Big Business Boi

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. And as always, we are joined by Matt Bershler. Matt, how are you doing? Hey, Chris, I am on a tight timeline today, so I'm going to be zippy. Oh, okay. Yeah, let's see if we can keep it in the time frame. It's going to be a tight, we're going to keep it tight this week. And we're also joined by Nelian. How are you doing, Nelian? Hello, I'm fine.

We have a couple of tiny topics, I think all of which you put in the document. So I will just hand it over to you and let you take it away. As I usually do, right? So, Matt, have you got something to say to us? I have nothing to be sorry for. Right. Okay, so last week when the episode was out, I noticed something was wrong in the chapters.

If you remember right, last week in the last episode, at the beginning of the show, I talked once again about transit in Switzerland. However, the chapter in the podcast file was in your podcast player, you may have noticed, was named Swedish Transit. it um so yeah geography strikes again shame shame shame but wait a wait a way really you know bolster

the american stereotype when we don't know what's going on outside of the united states europe is just one country right like that's just a country yeah i think so i the worst part of it is i wrote in Swiss in my chapters and I was like no that's wrong and I switched it. I don't know why I did it. It was a mistake and I would apologize to the comfort zone audience. Yeah we don't care.

However there is one way to redeem yourself. I have been mandated by the Swiss folk to ask you three trivia questions about switzerland oh no and if you can answer at least two of them right you will be officially redeemed but and yeah but you can't answer any of them is he like banned from switzerland yes let's say that yes he's banned and probably sweden too like switzerland and sweden kind of

banned from both yeah okay yeah the customs of both countries will be made aware okay so this high stakes uh so question number one matt what are the four official languages of switzerland four switzerland has four official languages oh boy so glad i'm not matt right now okay okay okay so i'm gonna say english

maybe right yes that's one of them no that's not right it's not right oh no um well he's already got the question wrong yeah I've already got it wrong yeah yeah I know I know I will look it up to make sure I'm not saying because I'm just basing it off my own knowledge but I'm sure I'm right I'm sure I'm right Emilion's gonna owe a public apology now don't worry about it

okay yeah yeah I'm right I'm right I'm right it's four what are the four okay so it's German, French Italian and Romance okay I would have only got German that's the only one I would have got wow okay Well, I still have a chance. The fourth one, I was not sure was an official language. That's why I was looking it up. But yes. Okay, second question. Which Swiss city is home to many international organizations, including the UN and the Red Cross?

This one is easy, Matt. That's easy. Because it's a city I've mentioned before on the show. Is it Zurich? it is Geneva Geneva Convention yeah well that's the other city sure yes they only have two cities yes of course okay the third one I'm sure you'll get right even though you are already banned from Switzerland and Sweden

what is the name of the major mountain range that includes the Matterhorn and covers a large part of Switzerland. Well, if it includes the Matterhorn, that's Disneyland. Is it the Alps? Yes. Okay, okay. You are still banned and you are not redeemed, but at least you know about the Alps. Okay. So I guess there is some good in this world. And Zurich is in Switzerland, right? Yes, it is. Okay.

Yep, it's one of the two cities they have. That's it. They only have split down the middle. Yep, two cities. Yeah, let's cite other cities in Switzerland just to make sure there is, of course, Basel, Bern, right? Oh, I know these from jet lag. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. Anyway, so we're done with that. Matt has been properly publicly shamed. And banned from two countries. That's tough. That's a bad podcast episode. Yes, we want to add it also to our Tiny Topics terminal, which is the tiny e-ink device that we've mentioned before,

that Chris has covered before on the show. I was about to buy one. You were about to buy one. But something has been making the rounds, which is that the guy who makes terminal is a fascist. Oh, no. This is why we can't have nice things, people. We can't have nice things. We will add a link in the show notes to a post from Adam on social.lol, who has screenshots of things that the terminal guy has been saying on X, of course.

Or else would you say them? which include, just to name them, transphobia, homophobia. And he seems to be a proud supporter of the current president of the U.S. as well as Elon Musk. So I think that's enough said. Yeah. You know, yeah. Let's just move on. I don't even. Just so we mention it and people have the information. Yep, because we talked about it on the show.

I was very, very excited about it. Yep, not so much. I was going to buy the big one and not anymore. So, yeah. Let's move on to the main show. There's not really a good transition there, but let's just move on. I'm first up in document, and I wanted to talk about the betas, but specifically everything but iPadOS and Liquid Glass. I feel like we've covered those two things. We've talked about, yes, Neelion, I know you want to talk more about sidebars, but I am banning us from talking about Liquid Glass and iPadOS for this segment.

I want to talk about everything else that might be exciting that we've come across in the betas. If you guys have anything, feel free to jump in and add anything. I'm sorry, Neelion is very upset at me right now because she's not able to talk about sidebars. I think we did a really good job of that last week. Hey, you know what? It's a good app that has a decent sidebar, floating sidebar. This hasn't come up in a while. Arc browser. Oh, okay. When you collapse the sidebar, it's actually a floating sidebar.

And it's a good one, I think, because it makes sense that it's floating, because it goes away and it can make it appear easily. That's a good floating sidebar. There you go. I'm done. I'm done. Okay. All right. Okay. That's your sidebar conversation for the whole episode. We're tied on time this week. I want to start off talking about iOS 26. That's probably other than the iPad. This is the beta that I have the most experience with. Actually, you know what? I take that back. I'm going to throw in one thing before we get into iOS 26.

Watch OS 26. A few years ago, they added the double tap pinch gesture thing to kind of select things on the watch. Now they added this flick gesture to dismiss things. Flippin' love it. Pun totally intended. Because it's great. There's so many things on the watch, like notifications come up or iMessage or whatever. And it's like, okay, I want this to go away, but my hands are full. Or like, I'm doing the dishes so I have like soapy hands and I don't want to touch the watch.

So just flicking to dismiss stuff. Great. Awesome feature. I need to look into this. Do you guys know this isn't coming to every Apple Watch that has WatchOS 26? Do you guys know off the top of your head which ones get it? I have the Ultra 2, so I got it. I don't know exactly what models get it, but I have an Ultra 2 as well, and I agree. It's very nice. It's very nice. It consistently always does the same thing. It just dismisses, whereas the pinch gesture sometimes does one thing, sometimes other things. Anyway, but I also have a Series 7, and I actually wore that for a week or two, and it does not work on the Series 7.

So 8 at least, maybe 9. I don't know if it's tied to the pinch gesture. Probably not the 8 one because the 8 was just the 7 with like some small thing added. Remember that? Yeah. It was like the same watch practically. Anyways, we'll put a link in the show notes so you can with like the device deals. But that is my favorite feature of WatchOS 26. I find Workout Buddy to be incredibly creepy, by the way. Hard disagree.

I love Workout Buddy. And I love because sometimes it'll say, like, let's power through with, and then it'll say, like, what you're listening to. And sometimes it is great. It is switched. I've noticed in, like, the more recent betas, it's switched to just telling you the name of the podcast, for example, that you're listening to, not the episode. Because I was listening to an episode that was, like, titled The Downfall of Apple or something. And it was very funny to hear it be like, now let's get powered up with The Downfall of Apple. Yeah. It had confused Overcast, and I was listening to Next Portable Console, and it said, like, let's listen to some music from Next Portable Console or something like that.

It was something along those lines, but I don't know. It's interesting. I love it. It gives you, like, milestones, too. Like, it tells you, like, hey, you just walked 320 miles this year. So, like, it's cool when you hit, like, those milestones that, like, I am sure were available somewhere if I looked for them, but, like, I like that it surfaces them. So that's it for WatchOS. Yeah, there really isn't a lot there. But let's talk about iOS 26. And I want to start with the lock screen. I love the new big clock. The new big clock is great. My only complaint about it is it only works with the default font of the clock.

So you can't use one of the fancy ones. But I absolutely love the big clock on it. Just because, like, my phone can be across the room and I can see what time it is now because of the always on screen. And just like, oh yeah, there's the time. It's fantastic. You can have widgets at the bottom of the lock screen, which is interesting. I'm not a big widgets on the lock screen person. I have the calendar one up top, just to show me what my next appointment is, comfort zone. But I don't have any widgets at the bottom.

I just found I wasn't using them. So yeah, but you can have them at the bottom now. I'm curious, are you guys using the spatial scene wallpaper? where it's kind of this 3D effect, this 3D parallax effect. I've been playing around with that with different wallpapers I have. And it's kind of nice because I use photography, that landscape photography I've taken. So it's like you can almost look around the area. Yeah, I've got one here with a turtle, a sea turtle.

This is one of my own pictures I took on La Réunion Island. I think it looks really nice. It's some of the pictures that you do this with are creepy as a result. Yeah. So I don't like making my wallpaper like pictures of people because I film my devices and stuff. And I'm just like, I don't like I don't, you know, like I love Danielle, but she doesn't want to be on videos and stuff like that. And I don't blame her at all. Like, so I don't make my wallpaper pictures of her or my nieces or anything like that.

but I did try it out and there were a couple that like with that effect, it did kind of be a little creepy. Yeah. The camera app. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I agree. It's horrible. Why is everything hidden? We have these massive devices now. Why is everything hidden in these drawers? I hate it. I am at the point now where I don't use the camera app for taking video stuff. I film everything in the Final Cut Pro camera app, like if I'm going to do video.

There's also more controls in the Final Cut Pro camera app. Maybe one day I'll cover that and talk about the differences because there's actually a lot more there. But I hate the new camera app. Did you, like, the thing that I hate the most in the camera app is the tab bar at the bottom. Yes. It's chaotic. And it's backwards. There's so much stuff in there. Have you noticed the scrolling is backwards compared to everywhere else where there's horizontal scrolling in iOS?

Backwards. It's backwards. Right. So like if you used to swipe to the right, it would go left because it's like you're swiping on a physical wheel. But in the camera app, if you swipe to the right, it goes right. If you swipe to the left, it goes left, which on paper sounds like the way it should. but it's backwards from everywhere else in iOS. It's driving me insane. I hate it so much. It is crazy. And you can still swipe on the main camera.

You can swipe in the middle of the screen to go between modes like you could before, but it's also reversed. So it's like broken all of the muscle. Right. Okay, I didn't know. Yeah, this hasn't gotten nearly as much discussion as it should, but yeah, it's very frustrating. I think the only thing I like about the new camera app is the ability to switch formats easily without having to go into the settings. In the top left, if you tap the settings, you can easily, you don't just cycle through them like you used to. You can just choose your format and resolution or frame rate and stuff.

So that's nice. But yeah, it's definitely way more complicated to get to anything, I feel like. This is going to be the photos app of last year. This is going to be the thing the regular people get it. and be like, where's all these options I used to have? Like, I think the camera app and the photos app are two that, like, you can't break like this. And this, this to me is broken. I do not like, I do not like the camera app. To the point where if this is what ships in iOS 26, I will be using a third-party camera app to take photos

and a third-party camera app to do video. I will not use this. Yeah, I'm curious how it'll be received. I'm not annoyed by it most of the time, but whenever I need to go outside just a standard photo or video, it's more annoying to get to them than they used to be, I feel like. Yep. I went to take a panorama shot the other day, and I was just like, how do I – what is going on here? And I was just so annoyed. The one thing I do like about the new camera app is it will tell you if you need to clean your lenses.

So there's a prompt now. If the lenses are dirty, it will actually prompt you to clean them, which I actually think is a really cool feature. Because I have seen so many iPhone photos of like, okay, you clearly have fingerprints on it or dirt or something, and you just need to wipe it off. Like, just take your t-shirt and just wipe it off. But yeah, that's pretty cool. Reminders got some really cool updates, but not quite enough to pull me back into reminders.

But they have some cool things that I want to talk about. They have this auto list feature that's kind of like grocery list. So when you have a list now, you have an option for it to auto sort. And it'll kind of look at it like it uses the on-device AI stuff that basically it looks at what the list is about. And we'll try and like sort it for you automatically. I've done a few tests with it. It's kind of cool. It's kind of handy. But, you know, I don't think it's going to be, like, something you need for every single one of your lists.

But, like, if you're doing, like, I don't know, here's my car washing project. First, you're going to, you know, get out all your supplies, fill up your bucket, and, you know, it could sort all that for you. Yeah, I'm trying to, I love that feature in the groceries list that they've had for a couple of years. I'm struggling to think of another use case where I'd want the task manager to guess the order that I want to do things. I mean, normally I just enter it in the order that I want to do things. But I don't know.

This could be interesting. Where I do think this feature comes in more handy is with the share sheet. So where this could be kind of cool, where this works, and it's really cool. Say I have a recipe in Safari. Like, I found this recipe online for buttermilk pancakes. We'll just use buttermilk pancakes because I'm hungry right now and I didn't get breakfast before we recorded. You can use the share sheet, send that recipe to Reminders, and it's going to extract all the stuff that you need for these buttermilk pancakes.

And you can add it to your Reminders list now or to your grocery list in Reminders, which is pretty cool. Like, that's a really cool feature. So you're not sitting there having to manually type all the stuff that you need for your grocery list. So if you save like, you know, staples of like, hey, maybe we do chicken fried steak one night. Maybe we do hamburgers. Maybe we do spaghetti. You can send those two reminders and it'll populate your grocery list for you. That is very cool. I know there's a similar feature in like a lot of these recipe apps.

So I assume it works similar to those. Yeah. And I mean, it's not just related to recipes. Say you're doing like a video game walkthrough. You could send the walkthrough to reminders and it could tell you, okay, first you need to go here. Then you need to collect this item. Then you need to defeat this boss. Like, that's just an example off the top of my head. But like things that like articles that have steps, that's what this will be really good for. Like anything that has like steps or like you need.

Yep. Matt's showing it to the camera right now. Yeah. Yeah. It is an Apple Intelligence feature, it looks like. But yeah, it parses the article and turns it into steps for you. Interesting. I had a good idea. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that one's kind of cool. I've been playing around with that. But I don't do enough stuff like that to get me to go back to Reminders. Plus, I could use other tools to kind of do something similar with Todoist right now. And then the last thing in Reminders I wanted to mention is there is a new Control Center interactive widget.

And as far as I can tell, Reminders is the only one that gets this. I don't even think third parties get this option. So I kind of have a feeling this is a test for something that might come in the future. But if you add the new Reminders widget to Control Center and activate it, you get this kind of card pop-up. Are you guys playing with it? Yes. so that it's kind of interesting i'm kind of i don't understand why reminders is the only thing to get it but uh it's kind of cool and i kind of have a feeling this is something that will

you know probably get opened up to uh third parties next year um because from what i understand third parties don't get this so do you mean this thing like it's like kind of a notification banner but interactive yes yes exactly okay yeah so that's new uh because it all used to be based off like shortcuts and stuff but this isn't exactly like shortcuts gets this kind of thing now but like from what i understand third parties can't put this in control center i don't know i need it this is something i have in my notes that i need to dig into more i i've kind of been waiting for

developers to send me test flights developers if you are listening and you have liquid glass ipad apps things that take advantage of any new apis please get in touch with me matt please put my email address in the show notes put email me your test flights i really really want your test flights to feature in my videos this fall you know matt will just put a swedish person's email address i think you mean a switzerland person right swiss person um another thing i wanted to highlight is visual intelligence.

I'm not the biggest user of visual intelligence. The whole, like, point your camera at something and have it explain it to you is not something I need in my life, I guess. I don't know. I've never really come across a use of, like, oh, I don't understand the sign. I don't know. I could see it being handy if you're traveling abroad, a country, different language, you know, like Switzerland. But one feature of visual intelligence in iOS 26 that I have used that I really like is it will automatically detect like events in like screenshots and stuff like that.

And then give you the option to add that to your calendar automatically and fill in the information. So I had an email with was it concert thing? But I don't remember. It was a concert thing, a movie thing. I don't remember. But the normal tappable create event thing wasn't there. I couldn't just tap on it and create an event. So I took a screenshot, used the visual intelligence, and it added it right to my calendar. That was pretty cool. And then the last couple of things I want to talk about for iOS 26 is gaming.

One of the really cool things in iOS and iPadOS 26, actually I think it's across all the platforms that do it now, is easier pairing for controllers. So what this is supposed to do, and I think the only controller that's confirmed for this right now in the beta period, is the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller. But that should be getting a firmware update. And essentially what's going to happen is you're going to be able to plug in a USB-C cable, and it should just automatically pair it.

So no more having to go to the old device to unpair, and then go to the new device in a Bluetooth and repair it. And then when you want to go back, unpair, and then repair. Essentially, now you should just be able to plug in a USB-C cable, kind of like the Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad, and it should automatically pair. Have not tried this. I don't think the firmware update for the DualSense controller is out yet, but this is something that has been confirmed. This is how I'm told it's supposed to work. We'll see come the fall.

Okay, that'd be nice. It is always nice when you can sync something just by plugging it in, and there's no, like, setting screen or menus to go to. Yep, absolutely. And then the last thing I want to mention is the games app. I have very mixed feelings about this. I kind of feel like Apple only went halfway with this. I know a lot of us thought all games were going to be pulled out of the app store and put into their separate store. I firmly believe that should have happened because I don't think this app is going to get used very often.

Now, because everyone is going to still go to the app store to get games, and on iOS, you're just getting quick clicker games. Like, you're not. It's not Xbox. It's not Steam. It's not PlayStation. It's not a Switch. So I don't think a lot of people sit down with iPhone games and, like, I want to play with my friends. So I don't know. I have very mixed feelings on if the games app will take off. I really wish Apple would have pulled all the games out of the app store and put them in the games app. Or, I don't know.

I know why they didn't, but man, is the app store hard to search to find productivity apps. Yeah. Is the games app even on your phone right now? Yes. Okay. I mean, it's not on the home screen. Oh, it's disappeared from my phone on beta 4. Whoa, wait. Oh, hang on. Okay, no, I have not checked since beta 4. I've got it. Oh, okay. Well, my phone's just messed up. Beta troubles. Okay. Yeah, no, I have it.

I have it. All right, well, never mind. No big deal. Yeah. Nope, I got it right here. Yeah, you know, it is what it is. I think they could have taken it further, but they didn't. So that's what it is. I'm curious, do you guys have anything in the betas that you want to highlight? Yes, a couple little things. I like the new call screening feature.

Oh. And messages screening, spam messages. Yes. Yeah. But yeah, the call one, like, it's, I mean, Android fans are going to be like, we've had this for years. But being able to see a transcription of the person as they leave their message is very nice to know. Like, oh, do I actually need to pick this up? Is this a doctor's office or something that I actually did want to take? So I'm happy to have that. And it is working in the beta, so that's cool. I also like the maps features, the visited places.

Oh, yeah. Where it automatically keeps track of the places you go. Already during the summer, it's been convenient for me to be able to go back and be like, what day was I at this place? And being able to just see it, even though I never used navigation to get there. I never did anything that would otherwise indicate I was there. But I was able to use that to know where I was and everything. So that was cool. And guess what? This feature is not coming to the EU. You shouldn't have punished Apple.

That's on you. Yeah. It is available in Switzerland, though. Is it? Available in Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Switzerland, UK, and US. Okay. But yeah, they did say it's definitely not coming to the EU. i don't care i'm okay okay yeah apple map sucks anyway so whatever i don't care not if you're in california it's got sidebar on mac os

um anyways anyways um i'm trying to think if there's anything other anything else significant I mean liquid glass of course but nope not a lot to talk about it not a lot to talk about it I will kick you off the call oh messages there's backgrounds there's polls we haven't done a poll yet we haven't done a poll but we sure did background let me tell you dear listener you want to talk about visibility and legibility issues we put that to the test in the

the comfort zone group chat. Yeah. You can get into a pretty bad state. I don't get why you removed Scott Forstall background. Because I couldn't read it. So, Niveon made Scott Forstall our background. For video viewers, I have a screenshot. I will hold it up to the camera. This was our iMessage group chat for a while. It's beautiful. I couldn't read anything. It's bright green. I couldn't read anything. Talk about legibility issues. Yeah, there's probably more, but those are the things I can think of off the top of my head.

Milian, do you have anything in the betas that's jumping out to you besides sidebars and liquid glass? You're not allowed to talk about it. I am sad in general. Like, there's so little stuff that jumps out to me. I'm not even trying to be negative. I try to search for things in my head. Like the messaging features, like the features where it will filter a non-sender, that's good. That's been great.

Yeah. Otherwise, like, guys, I really wish I could go back. And it's bad because I've never felt this way before. I'm usually excited about the new release. We should probably say we're recording on Monday. beta 5 is probably expected today so who knows what's going to be in that by the time you're listening to this you already know what's in beta 5 probably uh so i mean who knows maybe it's all

fixed i'm gonna i'm gonna choose to be the optimist it could all be fixed in beta 5 there you go but i'm i'm sad that the liquid glass stuff has overpowered everything else and i just i i if there was a simple button in the settings to go back to iOS 18 right now, I would do that right away. I am not happy. Really not happy. Anyway. All right. Well, I think that's some interesting stuff in the betas.

I haven't installed the tvOS beta. I have installed the Vision OS beta, but I haven't really used it. So I need to play with those two still. Yeah, there's a very weird thing in the Vision OS beta, and maybe it's better now. They added that scroll with your eyes thing, which is weird. It's kind of okay, but the fundamental problem with that, and maybe they've ironed it out by now, is that to close a window or to drag a window, you look at the bottom of it to grab the grabber or hit the X.

And so I'm often scrolling, And it's not, it's weird. It's weird. Yeah, I need to play around with this. Yeah. That's interesting. All right, well, that just about does it for my topic. Matt, what do you got for us this week? Oh, I have something that is kind of cool. I have this. It is the Synology CC400W.

But what you need to know is it's a little security camera that plugs in just over USB-C. So any little plug will work. And it is a little security camera that, as you may have guessed, based on it being made by Synology, works with your Synology. Which is interesting. Chris, you're holding back. The reason I was interested in this, just in full disclosure, this was sent to me by Synology, but no payment or anything just for review.

But yes, the main draw of this for me is that it runs 100% locally on my own network. Nothing is ever uploaded to the cloud, and there are no subscriptions with it. So you buy it once, and then there's no subscription to keep it going. which is nice because usually these like security cameras will have like free service but like you get no video history or you get no alerts or anything um and you have to pay like 10 bucks a

month or something for that and this one has actually no premium options at all as far as i can tell ah that's actually kind of cool that's kind of surprising from modern day sonology did you see what they're doing now with their nazas yes that you have to use their hard drives yep and their ssds and they are charging a absolute butt load for those are they the pricing looked reasonable to me maybe uh look at the vme chips they are they're insane and honestly their reasoning behind it i don't i don't buy um and then synology has sent me stuff in the past

my current NAS was sent to me by Synology I love my device but I don't think this is a great move from them yeah I don't know if it's the greatest move of all time but it affects me zero so I am saving my rage for other things I guess fair totally fair but yeah so this camera I think it's pretty okay so it's not a top of the line security camera it is I don't believe it's fully weatherproofed in the way that some of them are, but you can use it outside.

There's a little magnetic thing and then a plate you can screw it into. But it is a 1440p camera, 30fps, which is fine. It has infrared mode, so you can see in the pitch dark, which is nice. Up to 30 meters, I think they said. Like the Predator. Like the Predator. and uh yeah uh it does all the things has a mic and speaker so you can yell at people out there you can hear people out there if you want um and in terms of storage i guess this is where you kind of

uh run into limits is it will do just continuous recording and there's a mobile app you can install on your phone to um like get alerts for when people are there or i think it's just people there aren't like differences for animals like some of them have. Or cars. Or cars. I don't think that one's there either. So it's more limited. I do have a Google Home, or sorry, a Google Nest camera that I use as well.

And that one is better at alerts. But this one works, right? And is, yeah, I think pretty decent. And if you're into this video footage not getting uploaded anywhere, I think it's a good little option. In terms of pricing, it's $150 or $155, I guess, which is not terrible. I looked up kind of what other cameras cost. The battery-powered Google Nest Cam that I have is $180.

The wired version that you never have to recharge is $210. And then a bunch of HomeKit ones are in like the $150 to $200 range. So it seems on the lower end of the prices for these sorts of things. And yeah, I've been using it since April, I think. I actually got an email from them recently that was like, are you going to talk about it? Because I've had it for a while, but I've definitely put it through its paces. And yeah, on the storage front, which I hit on just briefly, it records about 10 gigabytes per day.

And then in the software that actually runs on the Synology, so you kind of have to sign into your Synology through a browser, install a specific app for this, and then it's good to go. But you can configure how much video you want to store. So I have it stored in the last week or something, and so that's just like 70 gigs that are just always in use, and it's just cycling out old recordings as I go. Because I don't need a full history of everything. I just want to know when things happened and be able to pull it up real quick if necessary. But it's been very, very easy, very nice to use.

So, yeah. Nice. That's awesome. This is something I might look into. We have some security cameras around the house, but they are garbage. They are, I don't even want to say the service that Danielle signed up for before we moved in together. And we kind of brought all that stuff over here. And, yeah, they're garbage. So I might look into this because I like the idea of just using my own storage and not having to pay a monthly fee or anything like that.

You recommended one to me, Chris, a while ago. Which one did I recommend? The Eufy what? Yes, that is indoor camera. I do have one of those. That one is separate than the service that we're using. The Eufy camera, I still have. It's in my studio. In fact, I'm looking at it right now. it's on the opposite wall and it's pointing at the door so that way and it only records when nobody's home um okay yes oh yeah so you you recommended this one to me and i've i've got it

set up so that uh it films our living room when we are not home just so we can keep an eye on the cat yes i i basically do mine for kind of like peace of mind in case like we're on vacation and somebody breaks in and steals all my camera gear i can go to the insurance company be like yep here's the footage give me my check um and i can get new stuff like basically that way i can just like just kind of like just check that box off as quickly as possible and it's not a very expensive

camera but we do have outdoor cameras as well um but they are garbage yeah um i do think the google one's quite good if you're looking for a google one um i will say the one thing that made me kind of move my use case for this one um is we have one on our backyard which is kind of fenced in and we let the dog out but there are coyotes in our neighborhood um and it's never been an issue but in theory a coyote could get into the backyard and we don't want to let her dog out like in the middle of the night when there's a coyote back there so um with the google cameras

there's a way to set like alerts for animals and so we know if there's animal that pops up back there I mean it's not supposed to the Synology one does not do that uh so that's a bummer but what I the way I'm using it right now is basically it is on the front of my house and it's kind of it's oriented in a way where I can see my garage door and a little bit of the front yard um but I use it in lieu of a smart garage door which I do not have uh if I'm ever like away from home and I'm like did I close the garage door I can pull up the camera and just see is it open or closed and if it's open well i'm i have to go back but it's at least uh it's peace of mind yep yep yep absolutely

yeah i i love having a smart garage door um but that's a whole other topic that is uh that's a doozy but yeah this is pretty cool um you guys ready to move on to the challenge yes let's do it all right neilion it was your challenge what'd you have us do i had us do uh what did i have to do The prompt was downgrade something about your audio setup.

Yeah, so anything from hardware to software, apps you're using, headphones, whatever. Just downgrade, switch to something that's worse. And the idea behind this challenge was that, hey, maybe it's not that bad. Whatever we downgrade it to. Should I go first? Yes, absolutely. Okay, so I have fancy headphones.

I have a pair that I want to talk about on the show that I haven't yet. The AirPods Max, AirPods Pro second generation, which I use very often, especially in bed. And so I knew that I could downgrade something on that front, and I downgraded it to the regular AirPods. and the second gen one. So it's like the long stems when they got their first chip upgrade, which was the H1 chip, I believe,

from the W1 chip, which was in the original AirPods. So the H1 chip second generation AirPods, regular AirPods. And I used those for a few days to see what it was like. And I hate them. And I wonder, How was I able to wear that every day in the past? So it's a fun story because now they are in possession of my mother. I have given them to my mother who needed earphones.

And these just work well enough for her. So she's got them now. In terms of sound quality, it's all right. I mean, it's considering their age, like they've aged, the battery is not as good as it used to be. It's probably not as clean on the inside. There's no way to tell, but even if I clean them on the outside, there's probably some dirt on the inside.

So it's probably affected by the age of the device, but it's not great. It's very tinny, I find. not a lot of bass and so that's on the sound front there's no surprises there on the comfort front that's where I was quite surprised because like I said I used to wear those all the time and now the stems I feel the stems

on my ears because they're long it's weird yeah because they're longer it's probably because I'm not used to them anymore so I feel them on my ears and I'm kind of sensitive to that stuff. If I feel something and notice something, I will not be able to unnotice it. So yeah, I can feel the stems on my ears all day long when using those AirPods. It's not great. When I use the smaller AirPods Pro, they have a tiny stem.

You don't feel those. And I think it's also because something I didn't realize before, But with the regular AirPods and the longer stem, the stem actually helps in making sure they still sit in your ears. Like they actually help balance on your ear. Whereas the AirPods Pro, most of the balance and the fit is in the tips, in the silicone tips. So the stems on the AirPods Pro, they're just further from your skin, from your face.

Because they jut out a bit. Yeah. Well, you can do... I've seen people wear theropods with the stems really almost at 90 degrees from their face. Yes, 90 degrees. It drives me crazy. I want to just go up to them and just go like, boop. You should. It is your right to do that. Yeah, I've seen that in a while. Maybe it's because I don't like the feeling of the long stems. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. I don't get how people can wear them like that. Yeah, it's wild. Every once in a while, I just see someone that looks... It just looks like there's a white stick going straight through their head, like in one ear or at the other.

And the final thing I wanted to mention is in terms of like features. So obviously no noise cancellation, but that's okay since I use them mostly at home and only at home actually. And the one feature that I missed the most was volume control. Like, there's no volume control on those AirPods on the original design. You can double tap to pause. Yeah, you had to, like, smack your head.

Yeah, you smack your head to pause. Double smack your head to pause. And you can triple to skip forward, I believe. And you can customize those. But there's no volume control. And that's something I do all the time. You're just swiping on the stem on the AirPods Pro to adjust the volume. So that's annoying. But that's it. Yeah, there's not much else to say. So the hope that maybe whatever I downgraded to was going to be better in some way, no, that did not happen with those.

I suppose they've come a long way. They are really good now. And the stem doesn't feel weird. And they have noise cancellation and they have volume control. And huge difference in sound quality. It's incredible actually comparing the two side by side. Huge difference. Yeah, it's not exactly the same, but I went back to use ear pods recently, and I was like, they probably sound the same.

No, they do not sound the same. We had it really bad back then. So that's it for me. All right. Matt, what do you got? Okay, so I took a bit of a gamble on what a downgrade would be, and I switched from using Apple Music for my music streaming to YouTube Music. Oh, yikes. Perfect reaction.

So I mean, I have YouTube Premium, so I have YouTube Music. I just don't use YouTube Music. And I was like, could I save myself a little money? And so I've been trying it. And I would say, I think this is the right word. I would describe it as cromulent. It's fine. It's not remarkable. It's not great. It doesn't do the things.

The one thing that I just really like about Apple Music is I can still upload my own MP3s if I want. and like basically no one else lets you do that uh shopify not shopify spotify oh no it's the switzerland thing all over again um spotify uh i think lets you do that but like only to the mac app and then you have to like manually sync to your it's a weird thing um anyway youtube music as far as i can tell doesn't have that at all um but it's fine all the music's here uh they make it

relatively easy to get to the videos for songs if they exist that's kind of nice um the one thing that kind of hit me that i don't like uh when i'm just listening to music and this is maybe irrational but when you're looking at any list of songs they always show you how many plays that song has um and for whatever reason it really annoys me because it turns it in it turns like music which as a more like just straight like art thing into content.

Here's how many views you got. And I don't, especially when I'm like listening to an album, I don't necessarily want to know like exactly how popular. So it's the global play count, not yours? It's the global play count, not mine. So yeah, just for an example, I pulled up the most recent Vampire Weekend album and I can see that one song has 3.1 million plays. the song after that does two at seven point or 704,000 the next one 1 million like I don't know there's something there's something I just don't like about that like it feels like I'm browsing a

YouTube playlist and like I love YouTube like YouTubers but like I don't know it's a different thing to listening to uh it's like if you were watching a movie and you could see like the YouTube style bar that shows where people spend the most time watching. I found out how the kids these days watch movies. They watch them in 30 second, 60 second clips on TikTok. It's not even the right aspect ratio. It's not even the right order. What is wrong with these kids? We had this conversation before, right?

Oh, did we? I probably had the same reaction. Anytime you can complain about aspect ratio, This is Chris Fader. And I wanted to say, one of the things I think is really nice about the way Apple Music does this, because Apple Music does a version of this. So if you're looking at an album in Apple Music, specifically an album, there's going to be little dots next to like one or two tracks. And that's just an indicator that this song tends to get more listens than the other ones. And for whatever reason, I find that really nice, especially when I'm like looking at new music um because you like pull up an album from someone you don't know or you've never heard of

and you just like i'll tap on the ones with the dot like right away to get an idea for kind of what um what it's all about but like the fact that it's not a number the number is i think it just really yeah bothers me so that's all i think shop or spotify does something similar um but yeah so I think it's fine. It's okay. It's just I don't think I'll be switching anytime soon. What about the app? The app?

Yeah, on the iPhone. I don't think I've used the app on the iPhone much. It is similarly fine. I think it's very, very much the same as the web interface in as much as I've used it, but just kind of crammed down. I think it's sad because remember Google Music that was amazing it let you it would let you upload your own library and it had a streaming offering which was really nice and it was like a proper music app and then they discontinued it

in favor of YouTube music and I think it's so inferior because it's just the randomness and the noise of YouTube blended it to your music listening experience. And like you said, it's overwhelming. Nice. So for me, I downgraded by switching to earpods. I put the wireless headphones away for a week. The timing of this challenge was perfect because I had literally the morning we recorded just ordered these.

Now, these are the USB-C version, not the 3.5. So I got these to use with my Switch 2 because I was sitting, like, I would play in bed while Danielle's reading, and I don't want the speakers happening. But I always, I didn't want to, like, always have to get, like, wireless headphones and pair them and stuff like that. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier with the pairing of controllers. I just wanted something easy that I could plug in. I got the USB-C one because the Switch 2 has two USB-C ports, one up top, one on bottom.

So for the challenge, though, I just put the AirPods Pro away and have been using these, and they suck. The audio quality is terrible. They're great for just quickly plugging in and playing something. Like, you know, podcasts they were fine for, you know, video games that I've been playing and stuff, they were fine. you don't get great high quality with them but they're fine for 20 bucks if you need a solution for like playing video games you don't care about having the best audio quality they're fine for

podcasts they're fine for music they're not fine not not by any any standards now um but yeah it was nice you know volume controls right there on the on the oh there's um there's volume controls right here on the cable so that's kind of nice um i didn't really use them for any calls or anything but i just you know yeah so this is what i downgraded to if you need something that's cheap easy and pairs really well sure they go with this did you use them with your phone at all yes yeah i use them to listen podcast and some music okay did you get hooked on any like drawer pulls or

doorknobs as you walked around? No, actually, I don't think so. Did this ever happen to you when you... Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no, absolutely. Especially like in iPod days, yeah. Absolutely that did. Something positive to say about the AirPods. A few years ago, like during the pandemic, I launched a podcast with friends, and some of my friends are poor, like poorer than me, could not afford a mic.

And I was like, hey, do you have earpods? Because the microphone in the earpods is pretty decent. Like, it's all right to listen to. So that's a good thing about them. Yeah, it can get cleaned up and sound pretty decent. So yeah, no, they're good. All right. Well, this is just a call out. This is for Becca. What's her name? what's her last name? Yes. She used to be at the Verge. She's gone solo.

She would always review the earbuds for the Verge. And every single time she did a microphone test, she would compare it to ear pods. And ear pods were so much better than every wireless option. And still are. And still are. Every time I listen to myself on AirPods, I'm like, good God, that's bad. You can always tell when somebody has AirPods on a call. Yeah. Yeah. So, AirPods, that is one thing they're still undefeated at. You know what sounds worse than AirPods?

The Sony headphones. Oh, yes. Sure. In WH-whatever, they sound horrible worse than AirPods. Yeah. True. All right. Well, we need to get moving because Matt is a big business boy. So, it is my challenge for next week. Let me bring it up. So we did a challenge a couple weeks ago that I really, really enjoyed despite not winning it. But I'm a little more bougie when it comes to this.

So I want you guys to compete to sell Chris on a new physical accessory, but it must be under $100. I thought you were going to say it must be over $100. No. I thought about that for a second, but then I was like, wait a second. I know these two. And if I'm going to have to buy this thing, now let's keep it under $100. Okay. But you have to find an accessory, something that I would like. Tailor it towards me. Just like what we did for Neelion, but tailor it towards me.

Okay. I'm happy about this. I want to be on this side of this challenge. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. All right. Well, I'm excited to see what you guys come up with. So $100 US? $100 US. Yeah, let's keep it simple. For me and Matt. Sorry, Neelion. There's conversion tools out there. You'll be fine. Swiss dollars. Swiss francs, yeah. Let's not go there. All right. Well, that just about does it for the show.

As we wrap up, normally I have an end of the show question, but I've been struggling coming up with new questions. So I want to put a call out to our listeners. We have a link in the show notes. to a feedback form. If you have something you want to know about the three of us, please put an end of the show question idea in there. Also feel free to play along with the challenge or feedback or any of that stuff. But really, call out. I need end of the show questions. It's literally the hardest thing every week when I sit down to fill out the show notes to come up with one of these things. So if there's something you want to know about the three of us, write in.

Okay. I have a quick question if we want to do a very fast one. Okay. If you could buy any camera, what brand would you buy from? Money's no object. So you could buy Sony, a Canon, a Leica, Fujifilm. I think I would stick with Canon still because my initial reaction is red, but red footage does not work on the iPad. So I think I would stick with Canon still. Okay. And what about you? I would get the one that looks really nice, the Fuji whatever.

Oh, the X something, something, something. Yeah, I would get that. Nice. I don't know much about cameras. That's fine. Yeah. I would get a Leica. I wouldn't have to throw out my original camera, so I still have that for like video, but I want a Leica for photography. Oh, okay. Are we just talking about stills? Yeah, you just get like a camera. Oh, yeah. If it's just stills, then I'm getting me a Leica. Yeah. Or no, I take it back. Hasselblad. Hasselblad. I'm getting a Hasselblad. Money, no object. I'm getting a Hasselblad. Okay, fine. All right. Well, anyway. What about a Pixel 9 whatever?

No. Nope. Nope. I'm giving me a Hasselblad. Okay. All right. Well, thank you all so much for listening. Big thank you to MacStories. We are a MacStories podcast after all. Be sure to go check out all the other writings and podcasts over there. There's a lot of great stuff happening this summer. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Thank you.