Accidental Tech Podcast

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**Accidental Tech Podcast**

Three nerds discussing tech, Apple, programming, and loosely related matters.

Latest Episodes:

691: A Menlo Phase May 14, 2026

Show notes

Pre-show:
Follow-up:
- CapEx vs. OpEx (via Andrew Leahey)
  - Bloomberg
- “Hot lot” (via Anonymous & Matt Jones)
- Ultra/Neo/etc
  - Is the “iPhone Ultra” the 20th anniversary iPhone? (via Janne Ojaniemi)
  - Did we forget about “Studio”? (via Karan J)
  - What’s the ∆ between an iMac Neo and a Studio Display? (via Zoran Nešić)
- Time Machine
  - …with lots of small files (via Jon Wilson & Andrew Hathaway)
    - Asimov
  - …with spinning disks (via Ben Mattison & Carlos Pereira)
  - …period (via David Fokkema)
    - lsof
Apple agrees to pay iPhone owners $250M for fumbling AI Siri
Apple is flirting with Intel and Samsung
- Apple’s Newsroom post about US manufacturing
- Apple and Intel have reached an agreement? (Apple News+ link)
Ask ATP:
- How do we actually move files around our Macs? (via Brandon Whichard)
  - Yoink
  - MD5
- Do we use a profile/theme for Terminal windows? (via Chris Harper)
  - Prompt 3
- Do we use any other IDEs? (also via Chris Harper)
  - LSP
  - Intelephense
Post-show: .nofollow
Members-only ATP Overtime: Non-developers building apps
- Ben Dansby

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690: Turn Left at the Next Tree May 08, 2026

Show notes

Pre-show: Two thirds of your hosts are sick 🤧
Follow-up:
- Backblaze & cloud backups
  - Carbon Copy Cloner & Backblaze (via Barry Rubenstein)
    - Support document
  - Maestral
  - Arq’s approach (via Daniel Luz)
- Neo-ing… other things
- Mythos
  - What makes this different (via William Moran)
  - GPT-5.5 is equivalent?
  - cURL security/bug reports
- Severe Linux security issue uncovered using AI
- AI is still ruining everything
- An examination of Apple’s CapEx
Ultra all the things
- iPhone Ultra
- MacBook Ultra
- AirPods Ultra
- iPad Ultra
- Apple Watch Ultra 4
- Mac Ultra
- iMac Ultra
Ask ATP:
- What size drive should one get for Time Machine? (via Pat Murphy)
Post-show: Marco’s Great Saunter
Members-only ATP Overtime: Adobe has also forgotten how to make good software
- Jason’s take
- Foster Brereton
  - somebehemoth
  - Neywiny

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689: The Positive Effect of Enthusiasm Apr 30, 2026

Show notes

Pre-show: Mythos
- Anthropic’s blog post
Follow-up:
- ATP Store
  - Yes, it happened again.
  - The ATP Neo Silver made it!
- UPenn is an Ivy
  - Kieran Healy’s story
  - Marina Epelman’s thought
    - US News & World Report 2026 Best Engineering Schools
- Gurman’s transition coverage
  - Tim Cook’s remarks to employees
  - Comparison between Cook & Ternus
- The Ability to be Hotter
  - New material proves to be more heat conductive
Backblaze is no longer backing up cloud storage
- Backblaze Mac Release Notes for version 9.2.2.878
- Backblaze Windows Release Notes for version 9.2.2.877
- Response on Reddit
  - Reparse point
  - Additional response on Reddit
- Backblaze blog post
- MJ Tsai roundup
- Alternatives:
  - Arq
  - Parachute for iCloud
Ask ATP:
- What generation is John’s Accord? What’s the plan for replacement? (via Brian Ashe)
  - ATP Neutral: Car Shopping
  - 2014 Honda Accord
- Which Apple CEO will 💩-can the Mac? (via Jason)
- How often should Macs be restarted? (via Paul Franz)
  - Bug report
  - Gruber’s take
Post-show: Pedometer++ version 8.0
Members-only ATP Overtime: Should Apple MacBook Neo all the things?
- MaxTech’s musing

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688: A Company Man Apr 21, 2026

Show notes

🗣️ ATP STORE IS LIVE! 🗣️
Follow-up:
- GL.iNet KVM security issues?
  - Mark Wadham’s write-up
  - Dan Godin at Ars Technica
- MacBook Neo cores 🤝 BMW heated seats? (via Edward Munn)
- Joe Lion waxes poetic about RAM on Apple Silicon
- More component delays
It’s Ternus time
Post-show: John quizzes Marco & Casey
Members-only ATP Overtime: Media consumption & the limits of human perception

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687: You Can Bend This Line Apr 16, 2026

Show notes

Pre-show: Casey requests an app from Marco
- Roon
- Nugs
🗣️ ATP STORE IS LIVE! 🗣️
🗣️ New ATP Member Special: ATP Dev: Nuggets of Wisdom
Follow-up:
- Suunto is… not young (via Henri Sivonen)
  - Garmin did beat Suunto to GPS watch though
- The other neat explainer John was thinking of (via Ben Landsberg)
  - Previously:
    - Eric Portis on Color Spaces
    - Bartosz Ciechanowski on… anything
- Is Apple running out of A18 Pros‽ 😱
- Apple IDs & passkeys (via Vitor)
  - Others with this issue
  - Apple said it’d be fixed… two years ago
- Stealing TV… may not be so wise. Shocker! (via Nye Hughes)
  - See also:
    - Krebs on Security
    - Darknet Diaries (via David Brownman)
Ads are coming to Apple Maps
- Newsroom
AI-generated code & copyright
Ask ATP:
- When Marco goes on a saunter with two watches, are the measurements similar? (via Jason)
- Why did Marco bother with colocation? (via Stephen Gozza)
Post-show: Casey’s silly new toy
Members-only ATP Overtime: John tries to reach acceptance
- Apple approves AMD & Nvidia eGPU drivers
- What if Apple adopted “MPX”-style modules? (via Jan Wedekind)
  - MK1 High Density Rack Mount
- Bandwidth comparisons
  - Thunderbolt 5
    - 80 Gbit/s symmetric
    - 120 Gbit/s unidirectional for displays
  - SSD (M5 Max MacBook pro, 4 TB)
    - 109 Gbit/s (13.6 GB/s) read
    - 142 Gbit/s (17.8 GB/s) write
  - PCIe speeds on PCIe 5.0
    - 1 lane: 32 Gbit/s (4 GB/s)
    - 16 lanes: 512 Gbit/s (64 GB/s)
    - …as compared to the Mac Pro’s 64 lanes across 4 slots (2,048 GBit/s)
      - 17× Thunderbolt 5’s maximum single-direction speed
- Internal vs. external SSD
  - 2025 Mac Studio: ~5.5 GB/s
  - OWC Envoy Ultra: ~5.1 GB/s; 8 TB for $2,250
  - OWC Thunderblade: ~5.75 GB/s; 8 TB for $2,700
  - PolySoft third-party internal SSDs
    - Kickstarter (ended November 2024)

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686: Write Two Letters Apr 09, 2026

Show notes

Pre-show: The new Ceramic Shield 2 in the iPhone 17 Pro is the real deal
🗣️ ATP STORE IS LIVE! 🗣️
Follow-up:
- Studio Display XDR price drop‽ 😱
  - Stephen Robles
    - 1
    - 2
  - Casey’s snarky toot
  - Tangentially related: John’s Google One price drop
- John’s upgrade cycle (via Ryan Himmelwright)
- How much hotter can a Mac get?
  - Mac Studio power consumption
  - Mac Pro power consumption
- Apple’s implementation of Passkeys (via Ben Frearson)
- Apple subsidiary fined over $500k for breaching Russian sanctions
- RetinaDisplays.com
- CIE 1931 & Apple’s 2026 CMFs
  - They’re more than just a monitor calibration standard (via Eric Portis)
  - The GOAT, Bartosz Ciechanowski
    - Mechanical Watch
  - CIE updates from 2015
  - On Apple’s CMF
- Long Island and “mainland”
  - United States v. Maine (via Craig Bowers)
The Greatest Podcast Ad Campaign of All Time
Marco’s letter to John Ternus
- A Tale of Two Letters
Ask ATP:
- How does Apple Silicon RAM work, anyway? (via Johnny “Decimal” Noble)
Post-show: Marco Garmin-watch update
Members-only ATP Overtime: The Claude Code leak & how Claude “actually works”
- Regex to detect user anger
- “Undercover mode” (via Aral Balkan)
- Future plans

Sponsored by:

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685: The Ability to Be Hotter Apr 01, 2026

Show notes

Pre-show:
- Happy independence day, John!
- The Great Saunter
  - Pedometer++
- The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
🗣️ New ATP Member Special: ATP Tier List: Home Screen Icons
- More about the flag
Follow-up:
- Overcast transcripts
  - Missed Apex
- MacBook Neo
  - Tim Cook on the MacBook Neo launch
  - New Ice Book? (via Adrian Bengtson)
    - iBook “Snow”
  - Teardown by Framework founder Nirav Patel
    - Framework
  - MacBook Neo vs. Chromebooks
    - “NFW”, says Henry
    - “This could be a breath of fresh air”, says Ari
- “Medium” Core and M5 Pro/Max information from Apple
  - Chance Miller at 9to5 Mac
    - Original article 🇩🇪
  - PCI Express
- Ubiquiti
  - What about site-to-site VPN for Marco?
    - UniFi Travel Router
  - “Not so fast, my friend” re: Wi-Fi 7 MLO
    - YouTube announcement
    - Blog post
  - Some shadiness from January
🪦 RIP, Mac Pro 🪦
- Thoroughly Considered #123: The Last Detail with John Siracusa
- CUDA
Ask ATP:
- Are we running any iOS apps in macOS? (via Alex Kent)
- How would we balance new shiny vs. familiarity? (via Michael Brescher Jr.)
Post-show: John and Marco bicker about islands
- Merriam-Webster’s definition of “mainland”
Members-only ATP Overtime: 🥚 Update
- 10 February: Delayed to 2027
- 20 February: Smart speaker with a camera?
  - The Information

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684: It’s Not What Young People Do Mar 26, 2026

Show notes

Follow-up:
- Overcast & Transcriptions
  - Marco had never seen inside a datacenter
  - What about podcasts that include their own transcripts (via Matt King)
  - What is Marco using for a job queue? Perhaps Faktory? (via Drew Stephenson)
    - beanstalkd
    - Ansible
  - Monitoring & control interface
  - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of the minis… (via Aaron Dippner)
  - Mac fleet management advice
    - Apple Business
- AirPods Max popularity in New York
WWDC 2026 Announced
Ask ATP
- What’s the deal with passkeys, anyway? (via Phillip Miller)
  - XKCD
- Does having an 8 GB RAM computer keep macOS lean? (via Jon Fabritius)
- Will we get an iPhone or iPad Pro that will use macOS when connected to a display? (via Keith Heaton)
  - Michael Cook’s contrary opinion
Post-show: Casey is continuing to quiet quit his Synology
Members-only ATP Overtime: How Apple will add touch support to macOS

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683: I Didn’t Want to Melt My Rug Mar 19, 2026

Show notes

Follow-up:
- You’re welcome, world
- Formula 1
  - A brief, renewed pitch to watch this season
  - Cameras
    - Are not a large portion of the coverage (via Matt Rigby)
    - Failures don’t [usually] matter (via The Racing Line)
      - Great camera overview video
  - The other perk of in-car footage (via Eric Fox)
  - On getting Sky Sports replays (via Brendan Webb)
- Rosetta
  - A deep dive from Colin McKellar
  - Instant Final Cut Pro deprecation warning (via Tom Obarski)
- iPhone 17e teardown
- MacBook Neo
  - Gruber on the camera & mic on-screen indicators
    - Apple Platform Security Guide
    - On Apple Exclaves (Medium link)
  - CPU benchmark correction (via Philipp Sommer)
  - SSD benchmarks (via Vito Traino)
  - John’s and Marco’s hands-on impressions
  - Teardowns
    - Tech Re-Nu
    - iFixIt
      - Video
      - Blog post
AirPods Max 2
- Newsroom
- John wins the bet (Overcast timestamp link)
- Apple’s compare page
Overcast beta now has transcripts!
Post-show Neutral: BMW i3 Revealed
- The Verge
- Ars Technica
Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple’s 27 OSes and Liquid Glass
- Gurman on 15 February
- Gurman on 15 March

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682: Medium Core Mar 12, 2026

Show notes

Pre-show: Casey brings us back to Anniversary Corner
- Related episode of ATP
Follow-up:
- An explanation for John’s post that broke containment (via Thomas Dickson)
- MacBook Neo
  - John’s theory about color & clamshells
  - The M1 MacBook Air was American Walmarts only. (via Pierre-Luc Gagné)
    - Aside also via P-L: does the Neo run Rosetta 2?
  - MacBook Neo inputs 🤝 iPad Air inputs (via Andrew Larson)
  - SSD speeds (via The Verge)
  - The  logo
    - iPhone 5 intro video is what John was thinking of (via Peter Puleio)
    - Jason’s review
  - Dave2D’s review
  - Teardown
  - Tyler Stalman on the Neo running “pro” apps
- Performance Cores vs. Super Cores
  - New in Xcode 24.6β3: CPUFAMILY_ARM_SOTRA (H17S) (via Brendan Shanks)
    - H17S is the missing M5 Pro identifier from iOS 26.3 RC
  - Quinn’s review
    - M5 Pro & Max are on N3P; M5 is N3E
    - Baidu leakers
      - Super cores (“P-Core”)
        
        4.61 GHz
        
        10-wide decoding
      - Performance cores (“M-Core”)
        
        4.38 GHz
        
        7-wide decoding
        
        ~70% the performance of a Super Core
        
        Dual operating mode from efficiency cores
      - Efficiency cores (“E-Core”)
        
        3.05 GHz
        
        6-wide decoding
  - Andrew Cunningham at Ars
    - L2 cache
      - Super: 16 MB
      - Performance: 8 MB
      - Efficiency: 6MB
    - Minimum clock speed:
      - Super: 1,308 MHz
      - Performance: 1,344 MHz
      - Efficiency: 972 MHz
  - Fusion architecture (via Frederic_Orange)
- MacBook Pro Storage pricing (via Richard Allen)
- MacBook keyboard glyphs (via Dan Moren)
- Environmental progress (via Andrew Leahey)
  - TOSTracker
  - Example individual comparison
- Third-party displays (via Dan Boyle)
- Pro Display XDR or Studio Display XDR? (asked by Imthaz)
- Studio Display XDR
  - UFO Test
  - MKBHD’s review states it has 12 GB RAM 🤭
  - Studio Display XDR white paper (PDF) (via Kevin Sliech)
    - Superwide viewing angle
    - Timing controller (TCON)
    - Calibration
    - Display optimization modes
Formula 1 news
- Drive to Survive (Apple TV link)
- Dad jokey-est promo video (Also on YouTube)
- 2026 season preview
- F1TV vs. Apple TV
  - Link accounts
- Romain Grosjean’s
Samsung Galaxy S26 Privacy Display
- MKBHD
- The Verge
Post-show: Marco’s Garmin adventures
Members-only ATP Overtime: The future of x86_64 on macOS
- Tahoe 26.4 warnings
- Slightly more detail from Ars Technica

Sponsored by:

Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code atp.
Claude: Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today.
Quince: Elevated essentials and staples that last.

Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

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