[00:00:05.290] - Leo
It's the Teh podcast, episode number 158. I'm Leo Notenboom of Ask Leo.com.

[00:00:11.630] - Gary
And I'm Gary Rosenswegov with Macmost.com.

[00:00:15.100] - Leo
So I would start by saying what's new new in Denver, but there's a bunch new in the Mac world. And I think we've got a lot to talk about.

[00:00:22.910] - Gary
Yeah. The announcement last week is really notable in that it's the first time in a while that Apple has changed the Mac line up. And it was a surprise, too.

[00:00:35.150] - Leo
I'm always impressed that they can pull off surprises. I really am.

[00:00:38.460] - Gary
Yeah. And we could talk about that actually, about how that actually came to be. But it's been imacs in the middle, and then a Mac Mini on the left and a Mac Pro on the right. And then you've got your MacBook Air MacBook Pro for laptops. It's been that way for a while. Right. They had a little variation. They had an imac Pro for a while. But Besides that, it's been kind of set. And then they threw in this thing. It just came out of nowhere. The new Mac called the Max Studio. And the reason I think it kind of surprised everybody is because there were rumors that there was going to be a high end Mac mini, and there were also rumors that there was going to be a low end Mac Pro. And this is the fact that they were both right. They were both right. But what they didn't get was the fact that it would just be a whole new machine that would be exactly right there in the middle. I guess if you look at the body of it and you could see how even somebody just even being shown it like here, this is what we're announcing next week.

[00:01:44.500] - Gary
We're not telling you anything. We're just showing it to you. We'd look at it and say, oh, that's a big Mac mini that is going to be really cool, or maybe looking at and saying, oh, that's kind of a small Mac Pro. So, yeah, it makes sense that people were confused and the rumor sites got it wrong. But it is also notable in that. So previously, Apple had two imacs, had the 21 and a half inch screen, the small screen imac, and the 27 inch large screen imac, which was a five case screen. The thought was they upgrade both of those to the M One processor, and they did, in fact, come up with a 24 inch imac with the M One processor, and they killed off the 21 and a half inch intel imac. The thought was that they would now come out with a larger screen imac and still have two different sizes of imac. But they came out with this Mac Studio instead and never mentioned the imac. And then when they updated their site after the announcement was over, the 27 inch imac disappeared completely, didn't remain like still have it for intel or whatever.

[00:02:52.180] - Gary
It's gone. Like, it didn't ever existed. So it's really Crystal clear to me at least, that Apple is back to having one size imac, which, to be fair, was how it was for a long time. You know, that original imac that made, like, you know, change the industry and all of that. It was just one screen size. They didn't sell multiple screen sizes. That until much later. And going back to that kind of makes sense. A lot of people confused about it, though, and a lot of people, I would say a lot of people, some people complaining about it, that they were hoping to get a 27 inch imac. Now it seems like that's not even going to happen. What are their options? Actually, before we get to that, let's talk about what this Mac studio is. So it's a small device. It's the same within depth as a Mac Mini, so seven and a half inches on either side, and then it's a little more than twice the height. So the Mac Mini is kind of flat and this kind of is like four inches tall. And it's obviously not something you're going to open up and add more memory or drive or anything, too.

[00:04:04.300] - Gary
It's just a solid device.

[00:04:05.780] 
Right.

[00:04:06.950] - Gary
And it's got pretty upgraded parts in it. It uses either the M One Max processor, which was only previously available on the high end MacBook Pros, or a new processor called the M One Ultra, which I have to say, I called it, I said when they came out with the M One Max, I think it was on this show, I said the M One Max sounds like it should be the maximum. But if they did want to come up with a better one, they could call the Ultra. Right. Because in marketing speak, even though Max does mean maximum, Ultra usually is the higher one better than maximum?

[00:04:41.420] - Leo
Yes, yes.

[00:04:42.420] - Gary
And I also called it and I thought that if they came up with a Mac Pro, they could put, say, two M One Max processors in it as like a dual processor. Obviously, there's many processors inside the chip itself.

[00:04:58.150] - Leo
Right.

[00:04:59.050] - Gary
And that's what the M One Ultra really is. It's two M One Max processors. The only thing that you have to note about that is they are actually attached to each other. They're not two processors sitting on the board that are close to each other. They're actually fused together.

[00:05:17.270] - Leo
So is it like one piece of Silicon that just happens to have two of these things?

[00:05:21.330] - Gary
Yeah.

[00:05:21.820] - Leo
Interesting.

[00:05:22.500] - Gary
So that means the transfer speeds between processors are not delayed by the fact that they're in separate pieces of Silicon.

[00:05:31.400] - Leo
Right.

[00:05:32.290] - Gary
So that gives us an incredible number of processors, 64 GPUs that you could have. I mean, it's just incredible. 64 GPUs is incredible. And also boost the amount of memory up to 128 gigs of Ram. It's a lot of stuff. Basically, they doubled everything. So the Max chip has ten media encoders on it that handle certain types of media for encoding, like H. 264, video or decoding and all that. And you get double those as well, because it's two identical chips fused together. So that's what's in the studio. You can get either the M One Max or you can get the M One Ultra. And if you get the Ultra, you get all the features. Bunch of extra goodies like you can go to maximum memory. It's got a bigger heat sink on it. It's got even an extra Thunderbolt like bus, because on the M One Max, you have Thunderbolt in the back and USB on the front. On the M One Ultra, you've got Thunderbolt in the back and Thunderbolt in the front, which tells me that it's a bus thing. Right. They've got two Thunderbolt buses there. So it's really cool. It seems to be super powerful.

[00:06:48.710] - Leo
So my question for you is which one did you choose and which one arrived?

[00:06:54.590] - Gary
Before I get to that, well, it's important to note that they also announced something, another big change in the map world. They announced a screen called the Studio Display.

[00:07:04.650] - Leo
Now, they haven't done that for quite some time, though.

[00:07:08.590] - Gary
They had a Pro display, which is a $6,000 screen that basically six K display. It's meant for Pros. It's extremely expensive. They have that the Studio Display is something different. First of all, it's reasonably priced for what it is, which is a five K display. You could get a $1,200.05K display, but usually they're refurbished or whatever. You have to put a little bit more to get a new one. So $1,600 for five gauge display isn't like Apple prices. Apple prices would be like $2,000 for that.

[00:07:42.300] 
Right.

[00:07:42.810] - Gary
Plus, you add in the fact it's got a twelve megapixel Webcam.

[00:07:46.910] 
Wow.

[00:07:48.110] - Gary
Yeah. So forget 1080, forget 4K. It's a twelve megapixel Webcam.

[00:07:52.400] 
Right.

[00:07:53.130] - Gary
It's got a three microphone array and a six speaker array. So serious AV capability.

[00:08:00.710] 
Okay.

[00:08:01.580] - Gary
Plus pass through USBC. So you plug this thing in with Thunderbolt, say to your MacBook Pro or your MacBook Air, and now suddenly you're using as a dock because you can have three things coming off of the screen.

[00:08:13.210] 
Right.

[00:08:14.630] - Gary
So you've got this display and how big is the display? It's a five K display, 27 inches. Okay. Okay. So pretty good, competitively priced display. It's clear that from the name Mac Studio and Studio Display, they're meant to be paired together, even though the Studio Display can be used with the lowest end MacBook Air or Mac Mini and presumably anything they could be used with my Mac Pro. I'm sure any new Mac Pro that comes out so it could be used by anything. But the name suggests that they made the two to be a pair. So that show tells me there's another indicator that there's not going to be a 27 inch imac. This is the 27 inch Imac.

[00:08:57.790] 
Right.

[00:08:58.240] - Gary
You get the Mac Studio, you get the Studio display grand total for the cheapest configuration, $3,600. Okay. And you've got your Imac. Now, the last five K Imac, the one that Apple just discontinued, you could have gotten a $1,700 version of that, which is like, oh, so $1700 for five K Imac. And now the lowest version of the equivalent is $3,600. But that $3,600 would actually be equivalent to a pretty high end previous Imac. Yes. That was like an I five no processor, eight gigs of Ram, 256 gig hard drive machine. That $1,700.01. So most people that were saying, oh, I want the five K Imac, they were probably spending well above $2,000 to get decent specs.

[00:09:52.390] 
Right.

[00:09:54.410] - Gary
The lowest you can go on the Max Studio with that. You get the M one Max processor in it. There's the lowest version of that, 32 gigs of Ram and a half a terabyte drive. That's like the minimum you can get that's that $2,000 Max Studio model. So it's the kind of thing where some people were disappointed that there's no 27 H Imac. But there's all sorts of possibilities. You could upgrade in a Mac mini with more memory and a bigger drive and then connect that to a screen. You can get the cheapest Max Studio and not get the Studio display. Instead, go out and buy one of displays. Like, I know both of us have a nice 32 or 27 inch 4K screen. Those only cost like $400, $500 for, like, a big one, and you can get something pretty decent. I'm actually doing a video on this later in the week, comparing all the different options of what you could get if what you wanted was a 27 inch IPAC. What am I getting? Well, of course, I ordered the Studio display, so that's coming in and that I should get first. Probably not next week, the week after have to keep an eye on the shipping on that.

[00:11:14.390] - Gary
I'm excited about that, even though it has a big problem for me, which is that I'm using a 32 inch screen now.

[00:11:22.680] - Leo
Right.

[00:11:23.300] - Gary
So I'm going to be going down in size, the physical size, and going from 4K to five kwh, which means that there's going to be two reasons Texas is going to be smaller.

[00:11:35.720] - Leo
Right.

[00:11:37.550] - Gary
So my reading glasses that I don't wear while working on my computer may have to actually come out for me to work on my computer.

[00:11:47.250] - Leo
Yeah. Welcome to Getting Older. Yeah, just late. I'm sitting here with Trifold on my friend.

[00:11:55.470] - Gary
I'm worried about this. I'm prepared there's about 14 days to return. I am prepared that if this is going to be a problem, I may return it. I may look at it and say, this is cool, this is me, but it may not be for me.

[00:12:09.910] - Leo
You'll go see the eye doctor, get yourself a new prescription, and just get on with it because it's too cool.

[00:12:15.440] - Gary
Well, I'll see now the camera and the microphone that I'm really interested in because technically I should be able to do my show using exactly right.

[00:12:27.680] - Leo
Yeah. It sounded like they were pretty comparable to what you end up using day to day.

[00:12:33.890] - Gary
But problems with that. First of all, the reason that there's a twelve megapixel camera is it's using what's called center stage, which is this cool tech that's on the iPad that allows you to basically as a wide angle lens and it will follow you around the room like the camera is moving. But it's not. It's using interpolation to actually make it seem like the camera is pointing in the direction that it's not actually pointed in. So that's why there's twelve megapixels in it. Now, what will that mean in terms of what I can actually pull off of this for filming my videos? I am worried. And I think at least initially, this will be true, that all I'm going to be able to get is 1080. Even though it's got all these pixels, that when I try to record its screen flow, it's going to be this is a 1080 camera. That's all I know. And I will have to then go back to my regular camera I'm using now, which gives me 4K right now. That might change some point. At some point, somebody may come out with some cool software, some extension, maybe even screen flow itself.

[00:13:41.860] - Gary
They would come out with something that would allow you to really take charge of this camera and get 4K out of it. We'll have to see microphone the same thing. It's like I'm using a shotgun mic now, a rather expensive shotgun mic. I have no doubt that this camera, these mics will sound fantastic for Zoom. The next time I talk to a user group over Zoom. I'm just going to abusing these and I think it's going to be great or me. The only time I ever wear a headset has been doing this show. And that's primarily because even though the microphone isn't as good as my shotgun, I could face any direction I want.

[00:14:24.810] - Leo
Oh, that's right. So you're kicking back while you're doing this?

[00:14:27.850] - Gary
I could kick back. I could look over somewhere else. I could as I'm talking, I could gesture. Because since we don't use a camera for this, I don't focus my eyes on a camera.

[00:14:37.020] - Leo
Right.

[00:14:37.770] - Gary
So I tend to like, yeah, push back, look up at the ceiling, look off to the side. And the problem is you would hear that in the show.

[00:14:46.880] - Leo
Yes.

[00:14:49.070] - Gary
I'd have to actually focus and look at the microphone the entire time we talk.

[00:14:53.730] - Leo
It's funny. I've actually trained myself so that even though I've got a stationary mic, it's moved from an arm to a traditional desk stand. I've actually trained myself, too. Even though I can look around the room, I'm pivoting my head around the microphone.

[00:15:07.970] - Gary
Yeah, well, and I think that's what would happen to be eventually if I tried to do it probably a few episodes in I would get used to it. So, I mean, that's basically what we've got now in terms of the Mac Studio. I looked at the Max and the Ultra options, and I'm with the Ultra because there's a higher data rate for it. So not only are you getting the two processors, but you're getting a higher data rate. So I went for the Ultra, but the 48 GPU core version, not the full 64 GPU version, because, well, first of all, I think it's like $1,000 difference. And I imagine having 64 GPU cores is really useful if you're doing 3D graphics. Probably useful if you're doing heavy video editing, like a movie or like weekly half hour sitcoms, that kind of thing. I'm doing ten minute YouTube videos. I don't think I'm going to miss the 16 core. So I went with the 48 GPU core version and I boosted the Ram. I went to 64 gigs of Ram. I could have gone higher than that. But I have 48 now and I never even get close to using it all.

[00:16:33.660] - Gary
And I have eight on my MacBook Pro, my M, one MacBook Pro, and I've never had trouble using that for anything, including Final Cut Studio.

[00:16:42.230] - Leo
So my question to you is that since it's a closed box and you've made the choice for 64, do you have an option to upgrade that later?

[00:16:51.060] - Gary
No.

[00:16:51.730] - Leo
No. Okay.

[00:16:53.810] - Gary
But I have no doubt that I'll be fine for the life of this machine. Whatever.

[00:16:58.380] - Leo
Suppose you probably go through machines a little bit more quickly than the average person. My advice for PC buyers is to always buy more capacity than you need, and I mean that in terms of expandability. For example, my most recent desktop, which is already a year and a half or two years old, came. I ordered it with 64 gig, but it has room for 128 because, as you know, over time, things expand. It's not that I necessarily will be using this as my primary desktop for the next ten years, but my prior desktop lasted for like twelve or 14 years of useful service simply because I did the exact same thing. So you might find yourself going through a machine just a little bit earlier.

[00:17:46.040] - Gary
I don't know.

[00:17:47.390] - Leo
But you'll have a reason to, right. Because it's your job, right? Sure. One of the reasons you get new machines is not necessarily because you need a new machine. It's because, hey, there's this new machine that you need to experience and evaluate and understand for your audience.

[00:18:03.790] - Gary
Yes. And I think either way, I think 64 gigs of Ram is going to be fine.

[00:18:10.410] - Leo
It should last you for some time. Yes.

[00:18:12.010] - Gary
Yeah. So I'm not worried about that. I actually surprised myself because I always try to go up in size for hard drives every time. But to be fair, I've had my super expensive Mac Pro for less than two years, which is a point of anger here. I've never spent four machine and I've never gone through it so quickly. But to be fair, there's nothing wrong with it. I could keep using it. I'm not like, oh, I really need one. I'm only buying a new one because there was the change in processor and whatever. But I kept with the same size hard drive because it's only been two years since I moved up to two terabytes of SSD. And I basically took an inventory of my drive and I have two terabytes now. I looked and I said, what am I really using? I noticed there were a couple of things, like there was 150 gigabyte file. That was a test I did in Final Cut, like a year ago. I threw some example stuff in and tried some transitions and I never deleted the library. So I was like, well, that shouldn't be there. And then also I noticed 150GB of Windows virtual machines, which I won't be using because I won't be able to use them on the M One Ultra.

[00:19:28.910] - Gary
Of course, I rarely use them. Matter of fact, I was surprised. I was like, God, they've been sitting there that much space. When was the last time I fired up one of those Windows machines? Not 2022, I tell you that probably once in 2021. I'm trying to think if there was something I did, but yeah, that's 150 gigs I get back and that put me under 1 TB of used space, right? I was like, I think sticking with two terabytes of going to be fine. And then you get to a certain size for what you do and the extra space is all like stuff that could be offloaded. I looked at my Photos library. It's 100 gigs. I looked at how much I'm using for video, stuff that I'm actually working on. That was about 100 gigs and then maybe 100 gigs of apps. I don't need more than two terabytes right now.

[00:20:20.190] - Leo
I went through the same thought exercise on this machine of mine a couple of years ago, and it's interesting. Like you said, it used to be that you almost always upgraded your disk space at the same time just because your needs were increasing, the space was becoming cheaper and so on and so on. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. And the other thing that offsets it for me, and I know what offset it for you as well, is that the speeds on the external connections, be it USB, three or Thunderbolt or USBC, are fast enough that even if you did suddenly have a requirement that I need five terabytes of something. Yeah, you slap an external disk on it and you've got relatively high speed and tons of capacity. And that's in fact what I've got on this machine. I've got a 1 TB and a two terabyte SSD native on the machine, which are both underutilized and a five terabyte true hard disk in the machine and another six terabyte external hard disk. And they all run kind of all the time. And I spread things out, but I could do with a lot less.

[00:21:31.540] - Leo
It's pretty amazing. It really is how things have changed.

[00:21:33.990] - Gary
Yeah, I think it depends a little bit on your usage. Sure. Like, I'd be making a mistake now if I was actually somebody that made films. Like if I was always working on my current two hour feature film and maybe already starting to work on my next two hour feature film and still have the old two hour feature film right now, going through the film festival circuit, that kind of thing.

[00:21:56.770] - Leo
Right.

[00:21:57.080] - Gary
Then I think two terabytes would be a big mistake. Right. Probably should Max that out. But I don't do that, and that's not going to change. And also, looking at people get in trouble with their Photos library, sometimes their music library, sometimes their apps. The things you can't offload very easily on a Mac because the Photos library is connected to the cloud, you can't just take it and put it on an external drive. It expects to be on the boot drive.

[00:22:26.660] - Leo
Right.

[00:22:27.260] - Gary
So when somebody gets 512 gig drive and they have 300 gigs worth of photos and videos that are part of the cloud.

[00:22:37.240] - Leo
Right.

[00:22:37.740] - Gary
And they run into trouble. But two terabytes is 20 times the size of my photo library.

[00:22:44.460] - Leo
That's interesting. So you can't move your icloud data off of your primary drive.

[00:22:48.330] - Gary
No, I mean, you can go and say optimize this, and then only a portion is cached locally.

[00:22:54.200] - Leo
Right.

[00:22:54.850] - Gary
That's the way, like a normal, typical Mac user would do it. Right? They would have.

[00:23:03.090] - Leo
I've got a terabyte of photos, right?

[00:23:05.240] - Gary
Yeah.

[00:23:07.530] - Leo
But I store them in Dropbox, which certainly can do what you just described. That optimized thing. They call it something else. It's Files on Demand or something like that. So the file is still there's, a record of it on your hard disk, but the file contents is not on your hard disk, but it's actually on that five terabyte rotating hard disk in my machine because I don't need it to be super fast. I'm only reading from it most of the time anyway. And it's actually sitting there with my OneDrive and my Google drive and that kind of stuff. But the point being, though, that offloading it to an external hard drive, to a second hard disk. It's honestly surprising that Apple doesn't let you do that.

[00:23:54.180] - Gary
Yeah, you can't do that with icloud. So, I mean, obviously if I did Dropbox, I could do the same thing.

[00:24:00.130] - Leo
Actually, on my Mac. I've got that set up. I've got my Dropbox and my Google drive and my OneDrive, I think, on an external drive connected to my Mac Pro.

[00:24:08.930] - Gary
I suspect it's probably got a lot to do with. So what happens if you pulled the plug on that drive and suddenly it wasn't there.

[00:24:17.310] - Leo
Right. I don't know how Icloud would handle that.

[00:24:20.920] - Gary
Well, I'm sure that the idea is to try to avoid having to handle that with something like Photos. Make it impossible by insisting it being the internal drive. It's someone like me. I want all my Mac Pro, or I can't call it Mac Pro, much for much longer. It's going to be Mac Studio soon. I want all my photos to be there. So I have the optimized thing turned off.

[00:24:47.110] - Leo
Right.

[00:24:47.460] - Gary
Which I MacBook Pro. It's turned on. Right. I only have like maybe five gigs of space taken up, caching some of the photos, but I want everything to be sitting here in my office.

[00:25:01.290] - Leo
The other thing exactly, like I have things set up here.

[00:25:03.910] - Gary
Yeah, it's my photos. But the other thing I wanted to bring up is I think I might have coined a new phrase this week. Maybe you could help determine that, because I thought something popped into my head as I was making this video about not having a 27 inch Imac and stuff and dealing with people's questions about which new Mac to get. And this popped into my head and I thought, oh, who said this? And I tried to look to see who said this. And I can't find anybody that's ever said this before. And the phrase is, there is always going to be room for indecision.

[00:25:40.330] 
Indeed.

[00:25:41.150] - Gary
And what I mean by that is somebody is always going to go and say because I kept getting people saying, I want a Mac mini, but with a little bit more powerful for processor. Or I want a Mac Studio, but a version that's a little bit cheaper. If Apple comes out with three computers A, B and C, there's always going to be somebody that says, oh, I want something right between A and B, right. If Apple came out with computers A to Z, there's going to be somebody saying, oh, I want something right between J and K. Yes. No matter what options are offered to you, if it was as easy as finding exactly the right machine, if everybody looked and said, oh, the new Imac, 24 inch Imac, perfect, sold, I don't want anything more or less. That would be a perfect world. Right? But everybody's always going to say, oh, I wish it was a little more powerful, I wish it was a little cheaper, or I wish the screen size a little bit bigger, maybe a little bit smaller. I mean, all this stuff. So there's always no matter what Apple offers or anybody offers, there's always going to be enough room for indecision.

[00:26:49.350] - Leo
It's interesting because so much of that indecision is exactly what fuels the PC market. Because in the PC market, you can tweak the crap out of your machine, right. If you want 20 gigs of Ram instead of 16 or 32, if you want this kind of hard drive or that kind of hard drive. You can mix and match whatever the heck you want, which also comes with, of course, its cost in terms of complaints, I want that.

[00:27:14.710] - Gary
But a little bit cheaper.

[00:27:17.010] - Leo
Exactly. For some reason, when I saw the quote in our notes, it immediately made me think of a Mythbusters quote, which I think they coined, Failure is always an option, and it just has that same kind of feeling. There's always going to be room for indecision. I like it.

[00:27:36.810] - Gary
Yes. Cool. So what do you got going on? Oh, man.

[00:27:42.390] - Leo
Well, nothing a whole lot new or exciting over here in the PC world, but I was thinking about it the other day. One of the things I like to do when I watch some instructional YouTube videos or get some from somebody or actually even provide some of the videos that I do for the volunteer work, it's nice to be able to provide a transcript. And it dawned on me that I do so many different things to generate transcripts that I thought it might be interesting to cover some of the options and see what kind of things you might be up to as well. Okay. The one that I am, I'll call it the most proud of in a my God, what a hack kind of a way is that when I'm in my basement on my elliptical, which is what I do for exercise, I'm usually on the elliptical for half an hour, at least five days a week, and I'm usually watching something, sometimes entertaining, like right now I'm watching Turning Red, but sometimes I'll be watching YouTube videos or Skillshare classes or any of those kinds of things. I will generate a transcript by taking my Pixel phone, turning on the recorder app, and pointing my phone at the TV.

[00:29:06.250] - Leo
It's an audio recorder, that's all it is. But the neat thing, and I believe it's only the recorder available for the Pixel is that it generates a transcript on the fly. It actually does voice to text on the fly, and it does a pretty reasonable job. So I'll be sitting there with my phone pointed at my TV while I'm exercising. And when I'm all done, I'll turn off the phone and Google does its Googley thing and synchronizes everything. So by the time I get back to my desktop, I've got a transcript ready for me, just ready to copy, paste, edit, clean up, quote, whatever it is I want to do.

[00:29:41.460] - Gary
Which is kind of cool.

[00:29:42.180] - Leo
I thought that was kind of innovative and probably not what the original authors intended. The other thing that I have available to me is some time ago I subscribed to a service called Happy Scribe, and I have a number of hours worth of transcribing time available to me each month. Most of the time that's being used by Connie when she's doing ascalio videos for me, she's editing and uploading and providing transcripts to augment the transcript that Google may be providing or I'm not even sure if they're showing up in Vimeo or not. But the point is that we're using that and that's a pretty traditional transcription service. You upload your audio file, they do some magic on it. You've got two levels there's the level that is included, which gets you. I think they claim 80% accuracy, which is actually a little bit better. They'll do speaker recognition so that the transcript you get actually has this person is talking and then this person is talking and then this person is talking, having it appropriately attributed to the speaker. But there's also the extra pay version where if you want to pay so much a minute, they'll actually have someone come in and proofread it, compare it literally a person will make sure that the transcript is accurate, which I don't think I've ever done yet because the transcript is accurate enough when it comes out of there.

[00:31:13.470] - Leo
So those were two kind of interesting approaches. There are other approaches. I know that some time ago you actually pointed me at a technique using Google or YouTube. I should say that was kind of interesting, but seems at least for me to be inconsistent. I don't always see this option. Do you remember what I'm talking about?

[00:31:36.250] - Gary
We're talking about basically letting YouTube do the automatic transcription and then downloading the transcription when it's done right.

[00:31:43.860] - Leo
And I'm not always able to download it, which has been kind of frustrating. Sometimes it's just not there, whereas the automated transcription is there. Because obviously when I upload a YouTube video without doing any of this, there's a Delta there's about a time they make the standard definition version available, then they process it some more and they make the high definition version available, and then presumably they process some more and eventually make the closed captioning available. That transcript. So I always give it like a day or two before I go looking for it, but it's not always available.

[00:32:20.210] - Gary
Interesting. I haven't looked for it like that. So I haven't noticed whether or not I've just tried it. Like in retrosping back. Let me just play with this. Of course, depending upon your volume, that's a pain. I may look at that happy Scribe site. The problem I've always had, the sites like that is they charge too much. It looks like half prescribes, a lot more reasonable. Usually prices like a dollar a minute. And I really need it.

[00:32:52.290] - Leo
I think they're $2 a minute for the edited version for that I'm talking about for automatic. Yes.

[00:32:59.330] - Gary
And the problem is that I've got things like I really want to provide. I have a system set up and have a human transcribe my regular daily videos. Oh, that's right.

[00:33:10.420] - Leo
I remember your human.

[00:33:11.420] - Gary
Yeah. So I don't have that for my courses because my courses are like my biggest one is 7 hours. Right. And I have others that are like 4 hours typically, it's a lot of transcribing. And it's also a lot when it comes to if you're paying a dollar a minute, you've got a seven hour course, there goes the first 100 sales or whatever. So it's a bunch. So I'm always looking for a way to do it more reasonably, even if the accuracy isn't perfect, just some way to get it. And part of the problem is, too, is sometimes I've found systems that are transcription. But Unfortunately, I'm using Vimeo for that. And Vimeo not only doesn't do automatic transcription or subtitles like YouTube does, but they won't even sync it up. So, like with YouTube, you could upload a transcript and it will take the transcript and sync it up with the video. So all you need to transcript, not subtitles. The difference for people that are like, what's the difference? The difference is subtitles has times.

[00:34:13.920] - Leo
Right.

[00:34:14.540] - Gary
At this time, the person speaking says.

[00:34:16.470] - Leo
This is better than our dogs because they actually break it into segments that fit on the screen, right?

[00:34:23.070] - Gary
Yeah.

[00:34:25.190] - Leo
They're not looking at the sentences or the lexical structure. They're just looking at. Okay. How many words will fit vertically, I'm sorry, horizontally on the screen at this point? And will it be one line or two and all that kind of stuff?

[00:34:35.970] - Gary
But yes. Yeah. So the problem is I can't just get a transcript and then toss it into Vivio. It wouldn't work. I have to actually get subtitles that are broken up and have those times. So I need something to be able to do that. I have experimented with a couple of things in the past. First of all, before I had a human doing it, I had a really interesting technique I was using for gears, Mechanical Turk.

[00:35:00.650] - Leo
Oh, right.

[00:35:01.570] - Gary
And that's a service that's still around from Amazon, where it has humans from around the world doing really small tasks for very small amounts of money. And typically it could be something like find the noun in the sentence or find, you know, is this a picture of a bicycle, that kind of thing? And get a paid a Penny to click yes or no. And all sorts of companies use it for all sorts of things. But you could go and say, here's a ten minute video, transcribe it for me, and then pay a dollar for the transcription, which seems low, except that it's a worldwide service. So when you translate the prices, like what it costs for a gallon of milk or meal or whatever.

[00:35:46.230] - Leo
Yeah. Basically, that dollar is a half day's wage for somebody.

[00:35:49.260] - Gary
Yeah, exactly. So you're not going to get somebody necessarily in New York City doing that, but you will get somebody who perhaps may actually speak much better English in another part of the world just because sometimes English as a second language actually means you have better transcription skills.

[00:36:09.180] - Leo
Right.

[00:36:11.390] - Gary
So I would do that for a while and I would batch them. So I would wait till about a month's worth of videos, and then I batch them to Mechanical Turk and I get these text files back and I use that for transcription. That was an interesting way, a way I experimented with a year ago to try to solve my course problem. I tried using AIS and I tried using Watson, IBM's. Watson has an API that you could go and if you know how to code, you could go onto their site and you can basically whatever it was I was doing, I was doing it for free. So I don't know if eventually it would have been a cost or what the deal was, but I was able for free to have Watson transcribe the videos. And it kind of worked. Like I was able to say, here's a video, and about ten minutes later I get a file back. And it was pretty accurate. But trying to build that out to something where I could easily feed in like a whole course load of videos was like the next step. And I never kind of went to the next step with that.

[00:37:19.280] - Gary
I thought, well, another day. So I wish I had taken good, better notes when I did that, because I'm going to have to start from scratch if I want to go back, which I just written down what I did so I could get back to that point. So that's kind of interesting. Now I have people asking me all the time about your technique, what you just said about taking some sort of dictation software either on a phone or a computer and basically having audio play into that dictation. And what I've always said is dictation and transcription are two very different things. When you're dictating, you're actually slowing down for the software to catch up. You're enunciating because you know this is what's happening with what you're speaking. And you're possibly correcting mistakes, maybe even if you're not correcting a mistake when you see it on the screen, you are correcting your voice for something later on. Like if it's doing a poor job, you slow down more. If you get some word wrong, maybe like a word of a city. The next time you say that city, maybe you pronounce it a little bit better because you noticed it was not getting it.

[00:38:23.450] - Gary
So that's dictating transcription, the words just keep coming full speed and the software has got to keep up. And the software is like, hey, this person never shuts it up, right? They just going because it's not built for that. So I always say when people ask me, hey, can I use the dictation feature on the Mac or the iPhone to transcribe something? I'd say, you can try. You're probably going to get poor results. What you really need to do is use a transcription service to do it properly. But soon I think we're getting closer. Like that Pixel function you mentioned. I expect Apple to add that probably in the next version of iOS, they have an app called Voice Memos on the iPhone and on the Mac for that, and it syncs up over icloud. And they've been adding features that steadily. And the last time they added, like the skip silence feature and all this stuff. And I really think that Apple is going to jump ahead. I know with Siri, they took a lot of data and they made a lot of progress with transcription and dictation and all that. I wouldn't be surprised if the next version or maybe the version after that.

[00:39:34.840] - Gary
They say, hey, new feature in Voice Memos. It now transcribes what you speak, right? And you just do your normal dictation and then you see the little sound wave and underneath it, it shows that. So, yeah, I think that's coming. And I think it will probably still be 80% accurate or whatever at the beginning. But then once it's there, like with the Pixel, then all it is is a matter of like, okay, 80%, today is 85%, tomorrow is 90%, 95%. And then a few years go by and next thing you know, you're like, hey, this works great. Like Zoom. People are amazed at how good that feature works on Zoom of throwing up the words.

[00:40:16.170] - Leo
Right. Which we should try sometime, actually, to turn on. I have no idea how to turn it on.

[00:40:22.300] - Gary
I don't know how to turn it on with audio.

[00:40:24.350] - Leo
Audio only.

[00:40:25.530] - Gary
Yeah.

[00:40:26.040] - Leo
One of the things do you know if it saves what it did?

[00:40:30.770] - Gary
I don't know.

[00:40:31.410] - Leo
I don't know either. Yeah, we should try that.

[00:40:32.730] - Gary
I don't know. But the technology there, if it can show what people are saying that well on the screen, obviously could Zoom might not do it for whatever reasons they have, but that means that technology could be used. So we're at the point now where this is starting to change and the computers are going to be able to transcribe things.

[00:40:51.670] - Leo
So one of the things I'm thinking of as I'm sitting here is sometime after Connie finishes editing this episode and posts it. For those of you listening to it, look at the show notes, and I will at some point after it'll take me a day or two just to get around to it, I will post a transcription of this episode done both by happy scribe, because I know, Gary, you probably want to see just how accurate is compared to what it is we're doing here. And by playing the episode and pointing my phone at the speaker, because I think you'll be fairly surprised at the quality of the latter results. I've been fairly impressed with the Pixel. This isn't even the latest Pixel. It's a Pixel four, and they're up to Pixel six. So there's faster processors, all that kind of stuff. But like I said, I've been fairly impressed with it. It ain't perfect, don't get me wrong, but it's absolutely useful enough for personal notes, which is what I'm using it for. And it can the way I could see it being used in, quote unquote production is to have someone review what gets created or what gets captured instead of doing the capture.

[00:42:11.760] - Leo
Because reviewing what's there is probably a lot faster than actually sitting down and creating the transcription by hand.

[00:42:19.430] - Gary
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So watch the space. And if anybody listening knows of other options.

[00:42:28.710] - Leo
I got to have one. I'm sure Amazon.

[00:42:30.720] - Gary
Oh, AWS. Yeah, there is. I think I looked into that. And the Watson thing seemed to be the better option for me to actually spend my time trying to develop something.

[00:42:41.390] - Leo
I'm actually using the reverse on my personal blog. Any blog post I post there that I write, there is a little play button, a little Read this to me button. And that is AWS, text to speech reading it to you. And it actually sounds relatively natural. That was kind of fun to do.

[00:43:03.660] - Gary
Yeah. Well, that's an interesting subject in and of itself, too, because having the computer or your phone read stuff to you is getting better and better. But also, I noticed we're getting more accepting of it. Like, we're meeting it in the middle. And I noticed this on TikTok. So TikTok has a voice. They have a couple of voices you could use where you could have instead of using your own voice, you could type some text out and it will read it to you. And there's a female sounding voice that is the TikTok voice. Right. If you hear that anywhere, you know something. But what's interesting about that voice is after hearing it a bunch of times, you start to I wouldn't say prefer it, but I noticed, for instance, things like ads are starting to use it on TikTok. Interesting, because they're like, hey, let's use the TikTok voice instead of a professional voice actor, because people who actually maybe watched it, if it's a TikTok voice. And even I've noticed some creators actually using it sometime instead of their own voice. I actually did this once just to see how it was done. So one of my videos does do this on TikTok.

[00:44:20.040] - Gary
And it's just like, well, people like this voice. They're used to this voice. There's absolutely zero negative anything from this voice because it's just accepted, even though it's still obviously a computer voice.

[00:44:32.440] - Leo
And even though it occasionally gets certain words wrong, that's fine.

[00:44:36.790] - Gary
It's almost like it's an accent. This is the Tik Tok accent. Is there certain words that gets wrong? As humans, not only do we sometimes get words wrong right, and we often get words wrong for different dialects of whatever. So you're probably right. I know I've got this Philadelphia accent because that's where I grew up. And there are words with the Philadelphia accent that are pronounced differently than if you're from some other English speaking place. I'm not wrong when I say them right. I grew up in Philadelphia. That's how people in Philadelphia pronounce it. You could go and say, well, technically it's pronounced this way and you'd be right. But I'm right, too. So it's the same thing with something like a mispronunciation in TikTok. It's like, yeah, that's wrong. But it's kind of right for that TikTok voice. It's like that's the TikTok accent.

[00:45:36.450] - Leo
It's where he's from. Yes.

[00:45:39.270] - Gary
And that may actually become true. I mean, think of the non English speakers watching TikToks, and that voice is saying a word or two wrong, and they're learning English from Tik Tok. So people are going to actually start using some of those mispronunciations are actually going to become correct pronunciations or at least variations that are correct.

[00:46:00.750] - Leo
To the extent we have any English teachers listening, there are a number of them that are just cringing right now.

[00:46:07.470] - Gary
Well, but language evolves.

[00:46:11.730] - Leo
That alone is enough to make a lot of English teachers cringe. Right.

[00:46:16.290] - Gary
Yeah. It's fascinating. I think we talked on the show a year or two ago about a book about linguistics and how computers change. Yeah, I've changed it.

[00:46:28.830] - Leo
All right. Well, speaking of books, that's a good transition. So before we get to books and even before we get to a segment that we normally call aided.

[00:46:35.750] - Gary
Cool.

[00:46:36.350] - Leo
I have to start with, ain't it confusing? We talked a couple of weeks ago about Raised by Wolves.

[00:46:42.690] - Gary
There you go. Confusing.

[00:46:44.400] - Leo
Yes.

[00:46:45.330] - Gary
I'm joined, by the way.

[00:46:46.760] - Leo
You are. Okay, good. I am enjoying it. But in a WTF kind of way. Right. It's like, what the heck is going on here? So it is very confusing. Supposedly, the last episode of the season comes out on Sunday, but it will be very interesting to see a where they take it, how they wrap up the season and where they leave it. Because, of course, every opportunity to potentially pitch another season is an opportunity that would take, I'm sure.

[00:47:24.040] - Gary
But it's just.

[00:47:26.310] - Leo
Okay.

[00:47:29.250] - Gary
It is a very weird show. I mean, it's not as straightforward as the first season. There's a lot of odd things. And on top of that, the characters make a lot of questionable choices. For what it's worth, if you're going to have a baby, a nice hospital room is preferred, not a rock over at sea all alone.

[00:47:52.410] - Leo
So that one at least I understood at the time. My belief is that she didn't want it and her intent was to get rid of it.

[00:48:05.500] - Gary
So the acid C was kind of convenient.

[00:48:07.510] - Leo
Yes. And also she did the it's almost a trope where someone who doesn't want a child suddenly has the child, sees the child and changes their mind completely 180 degrees. I think that's what happened here.

[00:48:25.230] - Gary
Yeah. So there's a lot of that that goes on with the show. That's a good example goes on the show. It's like acid C is like, what happened?

[00:48:32.260] - Leo
The acid C by itself just has me scratching my head because, yes, the sea is acid. But apparently the part of it that actually washes up on shore isn't because they're walking through it all the time. The critters that come out of it, they can touch without getting burned, even though they were just now soaking, I don't know.

[00:48:55.710] - Gary
Yes, there's a lot of.

[00:49:00.250] - Leo
Anyway, on the cool side, I ended up reading a book last week, and it's one of those things where I started it, and all of a sudden I just tore right through it and it surprised me. It's called Everything I Know About Life I learned from PowerPoint. Now, PowerPoint is a lot of people's whipping boy. They'd love to talk about death by PowerPoint and how horrible a tool it is. And of course, this person has the completely opposite perspective. And it turns out to be a perspective that I generally agree with. It's kind of like PowerPoint doesn't make bad presentations. People make bad presentations. Powerpoint happens to be a tool that they use. Now, to be fair, PowerPoint does make it easy to make bad presentations in ways that perhaps some other tools, like Prezi or Keynote, don't. But the themes that he talks about here in terms of PowerPoint making presentations, how to use the tool, how to think about the tool, how to think about your presentations using this tool apply to all of the tools. And I just found it a very interesting way to think about the content that you're trying to present in the guise of PowerPoint is a very powerful tool.

[00:50:15.220] - Leo
So I just enjoyed it. It's what's really funny, you'll laugh at this. So it's a hardback book. But when I went and looked at it like I usually do, I always look for the Kindle version because honestly, if it's not on Kindle, I'm probably not going to read it. And I found it on Kindle. I downloaded it and it had some formatting issues and it had some other issues. Okay, fine. I coped. It was fine, actually, as it turned out, I read it mostly on my desktop because it was a nice big screen, and you'll understand why in a moment. But then I went to I think he had a page specifically for afternoon updates. Erotic, that kind of stuff. And one of the very first things on the page is the author says, hey, I know there's a Kindle version out there. There isn't supposed to be. And I actually went and looked at Amazon again. And sure enough, the Kindle version was gone. You can't find it anymore, which is kind of unfortunate, fortunate for me that I found it because like I said, otherwise I probably wouldn't have read it. And it dawned on me, the issue with the Kindle version is that they took the book.

[00:51:23.040] - Leo
Somebody took the book and basically did the equivalent of screenshots of each page and turned it into a presentation, which doesn't really work very well on a Kindle, you can make it work. But if you've got the opportunity to have a nice big screen where you can have it all on screen at once and you can go from quote unquote, slide to slide, then it's fine. So this book about PowerPoint, they almost turned into a PowerPoint presentation. And yeah, that didn't translate very well. I just thought that was humorous. I enjoyed the book. I got some things out of it in terms of presentation stuff, and I'm starting to look into PowerPoint yet again. Cool.

[00:52:06.010] - Gary
I read a book this week that was also about communication. You might have read this one. Did you read this? You did. Okay. So it's called If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face? By Allen Alda, the actor. Course, it's been on my wish list for a while, and I finally got around to reading it. I was captivated immediately and I plowed through it in a couple of days. Very interesting stuff about communicating. And basically the bottom line is it has to be a lot of empathy involved when you're communicating, but a lot of practical examples. It made me think a lot. It was interesting because it did nothing to solve my communication problems. Not that I have problems, but I want to get better. Sure. He talks almost completely about communicating with somebody, either one on one or perhaps one person to an audience, a live audience. And that's what the book is about. So I'm interested in like, how do I now apply that to a situation where either I don't see the other person at all because I'm recording a tutorial that then people will have to watch and there's no feedback because I'm done by the time they watch it.

[00:53:17.960] 
Right.

[00:53:18.570] - Gary
Or the thing where I'm answering people's comments or questions online, I can't see their face, so I don't know what look they have on their face. I have very little information about them. And in fact, I have so little information about their problem. Usually that is the big issue is usually I have too little information or sometimes too much or sometimes the wrong information. All this and I'm trying to communicate with them by solving the problem. So I didn't find it completely worthless for that because I could apply some of the ideas of empathy. Like, for instance, while making a tutorial, try to picture who the audience is, create them in my mind and say what questions would they have? Would they understand this if this was their background? This is what they knew. There were things he says, like you got to know what they know first. Start teaching them from what they know. You start at the right level, because if you start too early when you're boring them, because they know some stuff already. And if you start after what they know, then they're lost right from the get go because they have no idea what terminology you're using, but also the comments.

[00:54:32.950] - Gary
He does a lot of talk about assigning emotion, two things. Like, a lot of the book is about an experiment of basically when you're talking with somebody, try to identify the emotions that they're going through. Are they confused, are they angry, are they happy or whatever it is and actually labeling it. And I thought, well, you know, that's an interesting experiment I'm trying with comments now just by reading the comments you're written word you refer a lot of it. Yeah. Is this person confused? Are they upset? Whatever. I'm trying to figure that out and maybe just label that first, then answer the question and maybe approach it from that. Maybe that will make me a better communicator. I don't know. Anyway, it was worth reading. And also, if you like the Malcolm Gladwell style of books where there's a lot of talk about studies, there was a study done and they came into a room and this was the experiment. And this is how it was set up. And this was the result. And you're like, oh, that's so cool. This is that style of book, tons of studies about how people communicate. And he goes through the study and what they learned and how it was set up and all that.

[00:55:43.760] - Gary
And I love that. For some reason, that really pushes buttons for me, for a lot of people. Interesting.

[00:55:50.700] - Leo
I read this book, I think, at least a couple of years ago, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Absolutely. Just as you did.

[00:55:58.210] - Gary
But it's been a while.

[00:55:59.090] - Leo
Is this the one that also relies heavily on improv?

[00:56:02.410] - Gary
Yes. He talks about having scientists or business people that need to communicate, taking improv classes first and then how that definitely studies now shown definitely improves communication. That's the part of the book that it's like. I just can't connect that because improv is always being with the other person, and I don't have that in any of my communications.

[00:56:28.590] - Leo
Right. I have to wonder if doing that kind of improv, even though it's all about being in person, would still Hone some of the skills that would translate perhaps not quite as effectively, but would still translate into some of the other realms that you and I work in, like talking to a camera or responding to a comment. Yeah. The camera issue, I believe this is a book that, among other things, was a bit responsible for the fact that I have a little Lego figurine sitting on top of my camera to remind me that I'm not talking to a camera, I'm talking to a person. And it's just a reminder. But it is one of those things that I think helps set a queue, at least for me.

[00:57:14.390] - Gary
Yeah. Some of the improv stuff was fascinating. He talks a lot about mirroring as one of the main improv things, which is where basically one person leads the other person, follows and tries to mirror every movement of the other person with the idea that the person leading wants the other person to mirror. Right. You're trying to get in sync. And the idea that at the beginning, two strangers or colleagues, perhaps one is leading, one's following, and there's a delay. The person following is delayed by a second or two, and then they switch back and forth, and after a while, they get so in sync that a third person, a third observer, cannot tell who is leading and who is following.

[00:57:58.910] - Leo
All right.

[00:57:59.720] - Gary
Which to me was fascinating. But the interesting thing was that by doing some of these mirroring like that and then trying to communicate what you're trying to say, it turns out that you're much better at communicating because simply you're paying attention to the other person more. You're looking at their face, their expressions on their face, and you say something that's confusing the small signals on their face that say that I didn't understand what you said. You get those right? Or maybe you get that they're bored. I get it. Okay. I could move ahead quicker anyway.

[00:58:35.190] - Leo
Literally insight. So as always, we have no sponsor. The closest thing we have, of course, is our own content. This week, I would like to point you out. Can I rely on my cloud servicesbackups? It's Askleocom 29970. This is a not obvious answer. It's at least confusing to a lot of people because both you and I often recommend people use cloud services specifically for backing up. However, using it for backing up is not the same as relying on their backups. Those are two completely separate things, and that separation can really bite you in the butt if you don't understand it.

[00:59:20.140] - Gary
Yeah. One thing we didn't talk about today is going to be my self promotion thing. Apple introduced new versions of operating systems. So Mac OS 12.3 and iOS and iPad OS 15.4. The big headlining feature of all of that is something called Universal Control, which is really cool tech that allows you to basically put either another Mac or an iPad next to a Mac on your desk. And you have your trackpad and you have your keyboard. You just move the trackpad over and it appears on the other device.

[00:59:59.110] - Leo
Right.

[01:00:00.110] - Gary
And actually in this video, which will come out before this podcast comes out. So tomorrow I demonstrate using it with a Mac, an iPad, and a second Mac, and just moving with one track pad across all the screens of all those devices back and forth. And I was surprised how well it works. And what makes it useful isn't just that you can use a keyboard and trackpad with your iPad and you don't have to reach over to the keyboard. It's not just that. It's drag and drop and copy and paste work with it across the platforms. So I was able to drag an image from my Mac across the two screens of my Mac across the screen to the iPad and on to the other Mac and drop it. And it appeared there on the other machine.

[01:00:52.330] - Leo
Very cool.

[01:00:53.570] - Gary
So it's basically a way of file sharing or text or whatever it is. Like I could drag and drop into an app that was on the iPad from a file that was on my Mac, and it's really cool. I'm really digging it and I talked about it before. Like, I don't have a use for this and I probably still don't have a use for this, but it's at least very fun to play with.

[01:01:15.980] - Leo
I do vaguely remember you talking about it before and you were questioning what it would be used for.

[01:01:21.590] - Gary
Yeah. And I'm still thinking but it works so well, it makes you want to use it. Matter of fact, when you go and you can go and manually go into preferences and say, hey, connect this iPad. I want to do it with this iPad. Or once you've turned it on, you cannot go into settings. And instead, if you put your iPad to the right of your Max screen, you could go and move your trackpad over to the right side of the screen and keep pushing it against the right side of the screen. And you look on the iPad and you see a bulge on the side of the screen of the iPad and you push further with the trackpad and boom, the pointer pops onto the iPad. I'm like, you got to be kidding me. That was so cool that they built the interface like that. They see this little cursor trying to break through from one screen to the next. It's kind of neat. So anyway, I have a video on that command tomorrow.

[01:02:15.370] - Leo
Very cool. That will sound good.

[01:02:17.620] - Gary
Yeah.

[01:02:18.150] - Leo
All right. Well, we're going to be off next week, or at least I'm going to be off. Maybe Gary will talk to you all by himself.

[01:02:24.620] - Gary
No. Okay. We'll wait two weeks.

[01:02:27.150] - Leo
Wait a week?

[01:02:28.170] - Gary
Nothing in the tech world will happen.

[01:02:30.710] - Leo
I hope. Not sure I will be actually out on the Pacific Coast relaxing for a few days. As always, the show notes for this week's episode are out@tehpodcast.com. Teh 158. If you got a comment or a question, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at the tehpodcast or you can always leave a comment in the show notes page. That's probably the most reliable way to get to us these days. I think we're both kind of tired of social media, Some of the different ways we have to interact with it in the current environment. As always, thank you very much for listening, and we will see you here again in a couple of weeks. Take care, everyone. Bye.