticed it yeah the other nice thing about the Alpine Loop is it's light it's comfortable and it's still comfortable when it's wet yeah that's the trick this is important to me just because I work out a lot nice wet and then it takes shower and it's always blech yeah these feel nice I want to ask another question on the action button when you say it starts a workout does it start a specific workout I didn't do that because I do cycling so I didn't it could have no different than a complication it's not doing anything yeah but I'm afraid of a complication yes I'll give you that yeah I'm just thinking about because Stephen Katz has been asking if there's a way to write a shortcut that would allow you to tap a complication that would start a specific workout and I don't think you can well you can do like you can make it start a shortcut and I have heard people do things like if I tap the action button at 9 o'clock in the morning it will do this and if I tap the action button at 5 o'clock in the afternoon I'll do another thing right so basically if statements in your shortcut to say if it's the morning time I'm going for a walk if it's the afternoon I'm going for a cycle so you can do things I think John Gruber had wonder if the phone is faced down when I hit the action button I wanted it to be the camera but if the phone's already unlocked I wanted to do something else oh jeez you can do a lot of things with it so I imagine you get very creative if you want to spend time with the shortcuts I was joking to you before not joking I was mentioning to you before we started recording I actually made a shortcut today I feel like I made fire because I didn't use the internet to google anything I actually figured out the first principle you said it it took me half an hour to make a shortcut with like two actions basically take input convert from PDF to PNG send to share sheet that's the shortest shortcut but I got there from zero just clicking on my phone not even on anything else on my phone I was pleasing myself I had a shortcut that was all it does is email something to myself so in the share sheet when you share it says email it to me and I was talking about it ahead of time I've mentioned this on the show I think is that I decided to do a nuke and pave on my phone which causes a nuke and pave on the watch so I've had to set everything up from scratch I tried to build that shortcut now I know exactly what was in the shortcut I have screenshots of the shortcut and I could not build it I had the screenshots I could see it couldn't do it turned out it was one of the ones from the gallery and so I downloaded it from the gallery and it looks exactly like it did but the things that are in there I can't find them I can't add them manually myself can't do it that is many shades of weird very clear yeah so basically that's kind of the main points I had in my notes but on the whole I've now been living with the watch and I was pretty sure last year that Tim Cook was describing the watch that was perfect for me yeah he was if you are an active person this is a really, really pleasant watch more than one woman who wears it because she refuses to wear glasses so that they can make the display so big and so bright and so clear that they can get away without wearing reading glasses more than one woman I have mocked those people she's get over yourself wear some glasses it is not a subtle watch I have been wearing an apple watch for many, many, many years and almost no one ever passes comment I think I had this watch on for a day the first time so I said that's a nice watch so it definitely catches people I just wish I could pull it off I have tiny little wrists and it just looks ridiculous on me plus I'd have to buy all new bands because I've always had the small one so it would cost me like $3,000 to replace my watch I did tell you I have 30 something bands they also fit the very, very, very first band from the series Zero which was the electric blue no it was an electric blue band that was my very, very first band come on I haven't changed much but I didn't think there were choices back then I thought it was black and white maybe I bought two bands actually I have two really old bands maybe one came with yeah I have a Nikon that's in white that must have come with the watch and I have a blue one that I must have bought separately so it was like you get your watch and if you want something else you go buy a band well I'm going to make you buy another band no one can see this but I got the the new orange Nike band with all the little speckles in it and it's so fun I love it and Steve got the it's like a dark blue with orange on the back so the little holes are orange it's gorgeous on them looks really good I have been procrastinating I am buying a new band but I have been procrastinating like crazy and part of me ends thinking I'm just going to buy more than one and not procrastinate that way well I'll send you a link to the one that Steve likes because I think it's like I notice it across the room how pretty it is so I like it this is cool this is as light as light can get I mean we covered what kind of cardboard it came in we got it all done we did indeed that's a long time since I've done a product review I'm very out of practice but anyway I dare you to figure out how to sign off stay active so you stay healthy there you go we'll take it bye Bart see it well that is going to wind us up for this 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