NC_2023_10_08
[0:00] Music.
[0:10] 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 they know 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 presence till the actual day of celebration, I hope you enjoy the new show.
On Sunday or Monday, wherever you listen.
Two Years Ago Today I Left Facebook and Instagram
[0:43] 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-anorexia websites.
[1:39] Let that sink in for a minute. The second one was an ad campaign for a Skittles party.
Since Minnie 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.
[2:21] 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 were friends of friends, or acquaintances of acquaintances, or maybe were 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.
Okay, they didn't say it that way, but that's what it sounded like to me.
I just go, you know, I know, I saw it on Facebook.
But that made me incredibly sad because it's like, okay, I don't know what I can tell you because I don't know what you've already seen. And it made, it just made me sad.
It also made me sad when Steve would mention something adorable Kennedy did in Texas.
And I didn't know about it because it was on an Instagram story.
[3:39] 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 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.
[4:02] During this last two years, Twitter's become a dumpster fire, as everybody knows, so I've slowed down my usage there quite a bit, and I've moved to Mastodon for my non-family fun interactions.
Twitter's so awful now that it's started to make Facebook not look all that bad.
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, Ash doesn't seem all that bad.
You can probably tell where 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 on 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 Mastodon. Now, I've started to pile through all of these lists of 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 I, you know, 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 I, it's like three or four taps to get rid of one person and so I'm like.
[5:27] Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, okay, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
I did it, went all the way down to the bottom And I 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 going to take me a while to really pull this back, but I really want to isolate this down to the people I really want to follow.
Anyway, and please, 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 Mastodon, 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 Mastodon, 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 going to 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 there's been a, there has been a lot of rationalization, But the important thing is that I think Mark Zuckerberg has learned his lesson.
Tiny Tip - How to See All of the Preinstalled macOS Apps
[6:48] Music.
[6:57] One of the great joys of macOS 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, erasing everything and reinstalling the OS, it's really easy to see which apps the Mac comes with.
But what if you want to 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 kind of recently figured out how to do just that. open your applications folder and set it to list view.
You can 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 kind of two ways to go at that.
[8:13] Once you can see the Date Added column, select the chevron in 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.
[8:34] 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 isn't life-changing, but it's kind of fun to look through all of the apps that Apple pre-installed for us.
Nuke and Pave - 2023 Edition - Battery Tests
[8:52] One of the greatest sources of content for the Nocilicast 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 from 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 Backhorse Sonoma has just been released.
[9:34] Now, the backbone of my Nukem Pave process is a massive mind map created and maintained in iThoughts from Toketaware. I started maintaining this mind map of Doom, trademarked 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 add 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 MindMap to remove apps I no longer use and to compare the list to the new apps I've installed.
[10:20] I certainly do not add every new app from my Mac. One of the joys of the new Compave 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 the name of each app that needs special handling, and then each of those link to the complex configuration instructions over on the left-hand side.
[11:07] Now one of the more annoying steps in the prep section says, two days before nuking, 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'd do it, and then I bugged Steven Gatz 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 back up to the backup, and then I bug Steven Gatz.
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, 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 megabyte, kilobyte.
[12:37] 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 1TB Samsung T3 SSD and connected it over USB-C to my Mac.
I created a 900GB sparse bundle on that drive. I then told Carbon Copy Cloner to clone from my 2TB Samsung T5 real backup to that smaller SSD. 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.
[13:14] 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 disconnecting or connecting and reconnecting.
I swapped out the cable, which did fix the problem, but then Synology said, I can't read this disk.
Turns out I didn't reformat the drive to exFAT 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 Backblaze off-site 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.
[14:20] 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.
Sounded 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 Margo 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 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 if you're starting over there.
[15:33] 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.
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 ask 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.
[16:11] 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 and asked me to enter the password the apple id password for null okay okay why is it null i don't know what it's talking about anyway it let me 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 error dash seven zero zero three okay At 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.
[17:05] 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 all 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 that 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 Mac and did I truly want to do that?
Yes, already!
[18:00] Alright, the Mac did some of the usual stuff, showing an Apple logo and a progress bar for a short time, and then it restarted with a screen I'd never seen before.
It was all black. In 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.
[18:22] 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.
[19:43] All right, 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 try 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, and 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 of 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.
[20:40] And 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, reinstall macOS Sonoma from scratch, and then add in half of the first half of the apps.
Very time-consuming and tedious. Several people, including Dan Weter, Sandy, David Price, and Ray Robertson, 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.
[21:55] 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 test, sleeping with Wi-Fi off always had zero battery drain, and this test revealed the same results.
[22:13] 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 0%. 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 Mac lost 14% battery. That is, the same loss I was seeing before nuking all of my apps and settings. The best part of this is is that if I select the battery in the menu bar, the little drop-down 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 rerun 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%.
[23:29] And one could argue it shouldn't even lose that much while still asleep, but 3% is a darn better than, say, 14 or 15%.
[23:37] 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 downloading my 100,000 image photos library when I ran the battery tests.
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, It wasn't Sonoma then, it was Ventura.
And I did not log into, let's see, 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.
[24:43] 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 gotta be something rogue in iCloud that's awakening the Mac.
If that's the case, why doesn't that same rogue 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.
[25:18] 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.
Support the Show
[25:29] One of the sweetest things about the support I get for 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 to when people leave or lower their pledges.
I mean, 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, you 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 podfeet.com slash Patreon or podfeet.com slash PayPal for a one-time donation to help pick up the slack for those who no longer can afford to help out.
Bart on Apple Watch Ultra 2 from Series 7 (no blog post)
[26:25] 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.
[26:38] 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.
And 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 0 to a 2 to a 4 to a 7.
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 2.
Oh, okay. Which is 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. Yeah. I've always had the bigger watches and I was very surprised so.
[27:48] Well, first thing I actually will say is this is this is one of Apple's new completely carbon neutral products, and the box is completely plastic free.
Oh, 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.
Oh, that's kind of interesting.
So it doesn't even have the little green tab plastic sticky thing.
To show you how it does have 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 us on the video.
So it's it's a big box.
It looks like an Apple Watch box, except it's square. Yeah.
OK, two pull tabs at the back and then it opens up to give you two smaller boxes.
And audio unboxing contain. And now he's holding up another part.
Yeah, but I mean, 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.
[29:02] 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.
OK, and they've just sort of sort of sort of use it to make it look a little bit pristine or a little bit prestigious. But most of it is very, very matte cardboard. OK.
And I really like that. 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.
I mean, by the way, 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, right?
Because they said that they were going to carbon offset the charging by building renewable energy.
But 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.
And she laughed. I always say to people, you know, I think we have enough trash already.
Oh, good point. In California, they made it where you have to pay for them.
[30:18] So they don't... Yeah, we did that too. I love it. Yeah.
Oh, they still ask us here. It's like, you know, they ask you before they ring up your toll. Yeah.
Do you want to bag it up? I always feel bad when I forget my bag in the car.
But anyway, okay, so you... So we're all over the box. So you take it out.
And wasn't it huge and heavy?
[30:38] Yeah, my very, very, very, very first reaction was, oh, no, I've made a colossal mistake You.
[30:45] 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 to stop you accidentally scrolling while you're out hiking, which makes it look even bigger than it is.
And that 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 aluminium 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.
Right. But around the pebble of shiny.
Oh, yeah. OK, so it's some sort of glass covered plastic. Yeah. But that mine is ceramic back there.
Oh, that feels nice. Still the circle with those, actually. But at first it makes it look and feel.
So basically without the straps on it feels obviously heavier.
And I presume it is heavier. I mean, if you put on a weighing scale, it is heavier.
But once the strap is on and the weight is actually distributed like you would wear a watch.
It doesn't feel heavy anymore.
It, I put it on my arm.
And it felt no different to what I've been used to. And I was like.
[32:13] That's hard. That's really interesting. I'm not saying you're not telling me what you experienced.
I'm just 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 favorite strap. The Tafika 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's it looks fine. Oh it looks good. It doesn't look silly. It looks really good. It's fine. So even, yeah so even the normal straps are fine and what I notice is that the only strap that makes it feel heavy is the plastic um 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, 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.
So 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 fifty nine percent heavier.
[33:30] I think it's the law of small numbers, it's not. Neither of them are like rocks on your arm, so it's okay that it's half a rock extra.
Yeah, it's like 25 grams though. I mean, 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?
Yeah, but the theory on that is that because it's a change in distribution.
It's at the moment of inertia. Sure, sure, sure. These are very small, so the moment is tiny.
I guess. I always wanted to have a stainless steel watch, and I never bought it because I was I was afraid it would be too heavy on my arm, but.
[34:06] Yeah, well, as I say, I was 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 when 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 was 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 to 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 and also brighter.
[35:33] 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 that's what I want to watch. That's what I want. I want a flat display.
I think that would be nifty.
[35:49] Yeah, 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's at a tangent to a curved surface. But the other thing that's amazing is this thing. This thing has a much longer battery life than my series seven 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.
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 it's not if you're not outside.
So indoors, it's it's as if my watch is just always at full brightness.
The only difference is the seconds vanish.
So, you know, the way the complications become simpler. Yeah. 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 percent, not to like 25 percent like the other one did.
And when I'm cycling, it is such a difference.
It is so clear. That matters a lot. 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 like when people say, oh, no, it has a better quality screen.
It is eye opening to me how much better the screen is.
I'm genuinely very, very impressed.
Now, Bert, let's not let's be honest. This audience knows you're never out in sunshine.
[37:15] Yeah, well, no, it never lasts for long. We have sunshine and showers is very common here.
You know, if you don't like the weather, wait 30 minutes.
[37:24] 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, right? So now I have the ultra modular face, which gives me the time in 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.
[38:27] 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 And you are from sea level.
It's like on an airplane. You have to set the altimeter before you take off or you're gonna crash.
Yeah, I'm not talking about it doesn't know the altitude. No, but what's weather and altitude got to do with anything? Okay, so the sensor that empowers this is an air pressure sensor. Okay, that's what's telling it the altitude. That's how it's figuring it out. Yeah, so you change air pressure by a certain amount when you go up or down. But in order to be able to give you an 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. Because you're not at sea level.
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 weather on the watch.
The weather. But if I tap into it, it always knew.
So the watch knew, I just wasn't showing him the complication.
[39:54] Right. So the altitude would jump around from at one point I was 50 metres below water, which I thought was interesting. It was raining, but I still was pretty sure it wasn't 50 metres below sea level.
Then it was 105 metres above sea level.
And then I was back at 62, which is what I know to be correct.
And it seems that when I used 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. So I 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 and 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 weather working today. And sure enough, I'm allowed to see the UV index and the weather at one glance.
[41:05] 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, well, that's how it's always been.
I'm afraid to touch it, though, Bart.
I'm afraid to touch it. Don't look at it funny. It'll stop working.
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. So I love the ultra watch face because of how much I can see it once.
And it's just amazing.
And also, one of the things you can have now, I didn't. 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.
Allow the compass to use your location. Well, that would make sense.
[41:57] Compass can be affected by magnetic materials and watch bands. Pay attention. Okay.
Okay. Don't walk off a cliff. Yeah, that's on the other watches too. That's pretty cool.
It 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, like you 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.
That's a great... I don't know if it's Series 9 only either.
It might be back farther than that, too. Further than that.
Yeah. Oh, one point. When you 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's is, okay, I was comparing to the Ultra, the Series 9.
Okay. Well, 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 when it got bigger too?
It got a little bit bigger too. Basically the bezel shrank.
A little bit bigger, that was really noticeable to me.
[43:17] Yeah, I noticed that when I would look at his watch and be all jealous.
All right, keep going.
I'm going to go do math on the series seven while you're while you're off, while you keep going.
The other nice thing that the the ultra the modular two face has that I've never seen before is it has automatic night mode.
So when I go out in the dark, I get 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.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah, I really like that. And the battery life is really impressive.
So with the series seven, I would I had 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 they're, but yeah, 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.
[44:34] Because I, I track two walks, one cycle and the housework every day.
So that's a lot of workouts is tracking and I would need to top it up between my walks basically only ever I only ever top it off 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 percent and because it was weekend, I did a three hour cycle instead of a two hour cycle and it's still at 40 percent.
That's a very, 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, I know how they made it really thick. But still.
[45:19] 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 for my iPhone when it arrives I'm hoping it will match perfectly with the watch.
[45:46] Oh, that'll be cool. Yeah. From here, it looks very pretty. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not it's not like the stainless steel. It's not blingy.
It's 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 for the Apple Watch Ultra and the underwater band I have in bright yellow because it's my favorite band for getting rained on.
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.
I'll go well with the titanium.
And it's a really pleasing band. It's because it has it has multiple notches.
So I was a little bit like, yeah, I prefer 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 and hook three or hook four.
It's that springy. Oh, wow.
Yeah. Like stretchy. It feels. Yeah. So it feels like an infinitely adjustable band, even though it has specific notches that you hook very, very securely into, like 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 to pixel density of versus the series 7.
[47:16] 31% higher density, so that is definitely notice that you'll notice. Yeah, I will I will now grant you that I, Certainly noticed it. Yeah, I have the other nice thing about the cat at the, The Alpine loop is it's 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, yeah.
That's why I don't wear those fabric-y ones.
Just because I work out a lot and I sweat and then I take a shower and it's always blech.
Yeah, these feel nice. Yeah, I want to ask another question on the action button.
When you say it starts a workout, does it start a specific workout?
[47:56] I didn't do that because I do walking and cycling. But it could have?
I didn't. It could have.
So then it's no different than a complication. It's not doing anything.
Yeah, but I freed up a complication.
Yes, I'll give you that. Yeah, yeah. I'm just thinking about, because Stephen Getz 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.
[48:23] 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 nine o'clock in the morning, it will do this. And if I tap the action button at five 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 one where if the phone is faced down when I hit the action button, and I want it to be the camera, but if the phone's already unlocked, I wanted to do something else. Jesus.
[48:52] Yeah, you can do a lot of things with it. So I imagine you get very creative if you want to spend time on the shortcuts app.
I was joking to you before or 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 called the first principles.
You said 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.
I mean, it's the world's shortest shortcut.
But I got there from zero, just clicking on my phone, not even on anything else, on my phone.
I was pleased with myself. I had a shortcut that was, all it does is email something to myself, so in the share sheet, when you go to share it, 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.
And 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 have 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.
[50:12] That is many shades of weird. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it's possible to do it. I can't do it.
It. To be 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. It is. If If you're an active person, this is a really, really pleasant watch.
I know 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 like it. I have mocked those people. I like it.
It's like, just get over yourself, wear some glasses. It is. 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 on it. I think I had this watch on for a day with the first time someone said, Oh, that's a nice watch. So it definitely catches people's eyes.
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.
[51:38] I did tell you I have 30 something bands, didn't I? Yeah.
They all still fit. I still have my very, very, very, very first band from the series zero, which is the electric blue. No, it was an electric blue band I bought as my very, very first band. Come on, I haven't changed much.
Yeah, but I didn't think there were choices back then. I thought it was like black and white.
Maybe I bought two bands. Maybe 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. OK.
And I have a blue one I must have bought separately. Because you're right, they didn't have separate SKUs. It was like, you get your watch, and if you want something else, you go buy a band. Yeah. Well, I'm going to make you buy another band. No one can see this, but I got 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 Nike band. So the little holes are orange.
It's gorgeous on him, looks really good.
I have been procrastinating about which of the new bands to buy.
I am buying a new band, but I have been procrastinating like crazy and part of me ends up 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 stunning.
Like, I notice it across the room how pretty it is, so I like it.
Well, it works for me.
This is cool. This is as light as light can get, I think. I mean, we we covered, you know, what kind of cardboard it came in.
We got it all done.
[53:08] We did indeed. I asked a long time to sit on a product review.
I'm very out of practice. But anyway, I dare you to figure out how to sign off.
[53:19] Stay active, so you stay healthy. There you go. We'll take it. Bye, Bart.
See ya. Well, that is going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at allison at podfeet.com anytime you like if you have a question or a suggestion just send it On over you can follow me on mastodon at podfeet at chaos dot social, Remember everything good starts with podfeet.com, if you want to join the fun of the Conversation you can join our slack community over at podfeet.com slash slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely No, silica stowaways, you can support the show at podfeet.com slash patreon or with the one-time donation podfeet.com slash PayPal, And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, don't come here in next week, but, if you come in two weeks or after that, you can head on over to podp.com slash live.
[54:05] Music.