There's Gold in That Computer!

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and every week I am joined by two insatiable co-hosts. As always, I'm joined by Matt Berchler. Matt, how are you doing? I am doing well. I didn't think of anything clever to say this time. That's okay. You don't always have to be clever. We're also joined by Niléane. Niléane, how are you doing? I'm doing well, and I am clever. I appreciate it.

So we have some stuff for you, but we have a little bit of follow-up. We recorded the last episode a little later than normal. Normally we record on Fridays, but we recorded it on Monday. The very next day, and I'm so frustrated, the very next day, Sonos updated the two products, Not their whole line, not a bunch of different things, just the two products that I happen to have bought and brought to the show the very last week.

So now there is the Sonos ARK Ultra and the Sonos Sub 4, and both, from what I have heard, are significant updates. So I am quite perturbed about this. It was quite the choice to review the just deprecated products the same week that the new ones came out. I think I... Really interesting timing. I am so frustrated by that. Yeah, and it was... I thought about going back and recording like a little bit for the show and just inserting it in, but I was like,

yeah, we'll just save it for the next episode. But I'm so frustrated. I was considering returning my ARK and sub, but they're both very heavy. It's going to be a lot of work to do it. And like I said last week, how I feel about them still sounds. They sound amazing still. So I'm just going to keep them, and I'm going to ignore the fact that Sonos literally updated it like a week after I got them. May you stay strong?

I think it's a 14-day return window, so I might still be in that window. I don't know. We'll see. There's just a lot of stuff happening this weekend, and, well, we'll get to it all. But, yeah, we have some stuff for you. I am first up in the dock because I have something special. I have here the new iPad mini. Oh, my God. Yeah. You know, it's not even out yet. Aren't I special? Yeah, no. So I have the new iPad mini here.

I'm curious, do either one of you use the iPad mini? Nope. I've never held an iPad mini. I've seen one in store. Yeah, I used an iPad mini. And it's barely bigger than a Max iPhone. So I stopped using the mini. Yeah. So that's actually kind of an interesting point that I am going to expand on in a future video. So stay tuned for that. But for me, I'm loving this iPad mini.

It's not a massive update. In fact, it's barely an update at all. But it's gotten me back into using the iPad mini. So I do have the 6th gen iPad mini, the previous one. And I basically use it for one thing. It's when I'm filming, I put my shot list as a PDF document in GoodNotes. And I use the Apple Pencil to mark up the shot list to basically be like, okay, this was an overhead shot. This was a B-roll shot. Okay, I'm cutting this. Okay, I'm going to reshoot this.

It's kind of my way of just marking things up and staying organized while I work. And if I'm editing a video in here, I will use that iPad mini. I'll put the script up next to it while I'm editing in Final Cut. So this iPad mini is not a huge update, but it does have some really nice quality of life improvements. The first one, and I'm just going to rip the Band-Aid right off, jelly scrolling is fixed. Ooh. So can you remind us what that was?

Yes. So jelly scrolling was the big upset over the last iPad mini. And basically what it is is the LCD controller for it would get out of sync when you're scrolling fast or even medium speed scrolling. So basically what would happen is the left side and the right side wouldn't line up. So it would look like jelly where like one side was like drooping down and the other side was up higher and stuff like that. While the display has not changed in anything in this iPad mini.

It's still the IPS LCD panel with the LED backlighting. It's not OLED or anything like that, which is a bummer. I'm definitely one of those people that would love an iPad Mini Pro, essentially. And I would give Apple all the money for that. But this one, there is no jelly scrolling. That's pretty much the only display change to it. So when you're scrolling the left and right side, stay in sync just like it would with any other iPad or iPhone or anything like that.

So that's kind of a nice thing. What was an interesting tidbit about the last iPad mini is my review unit, while it had jelly scrolling, it was barely noticeable. But my personal one, the one I went and bought, had it to like an extreme amount. Like to the point where like you can literally see it just wobbling. like the text wobbling from the left and the right side. It was kind of funny. If I had used the iPad mini for more things than what I actually used it for, it would probably bother me.

But considering for most time, I'm just using it to mark up a PDF document, it wasn't that big of a deal. This iPad mini now starts at 128 gigs. There is no more 64 gig option. And it goes up to 256, which I believe was the highest storage tier on the previous one. But there's also a 512 storage tier as well now, which I think is a good thing. Because once you start at, if you're somebody that keeps like photos and music and stuff locally on your device, storage gets eaten up pretty quickly nowadays.

So it's, I honestly don't understand how people get by with 64 gigabytes iPads. So I said I was using one. I got my wife's, when she got a, she upgraded, it was a lateral upgrade, but in size. She went to the normal iPad, the no-name iPad, and then she gave me the Mini. Her Mini was a 64-gigabyte one. I did a factory reset on it. I installed, like, two pretty small games on it, a couple streaming apps, but, like, I didn't download any, like, media locally to the device.

And when an iOS update came by, it said, I can't install it. There's not enough. You need to make space. I was like, I've done nothing on this iPad, and it's already out of space. Yeah. It's shocking. So I'm super happy it's 128 to start, especially because it's still $500, I think, as the base price. Yeah, so the base price of the iPad mini did not change at all. It's still $500, and that is for the 128 gig now instead of the 64 gig. I even vaguely remember, and I've been meaning I need to go back and watch my review of the 6th gen iPad mini.

But I vaguely remember even saying something about, like, do not buy the 64 gig one. this one actually starts at 256, and that's really the only proper option. Because 64 gigs, even just, what, it was three years ago, was not enough. So, yeah, I'm glad 64 gigs is gone. I don't, I think the base iPad mini still comes in 64 gigs. Is that right? The base iPad does, I think, yeah. Yeah, okay. So that's the only iPad that still comes in 64 gigs, which I'm assuming when that gets updated next, that will go away because that's just not enough space.

Can we agree that it should be less expensive? Oh, yes. Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think so too. I think $500, 500 gigs, $500 is a lot of money for the iPad mini, especially when you can get the base iPad. Well, it doesn't have, it's a little less, you know, turned down, it's not, it's not as high. You can get that one for, for like $3.29 now.

So that's, yeah, it is, it is a bit much. I, but also I see the, the people wanting like an OLED iPad mini and, you know, like some nice quality of life improvements. Like an OLED iPad mini would be an amazing ebook reader, would be an amazing comic reader, game, gaming device. It would be, it would be fantastic because of the size of it. And that form factor, I think, it plays a lot into the popularity of the iPad Mini, obviously, because it's really the only big difference.

But the iPad Mini is the kind of device that, if you're somebody that's traveling with a 16-inch MacBook Pro or a 13-inch iPad Pro or something like that, you can throw an iPad Mini into your backpack. It doesn't take up a lot of extra space, and you have this nice tablet for reading or playing games or even watching movies or whatever. Like, I traveled a little bit this year, and I watched a Formula One race on my iPad mini because I was also doing work on my main iPad, and that was just the screen I had, the biggest screen I had available to me at the time, and it worked out great.

So this has the A17 Pro in it. Yes. I'm wondering, have you noticed it get warm? Because the iPhone, we talked about this a couple weeks ago, that iPhone got warm with that chip. Is the iPad... 15 yes so this is the the the same chip with an asterisk that is in the iphone 15 pro and the asterisk is it's actually a binned version of that chip so it has six cpu cores and five gpu cores whereas the 15 pro version had six and six um leftovers so at the factory when they're making these all the good ones went in the iphones and this is the bin with all the bad 17 pros i have a

feeling this got the a17 pro because they probably had a bunch of binned ones left over and they didn't know what to do with them because as we know and let me answer your question really quick i have not noticed it get hot at all uh during setup i was i've been paying very close attention to it because that was my first thought when i read that this was going to have the a17 pro i was like oh boy the thermals uh it doesn't i haven't felt it got hot at all uh during setup indexing i did a little bit of raw photo editing um part of the challenge i did the challenge on

there as well uh didn't notice it get hot at all uh so that was really nice i was i was really happy about that um the a17 pro is one of these weird chips because it's it was the first generation 3 nanometer chip and tsmc quickly moved away from that first generation one because of how hard it was to make and it just wasn't um uh it wasn't thermally efficient uh so they quickly moved away

from that and went into the gen 2 3 nanometer chip which is what is the m4 chip and the a18 and a18 pro So I'm kind of surprised this didn't just get like the A18 chip, but also I could see the Apple being like, well, we need to save all of those for the iPhone right now because of how close they're being released together. But yeah, I am a little surprised that it's the A17 Pro. I saw Jason Snell say something on Mastodon about he would be shocked if this thing goes another three or four years before being updated, which is typically how often the iPad mini does get updated every three to four years.

because of how hard this chip is to make. So I kind of agree with him. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if there is like, okay, we're going to keep making this until we get to a certain threshold of A17 Pros, and then we'll update it to something else. So that way those chips aren't being wasted. But, you know, this is probably the first iPad mini that I could see being updated in two years and not three or four years. That'd be great. Honestly. Yeah. And I feel like A17 Pro is probably enough performance for the iPad mini.

I agree. The iPad mini is not an iPad you're going to be doing like a heavy creative workflow on or something like that. Like normally when I do iPad reviews, I switch my whole workflow over to that iPad for that review period. Well, that's not something I'm going to do with the iPad mini for a lot of different reasons. It doesn't have stage manager. It doesn't have external monitor support. So the iPad mini, I have to review it in a very different way than I would review any other iPad.

I can't move my workflow over to it. But I did do a bit of photo editing and stuff like that in Lightroom, and it handled it just fine. Even using the AI removal tools and stuff like that, it handled it just like the iPhone 15 Pro did. So despite the fact it's missing a GPU core. The lack of stage manager is a good thing. right uh yeah i i i don't i saw somebody from nine to five mac post something about the ipad mini needs stage manager and i completely disagree the screen is not big enough for that

stage manager works best when you have a keyboard attached to an ipad uh that's that's when stage manager is at its best because you can use a trackpad and mouse and stuff to move windows around and keyboard shortcuts and things like that but uh i i do not think the ipad mini needs stage at all. And I am somebody that uses Stage Manager all day long on my iPad Pro. So, yeah. Although it means that you can't use it with an external display fully. Yeah. So that's an issue.

So external display support for the iPad is still limited to the M-series chips. So you have to have, yeah, so the older, like the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pros got support for Stage Manager, but they didn't get support for external monitor support. In order to be able to plug your iPad into a monitor and not have it mirror to extend and not mirror, it has to be an M-Series chip inside of it. So, um, but to be fair, I have been having so many issues with external monitor support lately.

It has been so buggy and so slow. Uh, yeah, it's like this whole thing. I needed, I needed to do, I need to make a video or something about it because it is, it has been really bad lately. I thought it was just like an iPad OS 18 beta thing and then 18 shipped and now 18.1 is about to ship and it's still the same way. So hasn't been great. But jumping back to the iPad mini, because it got the A17 Pro, it also got a couple of other additions. Mostly the big one being Wi-Fi 6E, because it's all system on chip stuff.

So it's got Wi-Fi 6E, and it got Bluetooth 5.3. The Wi-Fi 6E is actually kind of nice. So one thing I've been doing lately is I set up my PS5, but it is just plugged into power and Ethernet. It is not plugged into a TV. I have been using Mirror Play, and if you go back quite a few episodes, you'll remember I brought up the subject of my new Wi-Fi 7 router system. So I have been using that previously with my iPhone and the Backbone controller to just play PS5 games on, and there is zero lag.

I'm getting 1080p, 60 frames per second performance. The PlayStation is plugged directly into the router. My iPhone was connected, which the iPhone 16 line has Wi-Fi 7, is connected to the 6 gigahertz band. Now for the iPad mini, because it got Wi-Fi 6E, 6E is what enables support for the 6 gigahertz band. So I have been doing the same thing with the Razer Kishi Ultra controller. I'm turning into John Voorhees. I'm buying all the video controllers.

Seriously, I have a drawer in my closet that's just full of different video game controllers. But I needed something that supported the iPad mini, and I actually didn't have one that supported the iPad mini. This is the only one you need, Chris. Nothing else. The Stadia. Oh, the Stadia one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm describing for audio listeners. Sorry, I clicked away so I could see my notes, so I didn't see you holding it up. Okay, you hate my face. I see. No, I'm just on an iPad and I can't see everything. thing um but no what i really like what i like for like ipads and iphones are that switch style controller where you have the controllers on the sides of the display i love that uh the backbone

controller feels really good the razor key sheet ultra feels really good uh i forgot to grab it it's in my bedroom um but yeah that that's been nice so i've been using the app mirror play to stream ps5 games to the iPad mini and it works great it is fantastic um I'm really big into handhelds like our sister podcasts in PC uh I'm really big into it because I don't live by myself I don't get to control the I I can't monopolize what's on the TV all the time so while yes I would get a much better

looking game if I took my PS5 and plugged it into my nice TV and played games that way I can't always control what's on the tv and this coming weekend we have five people and like two cats staying with us like it is going to be uh it's uh yeah you can i'll let you be excited for that one um it is gonna be a nightmare uh so the only way i'm gonna ever be able to play video games this weekend is by doing this remote kind of play so it's really nice that the ipad mini now has 6e

or Wi-Fi 6E support. So I can do this kind of thing, have a decent screen and play games. That's good. Wi-Fi 6E also means you can probably play like NVIDIA GeForce Now via NVIDIA GeForce Now, right? Yeah, except they don't have a native app. So I've tried NVIDIA GeForce Now and the Xbox Game Pass one. So you have to go through and you have to create a PWA for them. And especially the Xbox One is not optimized.

It is not very good. You really need the native app. The NVIDIA one was fine. It just wasn't as great. I definitely get better performance using Mirror Play and my PlayStation PS5 on my local network. But you are right. If that is your only option, it will technically work, but I just get better performance by using stuff locally on my network. But there is something we need to discuss. And I have a feeling Neelion is going to have a lot of opinions on that.

And it is the colors. So I have here the iPad mini. I have the blue one. Right here is the denim Smart Folio case, which actually looks really good. I actually like the Smart Folio case. Fun fact, since the iPad mini didn't get redesigned, the Smart Folio cases from the old iPad minis work on the new one and vice versa. So my orange one that I think Neil Leon would approve actually does work on the new iPad mini. But this right here is the iPad mini in blue. Now, if you're watching the video feed, I have it here.

That's gray. Yeah. Looking at it in person, it is gray with like a sprinkle of blue. Like it is, this blue is not going to show up on video at all. I don't know what it is with the iPad design team and them using the saturation slider. I know it's a little more complicated than that. But iPads that come in colors have never really been bright and vibrant.

Like the iPhone 16 line. You give me that blue iPhone 16 in an iPad, and here's all my money. Here it is. Apple, there it is right there for you. Just take it. Give me it. But yeah, the colors again this year are really disappointing. And I think they're even worse than the iPad minis last year. Give me one second. I'll grab my old iPad mini. Okay. Well, because the old iPad minis were pretty, I mean, they weren't like super saturated, but they were okay. Like I had the purple one and it was, it was definitely, you could definitely tell it was purple.

Yeah. And the baseline iPads right now actually do have a decent amount of saturation, I think. And my wife has a pink one and it's, it's very pink. Yeah. so um this was the orange smart folio cover i have feeling nearly i'm going to prove of this maybe not stickers but uh the orange looks pink right now but i believe interesting interesting okay it is definitely orange video compression is doing things but this is the old ipad mini and this is the one this one came in starlight this is the only device i've ever bought in starlight i just wanted to mix

things up and i the space gray of this ipad mini was not very good um it it honestly like you can it's starlight in person but it's not it's still a little grayish to me uh i just i just want i just want an ipad in colors specifically an ipad pro give me an ipad pro in the um midnight macbook air color that that would make me i i'd be the happiest boy on the planet yeah get on it apple yeah so

I just think this concept by Basic Apple Guy, at one point he made a concept of, what do you say that, he re-buffed, I don't know. Reimagined? He reimagined, yes. He reimagined the MacBook, the one that was just called the MacBook. Very lightweight, 11-inch display MacBook that came out still back in the Intel days.

He reimagined it if it came out today with an A1 or later chip. And he put the iMac colors on it. And it looked wonderful. I want these colors. Yeah. I wish Apple would do more with the six colors, like the, or not the six colors. Well, the Apple iMac colors. I started getting them confused, but I wish Apple would do more with those. I, you know, even if it was just like the base iPad line in those, that would be amazing. Um, but yeah, I, I, but I, I want to talk a little bit about the form factor of the iPad mini. Um,

I think it, it lends itself to being really good at a handful of things. Like this is probably the specialty device Apple makes because the iPad mini is not a device people are going to use as their main computer like an iPad Pro or even an iPhone. There are plenty of people out there that use like an iPhone Pro Max or whatever as their main computer because they're traveling all the time. I've seen people like with their like little Bluetooth keyboards that fold out and stuff like that and they'll answer email and stuff like that. But the iPad mini to me is I have this theory and

I've talked about it before and it's literally the opening to my review is that the iPad mini is everyone's second favorite Apple product or at least everyone that has it second favorite Apple product because it's really it's a really niche device like if you want an iPad that's going to be great for reading a book the iPad mini is that it's lightweight you can hold it in one hand this might shock some people the 13 inch iPad Pro not so great for reading a book in portrait mode it's just not

it's really not I've tried it several times I used to do that yeah it's too big so if I'm going to read that read a book or something I'm going to grab the iPad mini if you have something like Marvel Unlimited the ability to just show a single comic panel at a time works really well on the iPad mini. It's too small to display a whole page at once, at least for me. So you can do like a single comic panel and like swipe through them.

It's great for going through RSS feeds and you know, you read it later stuff and playing a few games and stuff like that. It's just a really specialty device. So it's kind of one of those things that's like, you know you need it. You'll know if you need it, but most people probably don't. yeah i would agree with that it's a nice second ipad to have but if you want an ipad for i feel like a lot of people would like a larger ipad yeah i i think that the the 11 inch ipad pro

or the ipad air the the the i guess they call it the 11 inch ipad air now too because there's the 13 inch ipad air which antidote i have never seen anyone in the wild ever use a 13 inch ipad air i I'm one of those creeper people that always looks, whenever I see somebody working from an iPad in public, I always check to see which one they're using. I've never seen anyone use a 13-inch iPad Air. I see iPad Pros all the time. I see 11-inch iPad Pros or 11-inch iPad Airs all the time. I've seen base iPads, but I have never seen a 13-inch iPad Air in the wild.

I forgot that it existed even. Yeah, me too. Yeah, I actually have a review unit of one that I've never taken out of the box because they released that and the M4 iPad Pros at the same time, and I knew what the people wanted from me. So I should probably do something with it at some point, but I just never had the time to do it. But yeah, so that's kind of my general... Use that instead of the iPad Pro. That means all of us are going to have to do it. Okay. Well, Apple, you have my address.

But yeah, that's kind of my thoughts on the iPad Air. I'm going to have more to say on it in my review, which will either be out at the same time of this episode because I was able to edit this episode and get it out early, or it's already been out for a few days and this episode got released on Thursday like it normally did. We will see. We will see. The only people who don't know are us. Yep. Well, and now the audience because I'll probably leave this in. Any questions on the iPad mini before we move on?

Thumbs up or thumbs down on the update? No nuance. Is it a good update or a bad update? Bad update. I think, look, here's the hot take. The iPad mini gets updated every three to four years. And really the only thing that got changed is the chip and jelly scrolling. So what could they have added to make you happy with it? How could they get that thumbs up? Look, I totally understand an OLED iPad mini is probably too much to ask for right now because that would jack up the price.

But there has to be either mini LED or something. There has to be a better screen technology than the IPS LCD panel with the LED backlighting. Like, there has to be a better display tech out there. But just anything. One thing, if you're going to do an update like this, have something new. Have something that makes the device compelling.

Because there is nothing. I was sitting around the other day just thinking about this iPad Mini and how I was going to review it. And I was like, okay, what's the big headlining feature? What's the big new thing that is unique to this iPad Mini? There's no redesign. The chip isn't new to it. In fact, it's a worse chip than the iPhone 15 Pro because technically it's a Ben chip. The screen is the same. Yeah, okay. It is nice that small things like Wi-Fi 6E, better base storage, the Apple Pencil lineup got cleaned up, which is really nice.

Matt, you wrote a really good article about that. I thought we all kind of knew that this was going to happen as the iPad mini and base iPad got updated. But it seemed like it surprised a lot of people that, oh, the Apple Pencil 2 is no longer supported. I thought that was kind of an obvious one, but I guess not. But the Apple Pencil lineup got cleaned up. You're forgetting one. Oh, yes. Okay, the big headlining feature is Apple intelligence. But you want to know a secret? It ships with 18.0.

This iPad mini ships with 18.0. It does not have 18.1 in it. So everyone that's going to open it up next Wednesday, you're not going to have Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence isn't coming next week or this week. Whatever week it is. It's such a weird rollout. Anyway, we don't need to get into that totally, but yeah. Another product that comes out where Apple Intelligence is the headline feature and it's not even there. It's not there. When you look at the comparison sheet on the website on apple.com, it's like the only thing you notice.

it's just that the new one has Apple intelligence 100% and this iPad mini does have 8 gigs of RAM that's the other thing too I will confirm it does have 8 gigs of RAM but yeah that's the iPad mini any other questions on it? no Matt what do you got for us this week? you put something in the show document actually both of you have put stuff in the show document that made me raise my eyebrow and go like okay let's see what is going on here I want to highlight that in the show notes, you've put an emoji.

And on my end, it's italicized. And it looks really, really funny. That's perfect. Perfect. Awesome. Awesome. I love when apps don't actually do italic text. They just skew the normal text. That's italic. Emojis are the giveaway. Yeah. so i didn't bring a product i brought more of a concept to the uh the show this week and interestingly uh chris what you uh talked about is relevant here because i for

20 years have been using rss to follow the news follow tech news primarily but also like media and politics and other things but like i get a constant stream of tech news in my rss reader like for many years i built up my subscriptions and i've probably get 300 posts in my rss reader every day and that gives people that makes people like shaky like they're like oh my god how do you how do you do that how do you handle that that's like that's normal for me like that that's about what i get too

Okay. Okay. And, but what this has done for me over the years, again, for like over a decade, at least, I just have a constant stream of tech news coming into my life. And I am on top of everything right away. I know when it happens. And I do this by following a bunch of blogs, but I also follow like The Verge, which posts like 30 things a day. I follow Tech Meme. I follow Ars Technica, I follow like all these sites that post a lot and I get just a ton of stuff and it's just kind of like always washing over me like this constant wave of stuff hitting me and I decided

like a month ago maybe I should stop that and see what that life is like that way. So I unsubscribed from all of the what I called firehose accounts which just like have tons of posts every single day and now i just follow like individual blogs and some enthusiast sites and i'm down to like 40 posts in my rss reader a day and it's very different and um i feel like a different person so typically

i would have when that ipad mini was announced last week i would have gotten a i would have seen like four or five posts in a row from like nine to five mac from mac rumors from the verge from all these places that would say like new ipad out and here's all the specs i didn't hear about it for another couple hours when i randomly logged on to social media and saw a few people i think chris actually saw your post is the first one that was like ipad min is here um and that was just weird um for me so yeah i don't know it was just a weird i'm getting these things recently where i'm like what if I change how I've done things for a long time

and see if I'm still doing the right thing? And I don't know if this is better or worse. I feel more normal, like a normal person now, where I don't know everything. I have to like hear from other people sometimes that something's happened. Interestingly, I've stopped using RSS completely for the past month. Well, you've gone too far. The main reason was that the new reader came out and because the new reader doesn't have red counts and red counts and stuff like that

and it just syncs your timeline there's no concept of um keeping up with what you you have subscribed to um i've tried going all in on that approach but what i realized is that um it just in the end I just never opened reader anymore. I just went to websites directly just to check up on them, on my favorite websites and blogs and stuff like that.

And at some point, I just stopped using it altogether. And it feels good. I think I like it because, yeah, the old reader, I always struggled with it. And, I mean, any access client, the habit of checking with RSS feeds. I was struggling with it. And just like you, I had a few hundred subscriptions in there. So I think it's good.

I think I like it now. I like it that I don't have to check an inbox of RSS feeds and I just go to the browser, check up on my favorite websites and readings. And Mastodon works really well to keep up with people. I like it. Yeah, so I'm kind of in a similar boat as you. I've been really rethinking because of the new reader update. I feel like reader caused everyone to rethink their news. Yeah, I wonder. Interesting. I tried so hard.

I tried so hard and got so far. Sorry, I couldn't help it. Yeah, no, I tried so hard to make the new reader work. And I tried everything of just following RSS posts, doing RSS Mastodon YouTube podcasts. I tried all the combinations, and I just don't care for it because it doesn't have support for RSS syncing services. So I use Feedbin for syncing all my RSS.

But also, Feedbin gives you an email address, and I use that for all my newsletters as well. Because as I've discussed on this podcast a few times now, I get a lot of email. I don't want to add more to my inbox. I don't want to add newsletters to my inbox. That's not where I, like, I don't sit down to do email and read newsletters. Like, that's just not, like, those two things should not go, email and newsletters should not go together. Or email and blog posts or whatever you want to call it. Like, they don't, they should not go together.

So, because it doesn't have feedback, and I've been looking at a lot of other services, I've kind of settled on Lear right now. But honestly, if it wasn't for newsletters, I think I would abandon RSS together and just follow specific sites on Mastodon. I did that for a while with Twitter. I stopped using RSS for like a year or so and just followed all the websites I liked on Twitter and kind of saw things in real time and stuff like that. But I just don't care for...

I don't know. I just have I feel like I have too many inboxes right now that I'm constantly having to check and stay up on. And my job is to cover technology. I need to know what's happening. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm kind of in the same boat. But Matt, where are you going with all this? So I still want to get the news. Like, I still love technology. I still want to know what's going on. So I'm not like just not paying attention. I'm just getting it in different ways. And so the main way I've solved this is I have basically moved a bunch of those Firehose sites to a folder in my browser called News.

And I can just command click on it, and it opens all those front pages and tabs. And I can go through there, and I'm browsing websites. Like it's 2002. It's great. But like, it's... There's an app specifically for like six or seven websites that you might want to check out. I've heard about this. And I've heard you're one of the six or seven websites. So... I think so. You are. But yeah, so like, I'm just, I'm like seeing the Verge's home screen. And I really like the Verge's design.

And like, this week, they've been doing a whole series on looking back at things from 2004, which was one of my formative years of technology. And like they have like this custom UIs for every page where like they have an article about Dig that looks like Dig from 2004. They have an article about Gmail being introduced, which I love that. Young people don't understand how unbelievably good Gmail was when it was new. We didn't understand. And you had to know somebody to get in. You had to know somebody. And it was cool then. It wasn't like it is now where it's like, oh, it's a wait list.

Great. Yeah. You had a Gmail address. You were one of the cool kids. I started college in the fall of 2004, and I had a Gmail address, and I bought my MacBook, which might be relevant for our next segment. I had a Gmail address that I gave the person at the Apple store, and they were like, ooh. It was very fancy. But anyway, we had like 10 megabytes of email storage, and then one gigabyte. Jesus Christ. It was insane. You had to delete your emails. There was no archive.

You would delete your emails once you read them. It was crazy. Anyway, this ending old man. Kennedy was president. too right here yeah yeah yeah it was we were just coming out of the great war it was a different time um but so i'm using those and i'm browsing the web and i'm enjoying that um and i'm also i subscribed to a couple newsletters i subscribed to casey newton's platformer i subscribed to oliver darcy i think his name is i i don't i haven't known him as long but his status newsletter which is more media and uh news stuff um and they put a bunch of links i used to always skip over those because i was like i know all this already but now i'm like using those links like cool links

of the day section because i don't actually know what's all happened um i'm listening to podcasts like i listened to connected and learned new things about things like apple news and i was like i usually come into these conversations knowing everything and just oh that's true so yeah that that that was a weird one i i wasn't used to that one um the trade-off i think is that when it was all just like a stream of like headlines and articles that all looked the same and felt the same i was prioritizing what was important but now since i'm going to like home pages and stuff i'm

letting other people curate like what's the important stuff to see which i don't love on the whole but it does kind of help me focus a little bit um and this all comes back to um a blog post from sean blanc from like 10 years ago where he called margin where he basically talked about how if you have margin in your life in different areas of your life um that's what makes you happy that's that that can help just make you feel more comfortable more fulfilled like you don't need a million dollars but you need a little margin in your budget so you can make unexpected expenses

so you can treat yourself every now and again you can buy those new sonos speakers whatever you know what i mean um and then have them updated right after you bought them yes um but like i i think for like news consumption and like my brain just having space to think about things and not just be like in the tidal wave of constant news happening um i am wondering longer term if i'll feel better and more time to think about things or if I'll go back to just subscribing to everything and kind of like deciding for myself and everything so I don't know

we'll see how it goes but it was a big change for me it felt like a big change because like I said I've been doing this for like 20 years ever like the RSS list that I have today started in Google reader forever ago and I've just been migrating it over the years and adding to it so yeah that's really it mostly vibes feelings feelings sorry sorry chris chris mentioned feed bin which is also the service that i used and i forgot to mention it's a funny thing that's why i want to mention it um the one of the

reasons why i stopped using rss is because i made a mistake um so when last month i wanted to just try and stop using rss altogether uh and my fitbin annual renewal came up so i thought okay i won't renew it because i i will try living without it um what i did not realize is that if you don't renew your fitbin subscription uh everything's gone

you lose everything oh no your account is gone that's that's a little dramatic on their part yeah maybe I did something wrong I don't know maybe I missed something I missed an export somewhere an export button somewhere before on subscribing but yeah I do know they have an OPML export because I exported mine to put into reader when I was giving the new version of Reader a shot.

So I do know they have an OPML export. Yeah, I know they do. But for some reason, I just thought I was going to be able to export after the fact, after you're going to a read-only mode or something. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Good tip. So anyway, I forced myself to stop using Feedback. Yeah, that'll do it. That'll do it. I like this, Matt. Yeah, it's definitely, I was on Clockwise this week, and my topic was basically asking the other hosts how they got their news

and how they organized all their stuff, because I feel like I'm in the middle of a renaissance. I haven't settled on what I'm going to do. I definitely want to clean up my feeds a bit more, because when something happens in tech, I get four or five of the very same articles from different sites and stuff, and I'm like, I don't need all this. I don't need five articles telling me there's a new iPad mini or the Kindles came out or something like that. So, yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, Niléane, what do you have for us this week? All right. I wanted to try something new because it is the concept of this show, after all. I thought that we don't know each other that well. And the dating questions at the end of the show, They're not great. I know you're doing your best. Ouch. So I thought I would inaugurate today a new segment that will maybe come back.

We'll see. And that's called Our Tech Stories, episode one. So today on the first episode of Our Tech Stories, I want us to just talk about our first computer we've ever had. Nice. Let's try not to ramble. Just keep it to the, just your first computer. And maybe next time we'll discover something else about ourselves. So just our first computer, not our first Apple computer, just our first computer in general.

What was your first computer? Is there like a story about it, around it? Just anything you want to say about your first computer? I can start because I, again, we're going to have to go back to the Truman era, the Truman administration. My family got our first computer in 1995. It was January. It was right after Christmas. Excellent. I was minus one year old. Oh, Jesus Christ.

And my dad saw an infomercial on TV for an Apple Performa something or other. And to this day, I don't really know what it was about that pitch. but he was just like son get in the car we're buying a computer he just went from we don't really need a home computer to this is the one um with this apple infomercial and we went to sears which is a used to be a big tech i guess technology gadgety store um it was an everything store like it was kind of an everything store yeah yeah but uh we went there to buy it and

And I don't know how much it cost. It was probably a lot. In retrospect, apparently that was the lowest of the low points for Apple computers. They were as bad as they ever were, is the impression I get. But it was incredible to us. And yeah, we mostly used it to play Monopoly and to use Clarisworks, which was a real problem for school stuff because we used Word at school. And I loved that thing.

It was so great. It had a floppy disk drive. It had a CD drive. It was gray as can be. It was lovely. Beige? Was it beige? It was beige, yes. It wasn't gray. Nice. Beige is nice. Yeah. I don't really know. It was a nice computer. Nice. Chris? Yeah. Okay. So, like Matt, our first computer back in 1995, that's wild. that was the same year.

Solid year. Different story. My dad had bought a computer at a yard sale, and his intentions were actually to open it up and melt all the gold out of it because computers, they have quite a bit of gold in it because it's really good. Yeah, it's a good... It was a different time. I'm blanking on the word. You wouldn't understand the early 90s. It was the 90s, yeah. You melt the gold out of it, and you take the gold, you go to a cash for gold place and you make some money. So he bought it at a yard sale.

It wasn't working, but he opened it up and he was like, this doesn't look too difficult. So I remember hanging out with him and watching him fix it. And I want to say the issue was the RAM. And I think this is where my memory gets a little fuzzy because I might be mixing this up with another computer. So if details of this are wrong, don't hold me accountable. I'm sorry. I was five years old when this happened. We can't really fact-check. Yeah, well, what I'm about to say could be fact-checked.

But I could be mixing this up with another computer. But this is how I remember it, is that we went to CompUSA, which was a computer store. Heck yeah. And we bought one megabyte of RAM. One megabyte. And we put that in. we reinstalled Windows 95 and yeah, got it up and running. Remember we mostly used it to play games. Mech Warrior was the big first one that I can remember.

That was fun. But yeah, that was our first computer and then my dad started working in IT and we built custom computers from there. I actually, I only had custom computers until I got my first Mac. oh that's not a show-off thing that was a hey i just took parts off of a shelf and just put them together kind of thing that sounded like a show off yeah but i'm not trying to be one of those nerds like i only use custom built pcs but yeah yeah that's that was our first computer all right uh my story is uh so the date was i believe um i'm not sure so around 2008 2009

something like that. I was, wait, math, okay, Raycast, 2008 minus 1996. So I was 12, around 12 years old. And I inherited the computer, my dad's computer. And that computer was quite something because already back then, so at 12 years old, in 2009 or 2008, I don't remember, I already told myself, wow, this looks old.

Like, I already thought this to myself. And that computer, my dad worked in the French Marine, I guess. What's that called? The Army on the Ocean. The Navy? The Navy, okay. not marine um in french it's uh la marine so that's why um fancy and yeah and that computer on it uh was on his boat um and he took it with him on year-long trips around the world

on the oceans and i remember something very specific about this computer the first time i turned it on by myself, was the high score in the pinball game included with Windows XP. And that high score, I don't remember what it was, but it was huge, like immensely huge. And I asked my dad, wow, how come you're a pro player at pinball on Windows XP?

And he told me that, yeah, he spent years, year-long trips playing pinball on this machine, on the ocean with no connection, of course. Back at the time, you couldn't get any internet or anything on the ocean, right? Even via satellite or anything. So no connectivity, just this computer. And he did nothing on it but play pinball. And he even admitted to me one day that, yeah, that computer was useless on the boat.

He didn't have to take it. He only took it for pinball. So that's something. I love it. Yeah. So the computer, I don't remember what it was. It's just a beige random PC with a huge old school monitor, like with the electron canons. CRT. CRT. CRT. Yeah, yeah. An old CRT. And that CRT stayed with me, even though I got a new computer afterwards, a newer computer afterwards.

I kept that CRT because my parents wouldn't get me a new monitor. So I kept that CRT for years, even though like they were old as heck. Nobody had the CRTs already. So I kept that monitor for years, for years. But I played my favorite game of all times on it. That was SimCity 3000 and then SimCity 4 on that CRT. So it served me well. I don't know where it is today. RIP.

That's the story of my first computer. A computer that traveled around the world and got the highest score in the world on pinball. That's awesome. That's really cool. Yeah. That's really cool. Nice. I like this. This was a good topic. Yeah. I think we should do this again every so often I don't know but we'll see I completely agree I think this is a great way for us to get to know each other but also our audience to get to know us plus we can flex our nerd cred exactly

alright so the challenge this week Matt it was your challenge what did you have us do so mine was just pretty fun find a game that you can play for free on the App Store and bring it to the show. That's it. Nice. Neilion, what do you have for us? Okay, so I've got a funny one and a bonus pick. So I will talk to you about my bonus pick first and keep the funny one for last.

My bonus pick is a game called Lyches. I don't know if that's how you pronounce it. I'm guessing LIChess. It's a website, actually, LIChess.org, I believe. It's an online platform, multiplayer platform for playing chess with people online. You can play against the computer, but you can play against people. And it's pretty, pretty popular. You can play ranked games.

There are tournaments. And it's also a great place to learn to play chess. They've got tutorials and guides, and you can ramp up the difficulty against the computer to get better. I think it's pretty nice. And the design of it, overall, is very simple. It looks really, really clean. The chessboard itself is in 2D, and everything's super fast. Like, it runs super fast, even in an old browser.

I would think just from the design, it looks like it could run in an old browser. But it does look nice. It looks very simple, but very nice. And so Light Chess is available as an app on iOS, a native app on iOS. And it runs really well on iOS and it's completely free. So you can start playing chess by yourself or you can get matched with people online. So that's really nice, I think. You should check it out if you like playing chess or just want to get started playing chess.

Chess, not chess. So that's my bonus pick. My main pick, I like it because the name is OK. I'm looking at the screenshots in the Aspore for this. And I'm very upsetting. This is very upsetting. Yeah. So it's a pay what you want game so you can download it for free and play for free. And you can use in-app purchases if you want to pay the developer.

But you don't have to. You can play completely for free. And so this game is like a very straightforward puzzle game where you have a tiny circle on screen and shapes. The circle, the small dot, is what you launch to bounce off the shapes. And the idea here is that you have to clear the shapes off the canvas with a single launch.

So you have to draw a line from the dot and just hit all the shapes with a single launch. And if you can get all the shapes with a single launch like this way, you win the level and you go on to the next one. and it gets increasingly more difficult. And that's it. It's pretty simple. It's actually pretty fun. So you're saying these fingers that are all over their promo screenshots are not part of the game? Those are your fingers? They're not. They're not in the game, those fingers. They should get rid of them off the screenshots because I'm clicking away.

I can't keep looking at it. It's very disturbing. I don't know why. It's just making me upset. They've got like the hot dog fingers. It's really scary. The promo images with the long fingers is what got me to install the game, actually. Okay. We're two very different people. So the name OK and the long fingers, the awkward fingers, that got me to install the game. I wanted to find out. How did you find this one? It was in the top charts.

Pretty low down, actually. It's not hugely popular. At least in the French top charts in the App Store. Okay. That one surprised me. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that. Yeah. The concept of the game sounds good, but the promo images are making me very upset. Don't stop at the promo images. It's going to take me a minute to get past those. Just click Get and install the game.

It's fun. Okay. I'll try it out. so that's my pick okay Chris what do you got so I went the Apple arcade route mostly because I tried finding a proper free game that was fun to play and didn't have very scary promo images and I couldn't it's a real struggle out there there's not like free games on the app store are not really free that was the struggle for me so matt did say we could either go the apple arcade route or the netflix game route so i went the

apple arcade route and uh i'm gonna start with the bonus pick first like neilion i somebody had to bring it up battle outro i i don't even know if i'm saying it right but it's it's the game everyone's playing right now because it is the most addictive iphone game i think i've ever or most it's not just on the iphone but i've only ever played it on the iphone but it is the most addictive iphone game i've ever played it's a poker like game mixed with a rogue like game where you're not really playing poker but if you know the poker hands it's helpful plus there's joker cards and there's way to like

upgrade your deck and it is incredibly satisfying especially when you beat it and i i i've had a hard time pulling myself away from it i played a little bit on the new ipad mini it's very difficult i just gonna say i uh i fully endorse this pick it's a hard game to describe to people and uh i i've played it on pc i have about 30 hours i was just checking my steam profile i've got 30 hours logged on pc and i've probably done another like 10 or hours or so hours on the iphone and i still don't really know what it's about do not download it this is the ultimate adhd trap it is it is 100

100% the ultimate. Literally, I have lost afternoons to this game. Like, whole afternoons to this game. You're right. It's very good. It is very good. It is very addictive. But it is a very well thought out game. It's not poker, but it helps if you know poker. It's very hard to describe. Like, I've heard other people describe it on podcasts, and I'm like, this doesn't sound that fun, but then I went and downloaded it, and I was like, I'll just give it a shot. And I haven't been able put it down. It's fantastic.

Do you want to learn how to say balatro in the French way? Balatro? Is that how you say it? The French way? No. How do you say it? Okay. Try to pronounce it. Otherwise, I won't say it. See, I thought it was balatro. Okay. Balatro. Balatro. Balatro? Am I getting it right? Balato? Say the R.

Trop. Balato? See, okay. Balato. Balato. Balato. It sounds so easy when you do it. It's the best question I've ever asked on this show. Yeah, I'm just going to keep calling it Balatro. And I know that's wrong, but... Balatro. Balatro. Balatro. Balatro. Sorry. This game probably doesn't have anything to do with friends. By the way, I'm just asking this because I wanted to hear you say this. Yeah, that's okay.

Fun fact, when I was in high school, I had to take a Spanish class, and the Spanish teacher actually wanted to fail me because I cannot roll my R's. Like, I physically cannot roll my R's. I can't, too. So, yeah, I've always had – in fact, when I was younger, I had to go into, like, a speech impediment class because I struggled with R's, W's, and L's. but yeah that's uh that that was that but okay my actual pick let's let's let's get this going my actual pick vampire survivors i know i am late to this game whole i i've seen screenshots of it i've

seen other people play it i didn't get it until i actually played it myself holy crap is this game amazing uh you starcraft one no this i don't think this has anything to do with starcraft but this is a row this is another roguelike game where you literally all you're doing is just moving your character around there's no attack button there's no jump button there's no button to pick up items or anything like that all you are doing is controlling your character and it auto attacks all these vampires and bats and demons and goblins and ghouls and all these different things it auto

attacks there's a bunch of different characters there's a bunch of different weapons and upgrades and all these things that you can, like, it totally, like, Balatro, I'm not going to be able to say it. I'm trying, but I'm just not going to be able to do it. But it's like that, where you're doing upgrades that can build, that you can bring over, and you want to constantly just, like, you just keep going and going and going and, like, you're going to die, because, like, any roguelike game, you're going to die, but As you die, you, the player, learn a little bit, but also you can unlock upgrades and things like that

and make the game a little bit easier to beat and a little bit easier to beat, and there's different characters that have different abilities and stuff like that. It is so much fun. They're both on Apple Arcade. If you want to sink a bunch of time into mobile games that are actually really good mobile games, these are it. I believe both of these games were on Steam first and then came to the iPhone later. But honestly, these games make so much sense on the iPhone.

Yeah, and Vampire Survivors is free off Apple Arcade as well. There's ads in it. Oh, nice. But yeah, and I have 43 hours in Vampire Survivors on Steam. So yes, fully endorse both of these. What's your starting weapon, Chris? I actually like the start guy, the guy with the whip, because once you upgrade that, you can keep upgrading your weapons. And the first upgrade, he does a front and back attack. But you can keep upgrading it, and once you upgrade it, you basically unlock this legendary version of it.

And he just whips it all the way around, and it just creates this circle around, like a whole circumference around your character. where you can just like completely keep enemies away from you yep i'm a garlic man myself but oh interesting it's pretty good you can just stand there and bats come and they just die it's great wonderful game though nice nice nice nice all right matt what do you got for us okay i've brought two brand new games to me uh my bonus pick which we'll start with is

zenless zone zero which is an action rpg game which is completely free and i think is from the same company or the same general group that does uh genshin impact which i know is also very looks like that by the artwork oh yeah it definitely looks like that kind of game so this i wanted to mention this one because you can play it for free uh i'm sure there's an app purchases at some point uh that they're gonna try to get you to do but you can play totally for free and this game looks astounding like i know there's been a lot of like excitement over like the resident

evil games and assassin's creed coming to like are playable on iphones and it's impressive those run but they are like bad versions of those games yeah this game is so good looking and runs incredibly smoothly on i mean i guess on an iphone 16 pro but like it is it feels like a console game and not like a wow barely running console game if you know what i mean um it's it's really really cool i don't it's not exactly the game for me um but i wanted to mention it because i did try it as one of my uh attempts at this challenge and it is really cool um if you have a newer iphone if you can just

crank up all the settings and it looks like a console game it's cool the the art the artwork for it is uh as the kids say very thirsty yep it might be that that's that's just all i gotta say on it is very thirsty spicing up the podcast um my real pick is is very weird um by comparison it's gubbins uh which is a word game where you kind of oh how do i describe it your base it's

kind of like scrabble where you have a bunch of letters but some of those letters are connected to each other so you can't just play the s you have to play the s-t-e or whatever and you place on a scrabble style board and eventually you form words and you slide to like select the words and then you get points and you get more points for longer words and this game is really addictive it's really freaking weird the vibe i keep saying it the vibes are very funky um and it's it's really fun they have a daily game daily mode which is of course what i'm leaning towards

and every day I'm playing this board that you try to clear. And it is really fun. I know there's in-app purchases somewhere, but I haven't been prompted for anything and I've just been enjoying it for free. So yeah, Gubbins is pretty rad. The artwork for this is absolutely lovely. Like this is very, it is just, I'm just looking at the screenshots right now. I'll play it later. But this is a very, like, it's just, it's very whimsical.

Like that, that's the word that comes to mind is it's just very whimsical. I'm installing it. Yeah. I'm going to, I'll play this later for sure. But those are my picks. No, my one pick, my one pick. Nice. Nice. Well, we'll have to bring back democracy for this one. Yes. This one feels much better than voting for what's the best accessibility feature. Yeah. That, that came out of my mouth last week. And I'm so glad Neilion caught me because I was like, Yeah, as it was coming out of my mouth, I was like, yeah, no, that's horrible.

Don't do that. That's horrible. Yeah, I think it was a force of habit kind of thing. But yeah, so those are our picks. I like all these. These are all interesting. I think my long fingers will win. Yeah, speaking of thirsty picks, man. Oh, yeah, that's right. I forgot about that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's thirsty right there. No, thank you. All right, we're going to move this along because I'm getting uncomfortable now.

So it's my challenge this week. And I want you to try a new version of multitasking. I, yes. So you are both Mac people. I hate you. You're both Mac people. I'm going to say you guys have way more options for this than I do. I was going to say, do you even have any options? I do. I have exactly two options. But for you Mac people, you can obviously install a bunch of different third-party apps that change up how multitasking works.

You can enable Stage Manager, or if you're using Stage Manager, you can disable Stage Manager. Or if you want, and this is where I'm going to go with it, if you want to work from your iPad for the week and try Stage Manager or Split View out, you can do that. Because I am a big 13-inch iPad Pro person, and I use my iPad pretty much in the keyboard case all the time, I primarily just always work from stage manager. Whether I'm using the keyboard or just in tablet mode or if I plug it into my monitor, I'm pretty much always using stage manager.

So for this week, and I think I'm going to put an asterisk on this unless I'm doing a video, but for this week, I am going to just use split view when I'm working at my computer. I'm editing videos, writing, email, whatever. I'm just going to be using split view. I'm going to go back. I mean, obviously, I had used split view before, but since stage manager, since iPadOS 17, I've pretty much just been all in on stage manager because they fixed a lot of the big issues, but it's still really buggy. Now, I would like to point out, before you remind me how much you hate me for this one, I am giving up something really big here.

I am giving up the ability to use external monitors because you can't use Split View on an iPad on an external monitor. It's only Stage Manager. So for this week, I am giving up using an external monitor. So you guys go whatever route you want. If you want to just work from your iPad or if you want to try something new on your Mac, a new app or Split View or Stage Manager, I mean, go for it. You know why I hate you? Why is that? Because for the past months, I've only done this.

Like, I've only switched up my multitasking habits left and right over and over again. And I've tried so many things. And I was finally settled. And now I'm back into it because I was finally happy. Yeah. And just pull me back in. Well, I will apologize. But I think that will make for a good challenge. I will apologize. I will apologize. Yeah, I think this can be an interesting one. So I'm curious to hear what you guys bring. But yes, for me, the obvious thing is I'm just going to spoil it now because I really only have one option.

I'm going to disable Stage Manager and go on Split View. And I'm kind of curious how, because Stage Manager, well, we'll save it for next week. But yeah, that's the challenge. So to wrap up the show, we have a question. And I've kind of stopped using the app because I agree with Neil and Leon, Our dating questions at the end of the show have not been great, so I've been coming up with my own. So I want to know from you all, what is the one tech device, or one device, I guess we could say, that you wish Apple would make, but they don't?

Oh, I've got one. Okay, go for it. Make a router. Please make a router. I knew somebody was going to pick that. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. I have two remaining. That was one of mine. I also wish they would make a printer. And most importantly, I wish they would make a mechanical keyboard. Oh, but Matt, their keyboards are mechanical if you ask them. I want a keyboard like their old Apple extended keyboards with Touch ID and actual clicks.

And I would love to have it. But then you know they will make their own switches and you won't be able to customize it. Not if they want to sell in the European Union. Got to use Cherry MX compatible switches. Okay. Got to wipe with Android too. I know. We could do a whole hour on that, but we're not going to. I think for me, it's a game controller. I actually think a big part of the reason Apple's gaming setup is being held back is they do not have a first-party controller.

They talked when the Apple TV got app support and stuff like that, they talked about, hey, here's all these great games and you can pair third-party controllers or use that terrible, terrible Siri remote. But honestly, I think a lot of Apple's issues with gaming would be solved. If there is a first-party controller, people could walk into the Apple Store or go to Apple.com and see, oh, hey, there's a controller and it supports all these devices. and then buy it and developers would be a lot more likely to make bigger games that are controller required.

Like literally, that's one of the things about the app store that bugs me is that there should be a flag that developers can check that this game requires a controller. And if you go to buy it, you get a little notification saying, hey, this game requires a controller. You've never paired a controller with this device before. get a controller before buying this. But yeah, I think that would solve a lot of Apple's gaming issues. Yeah, that'd be great. Maybe the controller could run iOS so that you could just connect it to a display.

Oh, that would be interesting. Oh, yeah. That could be really interesting. Interesting. I like that. All right, well, that just about does it for this week. Thank you all so much for listening. Matt, Niléane, you have anything you want to promote? Say goodbye, whatever. Goodbye, whatever. Goodbye. And whatever. And a huge thank you to MacStories. We're a MacStories podcast after all. And goodbye and whatever.

Sure.