Dinosaurs Are From Space

Hey, Editor Chris here. I need to apologize. Before we get into this episode, my mic cuts out for like a split second throughout this episode a few times and I apologize. I wasn't able to recover the audio. I don't think it impacts the episode in any way, but if you hear me drop out and come back in, that's what happened. I tried something different with my setup and I shouldn't have done it. I know better. I apologize. Now on to the episode. 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 am joined by the rambunctious Matt Birchler. How are you? I'm good. Last week I accidentally leaked an app, and then I just decided to say screw it and released it. So we'll see what happens this week. And that's why you're being called, wow, I cannot speak, rambunctious. But we're also joined by the rascally, Niléane. Niléane, how are you? I'm doing well.

As you can see, if you're watching the video, I'm in a white void. Because we're moving soon. So I started taking down things on the wall. And the apartment is a mess. I thought you were entering your Johnny Ive era. Yeah, no. Just pure white room. Oh, yeah, that guy on YouTube who made an all-white studio and called it an Apple Store.

Anyways, we have tiny topics to go over. Somebody take the microphone away from me. Okay. Yeah, I put in something nice. When this episode comes out, it will have been almost close, at least, to the one month anniversary of me launching TinyStart. Yeah. And it's been doing very well. Like, I foresaw, like, 10 people buying it and it would be fine.

I would be like, yeah, I was glad I did that and then move on. But no, it's more like a few hundreds, thousands of people bought it. Whoa. That's great. That's fantastic. This is insane, which means like when you start to get a critical number of people using your app, they find all sorts of weird things that are impossible to find that you can never reproduce. So right now, I mean, like I'm taking for the first few days, I released a bunch of updates in a row

I already had planned a bunch of things to add to the app after it initially went down to the 1.0 went out. But now, like, I'm taking my time. I'm just taking all my time to just fix the obscure bugs that people have found and add some new things that people are suggesting. For example, the next release, I'm going to release probably next week or so. Somebody suggested that TinyStart, it should not clear the search field immediately.

So for example, if you're doing the calculations in there, you're doing 2 plus 2, and jumping back and forth between TinyStart and document to fill in the results, maybe you want the previous calculation to persist in TinyStart. So I've added that, so now there's a setting so you can say, hey, keep the previous query for 30 seconds before clearing it. Nice. So, yeah, anyway. That's cool. Yeah, this is good. I'm happy. I assume people listening to the show are among people who tried the app. And thank you for the feedback.

It's been great. Nice. And if you haven't tried the app, what are you doing? It's great. Yeah. The fourth week in a row we'll have a subscription. It's very good. Matt did a video on it. I swear my video on it is coming out soon. If it's not out by the time this episode is out, something horrible has gone wrong. So by the time this episode comes out, it should be out by then. Something horrible has gone wrong is what you said. Yeah. If it's not out by then, come and check on me.

But yeah, anyways. We have some exciting news. So not the next episode, but the episode after that will be episode 100 of Comfort Zone, which, yeah, that's pretty exciting. Let me do the reaction thing. Where's the, there you go, fireworks. There you go. Yes, fireworks. So we're kind of brainstorming a few ideas, but one of the ideas we had for that episode is let's get some questions.

So in the description or show notes or whatever it's called, I get YouTube brained and I mix them up. Sorry. But in the show notes, there is the link to a feedback form. Send in your questions. Title it episode 100 question or something like that. Just first line or something like that. And ask us anything you want. It could be a follow-up to a challenge or a topic, something you want to know, something you want us to talk about, whatever. Especially in politics. want or maybe my red sauce recipe maybe you want my red sauce recipe my red sauce recipe is amazing

which i actually can't give you the recipe because it's it's it's a free-flowing idea that just you know it evolves it's like jazz my red my red sauce recipe is jazz title yeah i thought you're gonna say it was like claude mythos it's too dangerous to give to the general public it is it is dangerous it's spicy that's a spicy meatball anyways uh sending your questions for episode 100 uh we might have some other stuff for that or we might not i don't know we're figuring it out as we go along it's it's uh what we do best here it's what we've done since day one

yeah exactly and this would be normally the part of the show where i would say and this week on cozy zone we did something something something but we recorded the episode of cozy zone that would already be i'm you're listening to this because we're recording that in a couple of days i don't know we're gonna do something for that episode i don't know what it is yet uh but cozy zone is our members only show and if you like us maybe check it out it's a whole extra episode of us every single week uh it really helps out produce the show and you know we we appreciate it but anyways we should get into the main show

unless there's anything else just one thing, you recorded without me last week and I have still not listened to the I haven't had time and I do hope that it was okay, like I'm feeling for the listeners, I hope that you were able to get through this the listeners love me and Matt we talked about the MacBook Neo, we had a combined topic Oh, I did do one thing to catch up. I looked at, so you did home screens or something like this? And I clicked the home screen links in the show notes.

Of course you did. Of course you did. I had to. And she pinched, and she zoomed, and she... And I zoomed all the way in. Yep. To the very pixel. She went to the pixel. No, the challenge that week was to just have three app icons in your dock, and that's why our home screens were in the show notes. My one comment is that, Chris, I don't think there's enough exclamation marks on your to-dos. How many exclamation marks were there? Or badges?

No, like in your fantastical to-dos? Oh, that's because I use the priority tags in Todoist. That's what that is. So I use the priority tags to sort. This is what it looks like? Yeah. So if you, in Todoist, what you can do is you can set priority tags. And what I use that for is to basically make a list. So when I open my task manager, I just work top to bottom. I don't jump around. I don't do any of that stuff because it sorts via priority. So I just work top to bottom.

So that's why they're there on the, I wish I could get rid of the exclamation marks in the fantastical widget, but you can't, but that's why they're there. Okay. All right. Let's get into the main show because I'm very excited about both of your topics. But Matt is first up. What do you got for us? Well, there was a moment you may have noticed in last week's episode where I stopped in my tracks. And I was like, oh, no, there's something in my screenshot that shouldn't be my screenshot.

And I'll say for video listeners, I'm holding up my iPhone now. I still have three apps in the dock. I'm actually still holding on to it. I am so lazy. I just, I don't have time to add the fourth app back. But the app that caused the issue was this purple one right here called Quick Reads, which is a read later service, which I've been working on since January, which is the longest I've worked on an app before launching. I mean, honestly, it's not that long in the grand scheme of things, but for me, it was quite a while.

And I released it last week. And it's going quite well. Just like Niléane said, once you get people using your app, you realize all the weird ways they use their computers, the weird ways they interact with software that make you go, huh, I never would have thought of that, but I guess I need to account for it. So yes, currently in the fix whatever issues come up, although there haven't been that many issues, which is great. And yeah, it's going pretty well. I posted the night of that there were a million words saved to the service.

We're up to 1.4 million now as we record on Friday the next day. So it hasn't, two things have happened. It hasn't gone down. The service hasn't broken. This is good. Payments are working. And I guess the third thing is I'm closely monitoring all of my costs for this because it ain't free to serve a website. like this and uh it has not exploded i was afraid it would explode in cost once people are actually using it but it's generally around what it would be is that the icon in your menu bar the train icon

the train icon yes that is i i'm hosting it um and uh yes they have they have an api for you to monitor your cost in real time so every 30 minutes i see it tick up a little bit and i'm worried about the day where it goes from like you have spent five dollars so far and then 30 minutes later it's like $700, I would have to shut something down very quickly. But maybe that will be a good day. It will mean you will have surged in some audience. I should check my payments first.

And if those have not spiked as well, then I need to shut something down. But yeah, so I don't want to talk about the whole thing. But in general, I want to say what it is and what it isn't, because it's not for everybody. It is not a raindrop or pinboard replacement. It's not a generic link saver. It's not going to save an HTML archive of all these things that you have. It is an Instapaper, a Matter, a Readwise Reader alternative. So it is for people who want to read things,

and everything about it is optimized about people who want to read. So that's what it's for. Also, critically, it is not VC funded. I cannot lose money on this. And that is why there is no free tier. That is why even on the paid tier, if you generate too much audio, I'm going to cut you off. Because it is shocking how expensive generating audio is. But I'll talk about that a bit more later. So that's what it is. It's a read later service. It's made by one guy doing his best. He's in the Midwest. If you don't like these California people. Sorry, Chris. This is the middle America read later service.

Like literally a stray bullet just came from Chicago through the middle of America, pierced the mountains and hit me. I'm so sorry. I didn't know it was going to happen until it happened. I'm sorry. Ow. Not all California people are bad. I mean, most of us are annoying, yes. And I am including myself in that bucket, but not all people from California are bad. That's what they say. Then you say fly over country and I get irate. um yeah so so this was a hard project because it was actually a lot of different things that i had

to do uh things that i had never done before uh so this is an the core of this product is an api as far as i'm aware it's the only read later service that has just like a public api that anybody can build on like you can't do that with the other guys as far as i know they really want you to use their own apps which means anyone could do the things that i've done except for sign up and like that sort of thing. But like, if you want to build your own iOS app or an Android app, which I probably will never make, you can do it. But I had to make, to make people happy,

and to make it seem reasonable. Outside of the API, there's a web app, there's a web interface, there's an iOS app currently in TestFlight, open TestFlight, by the way. So once you sign up, anyone can use it. There's a Chrome extension, there's a Safari for Mac extension, there's a Firefox extension there is an obsidian plugin for syncing your highlights it's a lot um also if you thought uh app review on the app store was slow you should try the obsidian review because it has been in review since uh early February and is still not approved it's crazy why it's a small team

I don't know who to poke if I should poke someone at this point. Well, I know the CEO of Obsidian is pretty active on Mastodon. You could probably poke him. He is. I'm actually using his defuddle library to do some of the article parsing. There you go. Anyway, that's synergy. That's big business boy Birchler figuring out the synergy right there. Yeah. I'm loving this. I'm loving this for you.

I'm really hoping this blows up and you can, you know, make this a serious, like not that it's not serious, but like you can either go all in on this as like your big development project because the world needs a really good read it later app because they all start off good, but then they don't finish well. So enjoy mine before it gets cluttered with all the things. Maybe soon you will be asking for interviews with people before they sign up. Ooh, yeah. You should go full superhuman.

Why was I able to just sign up and give you money, Matt? Why didn't I have to do a 30-minute call with you? You do so many calls with me all the time. I cannot stop talking to Chris Lawley. That's true. You're welcome. So let's talk about a few things that I think are interesting. I am super proud of the authentication in this app. And why is it an exciting thing? It's because I have done the thing that passkey enthusiasts say should be happening. But as far as I can tell, nobody does.

Which is that all the benefits of passkeys are from getting the password out of the process. But in every service I have, I have a username or email, I have a password, and I have a passkey. Quick Reads does not have any passwords. I'm not storing any passwords ever. I never will. I hate them. We do magic email links. You can keep doing those if you want. But if you are a fancy gentleman or lady, you can set up a passkey. It's super simple. It works.

It was actually surprisingly easy to integrate into it as well. And it just kind of works. So you should set up a passkey. Ooh, that's a metric I could track. Anyway, we'll get to metrics later. I love data. So that's great. So pass keys, it's wonderful. Listening to articles. This is something I do all the time.

I will walk the dog or I'll go on a run and I'll not want to listen to a podcast. I'll want to listen to an article. So I just start playing an article, throw my phone in my pocket and it's cool. So I knew I had to have that. This was the hardest thing of anything I had to do in this project. It is so hard and expensive. So I initially was like, I'm going to have the best voices you've ever heard. I'm going to 11 labs. I'm signing up for a developer account with them and I'm going to be generating articles. It was like 50 cents per article that I generated. Jeez. And I was like.

You get somebody like Federico on there and that thing's going to bankrupt you. Yeah, I was like, no, this is at first I was like, oh, this is why all the other services are $10 a month or more. And then I was like, oh, that's why they're also probably losing horrible money on people like me who do a lot of this. So I'm not using 11 Labs. I'm using a company called Async, which I'd never heard of before, but they have a pretty good text to speech model that I've integrated to. It's much more affordable, but it's very complicated because you have to send them the text.

And then you have to, they have a way to do it where you get like timestamps along the audio. So I can know where in the article you are. So I can highlight the word that they're saying as you go. And I can auto scroll the page in the web interface and on the iOS app as it goes. So you can just kind of like watch it follow along. A lot of the other apps do that. That was hard to do. It is quite hard to do. Also, if you send them a 10,000 word article, that's going to take a while to process.

And so you're just kind of sitting there waiting for it to start and just waiting and waiting. And that was not good. So I was like, okay, what do we do? So we started chunking the articles into like little blocks of text. And so that 10,000 word article is like 100 API calls. And you just do one. As soon as the first one is there, you start playing it. Then you make the second request, and in theory, their network and everything is going to outpace how quickly it's reading back to you. But then you have to stitch them together. You have to make it play smoothly so they don't notice. It is a whole thing.

And then you have to store those files somewhere. So I have an S3 bucket that I'm using. It's a whole thing. This is why it took – this project would have taken half the time if I didn't do text-to-speech. It is so much. But I'm so glad it's there. So I've never been a big text-to-speech person when it comes to articles. I'd rather just sit down and read them. But I'm going to give this a shot. I signed up for the basic tier, but I'm going to give this the old college try.

And I'll switch my subscription and figure out how to do that later. But, yeah, because my issue with all the text-to-speech stuff in the past, and I think this is why I've never really used them, is they always sounded too robotic, but now we're in this age of they don't. They sound very normal. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I will say there's only one voice right now. Multiple voices will come. I cannot tell you how hard it was to get this out the door. So, one voice right now.

For $10,000, I'll record my voice for you. You know what I was thinking? I was thinking because with Eleven Labs, they have a voice clone feature. And so I was like, I wonder if I could upload a bunch of this audio. And then if you use quick reads, the voice is me. Oh, no. Oh, my God. So that's listening to articles. I want to talk about paywalled content because this is a tricky one. How do you handle paywalled stuff?

So you have a subscription to Mac Stories as a random example of something everybody should be subscribed to. And you get the email at the end of the week, and it's got the article at the end of the week, and it's got all this stuff, but you have to log in to see it. How do you do that with a read later service? If you save just a random link in the web interface or in the iOS app, you just hit add link, paste in the link, it's not going to work.

It's not going to show you the content because you're not logged in. My server isn't logged in. However, if you're on the page, you're logged in, all the content is there. If you're using the browser extension or on iOS, the just share sheet thing, it will grab all the content and save the whole page for you. So if you're logged in, you can save paywalled stuff. If you're not logged in, this is not a way to circumvent the paywalls. This is the thing you can sometimes do with some of the other services, because I think they cache and share the content of URLs between users.

So if someone saves an article and someone else comes by later and saves the same link, instead of them pulling the info again, they just say, oh, we already have this article. Here's the text. Give it to this user. So. Oh, OK. Yeah. So some people like that because it gets around paywalls. But I didn't think that was what this should do. So I tried to make sure that if you subscribe to stuff, it's easy to save it. But if you are not and are looking for some weird workaround, it ain't going to do that for you. I'm so sorry.

I'm not sorry, but I'm just saying I'm sorry. I also did special stuff for social media. So if you just use defuddle on, which is the HTML parser that I'm using, I also fall back to readability if for whatever reason the service blocks defuddle. If you do that, the social links don't look great. However, Mastodon has an API. Blue Sky has an API. And there are libraries out there that let you parse threads, posts.

So what I've done is a special thing for those, is if you pass in one of those, it will parse it correctly. It'll put like the user's avatar in the Favicon thing. So social media posts should play nicely. I appreciate that. because we're getting oh my gosh we're getting very close to wwdc in this season where i will end up saving a ton of posts of like hey i found this really weird thing that apple didn't show off

in the keynote so i i save all of those so i can reference them back uh so i appreciate that nice um i'll go quickly uh payments are a thing i have to link payment ids in my payment system to my system, link them up. I need to check when you open the service. Is it still active? Did they cancel their payment? That's a whole thing. Actually, I do appreciate this is one of the things you get with the app store. You just ask the system and it's like, yeah, they're subscribed. It's fine. There's a little more work

when you're doing it on your own. I am using the app BRRR, B-R-R-R which is a app for Yeah, it's a webhook basically that just you send requests to it and it sends you a push notification on your phone. It's cool. It's nice. So I currently have that set up to buzz me every time someone signs up because it's right. I hope, well, I hope for your sake, at one point you're like, I need to turn this off.

And I mean that in the best possible way. Yes. It's too much, but it's fun. So I'm using that. And then I'm using, oh, there's a whole email system. I'm going to stop in a second, but there's like a whole, I need to send emails. So I needed to use a service for that. I use Resend, which is a nice platform for that. Actually, when I woke up this morning, I had to upgrade that service because I was on the free tier and I was about to run into limits. So I suddenly have to pay for that, which is good news, bad news.

But yeah, Resend, really nice. I actually have that configured now to send me like a daily report of like, here's how many people signed up, here's how many articles were saved and that sort of thing. And the final thing I had to do was I had to build an admin portal for myself. This is the thing I didn't really think about until late in the process where I was like, how do I know what users I have? And what if they have an issue? And how do I know when they subscribed and what they've done? And oh, Lordy, how do I do any of this? So now I have. You export the database, of course. Oh, God.

um i now have uh uh this uh it's called backstage and it's basically just an admin portal that lets me see some basic stats um i'm not really looking at what people are saving although the closest thing i guess i have to that is i did create a little table of the top domains people are saving just to get an idea for what sort of articles people are saving to the service i'm not looking not the exact URLs, but the domains are interesting. You'll be shocked to hear it is a lot of tech and Apple stuff. MacStories is number four on the list. And The Verge is number one. Not number one. MacStories gang, get to it.

There's a revenue thing where I can see a breakdown of who's subscribed to what. I have a user list where I can see users. I have an announcement system, so I can send to the interface, like I'm carrot weather, pretty happy about that. And some error logging. So it was a lot. But I'm very happy I just released the stupid thing. And by stupid thing, I mean great thing. Yeah. So I've been playing around with it, and I really like it. I have two feature requests for you. Oh, no. Is it a clipboard manager? Because I cannot. No. Well, yes.

A clipboard manager and hush. Please put Hush in this app, inside this app. No, first one is, so you have the ability to do tags, but I don't see a way to like filter the tags. So if I had a bunch of stuff tagged newsletters or Mac stories or something like that, I don't see a way to filter just those tags. And that would be nice. And then the other- Let me address that one first, just so our listeners can keep up. I hate tags. I do not use tags, but people seem to love tags.

so this is also a late addition you can tag articles there's actually if you go into settings go into tags you can actually set up rules to automatically tag domains so if you say i saw that yep so you can automatically set tags if you want i could probably add more logic there but on the search page you can click on your tags there and it'll show you those um yeah oh okay i I see. It's something. So maybe it is something. Maybe the ability to have a drop-down lit, just like another on that sidebar,

have another section that just says tags, and you can turn it on or off or something. Yeah. That could work. I do see a bug where I tagged something. Before you were talking about this isn't used for a bookmarking app, I went ahead and tried it as a bookmarking app. saved an app from the app store to it and tagged it app but i deleted it and but that app tag is still there so even though there's nothing tagged with app so maybe a way to delete older tags um or

remove them if there's nothing associated with that tag anymore yep that's that's good feedback from someone who uses tags so that makes sense and then the other thing and you probably won't want to do this because it'll be a whole thing but one thing that i love is the ability to give um like newsletters an email address and have it auto add that newsletter into a read it later service so i don't have to manually add it loving the feedback john ford he's gave this exact same

feedback during the beta um i agree this is a thing people do who are not me um this is a thing would have to figure out how to do um but yes i appreciate the feedback and i've put it in the backlog okay all right okay those are those are my two things expect more text messages from me now that i've i've been able to sit down and start playing with it i've been a bad friend and i haven't been able to play with it until now that's okay that's okay but other than that i really love

it i understand matt's um concern about dealing with more email stuff i i get it yeah like i i get now i want i wouldn't want to do it either but i also know like i want that feature so yeah well i just paid for more email stuff so maybe maybe resent has a thing i can do maybe yeah but it's it's a handy feature like that's something i miss because i've stopped using

um what was whatever rss service i was using uh i stopped using that feed bin was it yeah it was feed bin uh because they give you an email address that you can use for newsletters and it automatically imports that stuff so i i've gone back to having newsletters go to my inbox and i don't like that nice well that's it it's quick reads i will say so i have not signed up uh

because obviously i'm me i will i will not be using this a system at least she's honest yes i i will forget about it as soon as it uh as it slips my mind which is immediately so so yeah but uh looking at it uh it looks really nice i think you're very good app designer and it shows especially when you're doing web stuff

yeah honestly very pretty thank you i i am so much more confident designing things on the web than i am on ios yeah yeah that makes sense i guess i've been doing it for like 20 years so i guess that makes sense um but yeah thank you yeah and i like that your buttons look like buttons i think this is a trend that we should bring back uh but oh i'm so happy with my buttons yeah yeah

it's good it's it's really good and i like that it's not and i mean this in the best possible way because read it later services always start off simple and then they get overly complex with like, I just became your podcasting app and all these other things. And it's like, no, it's just a place for me to put things I want to read later. And I love that. Yep. Nice. Okay. Niléane, I heard you had a big life event.

Yes, I'm in the future now. Whoa. Are Matt and I in the past then? I don't know. Maybe you were already in the future. And I joined you in the future. Okay. Although Chris is using an iPad, so he's in the past. I am currently not using an iPad right now. I'm sitting at a MacBook Pro. My iPad is behind me. If you're watching the video, I'm pointing at the iPad. It's off. So it just looks like a black slab. Okay. So, yes, I got a new Mac. Yeah. This is my first one in four years, like my first new Mac in four years.

I got, is it four? I had the M2 MacBook Air, and I was out in 2022. I think I bought it a few months after it was out. So, yeah, about four years. Yeah, four years. Wow. Yeah. Nice. Some days I felt like that Mac was still brand new. Time passes. Fun fact about that MacBook Air. I was at the WWDC where it launched, and there was a hands-on area afterwards in the Steve Jobs Theater. So we all walked over to the Steve Jobs Theater,

and then all of a sudden the old-school media people started lining up to the side of the hands-on where these MacBook Airs were set up, like this floating display. And I walk past him and all these old school media people start yelling at me. Like, just, just get out of the way. Get out of the way. Like, what the hell? Like, I'm just walking over here. Like, whatever. Turns out Tim Cook was walking in behind me. Oh. They were trying to get a shot of him. And Chris is just there. Yep.

Yep. That's great. Yep. I was expecting something related to the MacBook Air. No. Nope. Tim Cook was walking behind me. Speaking of which, bye-bye. Anyway, so I was saying I've got a new MacBook. You know, I've been like working around my storage issues. And it was all right, but it's tiring.

And also, I did not have the budget to upgrade. Tiny Start has helped immensely fund a new Mac. So that's great. This is like money in my bank account that was not expected to be there. So all bonus. So yeah, I told you in our group chat, I got the base M5 MacBook Pro. And it's great. I think it's...

So first thing, it's chunky. It's got ports that I will never need. But okay. For real, I only noticed that when I got home. I had completely forgotten that there was a feature, the HDMI port. When I looked on the side, I was like, oh, that's there. And an SD card reader too. And an SD card, like, this will, like, be plugged with dust at some point

because I will never insert anything into that. Yeah, and I got a, so the base model has one terabyte already. So this is, like, major upgrade in terms of local storage. Because you were talking about getting, like, a 512 gig one in the past. I don't even know if this was on the show or in our group chat. You were just, like, maybe a 512 gig MacBook Air or something like that. but like one terabyte, that's four times the storage. That's math. That's how math works.

And yeah, by the way, Tiny Start can calculate that. Let me do 256 times four. RFK Jr. could probably use that. 124. Yeah, I think that math's out. Yes. Nice. Yeah, I did upgrade one thing on that base model. That is the storage. the RAM sorry I got 24 gigs of RAM um because I was coming from 16 and my MacBook Air I was

making it swap uh all the time and that was causing my distress lately because not only was my Mac swapping all the time which is fine because like the M chips deal with that just fine um but also I was out of storage all the time. So there's nothing to swap into. And macOS would be like, hey, I will stop doing anything for a little while. Just hang on. Yeah. I was telling, I think I told this Chris off-air at some point, like recently I was on my M2 MacBook Air,

I was doing something, I don't remember, and macOS just locked up. Like it stopped responding. Oh, yeah. And no mouse movement. There was mouse movement. It was just moving every two seconds or something on screen. And no keyboard, no nothing. And that was frightening because I tried to force power it off by holding the Touch ID button. Did not work. And I had no idea that could be possible. It's a bit worrying.

That's not a good feeling. No. That's, yeah. I thought, like, this is a hardware thing. It will just power it off no matter what's happening. But it did not power off. I think that's worrying in terms of what does this button do, actually? How is it wired inside? Yeah, it's not a physical kill switch. It's probably, hey, this button has been... There's low-level software there, but it's still software. Yes. And it looks like that software was also choking on itself, just like the rest. So, yeah.

This drove the decision to upgrade. Now, Niléane, my comments and social media mentions have been filled with people since my MacBook Neo review, where I criticized 8 gigabytes of RAM, saying that Macs never run out of RAM. They don't have issues. There's no reason to need more RAM. And you're telling me that there's actually issues when you run out of RAM and have low storage? This is shocking. Okay. I'm just going to file that away. Like I said, it's fine as long as you have storage to swap into. And if you run out of that, it's game over. It's hard.

It's hard to unlock macOS. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So it's the base M5, 24 gigs of RAM, one terabyte of storage. That's a good machine. But most important question, what color? Silver. Silver. Ooh, okay. So my M2 Air was midnight. I really like that. But when do I change? When do I update my Mac? Like twice a decade at this rate.

twice or thrice a decade. So this is my one opportunity to change it, and there's only one other option with the Pro model. See, what you don't understand is the more you give Apple, the less fun options you get. See, if you go with the MacBook Neo, you get a lot of fun options, and you don't have to give Apple that much money. MacBook Air, you get a little more options, though that Sky Blue, I had a review unit of that Sky Blue. It is not blue in any context whatsoever.

and then you go MacBook Pro and I have the space gray MacBook Pro and it's fine but yeah my belief is when it comes to Macs the correct color to get is whatever is not the color you had last time and I felt this when I went from the M2 to the M4 for my MacBook Pro I got the same silver and I kind of opened it up and I was like I can't really tell the difference it feels bad it feels bad You just spend two grand and you're like, is it the same thing? Uh-oh. Did you get,

I think this is an option on the base one, did you get the nanotexture display or the standard display? Oh, so interesting thing. So when I was looking for this Mac, I was evaluating multiple options. One option I was evaluating was getting an M4 Pro refurbished or second hand or something finding a deal of that it's impossible to find actually it's a rare breed, if you find it, it's extremely expensive which doesn't make sense because

you're almost at the price of the new M5 Pro, so what are you doing, you're asking in your head, you're asking the seller that isn't in front of you. What are you doing? What are you expecting selling it at this price? I get it. As an M4 Pro owner, this thing's unbeatable. No one's computer is better than mine. This is great. I have no desire to upgrade to the M5, M4 Pro for life. As an M4 Max owner, my computer is better. Oh, stop. Oh, my God. I did at some point find an M2 Max

deal and looking at benchmarks and whatnot this is like a monstrosity still in 2026 so i could have maybe gone for that but also there was the issue of the battery wasn't brand new it was yeah so yeah anyway i i think when it comes to laptops if you're not gonna buy the go through the apple refurbished program which they replace all that like they put a new battery and stuff in it if you're not going

to do it just buy a new one because that having a new battery because you don't know what somebody's done with that battery like yeah has it is it a device that was always plugged in like you know i know macOS does some stuff but um oh if you buy second hand just ask the setter what's the battery cycle count uh and it looks like most people are doing that now by the way they put it at this inference like all the listings i was looking at they just put in in the listing uh they have a screenshot or even photo of the photo of the macbook screen showing the battery count because

people can't take screenshots in anymore um or they think they're gonna fake the screenshot like like yeah you know yeah maybe they'll yeah maybe yeah although you could put it in you could fake it then there's a this is not important there's a guy there's a customer there's someone that i deal with at work that doesn't know how to take a screenshot. And so he uses his phone to take screenshots, but he stands like three feet away from his laptop, takes the photo and then sends it to me in Slack. And is like, and so I'm, I'm feeling like Niléane pinching to zooming and enhancing to be the,

uh, see the, the action ID that I'm looking for. And it's, it's crazy. Computer enhance. Some people are wild. Yes. Command shift four and command shift three people. That's it. But to answer your question, Chris, so, I was also looking, obviously, at the Apple refurbished store. And on there, some very interesting deals. The M5, the base model M5, was on there in the French Apple refurbished store. Already? Wow. Yeah, there's a bunch of them. Of course, they come and go.

One of them was the base model M5, 16 gigs of RAM, 2 terabytes of storage. and nano-textured display. So that was very tempting because it was like at the same price of the one I got in the end. But except the one I got in the end has 24 gigs, but only a single terabyte and no nano-texture. And then I concluded,

I really don't care about the nano-texture. But it was tempting. It's weird because there's this very specific configuration on the Apple Store that's just very tempting with the nanotexture. Somebody bought that and then bought it because that's a custom order one right there. Yeah. Like, that's, yeah. So I have nanotexture on mine, and I like it for when, like, at WWDC, it was really nice because we were all sitting outside, and I was editing our episode of Comfort Zone,

and, you know, the sun hits it, and that's nice. But, like, where I sit on our couch, our sliding glass door to our backyard is right behind me. And if I'm working in that spot with the MacBook Neo, I'm, like, trying to, like, angle it just right. Looking there with my MacBook Pro or my iPad Pro, I'm like, yeah, no problem. I have a nanotexture thing, or on my iPad Pro, I have the paper-likes, I have the matte screen protector, and I'm like, yeah, this is no big deal. So it is nice if you have those specific use cases. Yeah, I guess. but like to facing the truth the truth is I'm

I'm an indoor person I rarely go out and when I go out when I use my laptop outside it's either on the train for a few hours at a time for a long trip or like some places that's not my place but it's always indoor so it was tempting but it's really not useful to me but yeah. Have you noticed the difference between the thermals of your M2 MacBook Air and 5 MacBook Pro because while they have the same, well,

they have the base chip in both of them, the MacBook Pro obviously has fans, whereas the MacBook Air didn't. I feel like I do notice a very noticeable difference. Like, I keep my MacBook plugged in all day to the dock, to the Thunderbolt dock, and do all sorts of things, and rarely turn it off, only at night. And I can tell that after a few hours, things are still fine. Whereas on the M2 Air,

I could tell that it had been throttling down, especially if I've been using it for a few hours plugged in with the big display and the dock. I feel like I'm noticing this, But it's not something major for now. Something I've noticed just today is Xcode. It builds my app like this. This is... I did not expect or want it.

I did not even want some performance improvement with Xcode. It was just fine. I'm building a small app. This is Tiny Start. It's tiny. And yet on the M5, I'm noticing like really I click the play button to run a debug build. This it's instantaneous. Like it just runs as soon as I hit. Maybe like there's one second when I make a change, I rebuild. So, yeah, that's a big improvement in terms of performance. And I'm noticing. That's awesome. Yeah. That's fantastic.

Yeah. And otherwise, I wanted to touch on one last thing. I did the Mac migration thing process. And this is my first time doing that, actually. I've never done this before. And the way I did this, not expecting it to be a thing, but I thought, hey, it's probably a thing, is I grabbed a Thunderbolt 4 cable and connected the two MacBooks together on the Thunderbolt ports.

And yeah, when you start the migration assistant on a new Mac as well as on the old Mac, it says connection type Thunderbolt. And you click start. First, the new Mac had to download a new version of macOS. So it rebooted a few times for that. But then I click start to start the migration. And it took two minutes, less than two minutes at most. I don't remember, but it felt very quick.

Like, I went out of the room, grabbed a drink, expecting that I would play the Switch in the living room for a while and then come back a few, I don't know, 40 minutes later. But no, I came back with my drink and it was done, transferred. That's awesome. That was extremely fast. It looks like it's using the full speed of Thunderbolt there. And yeah, just a few, like my experience with this is it's very impressive. Like I turned on my new MacBook Pro and it was underwhelming almost because everything was just there.

Just like when we were storing a time machine snapshot, like it's just everything is there. The one thing I noticed is I opened Fantastical and I had to be logging on my calendar accounts in there. fantastic hell is the worst about yeah migration stuff you always have to sign back in to everything uh ivory i had a log back in with my Mastodon accounts but that's okay because it's not the cache or anything so it just tells you hey you need to log in again you click login and it's done

uh vivaldi like vivaldi virtually the same like all of my weird configs extensions user scripts I made Chrome extensions for myself, by the way, for my Vivaldi setup. Maybe I will talk about these more someday. But they're all there. Just Xcode, all of this. I was worried maybe about the developer ID certificates and all of that. No, it's all there. So, yeah, it's great. Fantastic. Oh, man. Yeah, this reminds me of back in the day,

like 10 years ago, I dabbled in iOS development and the developer certificate in Xcode was an absolute nightmare to deal with when you switched computers. You had to go to App Store Connect and download a new file. And it was a whole thing. Now you just select your name from a dropdown. It's great. I did not even have to do that. You didn't even have to do the dropdown. No, I opened Xcode and it's just like it was the day before on my M2 Air. so that's great yeah why can't iphones do that why is it still like i know an hour even like cabled up

like do you guys have luck with iphone transfers when you do a cable to cable transfer i feel like it ignores the cable two-thirds of the time i've never done cable transfer uh it i did it when i went from the 16 pro to the 17 pro i did it and it failed and i had to go back to the uh device to device wireless transfer which takes forever but okay yeah anyway i'm glad this computer is working out and it is those little things like yeah or like the xcode builds that are just like oh

oh that's like that's like not no no wait at all that's great yeah and just having so many tabs open and I don't know. I think that's just like the single core performance of the M5 improvement is just things open just a tad quicker compared to the M2. Just small little things, yes. But yeah, I'm in the future now. And here in the future, Trump is still president. Sorry to say. We need to go further in the future. Yep.

can't be and so is my phone unfortunately uh well we should get to the challenge and appropriately and when i issued the challenge i did not know Niléane was laptop like i found out date a couple yeah this is the second time you've issued a challenge that seems innocuous and then Niléane comes back and is like i have a whole new computer yeah the iphone as well last year it was something about like doing something with your music and you were like i needed a terabyte of storage on my iPhone. What was I to do? What was I to do? I get it. I totally get it. You need it for your work.

But the challenge was to use your laptop in laptop mode. No plugging into an external monitor and you just had to use it for a day. And I was kind of curious if this would change any of our setups or settings or apps or anything that we used. Apparently it changed everything for Niléane. I'm taking full credit for this. For me, it actually surprisingly didn't change much. I just sat on the couch for a day and worked from my laptop. The battery life on the MacBook Pro is insane. I never had to plug in at all.

The screen, because I have the 16-inch model, the screen is big, beautiful, bright, mini LED. Like, it's nice. You know the one thing I found that was kind of getting annoying after a couple of hours? The edges of the MacBook Pro when typing on it. They're kind of sharp. Yes. They're kind of sharp. They're a little iPhone 12-y. They're a little iPhone 12, iPhone 13. And you know what? They're sharper than the air. Are they really? I think so. I have nothing to prove it, but it feels like it. I think maybe because it's taller. Maybe.

Yeah. But I felt like after a couple of hours, I was like, oh, man, that really feels like it's kind of not digging in, but just a little uncomfortable. So I know the MacBook Pro is supposed to get redesigned here soon. and I wonder if they'll kind of zedges a little bit. Oh, by the way, speaking of the tallness of the MacBook Pro, I've noticed that if you put the M2 Air closed next to the MacBook Pro open, the 14-inch one at least,

the bottom part of the MacBook Pro is exactly to the millimeter, the same height as the MacBook Air closed. And it feels very satisfying because you can pass your finger over the two of them. And it's like there's almost no limit. Which goes to show the MacBook Pro really isn't that thick. Because if the only difference is the screen, the screen is very thin. Yes. So the difference in the height from the M2 Air and the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro is the height of the screen.

Yeah, which isn't very much at all. Like, that's very thin. So, Niléane, I'm kind of curious. You talked about the MacBook Pro, but you didn't really talk about the display going from the MacBook Air to the MacBook Pro. I was kind of curious. Like, did you notice a big difference there? Like, how was this challenge for you? So, I did this yesterday, and it was only my second day using this new laptop. So, yeah. One thing I did, I watched jet lag on this new MacBook Pro. And yes, the screen is extremely good. Very nice.

You notice the contrast, especially. The improved contrast is what jumps at me. It feels weird because the colors are so very different compared to my main screen, main big screen on my desk. but when you're using it on its own it's great ProMotion is is very nice it's actually very nice I do stand by my previous take previous takes about it is that I care more about ProMotion on my phone than I ever will

on a big display or on a laptop display I just don't care that much about it. It's not that big of a jump compared to when you're using it on the phone. I agree with you. I think it's much more noticeable on smaller devices. Yeah. But I will say 240 hertz external monitor, it's very noticeable, especially when you go from the MacBook Neo, which is locked at 60 hertz. Yeah. And you're like using that. And then all of a sudden,

you plug your macbook pro into uh 240 40 hertz you know like oh this is smooth very i'm guessing on a big very big screen it makes a difference on a 30 inch 27 inch yeah so yeah uh it was great using it a laptop mode uh i was it made me try like for real like what it would feel like in terms of the weight difference compared to the air. It's all right. I think it's okay. I do feel it's way heavier, but it's okay. What else? What else? Yeah, that's it. Yeah.

Summing up, I'm just in the future in terms of display as well now. It's not that big of a jump, like in terms of first impressions, but it is very good. and feels very good. I was not expecting it to be this sharp as well. It's something I did not expect. It does look very sharp compared to the MacBook Air's display. Yeah, the contrast ratio, especially when you're using all...

If you use dark mode and have really black, black stuff, the screen is very noticeable. I have a wallpaper right now from the Artemis 2 mission. And it's just the moon. And it's the moon and then the earth is in the background. And then it's just black all the way around it. And it is very, like, it's gorgeous. I need to try looking at some black stuff to look at the black levels. Yeah.

This reminds me of when I had the M1 iPad Pro as my main computer. This had the mini LED as well. And yeah, that was an amazing screen. Nice. Matt, how did you do with this challenge? So I did this yesterday as well. And I worked from my couch. So like workday, workday from the couch, not like fun work, just like day job work.

And I didn't enjoy it. Oh. I mean it was fine I do actually like sometimes stepping away from the big monitor if I need to like focus on something because there's just like so much stuff here that I can do I just bounce around a lot um I guess is what iPad people say um but uh on the smaller screen it's easier for me to just kind of like go through my email and focus on that or whatever um in a way that I just don't do as effectively on the uh on the big screen so that's nice but it's just a pain um

i do video calls all day so uh need to figure out find a way to light myself that doesn't have like my entire home in the background and the place i would like to work which is on the couch is has a window behind me so i'm just like it's the worst possible lighting for a video call and i can't have Cause I roll into meetings with this setup and it's like, Whoa, look at the guy with the big mic and everything is great. And he sounds good and all that. And then I'm like calling in like a, just a monster, like a gremlin from, from the couch. So, um, most people do that.

I, those people do that. And I, I, I get it. It's fine. But, um, so it was okay. It was okay, but I wouldn't do it all the time. I think maybe an hour a day would be actually a nice thing for me to do to focus but a whole work day from the couch is uh not for me see i i will typically like if i really need to focus on a writing especially writing editing i i obviously i like having a big monitor but if i really need to focus on writing or doing email or something like that that's when i will go sit on the couch just have a laptop or an ipad or whatever and just bust out

a bunch of stuff because it is much more focused because it is a smaller display but yeah uh sorry matt that's okay yeah i mean i i'm on my personal computer now i have one two three four five six there are six windows i can see some content from so there's a lot that can distract me see right now i only have two i have notion and edge for for a call for riverside and that's so i don't distract myself because if there was anything else open I'd be distracting myself right now.

You don't want to know what my screen looks like right now. But what I do want to know is what your challenge is for next week. I had an idea. Okay. So the challenge is imitate one of your two co-hosts with your tech setup. I don't know if that's clear. like pick one of the other two. So in my case, I will pick either Matt or Chris.

Choose one of their quirks in regard to their setup and try to imitate that for next week. Perhaps let's bring something visual, maybe a screenshot or something. I don't know. Yeah. A photo of your setup. I don't know. It could be anything. So it could be hardware, software, whatever. And we, the other two, try to guess which co-host you tried to imitate. Okay. I like this.

Now, remember, I won't be here next week. Oh, that's right. But what we do is when you guys get to this, text me, and I will have an image ready to go. And I'll be driving to pick up the puppy, So I'll have Danielle send it. But text me, like, maybe give me, like, a five-minute heads-up, like, when you guys transition to the challenge, and I will have a photo ready to go. And we can put it in the submission.

You guys can try and guess, and we can follow up in two weeks on episode 100. Okay. Okay. Maybe you can tell us which one it is in Invisible Ink or something. Yeah. Or you can just text. After you guys guess, you can text and I'll have Danielle respond. Because I'll be driving, so I won't be able to send it. Alright, I like this. This is a fun one. I'm bummed I'm not going to be here for it, because that's hilarious.

Alright. So this brings us to the end of the show, and I have an end of the show question for the two of you, and it's pretty simple, straightforward one. Space or dinosaurs? This does not make sense. Space or dinosaurs? It makes absolute sense. Space or dinosaurs? They go together. You know, history. Tragically. Oh, dinosaurs are from space. Tragic history. Dinosaurs are from space. Space or dinosaurs? Yeah, space or dinosaurs.

Space. I'm going to say space for me, too. Basically, you're asking future or past? No, I'm asking are you a space nerd or a dinosaur nerd? Okay, okay. I guess space I mean they're both greats yeah like look I've been so when I was a kid I was in the Boy Scouts and one of the cool things was when we were living in Texas we actually got to spend the night in Houston at NASA and that was pretty cool because we got to spend the night in the museum so like we got to see

Apollo capsule and all that stuff so yeah pretty cool pretty cool pretty nerdy But that's the end of the show Thank you all so much for listening Please send in some questions for episode 100 We would love to answer anything Whether it's follow up on a challenge A topic or something new Feel free to send it in Matt, Niléane, anything you want to plug Promote I'm in the process So we're moving soon So I'm in the process of

Reluctantly Dismantling my Lego sets. Oh. I took down the Saturn V the other day. And I will recommend the method that I used, which is, I think, the universal one. Pick up... No, not a baseball bat. No, pick up the manual for the set and follow it in reverse. Start from the end and take a part in reverse

so that the booklet, the manual, will instruct you to put pieces back into the numbered bags. You can recreate the numbered bags. I used IKEA fridge, I don't know, transparent IKEA bags. Black bags, sort of things, yeah. I numbered them, and so in the end, I just have a bunch of numbered bags with all the Lego pieces, and if I want to put it back together, I just have to follow the manual normally. So I will say, and I don't know how your moving situation is going to be,

but when I moved here, we literally, Danielle's car, so I had a big U-Haul truck to move my stuff, but Danielle's car was the designated Lego car. So I put things carefully in there. And then when we were also, like, when I was moving out of my condo, We had a few weeks, too, where she would come over to my condo, and I'd just put some Legos in her car, and she'd bring them back here. So I didn't actually disassemble anything, and I only lost a couple of pieces to a couple of sets. Oh, that's too much. This part, things stayed intact.

No, I literally mean like two or three small pieces. Too many pieces. No, you can't lose anything. It's better than taking them all apart and having every belt on. That's what I've chosen to do. I will not dismantle everything, just the big ones. okay that's smart the Saturn V i still need to dismantle the discovery shuttle the LM i have the big LM uh the lunar module uh what else the iss is not big it's just that big the iss one is precarious yes danielle had that one it's flimsy that's so the only one that really

fell apart for me was the UCS X-Wing one, and that one is flimsy. That one is crazy flimsy. So I had to spend some time rebuilding that one. I do remember that was the only one. Okay, we should probably wrap up the show here, though. Thank you all so much for listening. Thank you to MacStories for having us. Have a great day. Talk to you later. Bye.