It's Five O'Clock Somewhere

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. As always, I'm joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you? I'm doing well. I wanted to just let the audience know who's watching that I'm drinking a Brew Dr., kombucha, which is not alcoholic, which really confused the cashier at the grocery store this weekend. They really thought it was alcoholic. So I just want people to know this is not, and I am fine. It is 10 a.m.

Nothing's happening. It's 5 o'clock somewhere, Matt. And where it's probably past 5 o'clock is Niléane. Niléane, how are you? I'm doing well. It's almost 6. Yeah. So it's not 5 o'clock there. It's almost 6. Well, pour me something tall and strong. I'm drinking fizzy water with a lychee syrup in it. And I have a Dr. Pepper zero sugar, but with cherry this time. It's okay. It's not as good as the cream soda one.

They were out of the cream soda one, so we're doing the cherry this week. It's good. I mean, I think Dr. Pepper already has a bit of a cherry flavor to it, so it just enhances the cherry flavor. Ew. You don't even know. You don't even know. You kid. You don't know. I don't know. Anyways, we got some tiny topics. Matt, you made something for Comfort Zone. You want to talk about it? I did.

I made the Comfort Zone database, which is the coolest database on the internet. And it's powered by crypto. So here's how it works. You are going to pay us a certain amount. No. This is a little thing that I made for myself where I had a problem where I was like, have we talked about this before? I think on a recent episode, I was like, I don't know if we've done this challenge before. And so I wanted to have a thing I could use to just search our past transcripts very easily and see when we talked about things. And this quickly spiraled into a, well, this should be a web app.

That'd be the easiest way to do this. Let me do that. Okay. I've done that. Now, oh, deploying this online in 2026 is super easy and super free. So I just posted it online and people can check it out if they want to see when we talked about things. And it has subscribe links and all that stuff. And it looks cute like our podcast. Nice. I love this. By the way, I looked up because I was kind of curious what has been mentioned on the podcast more, Mustangs or Dr. Pepper? Dr. Pepper has been mentioned more. Well, that makes sense, I think. Sure. If it told us who brought them up,

these are unanimously Chris topics. Yeah, that's why I was curious, because I was like, how many times have I mentioned the things that I love? I should have thrown in Danielle. Oh, because I know I haven't mentioned her as much. Ooh, I hope she's not listening in. But this is good. Because we're starting to get a lot of episodes in our backlog, And now we can search for things if we've already talked about something or not. Yeah. No, I love this. This was great.

In fact, for the challenge that I am going to issue today, I looked up to see if we had done something similar, and we had not. Interesting. At least as far as I could tell. Matt, a couple weeks ago, I suggested you get some new AirPods Pro 3 tips. And because of our weird recording schedule, I believe you have them now. And I'm curious what you think. I do have them now. They're on my AirPods Pro 3, which I do have on my person, because they are better than Apple's tips. Yes! Victory!

Woo-hoo! Chris wins something. I don't know what I win. My micro review of them is they are better than Apple's tips for my ears, which is good. They do not physically hurt me, which is the bar they are having to clear. They are not as good as the AirPods Pro 2 tips that Apple ships for me. So I still think those are like just peak comfort, just like sliding gears and I'm just like, ah, I'm in heaven. But these don't hurt me. Again, it's a low bar, but it's definitely better than what Apple shipped.

And yeah, it's gotten me using them again. And it's got me appreciating the slide gestures to change the volume on the Pros, which the normal ones don't have. Nice, nice. And for the record, these are the CharJenPro Active Foam something something linked in the description. Yes. Yeah, it came just like two days later after I ordered them. It was great. Oh, nice. Nice, that's nice. I'm so glad to hear they're working for you. I am working on a little short form video about them just to kind of spread the word because I know you're not the only one that has had complaints about the AirPod Pros 3.

Yeah. Can I also talk about AirPods tips? Please. Except it's not AirPods tips, but it's pretty close. It's my new headphone cushions. Are they new? Yes. Wait, are these another new pair? I think so. I just searched on the Comfort Zone database to see if I already talked about these ones, and it doesn't seem like it.

So these ones, they're really nice because they are angled. I don't know if I can show you. They are angled. See? Oh, I see. I see. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. They kind of got a slope to them. Yeah. Which means like the back of my ears don't touch like the driver inside the cups. So this is really comfortable. And also, since they are angled toward your ears, it preserves the sound because it adds

quite a bit of depth in the back. But since it's angled and in the front, it's keeping the same distance, the sound isn't affected. So yeah. Nice. Nice. That's actually really smart. I've never seen angled ear cups like that. Maybe we'll have some more headphone talk a little later as well. But for now, we have some feedback. We do. I think this is kind of related to Niléane stuff. Yeah, I put these in here. I pulled from our feedback form.

Link in the description, of course. We have two pieces of feedback this week. One from Jesse. Jesse is responding to Chris, your question about how we name our devices. That's right. From a couple weeks ago. And Jesse says, my iPad is named Love Magnet after the object of that name carried by the shaggy man character in the children's book, The Road to Oz. I'm not familiar with this. What is that? No idea what that is. Yes. But basically because my iPad feels like a magical, lovable object to me.

My Mac's internal SSD is named a lot, partially because I have a lot of files on it, and partially inspired by the Allie Brosh book, Hyperbole and a Half. So very deep literary cuts, or mainstream literary cuts, and we just don't read. I don't know. I literally have a library outside of my office right now, and not a single one of those books on those shelves belongs to me. They are all Danielle's. So you can tell who in this house reads. All my books fit on this bookshelf back here,

which is majority full of Legos. So, yeah. I feel like one day I should name all my devices after obscure characters from the Silmarillion. Ooh. Because it's one of the only big books that I've read in my life. So I should flex a little bit. Okay. I've tried reading the Silmarillion several times. It's the hardest book I've ever tried to read. it is it is insane how hard that book is yes in fact i have a copy right

why why would you want to show your copy i have my copy of the Silmarillion oh it's a fancy one yeah it's a fancy one nice yeah okay yeah oh so yeah if it's written in Runic like this chris it's gonna it's not going to be easy to read you're gonna want the English translation that's going to be a lot. It's in English. Okay. It's in Elvish. Danielle got me these really nice copies of the Lord of the Rings books. So The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and the three Lord of the Rings.

So she got me a really nice copy of these a couple years ago for Christmas. I think I talked about this on the show. Nice. Anyways. Let me check in the database. The Silmarillion. Okay. The second bit of feedback is from listener Josh, who said, On Comfort Zone episode 91, Niléane mentioned that she's using an emoji picker app in place of Raycast emoji picker. She got on GitHub and forked it, and it was a rabbit hole. I want to know more. Is there anything you want to say about this,

what this emoji picker turned into? Anything you want to talk? So at the time when I said this, it was meant as a teaser for what I announced last week when I launched Tiny Start, the launcher that I made for the Mac. And yes, I think I said this last week. in the episode a little bit but yes part of that rabbit hole started like this i was looking for obscure emoji pickers that people made on GitHub and i found one that somebody made and like it seems like this person made it over a week and then abandoned it and never touched it again so

i forked it and this is how like i um learned a bunch of the basics uh especially in regard to SwiftUI, getting used to that. And so, yeah, that's how I was, I really iterated on that a bunch. And then I scrapped it, started from scratch, made Tiny Start, and that was great. Nice. Yeah. Well, speaking of development projects that were scrapped, on Cozy Zone this week,

we roasted each other's 10-year-old home screens, iPhones, iPads, all sorts of different things, even an Android phone. And I showed off screenshots of my first app I ever made, first and only app I ever made. And when you see the screenshots, you'll know why it was the only app I ever made because, oh boy, is it ugly. But yeah, that was this week on Cozy Zone. Cozy Zone is our members-only special show where you get an extra episode of us every single week. And my home screen had widgets in 2016.

because technology hadn't reached a certain OS yet we hadn't been judged to be allowed to have them we hadn't been good enough to be allowed to have them at the time you were like hey iOS don't need we just need them right yeah they're actually bad Steve had decided we didn't need them so we were okay with that yeah anything else or should we move on to the main show let's move on I want to roast you

I don't know why you want to roast me I'm bringing something brand new to the show nothing like this ever seen before ever whatsoever so this last week a large technology company had their 50th anniversary and on the day of their 50th anniversary they uh release a new product uh for for purchase it had been announced a couple weeks before but you could go into one of their stores and buy it

anniversary Mac or something yes uh but uh the the 50th anniversary Mac comes in the form of headphones oh no i have the AirPods Max 2 not to be confused with the AirPods Max 1 which hang on one second look at these things like they're they're totally different they're they're absolutely completely different you you can't tell me which one's which i i can tell if you if you place in

front of the camera like the canopy especially like the yeah yeah yeah look at that we'll be able to tell yeah yeah the the headband on on my original AirPods Max that literally i got these the day they were released i've had these since 2020 um the the the canopy on these things is completely destroyed the fact that apple doesn't sell a replacement for the headband is a is a travesty but yeah yeah these are my original ones if you want to buy them let me know um you know especially since the

the headband is not that hard to remove no it's it's literally like a pin clip thing that you push down and it just pops out like it's actually pretty simple but enough about the originals those are filthy um you know these are the original these are these are the original ones with Lightning i got them day one they're filthy um but i have the brand new AirPods AirPods Pro Max Ultra something something twos and i kind of love them i kind of absolutely love them okay so one they're comfortable

they are comfortable for me they're comfortable two the ANC is better like they are better okay three the color is much better on these now the thing that actually really does bug me is so apple did the AirPods Max then two years ago in 2024 they did the AirPods Max USB-C and they did new colors for those now they did the AirPods Max 2 and it's the same colors as the USB-C version not to be confused with the original version so the midnight is the same midnight as the USB-C

first gen and you would think like if they're going to put another number behind this they would have come up with new colors like that's actually my my my nitpick complaint about this like i have big complaints about these don't get me wrong i do have big complaints about these But the fact that they couldn't bother come up with new colors because I don't think the color... Like, I got the black midnight ones because I don't think the fun color options are actually that good looking. I don't like them. But yeah. Do we think it's because... So they were preparing the AirPods Max 2

and they had a slate of new colors for that. But then they had to rush a USB-C version because of regulations. So they went with the colors that they already had. Probably. Prepared, yeah. Probably. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a thing. I'm more surprised at how long these took to come out. It probably was one of those things where like, oh, crap, that UK law or European law or whatever passed, and now we have to sell them with USB-C and stuff like that. So let's put that update out.

But the twos weren't ready yet and stuff like that. Yeah. Because I don't know. But they're still overpriced. $550 is way too much for over-the-ear headphones. It's way too much. I did it for the show. Also tax write-off. What? Nothing? The adaptive mode is really nice to have. I really like the adaptive mode. In fact, I have gone into the settings and turned off the transparency mode. So, like, when you click the button, transparency mode isn't an option. It's just noise canceling or adaptive now. What?

Yep. Why? Yeah, that's the way to go. Yeah, adaptive is literally better than transparency. Why? Why is it better? Because it's still blocking out stuff like lawnmowers, dogs barking, cars driving by. But as far as I understand, the transparency mode still caps those in volume, right? It's not as much. Like, it still lets that stuff through. Yeah. The best way I can describe it, because I didn't like the adaptive mode at first. It was weird.

I think they've tuned it since then to be a little better. I think what I like about adaptive mode is it is, so noise cancellation cancels out like everything. So if someone tries to talk to you, like there's traffic or something, that is all blocked out equally. But with adaptive mode, it's like white noise and that sort of thing is blocked out. But you still hear like if someone talks to you, you'll just hear it come through clearly. So that's kind of nice. It's kind of like a balanced thing. It worked for me on my last flight that I took. The airplane noise was really wiped out pretty well.

But I could still hear the stewardess ask me a question or something. I've not tried Adaptive Mode on my AirPods Pro since it came out. Because I tried it when it came out, and I hated it. Yeah, it's changed. I tried Adaptive Mode when it first came out. I didn't like it. I turned it off and I've gone back to it in the last probably six months or so. And I like it a lot. Like that's when I'm walking around the house, I have adaptive mode on. So Danielle can still talk to me.

But like if she's cooking something or like if the neighbor's doing something or something's going on, like outside of that, that's still being blocked out. Yeah. And pro tip for our future dog owner here. You should. Spoiler alert. Thanks. oh dope uh so it's okay it's okay no it's okay i was gonna i was gonna get to it later but that's okay that's okay i walk the dog and one of the i think the default settings for adaptive mode is when someone starts talking or you start talking it automatically dips whatever you're listening to

maybe it's not adaptive mode it's a whole separate setting turn that off when you're walking the dog because when you're gonna say like come on buddy and it's gonna like it dips everything it's horrible so i say turn that off yes uh yeah it's like uh it's like i forget what that's called but i already have that off because i hate that setting like i hate the whole and then there's like the adaptive volume thing where like if you start making a bunch of noise like my big thing is like if i start taking out the trash like pulling the trash bag out of the trash can taking it to the

bin throwing it in there and stuff like that the the volume goes all over the place i turn that off like i don't like that yeah um but some stuff i do like these now mean having the AirPods Max 2 now mean i have no more Lightning devices whatsoever that's it these are it there's no more Lightning devices i think maybe Danielle might have a pair of Lightning airpods pro 2 but that's not my problem that's her problem not mine um i'm just kidding i've given her solutions

mostly just wireless charging. So no more Lightning devices. And I feel good about that. Like death to Lightning. Wow. Okay. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Oh, is that the most exciting thing about this product? That you now do not need a Lightning cable? No. Better A and C is. Okay. Look, I'm going to tell. So we had that whole, I had that whole saga of getting a new roof. Getting a new roof was the loudest.

Okay, editor Chris prepared to bleep. Getting a new roof is the loudest thing that has ever, I've ever been around in my life. And I've grown up going to monster truck rallies. Like getting a new roof was insane. I still had to work while we were getting a new roof put on. Having AirPods Max were the only reason why I was able to was because of noise canceling. Now having even better noise canceling. Yes. Yes, please. Now, I don't expect to get a new roof again anytime soon, but loud things happen. I will take better ANC. Absolutely. Also, the battery life being refreshed is kind of nice. I was having to charge the old ones quite often, and having a new fresher battery is pretty nice.

You know, in regard to ANC, I don't want to, like, dismiss your experience or whatever. But it feels like, I don't know how to feel about this. Because for the past several years, even when they first came out, the AirPods Max, people were saying and kept saying that it was among the best ANC you could get on over-ear headphones, right? On par, if not better than the Sonys and the Bose. So how is it even better than that? I have a hard time understanding.

So, okay, so you know when you're wearing them. We've all had them. We've all had them. And for the most part, it blocks out everything. But every once in a while, like, there's something really loud that can still bleed through. Like, there's something that can still get through. This just takes that extra, like, 20, 30, maybe even 50% off that top. where it's just like it's it's silent it's it's truly silent like Danielle scared the again editor chris we've been prepared to bleep Danielle walked in my office and as you can see my desk is over here

for video viewers the door to my office is on the opposite wall so if i'm facing my monitor i cannot see somebody walk in Danielle scared out of me when she walked in she like tapped me on the shoulder and I had those on. I had no idea anyone had opened the door and had walked in. And like our floors outside, so in this room it's carpet, but in like the hallway and living room and space like that, we have like this linoleum hardwood floor kind of thing. And it is so loud. It's so creaky. I don't hear anyone walking anymore. It's fantastic. I am just, when I have them on,

I am focused straight ahead. There is nothing getting through. Okay. Chris, you've actually walked into a draft in my blog, which is my number one pet peeve from reviewers is when they say something's perfect. Because if it's perfect, then you don't get to be excited in a year or two when they make it better. If you can't acknowledge that these things are wrong now, you can't say that they were wrong before because you said today it was perfect. So what I'm saying, and this is going into the comfort zone database, is when the AirPods 3 come out, you may not say anything about the ANC because it's perfect.

That's a good point. I actually like that. Now that I actually agree with your point, even though I'm contradicting myself now. It's easy to do because you're like, oh, this is the best way to be. But then two years later, we're like, oh, obviously this wasn't perfect. We could get better. And I would say from a reviewer standpoint, that situation is, oh, I have never, perfect is, I haven't, everything I've tried, all my experiences, I've never tried anything that's better than these. So obviously these are perfect. This is as good as they can get.

And then technology advances and, oh, something else is going to, it's like the M1 chip. Oh, the M1 chip is perfect. Like, it's great, great, great. M1 Pro and M1 Max comes out. Holy crap. No, this is even better. This is an M2, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I see where you're coming from. And you know what? I'm going to try not to say that anymore. I'm going to say the ANC is very good, and it's the best I have tried to this date. And I have tried Sonys, and I have tried the Bose before. I do believe it's better, because I have tried the Sonys, and it's not as... My Sony, I have the 5s, whatever those are.

And yeah, the original AirPods and the Macs are better than those, even, I would say. So these are even better. That's quite good. To be fair, I don't think I've tried the Sonys since the 4s? It was the one right before they folded. I don't remember. I think it was the 4s. Before they did not fold. Yeah, before they didn't fold. Remember that time when they stopped folding and then those are the fives? Those are the fives. Okay, okay. So I tried the 4s. The 4s were the ones that were the last ones I tried then. Okay. So something else I really like about these, and it's stupid. It's really dumb. One second here. This guy right here.

This is the Apple USB-C to 3.5 millimeter cable. Now, Niléane, you and I have had the Lightning ones. You and I used the AirPods Max for podcasting for a little while, and I think we would both agree the Lightning to 3.5 millimeter cable was the worst cable ever made. It was the worst cable. It was super thin. It was fragile. My girlfriend's mom's cat ate those things up. I have probably bought six of them over time because she kept eating them up. My bad. I kept leaving the door open, but whatever. This is the USB-C version. It is a braided, thicker cable.

Much, much nicer quality. Big complaint. Still overpriced. $40 cable for this, which is stupid. Absolutely should not be that. But at least it's braided now and it's a little thicker. But it only comes in white. For a $550 pair of headphones and a $40 cable, they should have color matched these things. Oh boy. Isn't it like it's a reverse DAC, this cable, right? Yeah, there is a reason why it is.

Somebody's taken it apart, and there is a reason why it is so expensive, but I still think $40 for a cable that only works with $550 pair of headphones. You're not going to just buy this cable on its own. There's no reason to buy it. This cable only works with the AirPods Max, right? Oh, is that true? Well, I was going to say I never use the AirPods Max to record, So I never used it with my AirPods Max, ironically. But I did actually have the headphone to Lightning cable, the super thin one,

specifically for my car to plug my Lightning iPhone into the audio jack. Because that was... I'm sure I could have gone on Amazon and got something, but I was at the Apple store. So I just got it. So you may still want that if you have an older car that you can't do USB to connect your phone. Okay. Okay. All right. Interesting. Okay. So maybe there is a reason to have this other than that. I don't know. I just assume this cable only worked with the AirPods Max because that's what it was designed for. But maybe I am wrong there. I shouldn't have said that. But anyways, they should have color matched them.

They should have. It's ridiculous that they didn't color match them. If the iMac gets color matching for all of its accessories, come on. Right? Come on. Come on. It should be in the box. What's that? Yes. I would agree with that. It should be in the box. Especially considering one of the selling points of these is plug them into audio interface and you get lossless audio with Apple Music. And also it's $550. Yeah. They do come with a USB-C to USB-C cable though. So there is that.

It's weird that you can't use them wired with just a USB-C cable, by the way. Isn't that weird? It is weird. It is really weird that you can't just go USB-C to USB-C. Yeah, it has to be USB-C to 3.5. Yeah, something is really weird with the AirPods Max because it's not like they don't go to analog when you plug them in. They're still digital, which means they still have to do conversion, signal conversion in the mix.

And this is why you end up with this situation. You can't use a regular USB-C cable to use them wired, and you have to use the fancy cable that's a reverse DAC or whatever. Well, it's almost as bad as... Matt, you probably remember this. Niléane might be before your time a little bit, but maybe you remember this. I don't know. Maybe a little bit because Matt and I are old, guys. We are old. Matt and I are old, guys. Niléane's the youngster, the young, hip. I'm cool. You're about to talk about the Walkman? No, the iPod.

when the iPod video came out, Apple released an RCA cable. So it plugged into the 3.5 millimeter headphone cable, and then it had the red, yellow, and white RCA extensions coming out of it, so you can plug it in the TV. And at first, Apple's like, yeah, you have to use ours. But what later was the turns out was Apple reversed the signals. So the video signal, the yellow cable, was coming out of one of the audio ports and vice versa.

So you could actually use any 3.5 to RCA cable you wanted. You could buy a cheap one, but Apple was reversing them so you would buy their $60 cable or whatever it was. Well, that's lawsuit material. They weren't big enough to... A part of me just respects that sort of, like, we could do the super, it's like the opposite of Apple. Like, they have, like, oh, we're going to do this, like, over the top. We're going to go, we're going to be more innovative than we need to.

We're going to use more components than we need to. And this time, they're just like, what if we flip the yellow and the red? That's literally what they did. Insane. Yeah. So, because I remember, like, wanting to do video out from my iPod video, but I couldn't afford the crazy cable. And then I found online that's like, yeah, you can just take any 3.5 cable to RCA, reverse them to your TV's input, and you can do video out. So, yep. Yep, that was the thing. Okay, going long on this, so I'm just going to wrap up a few things.

A couple of some complaints about these that are pretty obvious. Price, they're too expensive. They still don't fold, which is ridiculous. To be fair, they just sit at my desk. I will never travel with these. AirPods Pro 3 are more than enough for me to travel with. These are my desk headphones. And the case is ridiculous. Oh, and another reason why I did get these is I moved my PlayStation into here. And I'm using this cable to plug into my PlayStation controller.

And honestly, it's just easier now to have USB-C so I can charge them anywhere. So that was kind of why I got them. But yeah, those are my AirPods Max 2. Niléane, feel free to roast away. Okay. My biggest pet peeve reading the reviews about this pair, the new AirPods Max, is how nobody talks about the headband because it's still atrocious. Yeah. And the headband alone, I don't want to recommend this to anyone at all.

Like it could sound like an absolute dream inside. I still think it would be a rip off because the headband, it ages like super fast. If you have long hair, maybe you're a bit of a sweaty person. I don't know. But as long as like, even if you don't have long hair, I feel like long hair worsens it because you have products in your hair or I don't know. Yeah, even if you wear a hard hat or something. Because I got the little dimple thing at the top that pokes onto it.

Those destroy the headband so fast. Like, I don't know any other headphones in that price range which has this problem. I'm like, this is insane. This is my biggest pet peeve. And to illustrate that, I read a review. I think it was Cult of Mac. I don't remember. Nine to five. I don't remember. One publication wrote, at the end of their review, wrote, so the headband still feels super comfortable, but we don't know how they will age. We'll see. It ended like this. We do know how it's going to age.

And I was like, what do you mean we'll see? This right here. It's not focusing. But this right here, that's how it's going to do it. Yes, we've known the issue for over five years. And people are still wondering, will this age well? No, I'm completely with you. The headband is not going to age well on these things. They're too expensive for the headband not to age well. Apple had said something about, oh, we've changed the headband. I could see that line. But no, they didn't. It's exactly the same. No, it's literally the same. We have so much data on this. Yeah.

This is insane. The second thing is, yeah, I think this comes back to the fact that I've come to hate Bluetooth so much that I just can't imagine having to deal with Apple's workarounds, crazy workarounds just to plug my headphones into something. I hate this so much. I hate this so much. The future, for them to feel like the future,

they would have to turn into regular analog headphones when you plug them in so that they don't use battery so that even turn off all the smart features, just plug them in, they're regular headphones, and it's just analog, and that's it. Yes, the Sonys do that. Yeah, I wear these Sonys every single week for an hour or like two hours because of Cozy Zones. I record two hours every week. I literally never charge these. Yeah. They're not on. They're not on.

Yeah, they're just analog. Can I point out something really funny about the AirPods Max when you plug them in? Yeah. So you have the USB-C to 3.5 millimeter cable. It plugs in on the right cup. But if you have a MacBook Pro, the 3.5 millimeter port is on the left side. So that means you're going from your right ear to the left side of your MacBook, which means you have a cable crossing in front of you. Ugh. Like this. Nice. Also, that's a short cable.

It is a very short cable, which is fine for me. Actually, the way I'm using it, I don't want a long cable, but it is a very short cable. Yeah. That's it. I'm done. Okay. All right. Don't buy these. or do whatever you know do what you want don't you don't know you listen to me listen to me do what you want you have a free will what do you mean Niléane is your free will now yes my free will then why did I buy them because you're rogue

you didn't actually do it yeah right these are knockoffs actually Yep, it's where I got Danielle's Gucci purse, too. Hermes. Hermes. I don't know. I don't know fashion brands. I think Gucci was the only one that I knew. All right. So that's enough of that. I have AirPods Max, too. I'm working on a video. I like them. But they're still too expensive. So, yeah. Matt, what do you got for us this week? So I don't have so much an app as the concept of an app.

What is an app? As the development bug captures the comfort zone crew more and more, I wanted to talk about the adventure I'm on right now where I'm trying to build yet another app. This one, maybe just for me. I think we'll see how it turns out. But I want it. I know. I know. You showed it to me. You showed it to me. It means you legally owe it to me. Yeah. Okay.

So what I am trying to do now is build a dictation app. Because of all the things that have changed about how I use my computer in the last few years, the biggest change is dictation apps. I literally use this all day, every day. It is a core part of how I use my computer now. Like, I dictate so much. And one of the annoying things is that Apple's built-in dictation is tough to use. It does not do punctuation well.

It doesn't do proper nouns well. It's a little rough. So there's all these third-party apps that do it, and they use local models typically, but they charge a subscription. And it is a pretty expensive subscription in most cases. Like it's 10 to 15 bucks a month, which is not nothing. Like before the days of the $20 AI subscriptions, like 10 bucks a month was like the ceiling for consumer software. Like nobody, nothing was more than that, right? Like $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus was crazy when they first announced that. We're like, nobody does $20 subscriptions.

And now it's like 15 bucks to dictate to your computer. Or a $200 AI subscription a month. Yeah. So I was like, there's got to be a better way. So I was like, look, I've been building apps for the past year that work with dictation and text and speech to text, text to speech, each direction. And, you know, surely I could take these skills and put together something myself that runs locally, that has zero cost to me as the developer, and that I could use myself.

And if it's good enough, I could release it and see if other people like it. and it is so hard to do this well i thought it would be easy i thought it would just be oh implement apple speech engine boom fast it's on everybody's device it has apple intelligence great lovely no it doesn't work that way uh apple speech engine is not good enough to do dictation because it's effectively what their own dictation does right which has its own issues so i tried using that, just doing raw output, and it sucked. It wasn't good enough. So I was like, shoot, well,

how do I fix this? And I was like, well, you have this Quick Notes app that has a cleanup feature that already does this. It does Apple's dictation. It transcribes everything. And then you clean it up with the power of AI. Again, still local, still no cost to anybody. So let's try that. But that was too slow. So I was just sitting there waiting for it to transcribe and then waiting for it to do some AI mumbo jumbo to it. And it wasn't even good enough. And Apple's foundation model is so frustrating because this is a thing that I thwarted in quick notes, but somehow it's literally the same

instructions to different things here. It really wants to chat with you. So even though I'm like, hey, here's some text, you are not responding to this. You are not giving a response at all to this. You are just trying to clean it up to fix things like punctuation and proper nouns and this sort of thing. And very often I would just like, I would dictate something into this and it would say like, I would be like, I don't know what I would say. It doesn't matter. But like it would return at the text that it would print out on my screen is the Apple foundation model replying to whatever I

talked into my app. And I was like, this sucks. It's slow and it sucks. What do I do next? So now I've implemented WhisperKit, which is the goat when it comes to local transcription, and it's doing much better. But now it's slower. And so I'm having, especially when you're like dictating for like 30 seconds, a minute or more, like it's just taking a while to transcribe that. And it feels slow.

So then I'm like, okay, here's what you do. We're going to pause on silences. So if the user pauses for more than a second without saying anything, we cut the audio file off, we transcribe that in the background, and we keep recording. And every time they pause, we cut off a new sliver and we do this transcription. And this is working okay. But now there's awkward breaks because the transcription, sometimes if you pause in the middle of a sentence, it gets confused because it doesn't know where to put the punctuation. So then I'm like, well, then do I do a foundation model request afterwards and say fix the punctuation?

And now I'm in the same situation. And so this can be done. It can be done because apps do it. But I don't know how they do it and I'm figuring it out. But I'm getting closer. It's getting better. So I'm actually using it. It's getting to the point where I can use it for myself most of the time. So I think that's pretty good. But software development is hard, especially once you move beyond just like displaying databases in pretty interfaces. Like it's very tricky. And I'm doing this on a Mac, so it's not like a window in the traditional way.

Niléane, you're dealing with this with Tiny Start. It's not like a window with three traffic lights and tabs and views and traditional stuff. It's something custom. And so it lives on screen, but it's not a window. It feels very hacky when you do this. Yeah. You have to create some fake stuff to make MacOS believe that it's a window, but it's not. It's weird. Yeah. And yeah, so you have to make sure like the focus works because when you switch to an app

window, it sets us to the focus, but you're not technically the focus. You need the focus to be the thing in the background because for you, for the emoji picker, you need the emoji to go into the app, not into your window. And same with my text. I need to go into a thing and then, yes, dealing with history. What if it fails? Can you recover the audio? Do I save the audio? I don't want to save the audio because that's going to take up space and people are going to freak out. So all this is to say I'm making progress. But it is very interesting because, not interesting, I think it's notable that this is not a super complicated app in the grand scheme of things.

This is a pretty simple piece of software. but there are so many things to consider and you don't get it for free you have to figure this out yourself and i'm saying this as someone who uses Copilot code for basically all the code that i write like a lot of this is happening in the terminal um and even then i have to there's so many things to know about how macOS works how how i want the data structure to be like how i want all this to work. It's not just like enter a prompt, get an app. There's still so much to do. And yeah,

it's very fun, but it's very complicated as well. And yeah, I don't know. I just wanted to talk about it because I was thinking about what to bring this week and I was like, literally the only thing on my mind is how to get this stupid app working. This is all I care about right now is figuring out What you're saying about the UI part and when you're developing an app that's not just sitting in a regular window. We mentioned this earlier in the episode.

That's what looking at emoji pickers, like Swift emoji pickers on GitHub, helped me understand the approaches that people are taking. Maybe you should do that. Maybe you should look at projects being done like this and look at this yourself and just try, maybe even try to fork it and modify things yourself to see how things behave. This has helped me a lot getting started and just getting a launch on screen that's not stealing focus from other windows when you're using it.

Yeah, that was a big breakthrough. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's really all I have to say. I guess the other thing that I keep thinking about is a year ago or almost a year ago at WWDC, Apple was like, we have this new transcription model and this new foundation model. And I started working on those like the next day. I started integrating with those and figuring out how they worked and how to use them. And just like getting those basic skills together makes me think of all these other ideas. Oh, here I have this skill. Here's how I can use it in a different context.

Right. Because like that's what my quick notes app was, was I want to dictate into my iPhone and get high quality transcripts from it. And OK, that's great. But that came from quick subtitles, which was let me just I have the audio file already. Give me the good text. And now I was like, what if I made the audio file in real time and then give me good text? And now this builds on that, which is like on a Mac in a totally different context where I'm not like bringing up separate apps. let me just hit a button and say things so anyway it's really it's fun to see how you could make

and it builds up you could build um like an all-in-one record your podcast publish it and you host it yourself so that's service there you go boom you have service revenue and so yeah it's all one So people can dictate their podcasts. It's all at the same time recording, doing the chapters. And it also gives you a transcription for the episode. And then you click publish and it's all uploaded to your servers and into the podcast apps. And you're welcome.

This is an amazing idea. That would be so much work. Call me when you raise one billion. Yeah, I expect a cushy job. okay okay makes sense but it would like gather up all you've done so far right i know i know this is this this is a thing that i've thought about is making some sort of like podcaster studio app that kind of combines chapterization stuff transcription stuff show notes all this stuff

into one place and oh it'll be so missing the hosting part and you're good to go I mean, I could figure out the hosting part. I am working on another app that does web hosting. It is a web app that lives on the web and hosts audio files for things. I won't say more. So, yeah, it could be done. Yeah. Within time. It's amazing. If you feel like this is like a billion-dollar idea,

you just ask our editor to cut all of this and sort of keep it to yourself. Well, the idea is nothing. People could think about this. You just got to do it. Okay. So, editor Chris, don't worry about it. Okay. Okay. All right. But if it does become a billion-dollar thing, you know, hire me. I'll become your in-house influencer. You haven't said anything. I should be hired in this. But I'll make the YouTube videos.

I'll be like, this is why you want to use this. That's a good point. Okay. Yeah. I'll use my influence. Whatever little I have. What can I do? I'll sell NFTs. I don't know. For you. No, you make the emoji picker. You build the emoji part of the dictation. So that way, like, you just dictate what emoji you want. Okay. Well, I mean, it's clear we'll all be even partners in this. Matt will do most of the work.

We're just scamming him live. We're just totally leeching onto him. You got this, Matt. You got this. You got this. Our futures depend on you. No pressure, Matt. We are on the line. I'm putting all my retirement, everything, my life savings, I'm putting it all on you, okay? I just sent my resignation. I would like to formally announce my retirement from coding. Hopefully that doesn't negatively impact anybody.

Wait, wait, wait, what? I deleted my YouTube channel, Matt. What do you mean? Oh, you keep, it keeps happening. Anyways, I hope this does work out for you because this is genuinely an interesting app. I would love to have a good local dictation app or a good, let me rephrase, a good dictation app that doesn't charge me an arm and a leg every month. Yeah. Agreed. All right. Should we move on to the challenge? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Niléane, it was your challenge. Yes. I feel like I cheated. But the challenge was the prompt was back up your entire photos library and the best method wins. Okay. So I can go first. Okay. so I looked at things things are expensive yeah storage is a little pricey right now even not counting the storage like software like just backup software that's dedicated to doing this

to backing up a photos library specifically it's expensive if it's not subscription even like I found utility that was one time purchase and I don't know it felt like I don't know the value of this I don't know if I should call in on this anyway so in the end I cheated by going to privacy.apple.com are you aware of this trick it's a good trick yeah so if you go to privacy.apple.com there's a

section on there so you have to sign in and there's a section on there I'm signed out now. I can't see it properly word for word because Apple accounts can't stay signed in on the web ever. Sorry? Request a copy of your data. Yes, exactly. That's the one. So request a copy of your data. And so you click on that and you can download everything from your Apple account. You can download your entire iCloud drive if you want.

You can download all your notes, all your contacts, your calendar stuff, all your emails. You can download anything. And there's a section there for photos. And there's even a warning there. I don't remember what it says specifically because now I'm signed out. But it says photos can be, like, very large. Yeah. It can be very large. The following items may be large and take a long time to download. And that includes iCloud Drive files, documents, iCloud mail, and iCloud photos. Exactly.

And so, but they have a way to deal with that. That's actually pretty smart. So I went ahead and did that with photos. I select photo, then continue. And there you have an option to split your download into multiple files of the same size. So you can, for example, you can cap it at 1 gig or more. I think it's 110, 100. I don't remember. So I went with 10.

So it gave me multiple 10 gigabyte files that you don't have to download all simultaneously. You can download one after the other. So that's actually pretty smart. It was tedious, but it worked. Also, where are Apple servers? Are they on the moon? Oh, they're on the Artemis 2 rocket ship or whatever because the download rate, it was really bad. I don't know where the servers are. I'm sure it's not a server location thing. I'm sure it's a server data cap thing.

So that way they're not just letting you just bleed their bandwidth dry. I feel like for this purpose, they should allow me to download much faster. Well, they have the warning there that it's going to take a while, which I think is fair. But I have a feeling they do this so people aren't constantly... Because that's going to cost a lot of money to download that amount of storage. So I have a feeling they're doing this so people don't constantly use this. Yeah, maybe. So anyway, I did this.

And I did this over two nights. Just because at some point I was like, I'm tired of this. So I'll do the rest tomorrow. And also it takes, like I said, it takes a few hours to download every time. So I downloaded two at once or three at once and then gave up and then started again the next day. But yes, there you go. I have folders upon folders of my entire Photos Library downloaded from this on my 4TB HDD.

I don't know if I'll keep that, but I've done it. I've backed up my photos library using Apple's thing that they had to do because it's probably illegal not to do this, at least in the EU. It's probably more just like people lose their photo library and more of a service too. How many stories have you all heard about a person gets locked out of their Apple account or iPhone and their photo library is gone because they didn't back it up or something like that.

So, yeah. Yeah. So, there you go. I don't know. Maybe I cheated, but I don't know. I backed up my photos library in the end. Nice. And it's for free, like using the existing hard drive and using Apple's download tool. Nice. How did you do, Matt? One second. I'm just actually, I was looking up something for our next bit. I did horribly. I was like, what if?

I mean, the answer is I want them on my Synology, which is already working, which didn't really fit the challenge. So I didn't just say I will continue to do what I've been doing, which I'm happy with. And so what I chose was sadness. And I chose this via, as often happens in software, through Microsoft. And I installed OneDrive on my Mac and was like, I wonder if this can auto, like, back up my Apple Photos library, because Google Photos does that. And I was like, let me see if that works.

And it does, but I hate it. The interface for photos in OneDrive is rough. It feels like a remnant of the Windows 8 era of design in that it's all just, I don't know. It ain't right. And it just, it sucks. And it very quickly was like, hey, buddy, you don't pay for storage through us. Would you like to pay? And I was like, no, not at any cost. So I uninstalled it and then deleted all the photos.

So I have done, I'm ending the week exactly where I started. But I did back up approximately four and a half gigabytes of photos to OneDrive before deleting them, which I can confirm the upload and the delete functions do function. So that's something. Okay. Okay. So because the free cap was at five. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I used to pay for it because I do have a Windows computer, but I was so angry. I just, I hate, I do not want to pay this. So I stopped. Yeah. Who wants to give money to Microsoft anyways?

Especially for OneDrive. Yeah. All right. So like Matt, I already back up my photo library to my NAS. Like that already happens through Synology. Synology has an app that like syncs with the Apple Photos app and will copy everything off. So I was like, okay, my Apple Photos library is already backed up. But I do have technically a second Photos library. I have fancy cameras. And whenever I shoot the raw photos with those,

I put them in folders in iCloud Drive. Usually what I do is I will date them, or if it's a trip or something, I'll label them or whatever. And then I have two folders in there, raws and then edited. So I will back up all the raw photos. So I always have the raw photos. And then anything I edit in Lightroom, now Pixelmator Photo, I will put in the edited folder. So that stuff was being backed up via Time Machine because it was an iCloud drive, and Time Machine will still back that stuff up. But what I did is I was like, okay, I have that, but let's take a look at this. So I went and built a Hazel script.

And let me pull up Hazel here. I should have already had that. So what it does is it watches that folder, and anytime there is new content of any file, it syncs this folder to a photography folder on an external drive that I have. And I'm actually going to keep this, and I'm going to switch it to my NAS. But since I already had the NAS backup, I figured I'd do something different for the challenge. I have a bunch of other external drives just laying around that I got pre-external drive storage costs that skyrocketed. I did look at a few other options.

I was like, oh, what if I bought like a specific NAS just for backing up photos or something? No, storage costs are stupid expensive. Not doing that right now. So I just took a one terabyte external drive that I have laying around. I plugged it in the back of the CalDigit hub. It just sits there. And anytime new stuff is going to be added to that folder, it'll sync those two folders together. So they'll always be in sync. Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye. No? Okay. So you can move. But, yeah, so that way they will stay in sync, and that library will now live in two places. I win. Okay, okay.

That's nice. I'm the only one that actually made a backup thing. Hey, I backed up something. You went to a website. Which let me back up my photos library. You weren't actually backing anything up. It was already being sent there. I still don't understand what a backup is. No, it was not already sent there. Like right now, apart from this, I have no copy of my photo library. You don't have it in an app called Photos. Yes, but that's on iCloud Drive.

Yes, and that's where that website you went to pulled it from. Yes, but to put it on an external drive. So there's a second copy now. I backed it up. This is what makes me not do backups because every time I say, oh, I did a backup, a backup person's like, no, you did not. That's not a backup. Why is it not a backup? It needs to be in a bulletproof, fireproof casing that is kept on the other side of the country at 20,000 feet elevation. Okay. Fair enough. No. Or on one drive. No. No, do not keep your backup on one drive. Get it?

OneDrive. That's actually a horrible name, I guess, if you want backups. It is a terrible name, yeah. I get what they were going for, but yeah. It's like one password. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can just use one password for everything. You have to backup your password on a post-it note on your computer monitor, as well as a third place that is under lock and key. On one post-it note. One post-it note. I have it tattooed on my forehead. That's why I have to wear a hat. This makes sense. So anytime I need my password, I look in a mirror, but then it's reversed. So I have to look at another mirror.

Oh, it's like Apple's encryption with the RCA cable. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's where I got the idea from. All right. I have no idea who won except I won. So let's move on to my challenge. Best method. I think you actually have a method. I do have a method. Yeah. I built something. Yeah. Okay. All right. You guys ready for the new challenge? Yes. All right. So as Matt said earlier in the episode, I'm getting a puppy in four weeks from a couple of days ago.

So at the time you're hearing this, probably three weeks now, I'm getting a little puppy. And we're very, very excited. Danielle and I have wanted a puppy for a really long time. And we had some family friends that their dog had some puppies. I know you should spay and neuter your dog. That's not my dog. Look, I had no control over that. But what I do know is that they were looking for people to adopt these puppies. We jumped on it. So in a couple weeks, once they're a little bit bigger and kind of weaned off the mom, we will be going and picking up a puppy. So for the challenge, I want you all to find some best pet tech.

Niléane, you have a cat. Matt, you have a dog. Oh. I technically will have both in a couple of weeks. So find some pet tech. Okay. Ideally, something for me to order for my new puppy. That's who wins. If you find something that I can order for my new puppy that I'm excited about and can order for, that's who wins. That's how we will decide the winner. There's something I've been wanting to get for our cat, but my partner, like, vetoes it every time. Now you can. You have to do it for your work. Yeah. For your work. I can say it's for the show.

Like, you're letting hundreds of thousands of people down. Yep. Hundreds of thousands. Yes. Hey, if you'd like to subscribe to, or not subscribe, if you'd like to sponsor Comfort Zone, reach out to John Voorhees. But anyways, so that's the challenge for next week. Find some pet tech. Ideally, you know, if it's something I end up ordering for my puppy, let me, you know, that's who wins. So, yeah. Okay. All right. That brings us to the end of the show. And I have an end of the show question for the two of you.

Wait, I have a question. Okay. Do headphone cushions count as pet tech? No. Okay. It's got to be something for the animal, not something to keep you from the animal. I mean, I guess if you want to give it to them and chew it up, I guess. Hopefully it's not toxic. Okay. Okay. Come on. I'm bringing all the hits today. Oh, yes. All right. Okay. So I'm going to show a question for you guys. In what sci-fi or fantasy world would you want to live in? Okay. Super easy for me. I could answer this right away.

Well, what's your answer? What's your answer? The Lord of the Rings, and I want to live in The Shire. I want to eat, drink, and be merry. Okay. That's a good one. I think you've asked a similar question in the past, and I responded with Beetlejuice, and you were like, no, that doesn't count. That doesn't count. So Beetlejuice. I'm moving on to something a little different. I would like to live in the Galar region. Oh. What is that?

This is from Pokémon Sword and Shield. Interesting you picked Galar. I love that game. I think it's just so cozy. It's like a British countryside. It seems nice. People are happy. the biggest controversies are around Pokémon battles. I think it'd be a chill place to live for a while. And all the Pokémon battles take place in stadiums too. Yeah. You just go and watch. So it's a Pokemon. Animals fight each other. Yep. Nothing problematic there.

So it's a Pokemon thing. It's a Pokemon thing. Yeah. Okay. What about you? I think my answer is also The Lord of the Rings. And mostly because in that world, they were able to beat fascism. And that sounds like a pretty good place to be. You don't think Aragorn would bring a different form of fascism as the king? I don't know. I don't think I would like to live in his kingdom. Yeah. Feels like too big of a place.

It's like today I don't want to live in the U.S., you know, too big. What region would you want to live in then? I don't know Would you want to be an Elf maiden? A Dwarf lord? Sorry Oh wow Damn Screw the elves I like your idea of The Shire You know You just see The Shire and it's like yeah That's where I want to live I want to live in The Shire I have a tavern I'm the manager Of the tavern In Bree Oh, okay, okay. I manage it.

I don't go every day there, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Isn't Bree technically outside of The Shire? Oh, it is outside, yes. Okay. All right. It's not fun. Just look, Stephen Colbert is going to listen to this, and he was going to write in and be like, well, you said The Shire, but Bree is not technically in The Shire. Okay. I'm just fending off the Stephen Colbert feedback. Okay, okay. All right. Cool. All right. Thank you all so much for listening or watching. We have a video version on YouTube on the MacStories channel if you want to check it out.

And a huge thank you to MacStories. We're a MacStories podcast. Go check out the website. There's all the other writings and podcasts. Lots of stuff happening over there. Thank you all. Have a great day. Oh, bye. What are you guys doing? I don't know. All right. Thumbnail.