If It's Not Space Black, It's Not Pro

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 I'm actually only joined by one. More on that in a second. But this week we are sponsored by Ecamm Live. As always, I am joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? I'm doing great. I have my drink this week, of course, but it is also 100 degrees here, and I had to turn the AC off for this recording.

So as ever as the episode goes on, I will become less and less myself. Yep. Same here. AC off. 100. It will be 103 today. So, yeah. Oh, and I have a heating pad on because, once again, I hurt my back. So it's extra toasty in my room right now. So this should be a fun episode. It's just that time of year where podcasters complain about the heat because we all have to turn off our AC. Neelion is not with us this week.

She is on a train right now. You know, schmoozing it up with, you know, big time. I actually don't know. I was going to do a whole bit, but honestly, I don't know where I was going with it. So but I know she's on a train right now. So hi, Neelion. Hope you're having fun on the train. Hey, Neelion. She will be back next week. But let's do some tiny topics. I'm curious, first off, have you seen the F1 movie yet? I have not, but I'm going to. Okay. All right.

So I did get to see it at WWDC. They had like a press and like select developer screening. They had like a lottery for developers. It was really cool. We got to see it in the Steve Jobs Theater. Pretty, pretty cool. There's subwoofers in the seats in the Steve Jobs Theater. Let's just say Formula One has never sounded so good. Like it was, it really made me bum that Formula One cars only have V6 engines and not like V10s or V12s or even the glorious V8. Yeah, the wrong generation of, I mean, they still sound pretty good.

They do. But could you imagine like a V10 and that like with the subwoofer in the seat, you would have been like, anyways, that'd have been cool. That's pretty good. It is a good movie. Everyone should go see it. It's kind of a movie. It has a little bit of everyone. Excuse me. It has something for everyone. If you liked racing movies, you're definitely going to like this. If you like summer blockbuster movies, you're going to like this. If you like a little bit of a rom-com, or maybe not rom-com, but just a little bit of romance, you'll like this. There's a little something for everyone in here.

And overall, as a Formula One fan, it's a good movie. There's a couple of moments where I roll my eyes. And I won't go into any spoiler details because I'm kind of curious if Matt picks up on the same spots as I do. But, yeah, it's a good movie. Go see it. Matt, did you try the Vision Pro onboard experience, like the hot lap with Brad Pitt? No, I didn't do that. I did do the immersive trailer that they did, which, if you watch on your iPhone, uses the haptics.

So that was pretty interesting. But I've heard that the hot lap is pretty cool. So I need to do that. The hot lap. So even if you don't have a Vision Pro, from what I've heard, is you can go to the Apple Store and try Vision Pro in their demo. This is part of the demo right now. It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen in Vision Pro. It's up there with the Metallica concert. But it's a little weird because when I sat down, I expected it to be from cockpit view. But it's actually off to the right-hand side because that's where they were able to mount the camera.

So you're kind of looking at it from a weird angle, but you're still really low to the ground. And the track that they do, it's Yas Marina. It's a street circuit. Well, sort of a street circuit. So the track's really narrow, and there's some really high-speed turns, and it's pretty cool. Like, it's, you know, the car that they used in the movie is a modified Formula 2 car, so it probably only goes about two-thirds of the speed of a Formula 1 car, but it's still pretty cool. Is it actually Brad Pitt driving?

Yes. Yeah. You can see in the helmet because it's Yas Marina, so it's at night. So you can see Brad Pitt through the visor of the helmet. Okay. Nice. Well, I'm happy. It sounds like people are generally liking it, and it is Apple's first successful theatrical movie launch. We're recording this on Monday, June 30th, and box office for the weekend is in. It made $144 million worldwide. in this opening weekend, which apparently, I'm reading now, is Brad Pitt's biggest opening ever.

Wow. Did not expect that. Worldwide opening, at least. Oh, okay. Yeah. Interesting. So, great. Good for them. There's a whole bunch of executives this morning going, phew. Yeah, if this didn't work, I don't know if they were going to do any more theatrical watches. Yeah. It's been pretty embarrassing so far. But I will say, it is a good movie overall. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was very late at night. We saw it. When we did see it, it was the Tuesday of WWDC.

That was a 16-hour day for me. But anyways, let's move on from the Formula One talk. We kind of have to have it when Neelian is not here. So, yeah. We did have a feedback question. You're kind of like the person to ask. We had somebody write in and say, Hey team, what app do you use to boot into Windows on your Mac? I'm starting to work from home and will need this. Currently, I have an M4 Mac Mini. And I was curious, are you using anything on any of your Macs to boot into Windows?

Because I know you're a little dual purpose, but you also have some PCs. Yeah, my solution here is to have a separate computer that just runs Windows. I do have a friend who swears by Parallels, though. They are someone who likes to use a Mac, but they have some software that only works on Windows or like the Windows version is far better for their work. They do like accounting and stuff. And yeah, they really like Parallels.

They think it's great. And it doesn't give you like the full boot into Windows, but it lets you kind of run Windows apps like from your dock, like basically is how he described it to me. So it feels pretty integrated into the system. So that's the best I think I can do on this one. Yeah. So full disclosure, I probably about a month or so ago, maybe it's a little bit longer now, probably a little bit longer, actually two months. I did a sponsored video with Parallels. So full disclosure there. But they are not paying me to talk about it right now.

I was shocked how easy it was to set up, like incredibly easy. Like I've done Parallels in the past, like in the Intel Mac days, and there was some fiddliness with it. it's incredibly easy now like you don't have to worry about the uh the um why am i blanking on the file but like mounting windows and all that's like it handles downloading windows and all that stuff uh handles drivers and everything like i was up and running in about probably five or ten minutes it was super easy super easy that like you could get into the nerdy bits but you don't really need to

um and the benefit of doing it this way is it's just a layer on top of mac os so if you want to get into like reminders or Mac specific stuff you can while still also having windows open. So parallels is my recommendation. Full disclosure, they have been a sponsor of mine in the past, but they're not paying me to talk about it. And I actually think it's a really good solution if you're somebody that needs windows on a Mac, especially M series Mac. Yeah, it got more complicated than like what in the bootcamp era. I loved bootcamp. I often had a it was partition going but after the apple silicon transition i haven't really done that i don't think

it's even possible anymore it is not in fact the boot camp app is still in mac os but if you open it up it's like boot camp is no longer supported goodbye uh it's so it's kind of funny um yeah we also had uh some lovely notes in the feedback form i you know i just wanted to say thank you i'm not going to read them because if i read them it'd sound a little egotistical because it'd be me reading them out loud and you know i'm not gonna go down that route i have a big enough ego as it is uh kidding um but no we've had some lovely notes and i just wanted to remind you all

feel free to write in we've had some challenge suggestions in there we've had some people playing along with the challenge we've had some answers to the end of the show question uh so yeah um you know feel free to write in link in the show notes but with that said you ready to get into the you, Matt? Let's do it. All right. I think you're first up in the doc this week. What do you got for us? I'm not bringing a thing so much as a concept, which I'm very excited about. Okay. I like a good concept. So a while ago, I wrote a blog post about the, quote, unsexy elements of pro tools,

Not Pro Tools, the app, just professional tools. And it was like, they should be flexible, reliable, and predictable, I think were the things that I said they should be. Which is just like, these are not exciting features. They're just things that most Pro Tools will have as part of how they work. And so I wanted to talk about what do we think counts as a quote unquote pro piece of software or hardware?

Because I have some ideas, but I'm curious what you think. And I'll start since I'm bringing the topic and don't want to just prompt you immediately to get the conversation going. I think the number one thing I want from a piece of software that I would consider pro is it just works. And that is I flip a switch, it turns on. I hit a button, it works. It never changes necessarily. It just reliably turns on and does what it's supposed to do.

And I never question whether it's going to work or not. I think for me, that's the most important thing. Yeah, I would agree. Like if I am relying on something, so I define professional for me, at least is a tool I use as a part of my business. So this could be anything from Final Cut to numbers, because I use numbers for all my spreadsheet, financial stuff. It does, it needs to just work if I'm getting frustrated because, you know, something is, you know, I don't use beta versions of professional software.

Rarely, like I have the test flight of Final Cut Pro for the iPad, but I'm not using that. Or maybe I don't have it anymore. Apple doesn't update it all the time, just like when there's new stuff coming. But, and like, I don't, I don't rely on that. Like I will install that if I'm making a video about the update and then I'll go right back to the stable track. Like I don't use betas for software I rely on professionally.

But yeah, I would completely agree. It needs to work 100% of the time every single time. And if it doesn't, it's going to get replaced. Yeah. This is like one thing that comes to mind for me is my camera that I'm talking into right now. It's a Canon R6, which is potentially overkill. But what I love about it is I just flip the switch to on. It immediately turns on. There's no software update checks. There's no anything. It just turns on and is immediately available as a good webcam for me.

And there's nothing to configure at all. It just works. it's stupid it has no internet access it just turns on and 100 of the time it works great um i've looked into like smaller cameras i could set up as like my webcam for this and like it there are smaller options and the video would look a little less good and i think that'd be fine but they don't seem they seem more fiddly they seem more software it's like oh go ahead and install this app on your on your computer make sure it's running and there's like limits on like how long you can record in some of them and stuff. So it's a whole thing. So I just like that I,

every single time I need to get on a call, I just reach up here, I flip a switch, and suddenly I have a camera that's perfect. It's aligned how I want it to be. It's great. I don't have to think about it. Yes. Now, so I kind of along the same lines, I use the Canon R5, which is basically the big brother to your camera. When this camera came out, there was an issue if you used it for a long time and high frame rates, which is something I do to record B-roll, it would overheat and it would shut down. You were kind of talking about there's no updates or any of that stuff needed. I will say

it's nice to have the ability to get updates because there wasn't a firmware update that came out for this camera like six months or something after it released, or maybe it was even a year. I overheating at all like i can use this i there are days i use this camera all day long zero overheating i mean i'll take the card out and it's stupid hot but uh it it all just works uh but yes i i would agree like i i shouldn't have to be doing daily updates or something like that to professional tools yeah and you shouldn't be forced to do them you shouldn't be like i think about

zoom or some often a lot of web browsers will be this discord yes like there's a mandatory either a mandatory or at least a modal that you have to like dismiss before you can get to what you want to do i don't like those for pro apps just the app should turn on maybe if there's an update available i can proactively get it or maybe it's auto updated in the background that's fine too but like it shouldn't slow me down when i want to get something done it just goes um i would also say it doesn't change that much this is a big thing i think like muscle memory

keyboard shortcuts uh just behaviors that you have i think too many changes to these apps are actually a detriment like a big redesign i used to love these and consumer apps i do love these but if there was a big update to how uh riverside worked which we used to record the video for this or um with how i don't know oh riverside's a bad example because they constantly update and move things around and it makes me so mad oh interesting uh they the the back end where like i get all the

recordings and stuff they're constantly changing that it drives me nuts it used to be super simple and now I have to go to a bunch of different windows. That's actually a perfect example of you did a bad job. Now I have to go to a bunch of different places to get the different files I need to edit this episode. Okay, peek behind the curtain. Chris is kind of the admin on this account. I just sign in to be a participant every week and the participant experience has been very consistent and I'm always very trustworthy of like what's going on.

I was not aware of the backend changes that were weird. But yeah, that's a great example. Like you had a workflow that was working. You've done this dozens of times. And when they change something, unless it's, it has to be like way better to warrant any sort of change to like behavior. You really don't want to mess with that if you can help it. I will say there are apps. Every app probably has this where there are updates as a professional I want. I think like the biggest example I can think of is Final Cut Pro for the iPad.

Super glad it's here. uh it's been out for a couple years now i was in la for the announcement like it was a big deal i like it was the number one thing on my wish list from apple for a really long time but there's a lot of stuff missing in that app that i have been begging apple for both publicly and behind the scenes for that for a couple years now like the the simplest one that i bring up all the time is just keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting effects from one clip to another in the timeline.

Like that is just a simple thing that I use all day long on Final Cut Pro on the Mac. And it just makes my workflow so much faster because I can move over color grades and stuff like that. Also like user creative presets. Plugins were announced were a thing that was like pre-announced when Final Cut Pro for the iPad came out. All mention of them has kind of been scrubbed off of Final Cut Pro for the ipad's website i don't know if that just feature got canceled or not uh but i do not see a mention of that anymore it was definitely there on day one i have screenshots um but uh yeah that's

gone but i've never been a big plug-in user because i kind of just make my own uh but i don't even have that option for the ipad version so there are pro there are professional apps that i'm just like okay yes i use this to make money but man does it need some updates or it needs some features yeah and it should usually add features like i think one of the things that a lot of apps do is they'll do like a big redesign and they will remove some lesser used features but i think pro apps again unless there's a very very very very very good reason to do it they should not remove features

it should be update should be additive another perfect example going from final cut when final cut pro 10 was originally announced the jump from 7 to 10 and there was a there was a lot of stuff that didn't make it over from 7 to 10 and it took them a long while to add that stuff back in mm-hmm um another thing on updates is pro apps are kind of expensive you often um not all the times all the time, but often they are. And they will, these apps are apps you tend not to buy in the app store. You tend to buy them directly from the developer. Again, not all the time, but a lot of

the time, especially on the Mac. And there are different pricing structures. Maybe it's a one-time fee. Maybe it's a subscription. Maybe it's one of those things where you pay for X number of years of updates, and then you can keep using the app, but you just don't get updates. These are a delicate it dance in my opinion. An example of an app that does not do this great is an app that I really like called Screen Studio on the Mac, which is a screen recording app. And they have a yearly subscription that you pay and you get updates for that year. And if you stop paying, you can keep using the app, but you don't get new updates. The problem is every time I launch the app,

it tells me there's an update available. And then I have to dismiss that. And if I click yes, do the update they're like oh you need to pay for this update and it's a whole mess and so i'm annoyed every single time i launch the app that i'm not using the latest version uh which is minorly annoying so yeah that's not something they're going to be fixing anytime soon because you know that gets people to be like fine i'll just give you money for another year oh yeah for sure like i i would forget i mean it works great so like i wouldn't even think about like they're missing up i'm missing updates or anything if they didn't do that so i get it but it's annoying so um i wanted to talk about some things we consider pro tools

and some of these are not traditional okay i would start with a wired keyboard this is something i strongly believe in uh a wired keyboard is great it never disconnects yes it never disconnects i never have to wonder is it available if i'm like rebooting like sometimes i'm restoring a computer and you don't have bluetooth and it's plugged in so it doesn't matter but yeah just like wired accessories are underrated well and and perfect example like right now i'm jumping between a macbook pro and an ipad pro at my desk and with

a wired keyboard that's plugged into my uh hub my my docking station whatever uh i don't have to worry about okay is this one paired to the macbook is this paired to the ipad oh it's the apple magic keyboard which can't pair to multiple computers no it's just plugged into the hub and it's just always working i mean i talked episodes ago about my frustration with the magic trackpad and i i just gave up and it's just always plugged in now like it's always plugged into the hub so it's constantly jumping between being paired to the macbook pro and the ipad pro whichever one it's just plugged

into so yeah yeah yeah and and it's no batteries to deal with no dead batteries um i do use a logitech wireless mouse uh but this is gonna make i know not everybody agrees but this is one of the reasons why a magic mouse is very frustrating for people is because oh you can just plug it in for five minutes and you'll get i want to work now i don't want to work when whenever so like i like that every other mouse in existence has a front-facing charger and you can just plug it in briefly and it's fine uh so yeah i won't won't go too deep on that but yeah um i mentioned my camera um i've got two mvps of hardware that are very particular uh one is my owc thunderbolt dock

thunderbolt 4 dock i think i use every single port on it so dang uh teasing for later but chris you have an upgrade for me i might need one of these eventually um but this thing is so rock solid i just have a single thunderbolt port plug that goes into my mac and it has like 15 accessories attached to it it's great and they all work wonderfully and super reliably one of those accessories being my roadcaster duo which i put off buying for a while uh but i love this thing

It's so, so nice. It's an audio interface, but a very robust one that has lots of inputs and sliders. And I basically have it set up so that my entire audio system is running through this one device, whether I'm using my Mac to podcast where I can control the inputs and outputs everywhere, whether it's my Windows computer that has a completely different set of rules or my work computer or like it's just a wonderful device and lets me do everything i need to do and then some

there's a whole uh soundboard on here too which i resist pressing every single time we record but there's some do it do it just do it once did that come nice okay good nice i heard i heard i have no idea if it shows up in the recording but i heard it it should um question does that the road uh roadcaster are you able to record to an sd card with that you can yes and does it have phantom power it does yes interesting okay you might have just got me to spend some money yeah it has a very very clean um oh boy i for amp phantom power i'm not totally sure but yeah there's i have no i use

an XLR mic and there's no need for an external like amplifier or anything. The one I actually have is sitting right there behind me because I don't need it anymore. Next to Riffin. Nice. Nice. Yeah. I, okay. Because I have like two different audio interfaces. I use the Scarlett Solo for when I'm podcasting here, but then I have the Zoom H4n, which is a normal Zoom recorder, but it has XLR in. And that's what I use when I'm recording videos because I have a Sennheiser MKE something.

I don't know. It's like a really nice shotgun mic that's just out of frame. And that's what I use when I'm recording videos because I hate the whole trend of like have a big microphone in front of your face when recording a YouTube video or I'll hold it. Or like I'll take this little dinky lavalier mic and I'll hold it right up to my mouth. I'm holding it like I'm sipping tea out of this thing. No, I hate that whole trend. I want a shotgun mic just out of frame. I don't want anyone seeing a mic while that. But anyways, that plugs into the Zoom H4n, which has phantom power because it needs that mic, and records straight to an SD card.

So that's how I do my audio setup. But I would love to condense these two items into one. Yeah, look into the Rodecasters. They might work for you. I don't 100% know. Audio is complicated. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but again, I think the thing that makes this, like, the Rodecaster for me great is that it's very flexible. No one else has my exact configuration for this. Like, it is tailor-made to my needs. I think that's great.

And it does not change. It has software updates every once in a while, but I don't know about them unless I go into the settings page and see them there. But like day to day, it just turns on and just works 100% reliably, which is what I want. Nice. What do you have? So for me, I, you know, obviously the, I, we talked about the camera. That's a big one. Audio stuff. My computer is, is probably the most important professional thing. And right now I'm kind of in this weird valley of, I don't know what my go-to, like literally when I sit down and work, I'm like, which computer do I need to do? Because I've got like, this

MacBook Pro, beefy MacBook Pro that like can handle all these like high end workflows that I'm doing. But then I have the iPad Pro over here with iPadOS 26. And it's just about everything I could hope for. And I'm like, what, where do we go? If Final Cut Pro was more robust on the iPad, like if it was closer to the Mac version, I don't think it would be an issue for me. I think I would go all in on the iPad. But then there's like the Mac and there's applications like Hush, which I use to clean

up the audio for this podcast and my videos. And it helps cut down on the echo and stuff like that. And it's such a great utility. Like it's, it's made my audio sound so much better that I can't give that up but i have not found anything like that for the ipad uh so like there's it's i'm kind of in this weird camp right now where i'm like i don't know but then i have like other things like i have my lights in my studio i have a bunch of like aperture lights i have three aperture lights four four aperture lights around here kind of lighting this whole studio and then i have this just out of frame but i have this whole like top down rig that i use for shooting those shots where

Like if you see me working at my iPad and like it's top down, the iPad's laying down on my desk and I'm like tapping away. That's what this whole top down rig is for. So like I have hardware and stuff that I use every single day that like I would be lost without this stuff. And I love it. It's fantastic. Nice. I should mention some software as well. They're kind of what you would expect. ScreenFlow is my go-to screen recording editing app.

I'll capture with several apps sometimes. But ScreenFlow is a tailor-made non-linear editor for screen recording edits. And it's great at it. And these guys do like one software update a year. It almost never updates. And I'm so thankful. Awesome. Final cuts on the list. VS Code is a great one as well. Visual Studio Code. You can really customize it to your needs. Very extensible, very customizable, which is great. And Audio Hijack.

Audio Hijack, previous sponsor of Comfort Zone, Rogue Meba. But yeah, it's a great app for capturing things built around customization, creating exactly how you want things to record and save and process stuff. It's a great little app. Yeah, I would say Final Cut is big on my list there. Hush is big on my list there. Lightroom and Photoshop are the other two big ones I use every single week, day.

I don't know. I literally was just in it about an hour before we were recording here. So those are probably my big must-haves. But I would also throw in Todoist and Obsidian. I run my life out of Todoist and I do all of my note-taking, research, writing in Obsidian. I know those aren't like big, sexy, creative apps, but they are apps that I rely on to do my business. And then the other one, the last one I kind of already mentioned is Numbers.

I use it to track all the financial stuff, stuff I purchase for the business, income, all that important stuff. there's one update I'd really love numbers to get. And that's the ability to put images in a cell, like link images, link a file or something in there. So like I can put a receipt in there because right now I just have a folder with a bunch of receipts that are dated and named and stuff like that, but they're not connected. Oh, really? That's surprising. I assumed numbers would have that. I don't think it does.

At least, I don't know. Not on the iPad at least, but that was a while ago that I checked. Maybe it has it now. but I've just been doing that workflow for a while. Yeah, yeah. Spreadsheets, relatively undefeated. Yep, can't beat them. But yeah, those are kind of the apps I use. Nice, yeah. So, cool. I know we have a passion for pro stuff, so I wanted to have a quick chat about it. So, lovely. Well, I like making things, and making things helps me pay my bills.

Yes, so keep making things. This episode of Comfort Zone is sponsored by Ecamm Live. Ecamm Live is a powerful live streaming and video production studio built exclusively for macOS. From Ecamm Live, you can stream, record, and present with integrated support for multi-cam setups, screen sharing, and a live camera switcher enabling real-time direction of your show. Compose custom scenes in advance with on-screen titles, split screens, animations, and view comments to enhance your broadcast's visual appeal.

With Ecamm Live you can record in resolutions up to 4K with options for isolated audio and video tracks. This helps in facilitating an easier post-production editing experience and repurposing of content. Utilize Ecamm Live's output option as a virtual camera and microphone in other applications Zoom, or Chrome, this expands your production capabilities. You can add up to 10 remote guests effortlessly with options for instant split screen or custom layouts, enhancing interview segments and collaborative sessions.

Display comments from platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch directly in your broadcast, fostering real-time interaction with your audience. You can also incorporate green screen backdrops, digital pan and zooms, image adjustments, and color LUTs to achieve the perfect shot and maintain brand consistency. But that's not all. You can control camera angles, overlays, sound effects, lighting with Elgato's stream decks, streamlining your production workflow. And you can also broadcast to multiple platforms at once including YouTube and Facebook, and all while managing comments from inside Ecamm Live.

You can also create and manage profiles for different shows or projects that you work on, allowing you to save and export your entire setup for team collaborations or just future use. Experience all of Ecamm Live's features with a risk-free 14-day trial requiring no credit card, and it's a proper 14-day free trial. And you can see how you can elevate your podcasting and live streaming setup from there. Go to ecamm.live and use coupon code MAXSTORIES to get one month free of Ecamm Live for new customers.

broadcast better with Ecamm Live. Our thanks to Ecamm Live for sponsoring MacStories and Comfort Zone. Kind of another professional tool, I left it off my list because we were going to get there, but you kind of mentioned your OWC Thunderbolt hub. What I have for you this week is the CalDigit Thunderbolt 5 Plus hub. Oh, that's a beefy boy. It is a beefy boy. And it's in space black too. Let me pull it back That's how you know it's actually pro. That's the thing we forgot to mention.

Oh, the color. If it's not in space black, it's not professional. Absolutely. Or space gray or whatever. Those consumer level silver computers. Did I ever tell you the original name for my blog? No. 50 Shades of Space Gray. Got talked out of that one. Yeah. So anyways, this right here, this thing's a beast.

It's a little bit, it's actually not that much bigger than Caldigit's Thunderbolt 4 dock. Like height-wise, like if you're laying it down like this, like long edge and stuff like that, it's just a little bit wider, but it's not any taller. So it's actually not that much bigger. It has a massive amount of ports. I think it's like 20-something ports. Let's see here. So it's got three Thunderbolt 5 ports, but one of those which goes to your computer. So really, it's only got two usable Thunderbolt 5 ports.

On the back, it has three USB-C, 10 gigabit per second ports, headphone jack-in, mic-in, display port 2.1 for all you gamers out there. On the back, it has three USB-A ports. It has a 10 gigabit Ethernet port, which is awesome. Wow. I'll get to that in a second. on the front it has on the front these are the ports that you can use to charge so it has one usb a port two usb c ports those are all 10 gigabit per second but they also do 36 watts of charging

on the back side the usb a ports have a battery symbol next to them with a line to it so i haven't tested this but i'm guessing that means you can't charge with them this thing just showed up the other day uh because oh i forgot to say i'm so sorry i forgot to say cal digit sent me this as a review unit i did not buy this this is a review unit disclosure that's important uh also on the front there is headphone jack uh and micro and standard sd card port so there this thing is just an absolute beast when it comes to ports i don't think i could fill this thing up i like that it

has a micro sd slot i have one micro sd to sd adapter that i use for everything and it is such a pain especially when i can't find it because i i have no way to get these micro sd cards anywhere i hate micro sd cards yeah they're so small i can't i can't pick them up like i can't do anything with them like i can't they're too small we don't believe in tech we can't pick up yeah yeah exactly oh yeah they're and i just bought a new one for the switch too and I used one to mod my 3DS, and they're lovely.

I love how tiny they are. But God, I wish I could just plug them into things. So this thing also comes with a really nice braided Thunderbolt 5 cable. Braided? Braided. It's very, very nice. It's very high quality. I would say it's up there with Apple's quality of Thunderbolt cables. Okay. Like Apple's Thunderbolt cables are really pricey, but they're extremely good Thunderbolt cables. Yep. Yeah. I bought it a year or two ago and it was worth every penny. It is very, very good.

Oh, and the thing that I love about this as compared to the OWC Thunderbolt 4 dock, the port that goes from the hub to your computer is on the backside. Oh, that's great. Really important to me. Such, I don't know why OWC put it on the front. I know their new one, I think, is on the back. Yeah, they have a new Thunderbolt 5 one, but it's their smaller one with fewer ports, I think. So it's not like the big one. Yeah, that's a very nice thing. If you'll remember to get around that annoyance in one of our previous challenges, I forget what the challenge even was,

but I have now mounted my OWC dock to the leg of my desk so that it is completely out of the way and I'm running the Thunderbolt cable up. to the desk. That's ridiculous. I mean, I literally replaced that hub because the cable was coming above my keyboard and it kept getting in the way of me typing. It was ridiculous. I have a question about the power brick. Yes. Tell me when to stop on how big it is. Keep going, going, going, going.

Okay, hang on. Because the OWC one is a beast as well. This thing is huge. Oh my God. Okay, iPhone for scale. so iphone 16 pro not pro max pro oh it makes it look like a little baby yeah this thing is i can't even hold it up right it's so big um there we go that thing it's it's much bigger than the 16 pro iphone that's junky this is a beast i luckily have a rack underneath my desk i literally unplugged this so i could show it to you because i knew you were gonna ask

Luckily, I have a rack underneath my desk that this thing can sit on. But if you don't have something like that, it's going to be hard to mount. Yeah. Oh, man. Now, I mentioned this thing has 10 gigabit Ethernet. So I've done something kind of clever with this. My NAS has 10 gigabit Ethernet. So what I did is I took the 10 gigabit Ethernet port from my NAS and plugged it directly into this hub. Then I took one of the USB-C ports and I plugged in a USB-C to Ethernet adapter that's 2.5 gigabits per second, which is what my routers are.

That's what's running through my house. So what I did in macOS is I set up a separate network interface with a separate subnet network. So that way, whatever is plugged into this dock, whether it's my iPad or my MacBook, can talk directly to my NAS over 10 gigabit Ethernet. So I can move files back and forth. But I also have access to regular internet. And what you have to do is you have to go into the interface and make sure your regular internet is set up high, or is the top one in the network interfaces.

And then when you mount your NAS, you have to mount it via the IP address. So I did 192.168.2.11 or 10. Yeah, 11, and then the computer is.10. So that way they can talk back and forth to each other. So you got to do it over IP address, but it works just fine. Time machine works, all that stuff just works. You just have to mount it via IP address and not the device name. But yeah, it works just fine. But this way I get full 10 gigabit ethernet.

And then I still have other ethernet ports on my NAS. Like it has four one gigabit ones that you can actually bind together and make a four gigabit connection. Anyways, I have that set up plugged directly into the router so it can still talk to the internet. But this is specifically so I can have the fastest possible connection between my NAS and my computer. Nice. This is a thing I need to figure out as well. Because, yeah, you're editing video off that, right? That's the... I technically can, but I don't. Okay. Okay. So you're just doing it for quicker file transfers. Yes. So, like, a lot of times, like, if I have reoccurring sponsors or, like, B-roll I want to pull off or something like that, I store it on the NAS.

And then when I want to pull that ad spot or something, I just pull it from the NAS. And that way it's just as quick as possible. It makes things just part of my workflow a little bit faster. And then I can back up footage and stuff like that. And like, especially when it comes to time machine, some of my video projects can be quite large. So it takes a long time to back those up. This way it's going as fast as possible. Got it. Okay. Yeah. This might be a thing I need to look into one day because I've got a Synology and I recently upgraded my wi-fi um to one similar thing to what you have and that's made it so much better

i'm able to transfer files quite reliably stream things over plex without issue um but yeah there are times where i wish it was a tad bit faster i'm spoiled by the the era of ssds and thunderbolt drives and everything yeah so i that that was kind of my thing too is the the nas just plugged into the router kind of like a standard thing you would do it was fine it was fast this is much faster okay so i like this uh performance wise with this hub you get 80 gigabit per second transfer speed which is what thunderbolt 5 is but then there's this boost mode with thunderbolt 5 that

you can get up to 120 gigabit per second transfer speed and the thing i haven't been able to figure out is when does this boost kick in like i'm not entirely sure how that works um i i need to do some more research like i said this thing just showed up the other day so uh i when i make a full video about it i will have the answer to that question interesting okay yeah so i have that thunderbolt 5 external drive that i talked about a few weeks ago uh it doing the black magic speed test it plugged directly into the macbook pro which has thunderbolt 5 because m4 max chip it gets about

5800 megabits per second both read and write and that's with a little bit of rounding because it's not always consistent when it does it rounds to about that uh plugged into the dock it gets about 4 300 megabits per second uh write speeds and the read speed is 5 700 megabits per second so you take a bit of a hit but i what i was doing is i was moving i moved a bunch of final cut projects to that drive and i was kind of editing off that drive plugged into this hub and i didn't really

notice a difference um yeah those are huge huge speeds like that's 4.3 gigabytes gigabits maybe i guess uh or no that's megabytes per second jeez um yeah i mean that's that's gotta be good enough i think at least for my edits like you know i usually don't have more than like you know three clips of 4k footage stacked on top of each other some effects color grade stuff like that so it's it was perfectly fine from my work um so with this with uh with this you can do on on mac os you can do up to two external monitors if your mac supports that like if it's like the m1

mac you can't do do that but like m4 max macbook pro i can have two external monitors i have two studio displays here uh apple sent me a second one when i got the macbook air review unit because that supports two external monitors now. So I have two here plugged in and works just fine. If you have this plugged into a Windows computer, you can get up to three external monitors. Nice. How are you plugging those in? Are those just plugged in via the Thunderbolt or the USB-C or DisplayPort? So for the Studio Display, they're Thunderbolt monitors.

So you have to plug them in via Thunderbolt. So that eats up. Yeah. So I wasn't able to do the external monitor thing. and two monitors at the same time, you kind of have to pick and choose what you're going to do. So if you're going to have a big Thunderbolt 5 external drive, you're not going to be able to have two Thunderbolt monitors. Okay. In theory, because Thunderbolt daisy chains, you could plug in to the studio display, use those ports, but you're losing a lot of bandwidth at that point, right?

Yeah. And the ports on the back of the studio display aren't Thunderbolts. They're regular USB-C. So you couldn't... chain them together what you could do is you could have external drive studio display and then generic third-party branded monitor plugged into the display port i'm a big fan of those there you go so you could do you could do that you said there's a display port on there as well yeah so there is display port 2.1 as well okay lovely right there oh it's not in focus at all um but yeah so there there is um there are ways you can have multiple monitors and still have a thunderbolt port

uh and oh this does work with the ipad like i alluded to but it only works with thunderbolt ipads uh on on their website i haven't tested this i do have some other ipads here but i need to set them up um it basically like if you have a regular usbc ipad so ipad air ipad mini something like that uh base ipad it's not going to work with this ipad pro with thunderbolt will work with this even though the ipad pro is thunderbolt 4 this is backwards compatible with thunderbolt 4 you just don't get all the fancy thunderbolt 5 speeds okay great this is oh this is the plus i'm on their

website now this is yes plus so there are two versions of this there's the regular one and the plus one the regular one has a few less ports and it's 2.5 gigabit per second ethernet not 10 gigabit um and then the the plus one is like you get to 10 gigabit ethernet and some more ports i forget what the exact differences are i also forgot to write down the price do you have that in front of you um they don't list the price what about the plus um they're currently all out of stock so huh well i think they're not shipping until july like i think right they're not shipping

until july but they don't have the price on there this is uh the plus is 499 us i should have looked at that i forgot to look at that uh i got it all excited with doing like tech expert i do this all the time i get all excited about doing experiments and stuff and i forget to look at what the price is 500 bucks for this you can buy them yeah it's 50 bucks more than the TS4 was. Oh, really? The TS4 is listed as $449 currently on sale.

I thought that thing was $300. Maybe it's like technically it's $450, but usually on sale. Interesting. If you need something like this, this is going to serve your purpose. It's really nice to only have to have one cable to plug into either computer. When I sit down and I need to jump between computers or something like that, it's just one cable I move over. And that is really, really nice. It's a very big quality of life upgrade.

Is it $500 nice, though? I would say if you don't have 10 gigabit Ethernet, you probably don't need this one and you can go with the regular one. But man, that's pricey. yeah it's pro though it is pro and we're all about pro this week we're all about pro this week all about pro but yeah I like it a lot it does it's job if you need this this will do the trick but yeah that's pricey hey at least it comes with a really nice

braided thunderbolt those are like what 80 bucks from Apple so that's a value add right there there you go you can't afford not to get it this is the danger we get into when neilians not here oh my gosh yeah uh all right well that just about does it for this unless you have any other questions on it no i think it's great and i love the tone change as soon as you heard the price yeah i should have looked that up before we started recording uh like i said just showed up the other day i totally forgot to do this uh totally forgot to do that for my notes um i think this is i mean this is basically like the best of the best right there's this is what you there's not a better thunderbolt dock you could buy as far as yeah

unless you're it's like there's some crazy like it like it stuff but like i think maybe this isn't the one for everybody but like if you have like a bunch of accessories on your desk um if you can find a thunderbolt dock even like a thunderbolt 3 dock like as long as you're not like needing absolute massive data transfer speeds like thunderbolt 3 is amazing and if you can get one of those docks and just plug all your accessories into them and have one plug that goes into your computer, it's an incredibly nice thing you'll enjoy every day.

So I highly recommend looking into it. Yep, absolutely. Like, I think you hit the nail on the head. Like, this is the best of the best. There are other options out there. Like, the TS4 dock, I have that one. That is going to get mounted at this desk, so when we sit down and record, I don't have to plug in a bunch of different things. I'll just have one cable to plug in when we sit down and record. PS4 dock still works great. That one's perfect if you have studio displays because studio display is Thunderbolt 4. This is nice because this is kind of future-proofing.

I have a feeling Apple's going to have new monitors soon and they will be Thunderbolt 5. And Thunderbolt 5 enables things like 8K which, I mean, I could see that being the new Pro Studio, the Pro Display XDR or whatever that. Yeah, I could see that being that and then like the studio display moving up to like 6k or something like that or maybe a high refresh rate all right well let's get into the challenge uh this week the challenge was mine and it was to figure out a new way to quickly capture a note and i just did a bunch of talking so matt why don't you go first

uh yeah so i i think i actually did basically the same thing i did a couple weeks ago which is I used Spotlight. I'm not a big notes guy. I'm a it's up here guy. And it's often lost. And that's maybe a cost of doing this mostly memorization thing of things. But when I do take notes, I tend to put them in Apple Notes because it's just been around forever.

It just is reliable. It syncs, it's searchable on all my devices. And I just put them in notes. And so my notes is so uninspired. It's so unorganized. There's nothing remarkable in there. But if I need a serial number for a device that I haven't used in six years, it's probably in notes. So I went into Safari using the beta on my Mac, as I am right now, and everything's working great.

And I, because they had the, they showed the Apple Mail thing where you could like, say, like send an email, send an email and you like write out the subject, the recipient and the body all in Spotlight. And I was like, surely that exists for notes, for Apple Notes, right? And it does. there's an action called create notes and I set it up as a keyboard shortcut. So if I just go into spotlight and type nn for new note, I can go ahead and create a note and it's pretty basic.

It's actually very basic, but it does work. So basically when you do that, when you go into create note, it'll do that kind of male interface that we saw at WWDC. And it says create note with contents in folder and so contents and folder are different things that you can tab through uh as far as i can tell you can only make a single line note and that single line note is the header of the note it's the title of the notes the header um yeah so there's no like subject line and then contents it's just contents and uh yeah it's all right um it opens the note afterwards so you can

add more to it if you want but it's a relatively easy way to uh make a new note i don't know yeah i i kind of feel like i would just go into open the notes app and just hit command n but there's a cool way to do it too yeah i like i said in the previous episode i like the idea of being able to just like send an email from spotlight so i don't have to look at my inbox or something like just a quick thing i like you know i do this kind of thing from uh raycast all the time of just like create a note and it adds it to obsidian uh it's weird that it adds it as a

header and like there's no like kind of like with mail where like there would be a title line and then the the content that's what you would you would think yeah and it opens it afterwards like i wouldn't want it to open afterwards i'd want it to just you know create the note and i'll move on because if i wanted to open afterwards i'd just open notes and then create the new note yeah that's that's kind of the thing right like i'm playing with it right now to see if i can change now there's no like settings or anything so it always opens it up um frustratingly that oh it doesn't even open it up maybe this is a beta thing maybe i should file a feedback on this

because the when it opens up the notes app it's not even like focused the cursor in the new note so you can't just start typing the rest you have to like click into it and then you can do it i'll file feedback after this that'd be a nice thing that is pretty bad yeah uh so i kind of alluded to what i was doing uh last week so i've had a shortcut called capture cut for a couple years now and there's been many iterations of this but the short version of this is it's basically a way for me to quickly write a note and then save it into whatever notes app i was using i think it originally started

with Apple Notes. Maybe there's a version for bear at one time, but now it's all about Obsidian. So it saves it into my Obsidian Vault. And it actually also uses the what's on screen action to look if there is a Safari is open. And then like if Safari is open, it'll actually take the URL that's in there and the title of it and make it a markdown link and save it in that note. So it does some stuff already. But I wanted to iterate on this because we are now in full research OS beta season.

I am constantly writing notes about things I find, stuff other people find and publish on the web. And I want a place to just, I need to be able to quickly write those down. And all of these notes were getting saved into a quick note folder in Obsidian. And that folder was getting ridiculously unwieldy too quickly. So I have used the use model, the new use model action to kind of take a look at the note and decide what to do.

So this is really tailored to me. So I'm not really sure if I could share this shortcut. I might make like a generic version after the public beta is out and make a video about this. But right now it's kind of messy because it's about my Obsidian Vault. It uses the Actions for Obsidian app, and it's about specific folders in my Obsidian vault. So it's kind of a mess. So the way this works now is as I write something with Capture Cut, it takes a look at it.

And I have the use model to basically say, like, your job is to look at this note and assign a tag to it if it's related to these things. And I have iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, and VisionOS. Those are the four OSs I care about right now. So I'm not going to do anything. I don't do anything with tvOS. And the Apple Watch is incredibly hard to film. It's the hardest device ever to film. So I have it look at those. And I basically say, like, if the note is related to one of these four things, add this tag.

If it's not, leave a blank. And then here's where it gets really messy. And I need to figure out a way to clean this up. It has a bunch of nested if actions. So it looks to see if there is the iPad tag, move it to the sub. So I have a research folder and then I have sub folders in there for iPadOS, MacOS, iOS, and VisionOS 26, all versions of those. So and then it moves it into those specific folders based on the tag that it was assigned to it. So it starts with like if iOS, if iPadOS, if MacOS, if VisionOS.

And then if it's none of those, it just keeps it in the quick notes folder. Because to me, like, so this way it's research. So my research notes for the summer are getting moved into the proper folder. But if I write something down about like, oh, hey, this is what Danielle wants for her birthday, which is coming up. Happy birthday, Danielle. Like it stays in the quick notes folder and isn't getting moved to a research folder. So this way it's kind of helps separating out the different stuff I have going on over the summer. Nice.

And it's a cool way to use the use model action. I don't have to manually tag things. It just looks at it and it's been spot on. Okay, that's good. Yeah, that is a very clever way to use the new foundation models. I think those are going to be so cool once people get their hands on them. Developers and just regular users in shortcuts. That is tied, or maybe it's my second favorite thing in these updates. it's iPad windowing up here, use model just underneath.

Especially the fact that there is a local option. So you can just like, it doesn't go to any cloud or anything like that. It all just runs on device. Now I will say I am using the cloud version of the use model of the private cloud compute model because I was having some issues with beta one and I haven't had a chance to check to see if it's fixed in beta two, but I was having some issues with beta one and getting the tagging system to work right. But when I switched it to private cloud compute, it worked just fine. So not sure what was going on there.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Beta season is fun. Yeah. And that's what I kind of chalked it up to. Like I'm like, because I was doing some other stuff with it too and I was having some issues with the local model, but private cloud compute was working just fine. So I think I would probably did something or it wasn't working just right. I don't know, but it'll all work out in the end. But for right now, private cloud compute is how I'm doing this. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Lovely. I love the tagging idea. That's a smart way to implement this.

Yep. Because then it just basically it's just nested if actions and it's just like if it has this tag. So it looks for pound sign iPad, pound sign iOS, pound sign Mac OS, you know, like if it and then it moves it to those folders. So, yeah. Very cool. Yeah. Love it. All right. Well, I think we did a pretty good job with this challenge. I think both of us followed the rules. I mean, Neelyon didn't follow the rules. She's not here. No. Absolutely. She loses. Definitely loses. Yeah.

I went super mainstream, and you went very particular to you. Yeah. It's good. Variety. Perfect. Love it. Perfect. All right. So is it your challenge, or is it supposed to be Neelyon's challenge next? I think we're in a weird situation now. I have a challenge I could give. Okay. Let's do it. Nope. I saw my screen flash and then completely like disappeared really quick in the doc. So I'm like, what did he just do?

Thank you, clipboard managers. All right. Based on what we talked about at the very start of this episode, I would like us to integrate F1, Formula 1, into your digital workflow. What? You got to give me an example of this. I'm lost. So as an example. Hmm. What's an example? I have an example. So you could update the design of your iPhone lock screen and home screen to match a Formula One team's color scheme or logo.

But how is that part of my workflow? Well, it's not. It's a tough one. Okay. All right. You could buy a Ferrari camera. Okay. I have some ideas. Neil Leon's going to have a field day with this one because she will be back next week. Yes. Okay. All right. Well, we will. Okay. I have a couple of ideas. Hmm. This is a tough one. I don't know what we're going to come up with.

I often have an idea what I'm going to do for my own challenges when I propose them. I don't have a great idea for this one, but I thought it would be interesting. Usually those are the ones that end up being impossible. Okay. All right. Integrate Formula One into your workflow in some way. Somehow, yeah. Okay. Maybe that just means I get like two second pit stops, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Swap out all of your cables in your Thunderbolt dock in 2.2 seconds.

Okay. Cool. There's options. There's options. All right. There's things we can do. Okay, I like it. Okay, cool. All right, well, that just about brings it to the end of the show. And as always, I have an end of the show question for you. And since it's just you and I and we've been talking about Formula One, I have a real important question for you. Is Max Verstappen going to go to Mercedes next year? Actually, let's go two folds with this. Is he going to leave Red Bull and is he going to go to Mercedes? Because I think those are two different questions.

Those probably are two different questions. Oh, man, this could be an hour-long podcast on its own. I think the smart money is he will not leave Red Bull, nor will he go to Mercedes. Obviously, he's not leaving. But I'm not 100% sure on that. I think it's like a 60-40 split. So I have a real hot take here. There have been rumors that the Mercedes, so 2026, there's new engines coming in.

New engines, new design. It is a complete reboot of a year. We haven't had this in a long time. Even the last design change, the engines were still kind of the same. So this is a massive year. There have been rumors that the Ford project isn't going great, which Ford and Red Bull are partnered with, which I have a real hard time with because I love Ford and I do not like the Red Bull team. so I have no idea. Next year's going to be tough for me. But there's also been rumors that the Mercedes engine is insane.

Adrian Newey went to Aston Martin. Aston Martin uses the Mercedes power engine. Aston Martin has somebody on their team that shares the same last name as their owner, because it's their son. So he's sticking around. But he's had some health issues with his hand because he had the accident. He's not been doing great this year. There's rumors that he just might call retirement. And if they have the option to get Max, running Max and Fernando Alonso in the same team would be wild.

So my theory is Max leaves Red Bull, goes to Aston Martin. It's going to sound like I'm just making this up, but I was actually thinking maybe if it's not Mercedes, who would make the next most sense, and I think it's Aston, because they've got their billionaire owner who's willing to spend money. They have the money, they have the project, and they have the talent, which Red Bull has been bleeding the talent, has been bleeding the money. I don't know what happens to Red Bull if they lose Max. He's the only thing keeping that thing together, it seems.

They've been losing people left and right. Adrian Newey is not the only big person that has left Red Bull. and they're in a world of pain right now. Christian Horner basically said, we've given up on the championships this year. Like, they've thrown in the towel. Which is wild, considering two years ago, they only lost one race in the whole season. Yeah, they won 21 of 22 races or something. That's insane dominance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, that just about does it. Thank you all so much for listening.

Huge thank you to MacStories for having us and a huge thank you to EKM Live for sponsoring this episode. Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great day. Bye-bye.

Bye.