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 Lolly and each
week I am joined by two incredible Co hosts.
As always, I am joined by the rambunctious Matt Merchler.
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 be called.
Be called, you're being called. Wow.
I cannot speak rambunctious. But we're also joined by the
rascally nee Leon. Nee Leon, how are you?
I'm doing well, as you can see if you're watching the video,
I'm in the white void because we start, we're moving soon.
So I I started taking down things on the wall and the
apartment is a mess. I thought you were entering your
Johnny I've era. Yeah, no.
Just pure white room. Oh yeah, that guy.
On. Just like that guy on YouTube
who made all White Studio and called it an Apple store.
Anyways, we have a tiny topics to go over.
Somebody take the microphone away from me.
OK, 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 Tiny
Star. 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. Oh, that's great.
Yeah, 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 that are impossible to find that
you can never reproduce. So right now I'm in.
I'm like I'm taking for the first few days I released a
bunch of updates in a row because I already had planned a
bunch of things to add to the app after it initially went out
to date one point O went out. But now like I'm taking my my
time. I'm just needing all my time to
just fix the obscure bugs that people have found and add some
new things that people are suggesting.
For example, I the next release I'm going to release probably
next week or so. Somebody suggested that tiny
start. It should not clear the search
field when immediately you know so that for example, if you're
doing the calculations in there, you're doing 2 + 2 and jumping
back and forth between Tinystar and document to fill in the
results. Maybe you want to the previous
calculation to persist in Tinystar, 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.
So yeah, anyway, that's cool. Yeah, this is good, I'm happy to
say. 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, it's. Just a launcher.
It's 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. Yeah.
So it should, 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 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 that's pretty exciting, 100.
Episodes reaction thing. Where's the There you go,
fireworks? There you go.
Yes, fireworks. So we're 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
can 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 at
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 you know if you want to know.
Politics we 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 going to say it
was like Claude Mythos. It's too dangerous to give to
the general public. It is.
Dangerous.
It's spicy. That's a spicy meatball.
Anyways, sending your questions for episode 100.
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 what we do best here. That'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 and you're listening to this because we're recording
that in a couple of days. I don't know we're going to do
something for that episode. I don't know what it is yet, 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.
It really helps out produce the show and you know, we we
appreciate it. But anyways, we should get in
the main show unless there's anything else.
Just 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 OK,
like I'm feeling for the listeners.
I hope that. Oh my God.
You were able to get through this.
The listeners love me and Matt. We we talked about the MacBook
Neo. We had a combined.
Topic 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.
Of course you did. Of course you did.
I had to. Remember that she.
Zoomed and she. And I zoomed all the way in Yep
to the. Very pixel.
She to the Pixel, Yeah. 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 do's.
How many X marks were there? Or or badges.
No like in your fantastical to do's.
Oh, that's because I use the priority tags in To Do List.
That's what that is. So I use the priority tags to
sort. Yeah.
So if you in to do is, 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's 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 fantastic L widget, but you
can't. But that's why they're there.
OK. All right, let's get in the main
show 'cause I'm very excited about both of your topics, but
Matt is first up at what do you got for us?
Well. There was a moment you may have
noticed in last week's episode where I, I lost, I, I stopped in
my tracks and I was like, Oh no, there's something to 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 3 apps in the dock.
I'm actually still holding on to that.
I am so lazy. I just, I don't have time to
that add the 4th 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 quite a while and I released it last week and it's going
quite well. Just like Neil Leon 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 1,000,000 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 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 and yes they had,
they have an API for you to monitor your cost in real time.
So every 30 minutes I see a tick up a little bit and I'm worried
about the day where it goes from.
Like you have spent $5.00 so far and then 30 minutes later it's
like you have spent $700.00. I would have to shut something
down very quickly. But maybe that will be a good
day will mean you you will have. Yes, you're right.
Surged in some audience. I should check my payments 1st
and if those have not biked 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
isn't, what it isn't because it's not for everybody.
It is not a raindrop or pin board replacement.
It's not a generic link saver. It's not going to save an like
an HTML archive of all these things that you have.
It is an insta paper, 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 unpaid tier, if you generates 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 made by one guy doing his best.
He's in the Midwest. If you don't like these
California people, sorry Chris, this is this is the middle
America we later service. I bet that like literally a
stray bullet just came from Chicago and it through through
the the middle of the America Pierce 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 peak people from
California are bad. That's what they say.
Then you say fly over country and I get irate.
I get it though. So this was a hard project
because it was actually a lot of different things that I had to
do, things that I had never done before.
So this isn't 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 the 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, to make it seem
reasonable. Outside of the API, there's a
web app, there's web interface, there's an iOS app currently in
test light, open test light, by the way.
So once you sign up, anyone can use it.
There is a Chrome extension, there's a Safari for Mac
extension, there's a Firefox extension, there is an Obsidian
plug in for syncing your highlights.
It's a lot. Also, if you thought app review
on the App Store was slow, you should try the Obsidian review
because it has been in review since early February and is
still not approved. It's crazy why it's a small
team. I I don't know who to poke if I
should poke someone at this point, but.
Well I know the C the CEO of of city is pretty active on
Macedon. You could probably poke him.
He is. I'm actually using his Defuddle
library to do some of the article parsing.
So anyway, that's that's that's big business boy Birchler
figuring out the synergy right there.
Yeah, yeah, I'm loving this. I'm I'm loving this for you.
I'm really hoping this blows up and you can, you know, make this
a 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, or you will be asking for like interviews with people
before they sign up. Yeah, you should go full.
What Superhuman. Why?
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 pass keys are from getting
the password out of the process. But in every service I have, I
have an username or e-mail, 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 e-mail links.
You can keep doing those if you want.
But if you are a a fancy gentleman or lady, you can set
up a pass key. 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 pass key.
Oh, 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 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 $0.50 per article
that I generated and I was like you.
Get somebody like Federico on there and that thing's going to
bankrupt. You 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 time stamps along with 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, OK, 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 1. As soon as the first one is
there, you start playing it. Then you make the second request
and they, 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.
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. The SO I've never been a big
like text to speech person when it comes to articles.
Like I'd rather just sit down and read them, but I, I'm going
to give this a shot. I signed up for the basic tier,
but I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, give this little
college try and I'll switch my subscription and, and, and
figure out do that later. But yeah, I because like 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, that's that's 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 for $10,000, I'll record my voice for.
You, you know what I was thinking?
I was thinking because with 11 labs, they have a voice clone
feature. And so I was like, I wonder if I
could upload it a bunch of this, this audio.
And then if you use quick reads, the voice is me.
Oh no. Oh my.
God, so that, yeah, that's, 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 e-mail 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 like sit, add link, paste in the link, it's
not going to work. It's going to, 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. 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 work around, I ain't gonna 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
favicon in the user's avatar in the favicon thing, so social
media and post should play nicely.
I appreciate that Come because we're getting, Oh my gosh, we're
getting very close to WWDC and 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.
So I appreciate that. Nice.
I'll go quickly. Payments are a thing.
I have to link payment IDs in my payment system to my system,
link them up. I need to like check when you
open the service, like is it still active?
Did they cancel their payment? Are they?
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 do it on your own. I am using the app Burr BRR,
which is a app for it's basically just a yeah, it's a
webhook basically that just you send requests to it, then 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.
I, I, 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 is.
It's too much, but it's fun. So so I'm using that and then
I'm, oh, there's a whole e-mail 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, I now have this.
It's called Backstage and it's basically just an admin portal
that lets me see some basic stats.
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 at the exact URLs, but the domains are
interesting. You'll be shocked to hear it is
a lot of tech and Apple stuff. Mac stories #4 on the list.
OK, and the Verge is #1? Not #1 Interesting.
Mac Stories 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 announcements to the
interface like I'm Carrotweather.
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, I've so I've been playing
around with it and I, I really like it.
I have two feature requests for you.
Oh. No.
Is it a clipboard manager? Because I cannot no.
Cannot 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 that would be nice and then the
other. Let me address that one first
just to just so listeners can keep up.
I hate tags. I do not use tags, but people
seem to love tags. So this is also a late edition.
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 have more logic there, but on the search page
you can click on your tags there and it'll show you those.
Yeah. Oh, OK.
I see. I it's something so maybe it is
something maybe the ability to like have like a drop down lit
like like just like another on that sidebar have like another
section that just says tags and you can like turn it on or off
or something. I do see a bug where I I tagged
something so I before you were talking about like this isn't
used for a bookmarking app. I I went ahead and tried it as a
bookmarking app and 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 a way to delete older
tags 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 like newsletters and e-mail address
and have it auto add that newsletter into a read it later
service so I don't have to manually add.
It he's loving the feedback. John Borges gave this exact same
feedback during the beta. I agree, this is the thing
people do who are not me. This is the thing I would have
to figure out how to do. But yes, I appreciate the
feedback and I've put it in the backlog.
OK, all right. OK, 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 OK. That's OK.
But other than that, I really love it.
I understand Matt's concerned about dealing with more e-mail
stuff. I, I get it, yeah, like I, I
get. Now I 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 e-mail stuff, so maybe,
maybe resend has a thing I can do.
We'll see. Maybe, yeah.
But it's it's, it's a handy feature.
Like that's something I miss because I've stopped using what
was the whatever RSS service I was using.
I stopped using that. Feedbid was it?
Yeah, it was Feedbid because they give you an e-mail 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 because obviously I'm me. I won't.
I will not be using this. A system?
No. No, at least.
She's honest, yes. I, I will forget about it as
soon as it, as it slips my mind, which is immediately so, so
yeah, but looking at it, it looks really nice.
I I think you're a 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 that makes sense. I guess I've been doing it for
like 20 years, so I guess that makes sense.
But yeah, thank you And. And I like that your buttons
look like buttons. I think this is a trend that we
should bring back. Oh, I'm.
So happy with my buttons, yeah? Yeah.
It's good. It's, it's, it's really good.
And I like that. It's not, and I mean this in the
best possible way, 'cause read it later services always start
off simple and then they get overly complex with like I, 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.
OK, Neil Leon, 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 I don't know, maybe you were
already in the future and I joined you in the future.
OK. Yeah, although Chris is using an
iPad, so he's in the past but. I am.
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. OK.
So yes, I 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 4? I had them 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.
Four years. Wow.
Yeah, some days I felt like I 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 like the hands on where the these MacBook Airs were set
up like this floating display. And I walked past them 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. They're trying to get a shot of
them. And Chris is just there.
Yep. Yep.
That's great. Yep.
I was expecting something related to the MacBook Air, but
no. Nope, Nope.
Just Tim Cook was walking behind.
Me Speaking of which, 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 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 bots that I will never
need, but OK. For real.
I only noticed like that when I got home.
Like I had completely forgotten that there was a feature, the
HDMI port. And when I looked on the side, I
was like, Oh yeah, 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 and you. Were talking about getting like
512 gig one in the past. I don't even know if this was on
the show or for in our group chat.
You're just like maybe a 512 gig MacBook Air or something like
that. But yeah, like a one terabyte.
That's that's 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 our kid. Junior could probably use that.
124, yeah, I think that maps out, yes.
Nice. Yeah, I did upgrade one thing on
that base model is that is the storage, the RAM.
Sorry, I got 24 gigs of RAM because I was coming from 16 and
my MacBook Air. I was making it swap 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, but also I was out of
storage all the time. So there's nothing to swap into
and Mac OS 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 at some
point like recently I was on my into my book.
I was doing something I don't remember and Mac W just locked
up like it stopped responding and this like no mouse movement.
There was mouse movement, like it was just moving every two
seconds or something on the screen and no keyboard, no
nothing. And that was frightening because
I tried to force power 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 no, I thought like
because like this is a hardware thing, it will just power it off
no matter what's happening, but it did not power off that.
I think that's worrying in terms of what does.
What does this button do actually, or how how is it wired
inside? Yeah, it's not a physical kill
switch. It's probably hey, there's.
There's a there's a low level software there, but it's still
software. Yes, and looks like that
software was like also choking on itself just like the rest.
So yeah, this drove the decision to upgrade.
Now, Neilian, my 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
than more RAM, and you're telling me that there's actually
issues with when you run out of RAM and have low storage?
This is shocking. OK, 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 it's hard, it's hard to
unlock Micro S. OK, OK, so so it's the base M524
gigs of RAM, one terabyte of storage.
That's a good machine. But most important question,
what color? Simva Silver.
Oh, OK. My M2 air was midnight.
I really like that. But like I when do I change?
When do I update my Mac like every like twice a decade at
this rate. Twice or thrice A decade.
So this is my one opportunity to like change it and there's only
one other option with the pro model.
See what? What you don't understand is the
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.
So that sky blue, I had a review unit of that sky blue.
It is not blue in any context whatsoever.
And then you you go MacBook Pro and I have the space Gray
MacBook Pro and it's fine. But yeah, the.
My my belief is when it comes to Max, 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, Yeah.
It feels bad because you just spend 2 grands and you're like
is it the same thing? Did did you get and maybe?
I don't know if the I think this is an option on the base one.
Did you get the nano texture display or the standard display?
Oh, so interesting thing. So when I when I was looking for
this Mac, I was evaluating multiple options.
One option I was evaluating was getting an M4 Pro like
refurbished or second hand or something.
Finding a deal of that. It's 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 like you almost
had the price of the new M5 Pro. So like what are you doing?
Like you asking in your head, you 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 will never, I have no desired upgrade to the M5M4 Pro for
life. As as an M4 Max owner, my my
computer's better. Oh my God.
I did at some point find an M2 Max deal and looking at
benchmarks and whatnot, this is like in 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.
So yeah, anyway. I I think when it comes to
laptops, if you're not going to buy the go through the Apple
refurbish 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 has it, is it a device that was always plugged in?
Like you know, I know Mac OS does some stuff but.
Oh, if you buy a second hand just ask to set a what's the
battery cycle count? And it looks like most people
are doing that now. By the way.
They do they put it a list in France.
Like all the listings I was looking at they just put in.
In the listing 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.
Or they think they're going to fake the screenshot like like.
You know, yeah, maybe they'll. Yeah, maybe they'll.
Although you could. Have put it in you could fake it
then there's a this is not important.
There's a guy, there's a, 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
3 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
Neil, I'm pinching to zooming and enhancing the, the, the see
the, the action ID that I'm looking for.
And it's, it's crazy. Computer and 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 models, M516, gigs of RAM, 2 terabytes
of storage and nanotextured 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 TB and the next nano
texture. And then I concluded, I really
don't care about the nano texture.
Wait, what's tempting like this? It's weird because like this
very specific configuration on the Apple Store, that's just
very tempting with the nano texture.
Somebody bought that and then because that's that's a custom
order one right there. Like that's, that's, yeah, I so
I have nano texture on mine and I like it for when I like at
WWDC it was really nice because we, 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, our backyard is right
behind me. And if I'm working at in that
spot with the MacBook Neo, I'm like trying to like angle it
just right being there with my MacBook Pro or my iPad Pro, I'm
like, yeah, no problem. Nanotexture thing.
Or on my iPad Pro, I have the paper likes I have the map
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 someplace else 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 have you noticed the
difference between the thermals of the your M2 MacBook Air 5
MacBook Pro? Because while they will have the
same well, they have the base trip of 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 thing things and barely turn it off only at night.
And I can tell that after a few hours it 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 with a
plugged in with the big display and the dock.
I I feel like I'm noticing this but it's not like it's not
something major for now. Something I've noticed just
today is Xcode. It just it builds my app like
this. It's this is made I I did not
expect or wanted like I did not even want some performance
improvement with Xcode. Like it was just fine.
I'm I'm building a small app. This is tiny start.
It's tiny. And yet on the M5, I'm not 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 this one second when I make a change, I rebuild.
So yeah, that's that's a big improvement in in terms of
performance and I'm noticing. That's awesome.
Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah.
And otherwise, I wanted to, to touch on, 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 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 the 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 Mac
OS, but so it rebooted, rebooted a few times for that.
But then I kicked start for to start the migration and like 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 if you,
I don't know, 40 minutes later. But no, I came back with my
drink and it was done transfer. That's.
Awesome. That was extremely fast.
It, 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're storing a
time machine snapshot, like it's just everything is there.
There's I The one thing I noticed is I opened Fantastical
and I had to be logging on my calendar accounts in there.
Fantastic health is the worst about migration stuff.
You always have to sign back in to everything.
I ivory I had to log back in with my master accounts but
that's OK because it's not purge the cash or anything.
So it just tells you hey you need to log in again.
You click log in and it's done. Vivaldi, like Vivaldi, virtually
the same like all of my weird configs, extensions, user
scripts I made. I made Chrome extensions for
myself, by the way, for Vivaldi, for my Vivaldi setup.
Maybe I will talk about these more someday, but they're all
there, like just X code, all of this.
I was worried maybe about the develop ID certificates and all
of that. No, it's all there.
So yeah, it's great. Fantastic.
Oh man, yeah that this reminds me of back in the day like 10
years ago I did AII dabbled in iOS development and the
developer certificate in X code was an absolute nightmare to
deal with when you switch computers.
You had to like go to App Store, connect and download a new file
and it was a whole thing. Now you just like select your
name from a drop down. It's great.
Yeah, Yeah, I I did not even have to do that.
I guess it's. Ah, you didn't have to do the
drop. Down.
No, it just, I opened Xcode and it's just like just like it was
the day before 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 2/3 of the time.
I've never done cable transfer. 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 device to device wireless transfer which takes
forever but. OK, Yeah.
Well, anyway, I'm glad this computer is working out.
And it is those little things like, yeah, where like the X
code 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 the like the single,
the single core performance of the M5 in the improvement is
just things open just tad quicker compared to them to just
a small little things. Yes.
But yeah, I'm in the future now. And here in the future, Trump is
still president, sorry to say. Yeah.
We need to go further depression.
Yep, can't be true. And so is Macron, unfortunately.
Well, we should get to the challenge and appropriately.
And when I issued the challenge I did not know Neil Leon 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 Neilion comes back and
it's like I have a whole new computer.
The iPhone as well. Last year it was something
about, like, doing something with your music, and you were
like, I needed a TB of storage on my iPhone.
What would I like to do? What?
Was I I get it. I 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 Neleon.
I I'm, 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. The the 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 little iPhone 12Y. They're they're little iPhone.
12 You know what they're sharper than?
Yeah. Are they really?
I think so I I have nothing to prove it but it feel like it.
I think maybe because it's taller and.
Maybe, yeah. But like I just, I, 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.
I wonder if they'll kind of Zedges a little bit.
Oh, by the way, Speaking of like 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 and disc, they're the like
the bottom part of the MacBook Pro is the 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 like over the the two of them and it's like there's
no, almost no limit like. Which goes to show the MacBook
Pro really isn't that thick because the if the only
difference is the screen, the screen is very thin.
Yes. So the difference in the height
from the M2 AI and the MacBook the the yeah, the MacBook Air
and the MacBook Pro is yeah the the height of the screen.
Yeah, which isn't very much at all like that's.
It's very thin. So Neil Leon, I'm kind of
curious. She 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 like, did you, 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, a new MacBook Pro.
And yes, the screen is extremely good, very nice.
You notice the contrast, especially the improved contrast
is is what jumps at me. It feels weird because the
colors are so very different compared to my like main screen,
main big screen on my desk. But wait, yeah, 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 by 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 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.
It's, I agree with you like it's, I think it's much more
noticeable on smaller devices, 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 and you're
like using that and then all of a sudden you plug your MacBook
Pro into 240 Hertz and you're like, oh, this is smooth.
I'm guessing on the big, very big screen makes a difference on
a 30 inch, 27 inch, yeah. So, yeah, it was great using it
in laptop mode. I was it, it made me try like
for real like what it would feel like in terms of the weight
difference compared to the air. And it's all right.
I think it's OK. I I, I do feel it's way heavier,
but it's OK. What else?
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah. I 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, like it's
something I did not expect. Like it does look very sharp
compared to the MacBook Air's display.
Yeah, the, the contrast ratio, especially when you're using
like all, like if you use dark mode and like have really black,
black stuff, the screen is very, very noticeable.
Like I have a wallpaper right now from the Artemis 2 mission
and it's just the moon and it's the, it's the, it's kind of,
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 to to to look at
the black levels. Yeah, I this this reminds me of
when I had the M1 iPad Pro as my main computer.
And this had the mini LED as well.
And yeah, that was an amazing screen.
Nice Matt, how'd you do with this challenge?
So I did this yesterday as well and I worked from my couch so
like work day work day from the couch.
Not like fun work, just like day job work.
And I didn't enjoy it. 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, I guess is what I've had people
say. But on the smaller screen, it's
easier for me to just kind of like go through my e-mail and
focus on that or whatever in a way that I just don't do as
effectively on the on the big screen.
So that's nice, but it's just a pain.
I do video calls all day so 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 that
because 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. Most people do that.
I, those people do that and I, I, I get it, it's fine.
But so it was OK. It was OK, 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 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 e-mail 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, sorry Matt. That's OK, yeah.
I mean, I, I'm on my personal computer now.
I have 123456. There are 6 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
our call for Riverside. And that's so I don't distract
myself because I, I, I, 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.
Oh yes, I had an an idea. OK, OK, 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 and we the other two try
to guess which Co host you tried to imitate.
OK, I like this. Now remember I won't be here
next week but but what we do is when you guys get to this text
me and I will have an image ready to go and I I'll be
driving to pick up the puppy. So I'll have Danielle send it,
but text me like get maybe give me like a 5 minute heads, heads
up like when you guys challenge, transition to the challenge and
I, I will have a photo ready to go and, 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.
OK, OK, maybe you can tell us which one is which one it is
invisible ink or something. Yeah, or you can just text after
you guys guess you can text and I'll have Danielle respond just.
Yeah, because I'll be driving, so I won't, I won't be able to
send it, but yeah, All right, I like this.
This is this is a fun one. This is, I'm bummed I'm not
going to be here for it because that's hilarious.
All right, 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 1 space or
dinosaurs. This doesn't 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?
Yes, that dinosaurs are from space.
Space or dinosaurs? 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? OK, OK.
Space, space, space. Yeah, Like, look, I, I, I, 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 that was pretty
cool because we got to spend the night in the music.
So like we got to see like Apollo capsule and all that
stuff. So yeah, pretty, pretty, pretty
cool. Pretty nerdy, very nice.
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 Neelyon, Anything you want to plug, promote?
I am in the process, so we're moving soon.
So I'm in the process of reluctantly dismantling my Lego
sets. I took down the Saturn 5 the
other day and I will recommend the method that I used, which is
I think the universal one pick up.
No, not not a baseball bat mat. 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 the
booklet. The manual will instruct you to
put pieces back into the numbered bags.
You can recreate the numbered bags.
I I used IKEA fridge sealed like, I don't know, transparent
IKEA bags. Yeah, black.
Bags sort of things, yeah. And numbered 1 and 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 what your, 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, like I, we had a few weeks to where she would, she
would come over to my condo and I just put some Legos in her car
and she'd bring them back here and put them like we just so I
didn't actually disassemble anything and only I only lost a
couple of pieces to a couple of set.
That's too much. Things stayed intact.
No, I'm, I'm 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 to rebuild.
Them. That's what I've chosen to do
now. I will not dismantle everything,
just the big ones. OK, that's smart.
The Saturn 5. The I still need to dismantle
the Discovery shuttle. The lamb, have the big lamb.
The lunar module. What else?
The ISS is not big. It's just that big.
The ISS one is precarious. Danielle had that one.
It's flimsy. That's so the only one that
really fell apart for me was the UCSX wing one.
And that one is flimsy. That one is crazy flimsy.
So I had to spend some time rebuilding that one that that I
do remember. That was the only one.
OK, we should probably wrap up the show.
Thank you all so much for listening.
Thank you to Max Stories for having us.
Have a great day. Talk to you later.
Bye.