OLED Dreams and Studio Display Realities

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and each week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts, but this week we're missing one. As always, I'm joined by Mr. Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? Oh, Chris, I'm doing fantastic. Happy New Year. We took a week off, and I feel like it's been a million years since we've done this. I know, I was talking to Danielle about this, my girlfriend, and it was like we recorded on a Friday when we normally do then took a week off and then now we're recording on a Monday because we're recording a little bit later because scheduling

and it just feels like we haven't chatted in forever even though we talk over iMessage so it's nice to see you it's nice to chat with you we are missing Neelion she just had something come up should we have our audience send her something on like Mastodon or something how about favorite cat gifts yeah that's something she would appreciate cat gifts would be perfect right now yep yeah send her some cat gifts she's she's not here this week she will be back but uh send her your favorite cat gifts on uh macedon or whatever i don't know all the all the places

but um definitely definitely macedon yeah let's let's be honest that's neilion's place But we still have a show for you all And I'm excited about this one I've been I've been really excited to talk about the challenge For this, but that's at the end of the show But you and I have a couple of things To discuss first I'm first up in the document And this is something I've been thinking about a lot Especially the last couple of weeks Is my yearly theme Now, for those that don't know Yearly themes are not resolutions

They're kind of a guiding north star and this is 100% something I am stealing from the cortex podcast this is okay I'm glad you said it it's not I'm not trying to take credit for it at all 100% curbing this from them not not original to us or me at all uh I do not get any credit for this in fact we're gonna put a link in the show notes to their podcast I I highly doubt anyone that's listening to this hasn't heard at least heard of Cortex, but probably listens. I'm going to go ahead and guess the Venn diagram is pretty

close to a circle. Yeah, exactly. So I'm not, I'm not tripping over this one too much, but the general idea, if I could give like a TLDR is New Year's resolutions. A lot of people be like, I'm going to go to the gym four times a week or five times a week. And the week, the first week, you don't go four or five times, you've technically failed your resolution. But with yearly theme, they're more of guiding North Stars. So you would have instead of I want to go to the gym four or five times a week, you would have the year of fitness. And you're basically your goal, your guide

for the year is to be more fit to do things, be more fit. And you know, like, hey, do I really need to order pizza for dinner? Or could I just, you know, make some chicken or something or you know, I got some time to kill. What could I do? Oh, maybe I should go to the gym. It's that kind of thing. You think I did a good job there explaining that, Matt? Yeah, that's pretty much it. Like, it's more of a guide for when you have a chance to make a decision or when you are trying to be mindful of what you're doing, your theme should be what kind of guides your choice.

Like you said, I'm hungry. Oh, it would be nice to get a pizza right now. But if it's the year of eating healthier fitness or whatever, then maybe you do something different. and you try to use that to uh guide yourself so yeah i i like the idea as well um yeah the cortex show is fantastic one of uh one i've been listening to for many years and yeah their yearly theme episodes they get way into it probably more than we will because yeah they go on for hours um but it's very very good it's a very cool idea um and aligns better with what i um feel is practical

because like you said resolutions are are tough and there you just fail them most the time yeah yeah no no i don't think anyone's ever properly completed a resolution like if you say you're going to the gym four or five times a week you didn't most people probably didn't go four or five times a week that yeah that first time like it's yeah yeah and they're like very ambitious that's the other thing that i think yeah trips people up is like going to the gym four times a week well you goes zero now so are you really going to make an enormous life change are you going to like lose 50 pounds are you going to write that your your first novel when you wrote zero words last year

like yeah resolutions like to be like very ambitious and that's cool and if they work amazing but i think that is another reason why uh they kind of fail more often than they succeed as people over reach um but this is more of a direction you want to go yeah and and so for me lately i've been kind of reviewing all the business stuff, my personal life, and just kind of like reflecting back on how 2024 went for me. And for me, my yearly theme for 2024 was the year of growth.

I wanted to focus on a few key aspects of my life, mostly personal and my relationship with my girlfriend and work stuff. And for 2024, I think I did a decent job. There's a few curveballs thrown in there. but you know the personal side of the year of growth my girlfriend and I moved in together I think that's a pretty huge step yeah I that's that's that's definitely a very big one for us so I you know on that side I think things went really well another like again not a goal but like something I wanted to accomplish that this last year was to get a new studio I moved a couple

years ago into a condo and i could not get my filming and studio and office set up to a way place i liked it it was a really weird room uh it was this long long but not very wide room it just it was terrible terrible for my needs so um built a new studio did great there the other thing i i kind of wanted to like really focus on was growing the channel and that didn't actually that didn't really turn out that great uh in 2024 it was kind of a weird year um any anyone you talk to in the industry ad sales were in the toilet last year like the ad business was absolutely

horrible uh so i spent a lot of time uh you know i'll just say i spent a lot of time last year fighting sponsors uh trying to get paid like way more time than i've ever spent in fact last year i had a sponsor uh basically just closed their doors uh before well it wasn't let me back up it wasn't the sponsor a lot of times companies will uh work with these like advertising agencies

to find youtubers and creators and stuff like that to kind of partner with well this middleman company closed their doors after i put out the ad in the video and this was something that took months and months of work i've never put so much work into an ad like hands down the most amount of work they close their doors after the ad and the video was out and they got paid but before i got paid and uh let's just say yeah and let's just say the insolvency company is like yep we're more we're focused on paying back the banks than we are paying you so um that's tough channel wise it's

it was a little rough last year uh yeah like hmm that yeah that is interesting like because you're thinking more about business wise growing the channel like literally because this is your job this is yes you make money i need to make a living um how did you do in terms of like subscribers and views over the year was that similar or was that more positive i i would say it's slightly more positive i i think i'm in this weird spot with youtube where right now when i put out a video

if it's ipad related it does really really well if it's anything else it might do okay most likely it doesn't i'm kind of like the algorithm has figured out i am the ipad guy And this wasn't a very strong iPad year. Yes, we got the new M4 iPad Pros. Those are great. They also launched iPad Airs at the same time. Because they launched at the same time, the iPad Air, it kind of got swept under the rug, forgotten about a little bit, because there really wasn't anything that new, that exciting about it.

Yeah, that was basically a processor bump, right? I guess there was the 13-inch, but it's bigger. I've literally never seen a 13-inch iPad Air out in the wild. My dad had a first-generation iPad Pro, was his iPad Pro, or his iPad, and he was like, I need to update this. He just bought a 13-inch Air because he wanted the larger text size because he's like, I can still see everything, but the text will be bigger. There's one.

So there's exactly one in the wild. Shout out to my dad. Keeping that product afloat. But yeah, I don't see a lot of them either. But yeah, I don't know. Because it works with the new Magic Keyboard too, right? No, it does not. It's the old Magic Keyboard. So that's why. So when I talked about, I made a whole video dedicated to the new Magic Keyboard this year. And when I talked about it, I love the new Magic Keyboard. The new Magic Keyboard is significantly better than the old one in lots of different ways.

I think we've even talked about it on this show here. So I won't rehash it all. But I was just like, once I, and the old Magic Keyboard and the new Magic Keyboard are the same price. So it's like, pay a couple hundred bucks more, get the really nice OLED display of the iPad Pro, you get the M4 chip, you get Thunderbolt, and you know what, get the, because if you're going to get the Magic Keyboard, get the new Magic Keyboard, get the new iPad Pro, because it's significantly better in just about every way.

Like in every complaint people had about the old Magic Keyboard, this new one is a bit better. So yeah, I am a firm believer in the new Magic Keyboard. Yeah, for sure. I would go so far as to say if I had to, if it was technically possible and you forced me to like go back to the old iPad Pro or the old Magic Keyboard, I would keep the new Magic Keyboard and go back to the M2 iPad Pro. That's how much. I see what you, yeah. In the combo, that's the part that actually brings me more value, I think, than the, like, the old screen. It's an awesome product, but, like, the keyboard is incredible.

Yeah, the keyboard, I mean, the keyboard is one of those things. I use it so much. I mean, the old Magic Keyboard had quality issues. I went through three of them. I'm pretty sure I publicly talked about that. But, like, I broke two of them. Just wore them out because of how much I used them. Oh, not from watching WWDC where they don't have any iPad updates for you, and you just slam it on the table. Slam it on the... Yeah, so that's the other side of the iPad story this year, is there wasn't really anything in iPadOS that was specific to the iPad Pro.

There were a couple of things, like SmartScript. I did get to interview a couple Apple executives this year. I went back up to Cupertino after WWDC and got to interview a couple Apple executives. That was really cool. That was really awesome. Yeah, yeah. So we talked about SmartScript and the calculator feature math notes. I was totally blanking on that for a second. But there really wasn't a lot iPadOS related. And that's kind of my bread and butter. Like, I focus heavily on software.

You know, I do do hardware reviews here and there, but I'm not one of those YouTubers that reviews the same piece of hardware six times and just being like, iPad Pro one month later, iPad Pro two months later, iPad Pro three months later and so on and so on. Cause it's just the same thing over and over again. Yeah. Well, this is not to go down a rabbit hole, but this is one of the things that I think I see a lot is people are like, I don't want to see a review of a product you've only had for a week or something like that. And they're like, I want to see like an extended review.

The two things about that. Number one, those extended reviews don't get as much interest. They never get as many views cause people have moved on. It's not in the zeitgeist anymore. And two, I think if you're a reviewer who's been doing it for a long time and have experience and are good at it, you don't need that long to decide whether this is an iPad that's good, bad. Same with phones. Like if you've reviewed 50 phones, you can tell pretty quick how this phone is going to be. You don't need months to, yeah, just figure that out.

So I think it's totally valid to review them right away. I think the later on ones can be interesting sometimes, but yeah, not quite as good. yeah uh getting back to the yearly themes so channel wise year of growth didn't wasn't great um but i feel like i kind of like stuck myself in a corner so one thing i want to do and i i want to i'm going to address this year is i'm going to branch out a little bit more and it's going to take a lot of work because like i was saying the algorithm knows me as the ipad guy and the way the

YouTube algorithm works is you essentially are training it with what you're putting up. So if you're stuck as the iPad guy, but you also want to do iPhone apps or Mac apps, you just have to put a bunch of those videos out there and let it get kind of caught up in the algorithm and it'll kind of relearn and retrain. And it takes a while and you're probably going to have some blunders, but just you got to keep pushing through that. And then it'll kind of kind of start to understand who you are and start serving your stuff up to other people as well interesting yeah uh i'm curious do

you did you have a yearly theme for 2024 i did not okay i do have one for 2025 but i did not for this year um i don't know what like thinking back on the year like what would the theme have been like what did i actually do um i honestly don't even know i think maybe part of it was this isn't a good catchy theme but taking my side projects more seriously might be the theme um like over the course of the year i um put more work into youtube i think i did

some good youtube videos this year um i two years ago i adapted a seasons thing where i just like take the summer off and i do like a old school tv season through the like school year basically um and that's worked really well for me like not getting burned out on like running out of ideas um on what to make so trying to do that and trying to be more mindful of what sorts of videos i make like you said you kind of you have there's certain things that work for your channel for your audience um i should really just make things videos and web browser videos and that would be perfect but that get boring as well so yeah but anyway um worked on that trying to make that like a more

serious thing um actually by the time this episode goes out the uh i might have my llc open so that will be a big one i know nice so we'll see if first tree productions is allowed to exist in the state of illinois we'll find out um but i know so um but in addition to that my blog i uh introduced a membership for that which has been um more successful than i expected it to be made it easily the most profitable that project has ever been in the 15 years I've been doing it. So that was good.

And then starting this podcast, I was doing freelance writing, and I kind of stopped doing that so that I could do this podcast. And while this isn't really a business yet, we've had a couple sponsors, but like it's not a big moneymaker by any means at the moment. I do think it's a good project. I think long term is going to be really good for hopefully all of us. But yeah, I think that's probably my theme is getting a little more serious about these side projects yeah i forgot to mention this podcast of the year growth we started this and and just like you said it's not a big money maker in fact i'm pretty sure i lose money because i pay for riverside so i i think i think i

might be in the hole here for that but uh i i think long term this is something that could be something quite big so that it's not something i'm i'm too worried about right now uh i i guess actually if if you factor in our time we're definitely probably losing money because we've only had a handful of sponsorships and it's not it hasn't been enough to cover the hours a week that we put into uh you know making producing prepping and all that stuff so um but overall i i wouldn't call my last year a failure i i wouldn't call it a rousing success but this year i focused on a theme

that wasn't so much a general like, okay, we want to grow everything. It's more of a sub theme of the year of growth. And I'll explain. Basically, this is going to help like if I do this, it's going to help grow everything else in the future. So my yearly theme this year is the year of consistency. Because this last year, like I said, I moved, had some family stuff happen, had some personal stuff happen that just took a lot of time away from work.

And I've basically most of the year, I was like a month behind on everything. Like I was absolutely a month behind. I was going to take a couple of weeks off between like Christmas and New Year's and now and stuff like that. But instead, I'm using this time to get completely caught up with all my work. And basically, I just want to be consistent this year. So what that means is I want to be consistently uploading. Like if you've noticed, if you look at like my release schedules for videos and stuff this year or in 2024,

you will notice that there will be like a week where I release like two or three videos and then like two or three weeks where I don't do anything. Because I was trying to like batch make videos and stuff like that. And it was dumb. It was stupid. I never should have done that. I don't know why I thought that was a good idea. I don't know why it took that long for me to realize it was a bad idea. That's kind of sad. But I'm much more focused this year on, okay, each week I want to have out one long form video and one short form video.

And the idea is the long form videos can be my typical, like, here's a bunch of apps that I like, or here's how I'm using Obsidian or a task manager, or, hey, here's some shortcuts I built, you know, the typical long form videos I've made for years now. But the short form videos are meant to be something fun like, hey, here's this mechanical keyboard I've been testing or that I just built. Or here's kind of a short one to two minute because YouTube shorts now can go up to three minutes, but don't make up three minutes, two minutes max.

Like here's like a short little walkthrough of this app that's like it's not like a complex task manager or something like that. Maybe it just has like one or two functions or something like that. So I'm much more focused on like just being consistently uploading. And I also want to cover, and I don't know how this works into consistency, but it's just kind of part of the whole growth thing. I want to cover more than just the iPad. Yes, the iPad is my main thing. It's the core of my channel. I'm going to keep covering it. Nobody freak out. I promise that's not going anywhere.

But the problem is, is when you have years like this last year, or especially 2023, when there is literally no iPad hardware, except the USB-C Apple Pencil in 2023, there was no new iPads that year. And iPadOS wasn't that exciting. You kind of get stuck and it's just like, well, what do I do now? So I have that M4 Pro Mac Mini that I talked about. I want to start covering some more Mac apps again. I did that on the channel for a while.

There's some really cool things you can do with Mac apps just because of the Mac ecosystem. Do more stuff with the iPhone. Maybe even the Apple Watch. I don't know. I've been using it a lot more lately. It's really hard to make videos about the Apple Watch, I find. Like, because it's so hard. You can't screen record on it. It's hard to film. Like, it's a lot of, like, talking head stuff. So, yeah. It's ridiculously hard to film. is the hardest device I've ever filmed. And I told the Apple Watch PR people that because they asked me about like, this was a few years ago,

they were talking to me about the Apple Watch and I'm like, I love the product. I'd love to talk more about it. It is the hardest product in my life. It is the hardest product I've ever had to film because you either have to keep it on your wrist or you're constantly unlocking it. And like, it's a whole thing. But yeah, so I want to do more of that. uh i want to focus being better on time for sponsorships and uploads and stuff like that like i said i've kind of been all over the place lately and then um i want to i want to post other

places um not just youtube and i'm not entirely sure what that looks like right now because instagram is kind of really annoying me lately like especially meta like with some of their policies they're gonna do tiktok dances well see that's the other thing is as of right now uh true january 6th tiktok is still on the band train like i think they have like 10 days or something 13 days i think app stores need to stop serving it and we will see yeah so i i'm like i'm not gonna invest in tiktok if they only have 13 days left uh meta like meta did that whole thing a couple days ago

where they put out AI profiles on Instagram. And it's so unbelievably bad. Like, so unbelievable. So I don't know where else I want to post, but I know I don't want my sole focus to be YouTube. I mean, that was a big reason why I wanted to start this show was because I didn't want all my eggs in the YouTube basket. I don't, maybe this means I start a newsletter. Maybe this means I do some other form of, you know, I'm not entirely sure, but I just know I want to expand even more this year.

Last year, like we've talked about out of the podcast, but I want to expand more. I don't want to be reliant heavily on YouTube and video sponsors and stuff like that, because this last year, I'm telling you, like, I mentioned that one that the middleman company went kaplunk before. they even paid me which was one of the highest paying sponsors of course or was supposed to be one of the highest paying sponsorships i've ever had it was the one i put months i put months and months of work into this sponsorship normally i don't do that normally it's like a couple of days of work this was months of work um i i've had some others that have just like completely ignored

contracts and like uh like uh invoice due dates and stuff like that so the the sponsorship ad realm like you i could kind of feel it crumbling and just like it's the floor's about ready to go out from underneath it so i don't want all my eggs in that basket i want to kind of figure out something else figure out kind of how to keep this going because at the end of the day i love what i do i love that i get to talk about computers and nerd out with people and help people with productivity and you know ADHD stuff and all all that kinds of different things that I cover I

love that I get to talk to people about this stuff but the business side of it is what has me worried right now hmm okay so consistency and kind of branching out I think that makes sense I mean and I think it helps you control a little bit more of your own destiny right like one thing I always hear or the advice I got early on was like when you're setting like goals for YouTube specifically don't set your goals necessarily on how many subscribers you get or how many views yeah like you want those to go up but

like at the end of the day you can't really control that like you can make the best thing you can and you can like try to tweak that a little bit but like if people don't watch the video they don't watch the video and you can't force them to so I do like the idea of yeah just being consistent branching out a little bit and then yeah diversifying is always good in business right you don't Apple makes all their money from iPhones they want to diversify so you can get into services maybe yep yeah yeah I'm going to be launching Lolly Plus it's my new media streaming service we're going to have all sorts of

original content and yeah it's going to be great yeah yeah Lolly Plus look forward to wherever you get your streaming services but yeah so that's that's kind of mine year of consistency i'm i'm hoping this kind of guiding star and so far you know we're only on the second week of the year but i feel like i've been really good i i didn't put out anything last week so you know i'm not starting the put something out every week but i got a bunch of stuff caught up i got some stuff submitted for ad approvals and all

that stuff but of course everyone's on vacation so nobody's you know in the office or anything to look at the sponsorship reads and stuff like that that is that is the one really annoying thing about youtube ads is that like everyone wants to see the video before it can go live now before anyone freaks out sponsors do not get any any sort of control or say so they don't they don't get any editorial rights over the main part of the video. What they want is they want to see the sponsorship read part because they want to make sure like you're being consistent. You're not saying that's

something that's not factually accurate or like, you know, if you're the promo code is correct or something like that, like that's the kind of stuff that they want to check for, which makes sense. Like I totally get that, but it just adds extra days into the whole process because you're waiting for somebody to watch the video and be like, oh, yeah, looks good. Okay, cool. But Matt, I am curious. What is your yearly theme? My yearly theme is the year of fitness, which is as cliche as it can be.

It's funny because I use that as the example, and I did not know this. I foreshadowing. I purposefully did not ask Matt what this was before we recorded because I wanted to be surprised. So that is actually really interesting. So tell me about your year of fitness. yeah so it's mostly around um something there's a few different aspects to it um but basically it's just a thing that over the last like few months i've noticed um and it really came to a head recently i updated my life insurance um policy and that came with a in-home like inspection to make sure I'm well um really yes wow um and uh I am however um one part of it had you step on a

scale and I looked down and for the last like 10 years of my life I've seen a number between like a five pound range basically and it was like 10 pounds above it and I was like oh no that's not a number I'm used to seeing and I'm not like super conscious about my weight or anything but it was a change and it was enough of a change that I was like, oh, interesting. I'm trending this direction. And there were a few other kind of things related to fitness that I felt weren't at a place that they were a couple of years ago. Part of that is just getting older. I'll turn 40 this year,

which is a big number and something to process. But so far, I'm doing okay. I definitely won't have a midlife crisis at any point during this podcast, I promise. That's okay. I had my midlife crisis early and bought a sports car so okay it's fine um but yeah so i was just like and it was also the holiday season so i was like you know eating more sweets and stuff and i was taking two weeks off work and was just like getting lunch eating out every day um so anyway a lot of things can uh conflated into uh yeah just me feeling like oh i could make some changes and move the needle so

the things I wanted to, this is related to this year are cardio health, weight, and strength and muscle mass. So these are all things I can easily move the needle on. I don't need to make radical changes to my life. And yeah, so basically, I like to run. It's my favorite way to work out. I like to run outside. I don't like treadmills. I don't like going to the gym. I just like running around my neighborhood it's so low effort it is uh well it's high effort but it is uh easy to do

it's completely free i refuse to pay to run i just will not do it the whole outdoors is right there just do it um as i say that as it's like 10 degrees outside today and absolutely freezing but um yeah i mean i think it's it's 41 degrees here so i totally understand um yeah but like i I want to do better. So according to my workout tracker, I ran 60 times in 2024, which is good. Like that's more than one a week. But the year before that I did 112 runs. So I went down by almost half. I can, I can increase that number. Um, I don't have a specific number in mind,

but just being more consistent, doing it more often. Um, I did find a really cool app for tracking this actually i should call out it's called habit kit and basically you it's an iphone only app which is frustrating um but basically you set things you want to do on a regular basis and then you just mark them off and the cool thing and the thing that got me to check it out is it displays the data like a github commit history so like those like charts people like developers will post with like here's how many times i coded over the last year it gives you basically a chart like that which

I find very satisfying to fill out. So it's, it's super simple. I think it's a subscription. So I'm paying more than I necessarily need to do this, but yeah, I'm tracking my runs with the workout app, but I'm also using that app. And yeah, so like cardio, I'm just trying to run more. And my kind of goal is to get closer to a 30 minute 5k, which I was able to do in my late 20s. And I would like to be able to do again. We'll see how close I can get to it. But yeah, I just think consistency is king here today.

So yeah, just want to run more and get my cardio health better because I used to be able to run quite a long ways without having to take a break. And I can like sometimes still see my house and I'm like, oh boy, it's really hitting me. Yeah. One thing I didn't mention in part of my year of consistency, but I'll throw it in here since you brought it up, is to be more consistent with working out. Like I've talked about on this show, my girlfriend is a part of the Peloton cult, so I inherited some Peloton equipment and the rowing machine.

I hate running. Absolutely hate running. You'll never see me running, but I love the rowing machine. I could spend 20, 30 minutes on it a day. No problem. Love it. So that's something I want to be more consistent about too. So I can see how our themes kind of like intertwine. So yeah, but that's good. I like it. I like the habit tracker app too. There's something about checking off a box saying I did this thing that is very satisfying.

And I don't know about you, but it just hits that part of my brain where it's like, okay, yeah, yeah, okay. now did it okay ready to do it again tomorrow do it and then like you just keep going and it's just checking that box off is satisfying yeah and the visualization the momentum that you can kind of see as you fill things out i've done this on paper for other things before um but yeah it is just very satisfying to just see that like block of look at all this time i did this thing nice also on the on that front um because working out won't really change your weight if you don't change your diet um i'm trying to do some food tracking i don't food track all the time i don't think it's useful

personally to do it all the time um typically i like to do it for like a month or two to get a baseline to like understand like how much i'm taking in um and so for that i'm using food noms which is so good i haven't used in a couple years but they've really improved that app um to the point where it's really really excellent like their food database is extensive um their search is really good it does a good job of like when you search for something it separates out the things you've previously logged, which you are probably eating again, as well as new things. It separates out like generic listings with brand name ones. It's really good. If you use their barcode scanner,

it pulls in most items. If it doesn't, it's like, oh, hey, could you just like scan the nutrition label for us real quick? And like it pulls in all the health data and it adds it to the library that everybody can use. If you want, you can opt out of that if you want. They have a new AI tool. of course they do but you can feed it we we like to find recipes online to make sometimes and you can feed it a website that has a recipe on it and it will read the article find the ingredients find the amounts and make a pretty good estimate as to how the nutrition benefits of it so really really good food noms I'm actually very very impressed with it but that's helping me kind of figure out

how much am I eating? Is it more or less than I probably should? Um, and then once I have a baseline about like how much, um, everything is, I'll probably stop doing it in like February or something. But right now it is good to kind of reset that kind of baseline and kind of understand because, uh, when I was, I started tracking around Christmas and Ooh, buddy, those numbers were high. So everything immediately came into focus. I was like, Oh yeah, that's a, that's too much. First breakfast, second breakfast, nearly daily second breakfast.

Don't do that. You just set up to lose at that point. Yeah. Yeah. My family is, so both Danielle and my dad are big bakers. Like, they love baking. So around Christmas time, it's just there's cookies everywhere. There is, have you ever heard of Christmas crack? No. So it's Chex Mix with a crap ton of butter, brown sugar, and caramel. And it is the most amazing thing ever.

I love it. It's terrible for me. It's amazing. So, like, we just have that stuff laying around. So I totally understand. Just that time of year, it's full of goodies. So I think those are some solid yearly themes there. I really like yours. I think we should check in at the end of the year. We should make a note or something and maybe make this a yearly thing that we just rip off Cortex and just check in with each other kind of thing.

Absolutely. Steal from a good podcast. Yeah. Steal from a great podcast. We're just borrowing. We'll return it, I promise. We're stealing like great artists steal, of course. Yeah. We're stealing like how AI steals. Moving on. Matt. You have something in the document that I'm very excited to talk with you about because I have been doing some research. Tell me what you got. Okay. So I am looking at what I'm talking about right now.

And that is a new computer monitor. My first computer monitor I bought in a number of years. This is, give me a second to get it all out. This is the LG 32-inch UltraGear 4K OLED monitor. And it is fantastic. I love this monitor. This is the monitor I've been looking for for a year, maybe. I've been looking for a new monitor. I haven't been super happy with what I had. And there were a few features I was hoping to get. And this one finally checked all the boxes at a relatively reasonable price, which was great.

So I was thinking I could go over some of the core specs of the monitor to give you an idea for what we're getting with it. And then why I chose this over the studio display, which is, I feel like in our circles, the default display for a lot of people. I know you have a studio display, don't you? I do have a studio display. I love my studio display. There are some issues with it that I think you're going to probably address with this monitor. But there's some stuff about it that I just, I absolutely love.

And no other monitor has been able to give me that. Nice. Yeah. So I think the thing that's important here is that different people have different needs. And so while those things are awesome, my needs had different things. So anyway, so the first thing, the elephant in the room that is going to send a lot of people away is it's a 4K 32-inch screen. i see what you've written in the document yes just just go go ahead and i i'm because i'm curious how you justify it sure so um with where i sit in my desk at my desk which is about 28 inches

from the screen it's a little over two feet that is retina by the definition that steve jobs used when introducing retina screens in the iphone 4 you can bring it up with steve jobs if you think he's wrong um but it is just barely over that so it's pretty close um if i was like 18 inches away it would not technically be retina but retina is just kind of an arbitrary line in the sand um the gist for me is that it looks great it looks less crisp than my 27 inch 4k screen i was coming from obviously um but like only if i really look at it like moment to moment it's totally fine um for me

i suspect this would be harder for people who have gotten used to a 5k monitor and don't want to go back i totally get that but um i've never had a 5k monitor and don't want to get one in the near future so yeah um so retina i always thought retina was defined by like pixels per inch of or it's the resolution of the screen size in pixels per inch so like by like apple's definition a 20 like a 4k monitor can't be bigger than 24 inches and if you do like if you do a 27 inch monitor has to be 5k but uh and like i think so the the vision pro actually is a very good thing to

that introduced a lot of people to the idea of pixels per degree and pixels per degree is the thing with retina your television is super retina your television like pixels per degree of your vision is likely the highest resolution screen in your life like it's 4k it's enormous but if you're sitting on the couch 10 feet away you have absolutely no way to see those pixels you could probably not even see pixels at 1080p right like so if you are holding a phone which is the thing that's closest to your eyes that needs the highest resolution screen to be retina because it's super

close to you but if you're further away then the pixels can be larger um okay that makes sense because there there are plenty of games that i'll play on like my xbox in performance mode which drop to like 1080p or 1440 and then that way i can get 60 frames per second and where i sit relative from my tv on the couch i i don't i don't really notice much of a resolution drop between like yeah like i can jump between i can switch between performance and resolution mode in a lot of games and i can't see the resolution difference the thing i can see is uh frame rate that's the

That's the big difference. Absolutely. So I will fully admit it is much less crisp than a 5K monitor would be, especially the studio display, which is 27 inches and 4K. So more pixels and less screen, tinier pixels. I will concede the point. Studio display is 5K. Yeah, 5K, 5K, 5K 27. So is the tech. So I think for me, because I've used non-retina monitors with my iPads and Macs and stuff in the past. And the thing that always killed me wasn't necessarily like photo or video edit, watching or editing or anything like that.

It was the sharpness of text in a text editor like Obsidian. How's that? So, again, it's going to be less crisp, but I do do integer scaling of everything. So I think what a lot of people get hung up on is they want the UI to be a certain size. And so they're going to upscale a 1440p image to 4K, which is not a one-to-one. You can't do like four pixels equals one logical pixel or whatever. The perfect pixel double that we all like to have.

It doesn't do that. So everything does look grainy. Or not grainy, just like less crisp. But for years, I have outputted my Mac at 1080p up to 4K, which does give you the perfect pixel doubling. So while it is not as crisp as a 1440p upscale to 5K, perfectly doubled, it is still very good, in my opinion. It does mean my UI is larger than yours is on the screen. And that's probably another thing that's going to be weird if you try to use my computer.

But I actually like this because I do a lot of design work. And a lot of the products I work on are used on people on laptops, not desktops. And so it gives me a better sense of like how much will fit on screen by having my UI a little larger. But yeah, I think it's great, but not quite 5K. Okay. Quality. Okay. No, I totally get that. Okay. What else does this monitor do for you? Okay. Now, here's the big two. Next one is refresh rate.

It's a 240 hertz display, variable refresh. So just like ProMotion goes from 120 and can scale down as needed, this is 240 hertz and can scale down as well. It does not work well on macOS. For whatever reason, whenever I choose the variable refresh rate mode in, like, the display settings, I get, like, corruption in the image. I think whenever it tries to change the refresh rate, like, I don't know if it's my cables or whatever, but, like, it doesn't behave that nicely. So I just have it set at 240 hertz all the time.

Maybe wasteful. But on Windows, it works amazingly. especially in games to get even frame pacing no matter what my frame rate is and there's a special button on the bottom of this monitor so right below the chin you can just kind of like tap this little button and it does something crazy that i haven't seen in a monitor before i actually personally will never use myself but is there so i may as well mention it you are using your computer everything is great looking swell you tap this button on the bottom of the screen and the screen goes black for a moment when it comes back it's very blurry but it's refreshing at 480 what

that's that's insane oh so it can it will it'll output video at 1080p and if you thought 4k at 32 inches was blurry 1080p at 32 inches is insane um you would never use your computer like this however the intended use case is for people who play games uh competitive shooters especially where twitch reflexes are ideal um there's people out there who are adamant that our displays won't be

in they won't have enough refresh rate until we're at like a thousand hertz um because it's that's that's wild i know it is wild but like fast motion um still blurs on like these high refresh rate screens we have today like the apple pencil updates like 240 hertz anyway um but i use it 240 hertz on my mac um and it's lovely um most things that's unnecessary like it doesn't really matter but animations are very smooth and i notice it most with the mouse uh the mouse just moving it

around is like super super smooth and is very satisfying i also notice it when typing like it's not a thing you might think about but like just like the delay from me hitting a button on my keyboard and seeing the thing on screen is just quicker and just feels sharper um which is cool but maybe the more impressive thing or the more exciting thing is it's an oled screen and oh buddy it is so nice that would be so nice oh see that's the thing that kills me about the studio displays it's still in a regular lcd display it's an lcd ips whatever yes yeah and and it's 60 hertz

which the bigger I have this theory the bigger the screen the more no wait yeah the bigger the screen the more noticeable it is to me sorry I was I got confused the iPhone not very interesting story I'm using the 16 plus right now so I don't have 120 hertz display can't really tell the difference I can kind of notice it when I scroll fast but can't really see the difference My iPad Pro absolutely can see the difference between a ProMotion and non-ProMotion.

Studio display can absolutely notice that it's 60 hertz. So, yeah, that's, I'm kind of, and then the fact that it's an IPS LCD display and not even mini LED or OLED. So I'm a little, I'm a little jealous over here about the OLED thing. Yeah. So perfect blacks, of course, incredible response time. So there's really no ghosting or anything when you're moving, things are moving quickly. it just looks fantastic it supports hdr and like actual hdr it gets over a thousand nits when watching hdr content and it really it really hits home when you watch like something in hdr on

a screen this big um it looks so good i don't know how else to describe it but just like it's fantastic and this was the big thing for me i was looking i had an ips lcd display um myself before and I really felt like to get an upgrade, OLED had to be part of the equation. And so this was the right price and the right monitor and the right size with the right aesthetic. It has a matte finish. I know some people like glossy for OLED. I probably prefer it as well, but a matte finish has no reflections or anything.

So that's nice. And then the last thing about this that I like are the aesthetics. For a PC monitor or for a PC style monitor or for a monitor not made by Apple. So 99.9% of the monitors, I think it looks really good. I'm actually using it on its built-in stand, partially because my Amazon Basics arm was not going to be able to hold a monitor this large. But it's pretty darn thin. It's all white. I got the white model, and it looks good. The stand is very, very minimal.

It's very, very flat. So even though it's taking up desk space, it doesn't feel like I can just put things on top of it, which I do more often than I'd like because I have a messy desk. And yeah, can rotate, tilt it. You can go full 90 degrees and you don't have to pay an extra $600 for a stand that does that, which is lovely. You can just include that in the normal price. Yep. I definitely paid the extra money and I don't remember how much it is, but I know it was a significant chunk for the tilt and height adjustable studio display

Because the regular studio display that's just tilt adjustable is too low for me. I'm 6'2". I'm a little tall. So I knew I needed the tilt and height adjustable one. And if I didn't get it, I was going to be annoyed. So I definitely got that. But hey, it's not the $1,000 for just the studio display stand. Or not studio, Pro Display XDR stand. That is ridiculous that that is still for sale at that price.

um okay so to close out this uh section there's a couple reasons why i went for this over the studio display and i think you would still prefer the studio display over this monitor so i'm curious what i would agree with an asterisk a future asterisk okay okay so for me um it was the cost uh the studio display with the adjustable monitor and the nanotexture matte finish would have been like 22 or 23 hundred dollars do you have a window behind you that you need the nanotexture i don't maybe i wouldn't need it so maybe i could say like 300 unless you unless you have so nanotexture i'm

firm believer in this if you don't have a window behind you or in like our case where uh so like i have big filming lights so the nanotexture display on the ipad absolutely makes sense for me because I'm filming my iPad. If I wasn't doing that, it wouldn't make sense for me. Unless you're working outside, have a window next to you or have big lights that are glare, you don't need the nanotexture. Okay. So if I don't do nanotexture, I just priced it out. It's a $2,000 monitor.

Oh, God. Which is a lot. That's a lot of money on that. This one is, normal cost is $1,400, but I got it on sale for $1,000. So half the price of the studio display. And CES is going on as we record this. So there's probably going to be a new generation of monitors from LG and everybody. So presumably this will be around that $1,000 mark for a while, which is a ton to spend. But this half of the studio display I would have got. So that was a big factor. I'll put on a good monitor. And keep in mind, obviously you know this, but audience, Matt is a designer.

He does graphic design work. He can't just have like the off-the-shelf 24-inch 1080p monitor. You need to have something that's decent to show your work on. And I play games. Is it more for the games or more for the design? Who can say? Let's say. Tax season's off. You say it's for your work, Matt. You say it's for your work. It's tax season. Mostly the work. Yes. The other things very quickly. OLED, we already talked about that. Refresh rate, we already talked about that. Those are clear benefits to the studio display.

Or sorry, to the LG display. And the last one I didn't even mention yet, but IO. The studio display just has one Thunderbolt input, which is great if you're all in on Apple devices. But I'm not. I have a Windows PC, and it just does not work well with studio displays. The Thunderbolt output is not—it would not work well for my setup. And this has a display port and two HDMIs. And I don't even know if the studio display works well if you're all in on the Apple ecosystem. So my problem right now is I have that Mac Mini.

I also have my iPad. I'm working from both. I'm doing things from both of them. I'm constantly having to unplug from the back of the Mac mini and plug into the iPad. And dear list, I've looked for Thunderbolt KVM switches. They technically exist. It is a flip of a coin. And like, I've read all the reviews. I've watched videos. They don't work consistently. And they are very, very expensive. Like we're talking multiple, multiple hundreds of dollars. And I'm like, I'm not going to spend that kind of money on something that's not going to work consistent.

Like if it was a $20 or $50 or even just a $100 thing, I would roll the dice on it. But we're talking $200, $300, $400. I'm not going to roll the dice. That's a risk. Because I know you're a big PC gamer boy, you know, you're a real gamer. Does this have a built-in KVM switch so that you can jump between your Mac and your gaming PC? So I don't fully understand what a KVM switch is, but I do not believe so.

The closest this has is it will detect which input is currently getting a video signal and automatically switch to it. So when I'm done working for the day, I just like lock my Mac, the screen goes off, and then I hit the power button on my PC, and it just switches to that input. So that's essentially KVM. You can have multiple devices plugged into the one monitor, and it switches between them. I'm sure if you go into the menu of the monitor, you can pick the input as well, which is a built-in KVM.

So for those that don't know what a KVM is, you mostly find these in server rooms and stuff with a crappy 13-inch 4x3 monitor sitting on a makeshift stand with a crappy leftover computer or PC keyboard and mouse. And the keyboard's probably missing a key. This is probably hitting home for a few people. Typically, what you would do is you would take all your physical servers and you would plug it into the KVM switch and there'd be a physical button that you can jump between them. And the input for the monitor, mouse and keyboard would all change to that physical machine.

So that's basically what you have is a KVM switch built into the monitor. I had this with I had the really fancy BenQ 32 inch 4K like their their fancy display monitor. They sent me that years and years ago. In fact, I don't even know where it's at. My brother probably has it. They had this little hockey puck thing that would sit in it, and you could jump between your inputs. And if you plugged your keyboard into the back of it, and if you had a wired mouse, you could plug it in the back of the monitor,

and it would switch the monitor input, the keyboard input, and the mouse input to whichever machine you wanted. So, yeah, a lot of monitors like that have a built-in KVM switch. Gotcha. So yeah, it does automatically switch and it switches quick. One of the things I didn't like my old monitor is it took a while to like turn on. So like I hit the space bar on my like keyboard, my Mac would wake up and it would show the login screen, but it would take so long for the monitor to wake up and like light up that like the Mac would turn off again before that would happen.

So whenever I like went to my desk, I had to just like jam on the space bar key until the monitor turned on like 10 seconds later. This one turns on in like two seconds, which is great. Nice. I like this. So I'm looking for a small monitor for my studio in here when we have people in the house and I can't work at my desk. I want to be able to work in here. I'd like to have an external monitor for that to plug my iPad into. I think 32 inches is a bit big because I would have to store it.

I think the maximum I want is like 24 inch, but I'm not going to buy another studio display. Ideally, what I would love is to find like a 24-inch OLED display, but I don't know if they make those or not. I'll have to do some searching. I don't know about 24. I know 27-inch OLEDs are starting to hit the market. Yeah, it's just a little too big. Because what I'm going to have to do is I'm going to have to take that monitor and put it in the closet when I'm not using it.

And I think 27 might be a bit too big. I don't know. I might take advantage of a Best Buy return policy or an Amazon return policy or something and just try it out. But yeah, I want another monitor for in here. But right now, I'm just because right now when we have people over, like if it's my mother-in-law or my girlfriend's not working that day, because and I'm working, I just my ADHD kicks in if I'm sitting at my desk. People in the house, I want to distract myself.

I need to be able to come in here and close the door and just focus on my work. So right now I'm just working straight off the iPad and the 13-inch display with the Magic Keyboard. And it's fine for the most part, but it does get a little cramped. Gotcha. Nice. So the studio display, I think, still wins. It's a built-in webcam. The LG does not. Oh, it's not a very good webcam. Yeah, it is there, though. So it is at least built in, which is a nice part of the all-in-one. What's the difference?

There are speakers on this that are terrible. That's like a given for any PC monitor. I'm trying to think. Is there anything else special with the studio display? The studio display speakers are pretty good. It also has USB-C ports, three extra USB-C ports on the back, and I think they are the 10 gigabit per second USB-C ports, but they might be the 5 gigabit per second USB-C ports, which is better than the Pro Display XDR because, yes, it does have USB-C ports on the back,

but they are USB 2.0. Ooh. Yes. 2.0? Yeah, 2.0. They are USB 2.0 speeds because of the fact that the Pro Display XDR is 6K. It maxes out the bandwidth for Thunderbolt, so they have no extra bandwidth left over to do any sort of high data transfer. Okay. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. Oof. Yeah, yeah. So I still think the studio, like if you were buying, if you're going to buy an Apple monitor, well, the mini LED of the Pro Display XDR would be nice.

Unless you really, really need that, I would just go studio display. I think it's because the Pro Display XDR doesn't have speakers and it doesn't have a webcam either. And it's $6,000. And it's $1,000 plus $1,000 stand. Yeah. that's so expensive it's so and you know what there was a time i almost bought one too oh my there was there was a time i almost bought because i was so sick of because i i was like in the wilderness for a while using like different pc monitors i used that bin q 32 inch like super high-end design one uh i also bought that lg 5k 2k one which was technically an ultra wide

retina monitor so it was technically a 5k monitor that ran at like 2.5k uh so it was technically retina but like everything was just massive on it because of that uh i i was in the wilderness for a good while and then apple released the studio display and i couldn't order that thing fast enough nice okay yeah all right well i think you have something related to monitors in our challenge Yes. So the challenge this week, or I guess technically this last two weeks, was mine.

And it was to change something about your desk setup. And speaking of studio displays, I just took it off. I took the studio display off my desk. I had no monitor. You know what I had sitting on my desk? The M4 Pro Mac Mini, a keyboard, and trackpad. Because I used my Vision Pro as the monitor. And it worked really well. So this is the virtual display pass-through, and this was actually the first time I used it because since the Vision Pro was out, I didn't really have a Mac.

I mean, I had the Mac that I used to record comfort zone here that's underneath this desk. It's just the M2 Mac Mini, but it's the base M2 Mac Mini. It's 8 gigs of RAM, 256 gigs of storage. Like, it's not enough to use it for anything in my workflow. I never wanted to set it up with like Obsidian or my task manager either. Like I didn't want to deal with any of that stuff. So I never used it for that. So this was the first time I've used the virtual display option with Vision Pro.

And I have to say this thing is amazing. This is the killer feature of Vision Pro, which is kind of sad that it requires a whole separate computer. With Vision OS 2.1 or 2.2, something like that. One of those. Yeah, they added the wide and ultra-wide modes. So before it was just like a standard 16 by 9 screen, but now you can get a wide and an ultra-wide view where it stretches the image out.

I like the wide. The ultra-wide was too wide. Have you tried this, Matt? I have, yeah. I felt like I was turning my head a lot with the ultra-wide. Yeah. So yeah, not a fan of that one, but I do think the wide is, if you do feel cramped on the 16 by nine, if you're like a two monitor person, then yeah, the wide I think is probably a good compromise. Even if you're not a two monitor person, like I, so what I did is I put it in the wide mode, opened up Obsidian,

made Obsidian, you know, the whole screen. And I had multiple documents, you know, like how in Obsidian, you can add a document to the right of your screen. You can basically do like a split view within Obsidian kind of thing. Yeah. I did that. And it was really comfortable to write in. The text was really nice and crisp. The one thing I did do is I changed the resolution from the default to 2520 by 1080. Because it made everything a little bit bigger. The default resolution is a little too small for me.

I typically wear reading glasses and stuff when I sit at a computer. It was a little too small for me. The text was a little too small. I felt like it was a little hard to read. And a couple other things I did, I'll talk about in a second. Like, everything was a bit too small. But when I changed the resolution, it all just clicked for me right away. Yeah. This is just real quick on the resolution thing. So we're talking about pixels per degree, like 4K versus 5K screens in the physical world.

The studio display has about 112 pixels per degree. So keep that in mind. Your studio display is 112 in sharpness. My 32-inch garbage 4K monitor is about 73 pixels per degree. Okay. Less, but around 60 is kind of the cutoff where people generally consider it retina. The Vision Pro, 34 pixels per degree. Interesting, but I have a feeling it's because it's doing the foveated rendering, right?

No, so that's before any foveated rendering. So that's the physical screen. it's 34 pixels per degree of vision at peak crispness. And if you're just curious what 34 is in like physical world, that's a 27 inch 1080p monitor at about two feet from your face. So interesting. This is why this is, I think this is a very interesting thing because I know a lot of people who love using their Macs in the vision pro. Like they really enjoy that. And they're like, Oh, it looks like, so the screen image looks so good.

And like, it does look good, but it is interesting that like in the physical world we have very high demands and in this uh in the headset um like a much lower resolution screen um feels better for whatever reason so yeah just just an interesting thing i wonder if it's because it is closer to your face or well because the physical pixels per degree are like a thousand per inch on the yeah they're so tiny and they're so high resolution but like they're so close to your eye that like yeah and again on top of that

the uh vision pro is oled whereas the studio display is the lcd ips thing so i i like i definitely noticed like oh all the blacks and the colors look a lot better on the vision pro as opposed to what the studio display would look like um but i did have a couple of issues i i think the big thing that I had was an issue with the keyboard and trackpad pass through. So what's supposed to happen is the keyboard and trackpad you have paired with your Vision Pro, the Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad is supposed to pass through and let you control the Mac. And this would

work like half the time. Sometimes it just wouldn't pass through for whatever reason. So what I eventually did is I just gave up using that. And I would use the keyboard that was plugged into the um mac mini and the trackpad that was paired because i would use my mechanical keyboard i i that that was the other thing is i wanted to use my mechanical keyboard i would much prefer to use a mechanical keyboard but for some reason vision os does not support mechanical keyboards uh with the quick type bar and the pass through and all that stuff so um i used the mechanical keyboard that

was plugged in the mac mini and the magic trackpad that was paired to the mac mini and that seemed to work a lot better. The issue is, is if you went 100% on with your the the virtual environments, like I typically like to do because it blocks out distractions, there's no keyboard pass through. So you can't see what you're typing and stuff like that. So what I would do is I would go to about 60%. So I could see like, my keyboard, my trackpad, my Dr. Pepper, but if I would look to see where the Yeah, exactly. The necessities.

But if I was sitting at my desk and I would look and see where my monitor used to be or would normally be, that would just be the environment and the virtual display. And that seemed to work really well as kind of like a compromise. It's still blocked out. Like if there's anyone else home, it's still blocked them out walking past me or something like that. So I wasn't getting distracted. That worked okay for the most part. um the one thing i did notice is when the keyboard and trackpad pass through did work when that did work the trackpad scrolling was really sluggish have you had that issue um i don't not really

sluggish i have noticed a little bit of latency um from like what i when i type to when i see it on the screen but like minimal i would say not like enough to notice that it's not as good as just like looking at normal screen but like not bad i wouldn't say see for me what maybe maybe it's the trackpad or something that maybe i need to unpair i don't know but what i was doing is for the trackpad pass through so the trackpad that was paired to the vision pro and it was passing through to the mac i would scroll aggressively and it would move very little and i'm somebody that i

i turn up trackpad scroll like trackpad scrolling sensitivity and pointer sensitivity i turn that up because I think the default options in macOS are a little too slow for me. So maybe it was just a bug on my end. I don't know. But using the trackpad that was paired with the Mac Mini, that one worked fine. Apple, please, for the love of God, add the ability to support multiple devices for one magic trackpad.

I currently have three magic trackpads sitting on my desk. One for my iPad, one for the Mac, one for the Vision Pro. Yeah. It's ridiculous. I know people like to make a big deal of the charging situation on the Magic Mouse, which is stupid. But the biggest issue for me is not that it's the multi-device usage. It literally will not work with more device at once. That is way more. And before anyone tells me, use the continuity iPad thing where you can move the mouse between the Mac and the iPad,

that only works is if you have both the Mac and the iPad on and next to each other. I don't always have that. So multi-device pairing would be really important. Would be great. But overall, like the performance, I was shocked how good the performance of the pass-through is, considering it's a wi-fi five chip in the vision pro i was editing video in final cut pro and there was no latency at all i was editing video i was chopping it up i edited so i have coming out i have an apple intelligence video and i have a video uh it's a sponsored video but it's uh about

a robot vacuum cleaner i edited both of those in using vision pro and this mac mini and it worked fantastic i could not believe how well this worked um this was the thing that made me give up the ultra wide because it was way too much head turning uh because like like there's things in final cut that are in the top left corner and like your timelines in the bottom right and like it was it was a lot of head turning um so that is what made me go wide uh as far as the monitor view but it was

perfect for that um and like the thought what the thought i had about this too about the mac pass through is the fact that there is not a lot of apps for vision pro right now uh and in fact there's a good chunk of apple's apps that are still just the ipad versions reminders you would think they would have a dedicated reminders app by now for vision pro it's just the ipad app right now running in compatibility mode.

A lot of apps are still running in compatibility mode. And even more apps just aren't even there. Like there are a lot of apps that aren't even there. So this gives you the ability to use all the Mac apps on Vision Pro, which is kind of nice. But it leads me to my big thought. Why is there no iPad pass-through? Why? Why? That's the thing. I would kill for that. Well, not really kill, but you know what I mean.

I'm exaggerating. But I would love an iPad pass through so that I could use my iPad. Like, even if I just had to use the magic keyboard for the iPad, even if I had to use that and that trackpad built into it, I would love that. Let me have my big iPad display. Let me have all my apps there. And it's not like iPads don't support like external displays already. Like it doesn't even need to be just like a floating iPad. It could be, you could have the wide or normal wide and ultra wide screens.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Just make it the external model. Absolutely make it the external model. Well, and the other thing that it supports is the Vision Pro is now an AirPlay receiver for all iOS and iPadOS devices. And I believe technically the Mac too. so you can air play your ipad display to the vision pro and you could sit there with your magic keyboard and trackpad and use it but it lacks like there's major latency like it was fine for writing some text but like the minute i tried to do something in final cut or photoshop or lightroom it fell apart so like it seems like the pieces are there just put it in apple put it in

give me a reason to use my vision pro more vision os3 added to the wish list so the kind of like my my summary of this is works great with the mac love it probably not a great idea to invest 3500 into a monitor for your mac uh but if you're like matt and i and you are a sucker and bought one right away and uh it does give you things to do i thought that was going to be the thing that i spent most of the year covering um nope um zen but but ultimately i mean it's cheaper than the pro display

xdr i guess there you go yeah that's a way to look at it yeah yeah yeah i was i couldn't afford not to matt you know i had to do it the opportunity cost was way too high you had to go in yeah but ultimately, I would say just get a studio display. Yeah, it's cool. It's nice. You can have this wide monitor, but I mean, I'm going to put the, as soon as we're done recording, I'm putting the studio display back on my desk and stuff like that, mostly because I use it with my iPad.

But yeah, I like this. I think it's a great feature between this and the personas. I think those are the two killer things of Vision Pro. The issue is personas require you to know other people that have a Vision Pro, which I would not say is very likely for most people. And on top of that, and then for the Mac virtual display, it requires you to have an M-Series Mac, which is also an expensive purchase. So there's not really a dedicated standalone killer feature for Vision Pro right now, which was kind of my takeaway.

I think that is totally fair. I bet the Vision Pro didn't think it was going to get that feedback during a desk setup challenge. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep. But, I mean, it works out great, but it's just, I mean, I wouldn't want to spend $3,500 just to use this with my Mac. There's better solutions. Well, also, like the headset messes up your hair. Do you want every time you use an external display to have your hair messed up and potentially red rings around your eyes? Yeah. I still haven't updated my persona to the new version because I like every time I do it, it messes up my hair and it makes me look funky.

And I'm just like, I just don't want to do this. And I need to because I had a call and it didn't work right because I was on the I hadn't put on the new one. And yeah. Same situation here. But yeah. Matt, what do you what do you have for us? Well, mine was very simple. I recently got a new desk and the new monitor, I guess. A big desk month for me. And we talked about this weeks ago, months ago maybe at this point, when I talked about my OWC Thunderbolt dock,

which is the heart of my desk setup. Everything plugs into it, and the one Thunderbolt cable just goes into whatever computer I'm using at the moment. And I love, but that did mean that I have this Thunderbolt cable just winding its way across my desk. I've had this for five years. This has been an issue. And so, you know, real desks have wires. You know, it's okay. But it is annoying that it's there. And I was like, okay, this is a great opportunity for me to find a way to move this Thunderbolt dock somewhere on my desk where I don't have this wire just constantly going across half

of it. So I've done that very successfully. I forgot to put pictures in our show notes, but they will be in the show notes when you're listening. um i have used command strips and i have just slapped it to the side of the leg of the desk nice and i've why i've kind of run the cable with these cheap little uh little clip things um i've run it up the side of it and then the thunderbolt cable is just kind of up at the front of the desk right where it plugs into the laptop and it's great it's really nice um i also have a

capture card that I use for recording this video that runs video for my camera into the computer and that had a similar situation where it had a wire just kind of randomly strewn across the desk and I did the exact same thing slapped it right next to the Thunderbolt dock and now that cable kind of goes up as well that one's messier because it has to travel farther for the camera but But yeah, I finally have a relatively clean cable setup. I'm looking at it right now. It's still not perfect.

But yeah, it's certainly better than it was. And that pet peeve of mine is no longer an issue and will save me hundreds of dollars from wanting to buy a Thunderbolt dock that fixes that issue in the future. Which is what I did. Yes. I just sent you a link to something in our iMessage chat. This might help you even further. This is a shelf that mounts underneath your desk. And on the backside, it has basically a spot for cables to come out. So this is the desk I'm sitting at right here.

I have one of those right underneath here with my audio interface. So basically XLR cable and headphone cable go out the back and connect. And then over here, there's also on this left side, my left side, there is a shelf for the M2 Mac Mini as well. So I have a bunch of stuff mounted underneath this. And then on the backside of this desk, you can get cable trays. So all the cables come out from these two shelves, go to the cable trays and kind of get tied up there and then go to their destinations.

Nice. Yeah, this looks good. I want a wider version of this. My dream, because you'll be able to see in the picture, but like I have my work laptop from like my day job and my personal laptop, and they're just stacked on top of each other. And I plug into whichever one. I'd love to get those under my desk as well. So what I've been looking for is some sort of this under desk shelf. That's more of like a pocket, but that could fit the laptops. Gotcha. I wonder if this would. That seems like, do you have to unplug, are you unplugging a cable from one and plugging it into another?

Yep. That might be annoying. I feel like you could get like a dual laptop stand. Like, do you use them in clamshell mode? Yeah. Oh yeah, my screens are almost never open. I feel like you should be able to get something that slots them in, and then you could just unplug it and plug it in. Yeah, you'll see in the photo. They're literally stacked, so the Thunderbolt cables are right next to each other. Oh, okay. Unplug it and plug in. It is the smallest amount of effort. Okay, gotcha, gotcha. The physical effort I can possibly have for it. See, if Thunderbolt KVM switches were actually a thing and reliable, then you could just have a button on your desk.

You push, and it would switch between the two. We don't live in that world. No, we do not. I really want a Thunderbolt KVM switch. That would mean a lot. But no, it's good. I love a good cable management setup. I, one of my first projects of this year, it wasn't really cable management, but it was organizing the tool chest that I have in my closet that are full of cables and gear and all that stuff. And it was nice to be able to do that. But I want to rip all the cables at this desk out because they are kind of messy right now and tie them up a little bit nighter.

Niser. Niser. Niser. Why did I say nighter? Nicer. Nighter. Anyways. All right. Well, that is our challenge. I think it was a solid one. We'll let Neelion decide who won. That one. She'll just pick her. Yep. She somehow won. She's not here. Neelion still somehow won. All right, Matt. What do you have for us? What's our challenge for the next week? So our challenge is to just bring a movie that has tech you wish you could use in real life.

Ooh. I wish you would have said movie or show, but okay. Okay, movie or show. Oh, okay. Or TV show. I didn't mean to change a challenge, but... I mean, unless we're going to bring a TV show with tech you want to use in the future, we may as well do them both at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now, there's one that just straight up jumps to mind that I'm like, yes, I've wanted this for a very long time. But we'll save it for next week. Okay.

Yeah, I think it'll be fun. A little different. Yeah, it is a little different. I like it. I like it. All right. Well, that just about does it for the show. But before we wrap up, I have an in-show question for you. And since it's just you, I figured I would ask something video editing related. I guess Neilion did mention she is getting into video editing, so I probably could have saved this for her. But it's the question I came up with, and I don't have time to come up with something new. So we'll use it. I want to know, what is your favorite video editing app that assists you in your work, in video editing, but not Final Cut Pro or any other nonlinear editor?

Hmm. Oh. Um. Oh, that's a good question. I can go first if you'd like. Yes, please. So mine is Hush. Hush is an app that basically you drop your audio clips in, and it cleans up all the background noises, it EQs everything, and there's literally not a ton of sliders. A lot of these apps, like I know the big one for a lot of podcasters was, what was that app?

It was like stupid expensive. Everyone used it to clean up their audio tracks. What was it called? I forget what it was called. I know what you're talking about. It was ridiculous. I tried using that once. There's so much happening. I've been in video editing. I've been editing video since I was 12. I had no idea what was happening in that app. There was so much. This one, there's literally a slider that you just select how aggressive you want it to be. I put it at about 80%. It cleans up all the background noise. somebody was mowing their lawn while we were recording this.

Hopefully, if you don't hear it, it's because of Hush. Because otherwise, like, I could absolutely see the levels going when I wasn't talking because somebody was mowing their lawn. I use Hush for not just my videos, but obviously this podcast as well. You probably would have noticed a difference. I think it was like somewhere in episode 10 to 12 or something like that. The audio quality just completely shifted of the podcast. It's because I started using Hush. It cleans up air conditioning noises, fan noises, background speaking.

It does a great job. The first time I used this was for that Apple executive interview I did about smart script and math notes. We filmed that at an Apple office that was not set up to record audio. It was incredibly echoey. Used it, cut out all that echo, did a fantastic job. It's like $80 or something like that. It's a one-time purchase. Amazing purchase. Love it. It was fantastic. I would buy it again. If it was a subscription, I would subscribe.

No problem. I use it for everything. Okay. That's a good one. Mine is, I feel like a thing I talk about all the time, MacWhisper. It's great. I knew you were going to pick this one. I was hoping you would pick this one. MacWhisper is a tool that uses a bunch of different AI models to transcribe audio, video, whatever. It's really fantastic. It runs 100% locally on your device once you've downloaded the model.

So it works really great. If you have a fast computer, it'll go very fast. If you have a slow computer, it'll still work. It'll just take a little while longer. It is free to do kind of the basic models. But if you want the really high-quality transcriptions, you have to pay for MacWhisper Pro, which is a one-time 50 euro fee, it looks like. I'm on their website right now. I think it's a subscription. I'm subscribed. Oh, I'm not. Oh, maybe you got in earlier or something. I think I'm on a subscription. Hang on. Let me double check.

You talk about it. I'll double check, but I'm 90% sure I am. But yeah, it's super valuable. So I use this for YouTube videos. I will, as soon as after I export a video, I feed it into Mac whisper while I'm finishing up other things and it spits out a high quality transcript for me that I upload to YouTube so that the video has better transcripts than YouTube's built-in ones. And I use it for this podcast. Every time we record a podcast, once Chris, you finish editing it, you send over the file to me and I do all the audio stuff. And I will transcribe the whole podcast and I have a custom GPT thing in chat GPT that I feed the transcript

into and I have a few questions that it is supposed to help me with so it helps me um find all the products we talked about it looks for any time we say that'll be in the show notes and tells me that's when we said it and what the product is which is very very helpful because sometimes you forget um and it does a few other things but just like it it's very very nice to have a transcript of video and audio stuff um and so yeah it's it's invaluable it's part of all of my video productions at this point and yeah even though i speak about it all the time um it is

the answer so yeah i'm i'm using this for all of my videos now to do uh proper subtitles i was asked for years to do proper subtitles and not just rely on youtube's auto-generated subtitles which are really really bad uh but and there have been services and stuff out for years but they were not affordable because they were people manually going in and transcribing your videos which takes a really long time uh so that's that it was never something that was tenable uh this to me is the best kind of

use of ai where it is assisting you in a task that i don't think i could sit down and type out the transcription for one of my 40 minute videos i really don't think i could do that i wouldn't but this is this does all the time code and everything you like if you're a YouTube person you just go to the subtitles you click you know in our case English you upload the files you select with timing add the SRT file and boom Bob's your uncle it's just there my I am paying 25 bucks a year as a yearly subscription I'm wondering if there is a

lifetime purchase that I missed normally I go for the lifetime purchases um but i have a link yeah and i have well i i signed up not too long late last year so i'll just switch to the lifetime purchase when that this is about ready to go up but for now i'll keep it the way it is but there's also a monthly for nine bucks and a weekly for five bucks and i this is one of those apps that i actually think a weekly option makes sense that if you're just like hey, I'm working on this one-off project and I need subtitles for it.

Five bucks to get really good subtitles is not bad at all. No. Yeah. No, this is one of those things that you told me about this, and I've not looked back. I've done this for every single one of my videos. It works great. I want to go back and do my back catalog of videos. That's just going to take some time to get all those files together and do that properly. But yeah, I absolutely love this app.

Completely co-sign agree with you on this one. When I came up with this question, I was hoping you would say this one. I'm glad to delight. Yeah, the one bummer about this is that it's Mac only. They had a beta for an iOS and iPadOS version of the app, and it just disappeared. I don't know what's going on. which is a bummer. I really hope that comes back because I'm having to, like I'm editing all the videos on my iPad. I'm having to move the file over to a Mac, transcribe it.

And that's just like, it's an extra step. Like it's not great. It's not a good process at all. It's fine because then I take that file and move it to my NAS, but I mean, I could just move it to my NAS for my iPad, but it's not great. I really hope that the iPad version comes back or at least another kind of app like this pops up. Every other app that I've kind of looked for on the iPad that does this is very scammy and not kind of the same quality and style as Mac Whisperer.

Yeah, there are some apps that do the same thing. I mean, the models are available to anyone. Like a lot of these are open source. But yeah, I agree. For whatever reason, the ones that are available on iOS and iPadOS, they don't match Mac Whisper in quality or reliability. 100%. All right. Well, that just about does it for the show. Huge thank you to Mac Stories for having us. We are a Mac Stories podcast. After all, go check out the other shows on the network. There's some great stuff happening, especially because as of right now, John Voorhees and Brenda Bigley are at CES right now.

I'm a little jealous. I was originally planning on going this year, but I had a bail at the last minute. So I'm probably check out next portable computer, or next portable console. I heard NPC and I thought computer for a second with all their stuff. Matt, you have anything you want to promote before we jump off? You should go check out my video I made about the monitor. If you're like, I want to hear that again, but with video, there you go.

And I think I explained the retina thing in more clarity there, less off the cuff. I had an actual script for that one to make sure I said things right. But yeah, same answers every time. Check out my YouTube. Yeah, check out my YouTube. I'm going to have a lot of stuff coming out here in the next few days or so. So be sure to check that out. Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great day.

Bye.