Mac Mini & Mac Studio Shortages, Kindle Cutoffs & Four Things Worth Knowing About iOS 26.4

Jeff (00:00)
sure we can ⁓ fix that in post. ⁓ Great. Love you, Tom. You're the best.

Tom Anderson (00:03)
Come, I'll leave it.

This is Basic AF episode 85. Show notes for this episode can be found at basicafshow.com slash 85. In this episode, we're going to talk about how difficult and ridiculously difficult it is to get a new Mac mini or Mac studio in certain configurations. Update on some apps we've talked about and Amazon pulling the plug on some Kindles. What's up everybody? Thanks for joining us again. I'm Tom Anderson and as always joined by my

Bald headed brother, Jeff Battersby. Hello, Jeff.

Jeff (00:40)
Morning, Tom Anderson. I'm now relegated to after what it is we're going to talk about. Pretty soon, I'm going to be on the end credits. And Jeff Pattersby was in the show.

Tom Anderson (00:42)
How we doin'?

The disassociated voice was Jeff Battersby.

Jeff (00:54)
Right, whoever that was.

Here we go, guys.

Tom Anderson (00:59)
Pretty

soon I think we just go to 11 labs and lay down voice tracks and then just let it do it. We don't even show up, man, it just doesn't. Right, probably be better.

Jeff (01:04)
and let it just make up our right. Great.

Might be more interesting, to say the least. I am happy to say, Tom, that I was in my first performance this last week.

Tom Anderson (01:10)
Correct.

Jeff (01:21)
had a friend who is playwright and I read stage directions for one man play. But I was there, we had an audience and I could speak so I'm back on the trail, pal. Moving my way back into humanity. Yeah, it is good. And I am also now completely done with vocal therapy, not, you know, I got stuff to do at home that I got to get better about doing. But

Tom Anderson (01:35)
There you go. Good deal. That's good.

Jeff (01:50)
like PT, know, and hiking and doing all that stuff. I'm grateful to say that I'm probably at 92%, which is, you know.

Tom Anderson (02:00)
That's awesome. Yeah, I'd love to hear

that. That's what seven months, six months, seven months.

Jeff (02:04)
Yeah, what's today's date?

Today's the yeah, it will be six months today. Today is six months. Yeah. So six months ago on a Sunday, just like this, or maybe it was a Saturday. Can't remember. I, ⁓ I blew you off. Yeah. And, ⁓ it did decided to go to the hospital instead. ⁓ and good thing. Yeah, that's about right.

Tom Anderson (02:08)
Okay.

Yeah, it's remarkable.

of sorts. I mean, I didn't hold it against you or anything.

And Jeff's like, I'd rather have a stroke than talk to you, okay? I was like, Jesus, thanks.

Jeff (02:31)
or the whole

idea of having a conversation with you caused a stroke. So there you go. Yeah, whatever it is. But yeah, that was six months ago. Hard to believe. yeah, I am in ⁓ pretty good shape. Still some ways to go. I did also see the neuro-ophthalmologist this past week. And he poked me in the eye and I felt it, which is a good thing.

Tom Anderson (02:35)
Well, it could be that too, yeah. You're welcome.

That is, yeah.

Yeah

Jeff (03:00)
There was a problem previously when I saw him in January where he poked me in the eye. I was like, I don't feel anything. So that wasn't too good. ⁓ Exactly. Well, so anyway, right. Neither of us are Mo or Curly. So anyway, yeah, so that's all good news. ⁓

Tom Anderson (03:07)
You'd be perfect for the three stooges redo. You can just get poked in the eye all the time. Two of the stooges are right here. So we just need one more. Yeah.

Yeah

Yeah, that is good

news. Happy to hear that.

Jeff (03:30)
Still a little wobbly, especially in the morning. It takes me a little while to get my ⁓ feet in order, but I'm back to writing actually a lot. So I'm back on the train. So that makes me very, very happy. Correct. I'm moving where I need to move. that is a very good thing, and I'm pleased about it. So here we are.

Tom Anderson (03:41)
Cool. Very good.

All things in the right direction, very much in the right direction.

All

So.

Jeff (03:59)
All right, have you tried to buy a Mac mini or Mac Studio?

Tom Anderson (04:05)
Not of late. Which seems like it's a good thing. You should not get one in certain configurations, it sounds like.

Jeff (04:06)
It doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah, because you're correct.

Yeah, yeah. So it looks like Apple ⁓ is either wiping these things off the planet, which is unlikely, ⁓ or they're about to set up some new configurations, which, who knows, maybe we'll see in the next week or two. But there have been limitations to the your ability to buy a Max to your Mac mini, depending on

you know, what kind of configs you have. And most of those things have to do with the fact that you're maybe upgrading RAM. I think you can buy some off the shelf ones if I'm not correct. So you can you can get a Mac mini ⁓ from Apple as long as it's like in a base configuration. I think that is that is the end of the story.

I just double checked that to make sure I'm not lying today.

Tom Anderson (05:08)
Yeah, I looked

at that this morning and I spec'd ⁓ out M4 10 core 10 GPU kind of base config. ⁓ Do 16 gigs of memory, 512 storage. So not exactly the base config, but ⁓ order delivery May 12th through May 19th for that lower end model. ⁓ But like you alluded to there, I think we're in... ⁓

We could be, we don't know for sure, but maybe a situation where the M5 upgrades are coming, which would explain maybe why that lower end model is pushed out a little bit. That's not uncommon when they start to shrink down supply of stuff. And plus people have been buying them too, so they may have kind of run out a little sooner. But I think the higher end ones, like I spec'd one out that was an M4 Pro, Jeff, that had 24 gigs of

Jeff (06:04)
Yes.

Tom Anderson (06:07)
memory and an 8 terabyte drive. $3,800 by the way. So that storage upgrade is insanely expensive. That ships in 10 to 12 weeks. So that would put you out right about July, mid July. So enjoy the fireworks and then you'll get your new computer.

Jeff (06:26)
Yeah, it's a long ways away. ⁓

Tom Anderson (06:27)
Yeah. So

those, they, there's speculation that that's all tied into the, tram shortage, you know, tied into the AI stuff and people buying a lot of these to run LLMs locally and constraints cross the board for a lot of that stuff. mean, RAM prices by themselves are crazy these days too. And stores like there was, saw, ⁓ bought the, ⁓ Samsung, I think it's the T2, a little USB-C drive.

Jeff (06:33)
Dude.

Right.

Tom Anderson (06:57)
that I use for my time machine backups and this 2 terabyte model and I think when I bought it it was $179 or something but that's gone up a couple hundred bucks too so it's up to $350- $400 I think somewhere around there so everything's squeezed because of supplies being limited so it's an interesting time

Jeff (06:59)
huh.

Yeah, and I'm looking right now to see what the deal is. Everything looks like it's May. I don't think you can get, let me see if I can get out 256 gig model.

May May May. So yeah, maybe it's RAM because I didn't do anything special to this. just took base, you know, base model. My gut feeling is that this is this is we're going to be seeing new configs very shortly. And so they've they've sold everything. So if you go to Best Buy or one of those places, it probably has a couple on the shelf if you needed one, you could get it. But frankly.

M5 seems the way to go. So just interesting that this is the case. And I think didn't this happen the last time Apple was getting ready to upgrade chips that they

Tom Anderson (08:20)
Yeah, it does

happen fairly regularly. And I just checked the MacBook Air. It's got the new M5 chip, and it says, in stock, free shipping. Let me look at delivery dates here. Throw in the zip code.

Jeff (08:24)
So.

Tom Anderson (08:37)
Yeah, Tuesday, April 14th. So those look to be in good shape, which is reassuring for work because we're about to buy a whole bunch of those. I was like, Hmm, I want to do that a little earlier than we typically do just in case.

Jeff (08:39)
Yeah, so.

Yeah, tis the tis the season.

Yeah, well, mean, do you need the, you don't need this till the fall though, really, right? I mean, you get them in, but you...

Tom Anderson (08:57)
⁓ We will

have those, we like to have those on hand about the first of August and then about two weeks after that we start handing them out.

Jeff (09:03)
Okay.

Very interesting, very, very interesting.

Tom Anderson (09:11)
We just ordered

a hundred for summer stuff and they're coming in first of May last week of this month. So those are looking pretty good.

Jeff (09:17)
Okay.

All right, very cool.

Tom Anderson (09:22)
Okay, and the Neo, which, quick for that, sounding like hotcakes, so I think that one's still got a little bit of delay, but I think that is just a demand thing. I don't think that's any...

Jeff (09:32)
I

listened and I finally went and got my hands on one of those and went to Best Buy and played with it, played with it side by side with the MacBook Air and you could see the screen difference, you know, there's definitely a difference between the two of those. But what a computer. It's hands down better than anything in that price range. Hands down.

Tom Anderson (09:44)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yep.

Jeff (09:56)
⁓ It's a pretty amazing computer and Apple's done a brilliant job with it. It designed beautifully. They had that citrus colored one there, which I think is probably the most popular at this point in time. ⁓ That thing looks amazing. Love the color on it. ⁓

Tom Anderson (10:15)
friend of the show,

Bill McLean, his wife got one and so he did a video on YouTube review of it. ⁓ She got the blush, so kind of the pink one. Yep. And ⁓ he referred to the citrus as a dehydrated pea color. It was hilarious. was like, well, yeah, yeah, kind of.

Jeff (10:20)
Okay.

Okay, the pink looking thing, yep.

Okay. I think it's

more like Gatorade, but whatever floats your boat, Do what you need to. Yeah, that is dehydrated pee.

Tom Anderson (10:45)
So that made me laugh. then he had,

⁓ his, ⁓ old PC that he had from a few years ago. It's kind of in the same tier of performance, supposed to be the same price range. Anyway, I'll say, it was one of those Lenovo yoga kickstand touchscreen deals and, he booted it up and it takes forever to boot up. he put a background sound effect of a dial-up modem.

Jeff (11:04)
huh.

Ha ha!

Tom Anderson (11:14)
He was like, waiting for it to boot. I was like, that's pretty good too. So he was on a roll on that one. He was feeling pretty good that day.

Jeff (11:18)
Yeah, How

old was that PC? Couple years.

Tom Anderson (11:26)
yeah, I want to say it was for maybe but I don't remember exactly. But we can drop a link in the show notes to the video. It was good. The Neo aspect one out just the base model. It's about three weeks for delivery. But again, is a demand thing. Yeah, and then saw an article this week that with demand being so high, they're like, Apple's got an interesting decision coming up if they run out of

Jeff (11:32)
Okay.

Yeah, cool, I haven't seen it, so it'll be good for me.

Okay, but like you said, think that's demand. That's not anything else,

Tom Anderson (11:54)
chips for this. Because remember, they're using the A18 Pro, and we're on the 19 now. And so I don't know what their supply is. I'm sure they've game planned on this stuff. They're, they're very smart people there. So I'm not concerned about that. But I didn't think about it. So there you go. There's the situation on the Mac mini and studio. So if you're in the market for one of those, it's an interesting time, depending on what you want.

Jeff (11:57)
It's 18, right? Yep.

⁓ you think? Yeah.

Yeah,

and who knows, maybe in the next two weeks we'll Fresh, refresh all these things, yeah. All right, cool. Yeah, I'm still in love with the Mac Mini I have here and it's, you

Tom Anderson (12:23)
Yeah, it seems like those refreshes are coming up pretty soon.

Yeah, and I hope they get that situated

because I've got the studio on maybe an upgrade list when I upgrade the mini, which probably won't be till early next year. So I've got some time.

Jeff (12:43)
Gotcha. Yeah, I'm looking at the old school Mac mini. I've got a 2023 here with an M2, 16 gigs of RAM. mean, no need to replace this. Right, right. It's exactly right. Just runs. ⁓ Connecting to Riverside, not always easy, but that's not a Mac mini problem. Something goofy with ⁓ Riverside. Chrome, my favorite browser.

Tom Anderson (12:53)
just runs.

you

Jeff (13:14)
It's the only device I have it on. Is this one. So we can talk, Tom, so we can have our little moment of joyous discussion every other week. All right. All right, so that's it on MacMinnies. I wanted to re-bring up an app that I've been using and I've mentioned, or we mentioned it in a few of our favorite things at the end of the year. The BookTracker, the bookshelf.

Tom Anderson (13:24)
Mm-hmm. You do it just for me.

Jeff (13:42)
app. I have now been using this ⁓ with amazing regularity. ⁓ Basically, any book that I'm reading, any, anything that I'm, you know, that I'm doing any books that I'm buying, I'm using this app now. And it's, it's become super sweet. So one of things I really like about it is, you know, I my books, all my books in there, and I'm, you know, I'm reading them.

I can put a timer on when I start reading. And what's nice about the timer is I'm tracking how long it takes me to read a book. Plus, I'm keeping track of where I am in any particular book. right now, and I highly recommend this book, reading Nnedi Okorafor's Death of the Author, ⁓ which is brilliant. it's one of those. Usually I have a book by my bed and a book that I read when I'm sipping coffee in the morning.

and this would normally be my morning coffee one and I have another one that I'd be reading. Well, I've been dragging this to bed with me every night. That's how good it is. the great thing about BookTracker is, and if I'd have been smart about it, I would have done it a little differently. There's a really good bookstore near me, used bookstore, but they also have some new stuff called Binnacle Books. ⁓

I wanted to pick up a couple of other books by Colson Whitehead there. I've been reading through Colson Whitehead's catalog as well. And ⁓ I found a copy of something. But it had a different cover than the one that I currently had. And so scan the barcode and it pops up and says you already have this in your library. So really, really good ⁓ app as far as tracking what it is that you're reading, tracking what it is that's in your library.

You've got the ability to lend books out and keep track of who you've lent books to if you've lent books to that. ⁓ I love this app. I had been using another one, actually a free one, this is paid for. ⁓ I've been using another app and honestly, this is worth the money that you pay. I think, and I may have mentioned this when we talked about it ⁓ back at the end of the year.

The only disappointment I have is ⁓ iPad and iPhone one price. If you want it on your Mac, you need to pay another price. So that's a little disappointing. get it. Completely different platforms. ⁓ But really, really good application that I recommend even more now than I did when we talked about a few of our favorite things at the end of the year.

Book tracker, we'll put a link in the show notes just so you can get to it, but highly, highly recommend that app.

Tom Anderson (16:40)
How many books do you have in there?

Jeff (16:43)
Tom, don't embarrass me. I have close to 400. And I haven't even scanned all my books.

Tom Anderson (16:46)
Yeah

Jeff (16:54)
So I so here's the deal. I have I have a bookshelf ⁓ that is full of just first editions. I have a bunch of first editions that I've collected or picked up over the years. ⁓ Some of those are well before barcode days. So, you know, they get manually entered. haven't done really any of the manual entry on that. And then I have stacks of books everywhere. My children are either going to have to read a lot of books or curse me as they go back to Binnacle and sell the books back to them.

Head rush now, I've coughed my brains out.

sure we can ⁓ fix that in post. ⁓ Great. Love you, Tom. You're the best. Yeah, today's a quick edit day. So yeah, ship it. ⁓ Which kind of ties me up to a ⁓ another ⁓ in you and I will have a difference of opinion on this. ⁓ I read the vast majority of my books now. ⁓

Tom Anderson (17:32)
Come, I'll leave it.

Jeff (17:59)
physical format again. I for a very ⁓ brief period of time was using a Kindle I got one of the original Kindles then when the paper white came out I got the paper white that original Kindle that I got which I got pre 2012 is now deprecated. ⁓ Amazon no longer supporting those Kindles so if you have stuff downloaded on the anything that shipped

for 2012, get to keep those books. But if you were to wipe your Kindle, your 2012 or earlier Kindle, you can no longer register that device and you can no longer download items to it, which brings up for me a significant point. I mentioned that I have a bunch of old first editions. have...

of stuff by Steinbeck that was from a good long time ago. And guess what? I can still read those books, never been deprecated. ⁓ You know, I can thumb through them, ⁓ read everything that's in it. ⁓ the fact that, I mean, I get it, technology gets old and things change and who knows, Amazon's got crazy DRM going on, so maybe there are gonna be updates to their DRM. ⁓

but the fact that they can just say, nope, can't read your books on this device anymore, you have to get something new, pisses me off. Really pisses me off. Now, I understand you have a difference of opinion on this, Tom, and I wanna hear that difference of opinion, and then we'll fight. ⁓

Tom Anderson (19:48)
Wow, that escalated.

Jeff (19:49)
Yeah, it did, right? Yeah, well, it escalated way less than it did before we started recording.

Tom Anderson (19:57)
Well,

we got it out of our systems early, so we spared the listeners from that episode and probably kept us from getting cancelled as well. Yeah. I'm okay with it.

Jeff (20:03)
Yeah, maybe.

well. Good chance, good chance. Anyway, Tom, talk to me. What do think?

Why? Why are you okay with them?

Tom Anderson (20:16)
They are

14 to 18 years old.

Jeff (20:20)
Oh, that's it. Great. I mean, I get wanting to get rid of teenagers. Right. But if you for any reason needed to wipe it.

Tom Anderson (20:22)
Yeah, yeah. And as long as it's working, you can still use what you have. Everybody pretty much has a smartphone,

so you have a Kindle. Now, I will put a huge caveat on that statement. The people, the reason people have Kindles is they don't like reading on their phone or as much. And I'm not saying they don't, but they, know, it's the...

Jeff (20:37)
Go for it.

Tom Anderson (20:50)
backlighting on the E Ink isn't as harsh. You know, some of them don't even have backlighting. I think some of the newer ones, added that, but, uh, so I get that that's a different experience and everything. So it's like, okay, well, if I want to use my phone, but if I wanted to use my phone, I wouldn't have bought the Kindle, but that was a long time ago. Um, so they're giving you 20 % off and a $20 ebook credit.

Jeff (20:56)
Yes.

⁓ I feel so much better.

Tom Anderson (21:14)
So,

so I think that eases it. mean, you run into that with apps. Like if you have an old device and you're running a version of an app and then that device stops working and you have to reset it. But the app's been updated to use iOS 26 frameworks. You can't install it on your own device. You're in kind of the same spot.

Jeff (21:19)
I mean, I get it.

Yeah, I would say when you're talking about an app, but if you're talking about a physical book that you can read with your eyes and ⁓ You know that never goes away. So the fact that you know

Tom Anderson (21:44)
Yeah.

Right. But people would buy Kindle. mean, some people have to do both, right? Like I, I bought David Pogue's book, which is excellent, by the way, just come back on that. I'm 140 ish pages into it. Love it. Like absolutely great. So highly recommend that one. But, ⁓ most of my stuff is, well, I have some in the Apple books app, ⁓ of late I've gone back to the Kindle app. ⁓ so most of my stuff is in there. ⁓ so, know, it's my

Jeff (21:55)
Correct.

Okay, cool.

Tom Anderson (22:21)
thought there is I like having the books, all the books in one place. So, right. So the digital books gave you that plus, ⁓ you know, I'm a read wise user. So I highlight it, it sinks up there, comes back down. We've gone through all the read wise stuff before. so, you know, I get where you're coming from and I do understand that, but I think if these were six years old, seven years old, I'd be like, yeah, that's crock shit. That's not good. but

Jeff (22:33)
Yes.

Who shit?

Tom Anderson (22:51)
I did. ⁓ But these being 14

to 18, at least according to the email here that we're looking at. ⁓ 2012 or earlier, that's really, really old.

Jeff (23:03)
Yeah, I, you know, definitely old.

Tom Anderson (23:04)
And what I

wonder too, ⁓ is any of it tied to additional security measures that they're putting in? Well, the DRM too, but are the old devices, can they not be updated? Maybe they've changed security protocols for the connection to the Kindle store and things like that, and they want to do different things there. And I don't know the technical reasons for it in the background. ⁓

Jeff (23:15)
Yeah, that's what I said, some of the DRM that they put in and stuff like that, maybe.

Tom Anderson (23:33)
I get it. Like if you're one of those customers, you're like, ah, great. And it's like, you YouTube raised a price on YouTube premium this week. So one up two bucks. And I'm like, I get it. And it's like, it's only two bucks, but it's still annoying. Right. So I don't want to dismiss the annoyance of it because it is. It's like, I've got this thing is working fine. And I guess as long as it continues to work fine, I mean, you can keep using what you've already got, but you can't buy new stuff. Right.

Jeff (23:43)
Netflix went up.

Yeah.

Right, and now I can't use it.

Well, right, but you just can't buy a new book.

can't. You have to buy a new device in order to buy a new book. Or as you said, you can get the app on your phone or your iPad. You know, those are all things. I will say that part of the reason I went back to and I really did try to use Kindle for a good long time. Reason I went back to it is there's just something about the quality of a physical book that that for me and I will say even for my children. So.

Tom Anderson (24:08)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jeff (24:26)
You know, it's not a old man, young man story. ⁓

Tom Anderson (24:28)
I hate that we're in

that part of life where we have to add that. like, no, I'm not the old man yelling at the clouds.

Jeff (24:33)
Shut up! Get off my lawn!

I might

be yelling at the cloud at this point. Yeah, thank you, thank you. Old man yelling at the cloud. ⁓ You know, my kids like physical books too. ⁓ I gave my Kindle paper white to my son-in-law. I gave my mom my original one, the one that will now be deprecated. ⁓

Tom Anderson (24:41)
Well done. Yes.

Jeff (25:06)
My niece was using that to read a Philip Pullman book that she couldn't get from, that she couldn't get physically from the library. you know, for whatever reason, it was like a multi-week wait. you know, we, there's a couple of really good apps for that, Libby app. If you connect your...

your library you've got the ability to get books and I was able to download that to her Kindle so she could read it. You know she could read that book. That Kindle though is bye bye and also by the way can't get library books on it anymore either so those old things so makes me a little pissy but I'm pissy anyway so what does

Tom Anderson (25:56)
That's why I hugged, that didn't take much. So yeah, yeah.

Jeff (25:58)
Yeah, right. It's a little... I'm

a whiny little whatever you want to call me.

Tom Anderson (26:05)
The affected devices include Kindle first and second generation, the Kindle DX and DX graphite, Kindle keyboard, Kindle 4, Kindle Touch, Kindle 5, and Kindle paperwhite first generation.

Jeff (26:19)
Yep. All right. So that's two of mine gone then. Both of those. The one that the paper white that I gave to my son-in-law and the other one. I mean, I had him for a long time. You know, I gave one to my mom, like I said, and good for camping and things like that. I'm not going to, you know, really offer some opportunities, but come on.

Tom Anderson (26:36)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Kindle users love their Kindles.

Jeff (26:45)
The ones that love them, I did not, but yes, the ones that love them do love them. You're correct.

Tom Anderson (26:49)
So if you're into

it, you're really into it. Yep. Yeah, I had one at one point. I forget what you want to had. It was a small, it was not the, it's not a newer one. It would probably would have been on this list. That's how long ago it was. And, it was okay. But I was like, man, it's another thing I got to drag around. And the back then the E Ink was really slow and it was kind of cumbersome to put new highlights on and things like that.

Jeff (26:53)
Yep, great.

Yeah, no, it's.

Tom Anderson (27:19)
And now they've got a

color one of some sort. Different ones. Right. It's wild.

Jeff (27:22)
He's been $600 bucks on a Kindle now.

Yeah, very well.

Tom Anderson (27:28)
But then

that market's opened up a little bit too. There are some competitors that have come in that are E Ink and do some stuff too. So you can look at those maybe if you're...

Jeff (27:31)
other devices. Yeah.

Yeah,

and I think a lot of those you can use with Libby as well, which Libby, if you haven't checked out the Libby service, first of all, you should have a library card. So go to your local library, get a library card and ⁓ audio books and physical books you can ⁓ read using the Libby app. The Libby app is brilliant. So highly, highly recommend. ⁓ Can highly, highly recommend that to you. Speaking of books.

Tom Anderson (27:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And I'll be honest, Jeff, I don't read that many books. Now I've been lying to you all the way up to here, but like I've got, what I do is I see books I want to read and then I go into the Kindle app or I may want to read and I download the sample so I don't lose track of it. And then dish it there. Some of them I buy it cause they're on sale. Like I bought ⁓ one of Tiago Forte's books recently cause it was $4. It was on sale. like, go ahead and grab it. Maybe never I'll read it, but at least I've got it if I want to. ⁓

Jeff (28:07)
⁓ really? You've been lying?

Yes.

Right.

Tom Anderson (28:33)
But I mean, I

Jeff (28:33)
Yeah, I've got a.

Tom Anderson (28:35)
know I'm in the majority there. That's not like an outlandish statement to make that I don't read many books about.

Jeff (28:38)
No, no, no. A lot

of people don't read. I read a ton. You know, I read.

Tom Anderson (28:43)
I'd rather look

at like a, could I just get the cliff notes and get the highlights? And there's this, what's the name of that service? There's a service that does that. ⁓ David Sparks just emailed out about it a month or so ago. does the kind of the summary overview of the book and then encourages you to buy the book. But I forget what it was. if I find it, I'll, I'll put it in. Go ahead.

Jeff (29:05)
All right, you can look that up. Will I talk about the next? Will I talk

about the next thing? Yeah, which by the way, no surprise, are a lot of people don't read books. Although I saw an interesting stat the other day that still 60 % of books purchased are physical, which is way, way higher than I expected that number to be. I thought it was far, far less than that, but yeah.

Tom Anderson (29:32)
feel like they're just too

long.

Jeff (29:35)
Books are too long.

Tom Anderson (29:36)
Yeah, it's kind of like albums. It's like you got to have

12 songs. Your books got to have so much and a lot of it is filler.

Jeff (29:44)
Says someone who's never written a book. That's right. I do still listen to whole albums.

Tom Anderson (29:48)
I'm just telling you, that's one man's opinion. You still listen to whole albums and I don't do that because eight out of 12 songs are not good.

Sounds like, and everybody knew that back in the day. Like that's why they had radio tracks right here. The four hits were going to promote. You get the rest just make, you know, look like something's on the album. It's like movies. Movies don't need to be two hours. By and large, you can cut a lot of that fluff out. That's a little short.

Jeff (30:02)
I... ⁓

You

TikTok nation, baby.

Somebody was telling me the other day, I was listening, they too, was listening to the Dungeons in the Attic podcast and they were talking about.

Tom Anderson (30:18)
Although they do have longer form now, but...

Jeff (30:30)
movies and they're all in that little group movie aficionados. But one of the guys who had had surgery was in the in the hospital after surgery and was he said he watched an entire movie on TikTok in segments. It's like you got to be kidding me. But I think TikTok now allows like 30 minute pieces. So it was broken into like 20 to 30 minutes.

Tom Anderson (30:50)
you

Jeff (30:59)
bits that he was able to to see it.

Tom Anderson (31:00)
Yeah. Yeah.

And X has Twitter has long form too. Like the podcast I did with Bill McClain that we were just talking about a few minutes ago, he posted the whole thing up there. I was like, Whoa. Yeah. So they do really long form now. don't, I don't do any video work, so I don't know how good that is or not, but anyway, onto the next.

Jeff (31:08)
Yes.

Really? Well, interesting.

Yeah.

On to the next. So I got a text from my mother kind of random the other day. ⁓ She said, Do you have a visual dictionary? It was like, you mean like pictures in my head, you know, for words. And ⁓ she has been listening to a collection of essays. She's a huge Libby user. She was listening to a collection of essays by Anne Patchett.

Tom Anderson (31:37)
I'm just...

Jeff (31:52)
And we'll go into all the details of the story. It's kind of a funny story. But Anne Patchett was in this in this interview with this guy that she said was an absolute dick and never spoke to the guy again. But one of the things the guy asked was whether or not she had used a visual dictionary. She said, have no idea what this is. ⁓ I also had no idea what a visual dictionary is, but my mom.

sent me one the other day. She bought me the Merriam Webster's visual dictionary, second edition. And I will tell you that ⁓ I am absolutely delighted with this dictionary. So ⁓ visual dictionary, you know, usually you have a word dictionary, look a word up, and gives you a description of what you know, whenever that term is in the on you go visual dictionary is nothing but pictures.

with descriptions and it's very very detailed so you get a breakdown on you know if you're looking at a medieval castle ⁓ what the details of that medieval castle might be and know where each of the rooms is and where the things are it really is amazing in terms of ⁓ the details so if you are a writer as I am ⁓

and you're trying to explain something that you don't know, you can use the visual dictionary, go in there and you can start naming the pieces of the, know, whatever it is you're talking about, everything from computer chips to, like I said, medieval castles. I'm looking right now at a Romanesque church and it's got, you know, all the detailed information about kind of roof, you know, different pieces of information about what's

you know, what what this thing consists of. ⁓ I just like to sit and thumb my way through it. It's really quite a bit of fun. And ⁓ useful, hugely useful as far as as you know, being able to explain things or name things correctly rather than he crawled up on the roof by that triangular looking thing, you know, at the very top.

Tom Anderson (34:08)
You

Jeff (34:11)
I could say that it was the pyramid roof or whatever other kind of roof there might be. Information on how things go together, what the pieces are. There was one thing I looked for, not in the visual dictionary, I had to look it up, but was looking at the pieces of a shovel. And I did not know that...

A portion of a shovel is called a shoulder, which is where the wooden handle goes into the body of the shovel. So those details not in there for a shovel, it just told you what a shovel was and what the basic pieces of the shovel were. ⁓ But for the most part, super detailed information about muscles and lights and motorcycles and... ⁓

flies for fishing, which I know nothing about, you know, some really kind of cool, cool information. So if you have never heard of a visual dictionary, and honestly, if you're just interested in knowing things, I don't think you have to be a writer or someone who, you know, needs to be able to explain things to other people to enjoy this.

It's just kind of fun to thumb through and look at items and really kind of gain a different kind of knowledge. I went as a kid, friend of mine, ⁓ his sister, super smart young woman. She was little at the time, like read the dictionary. ⁓ I'm disinclined to read dictionaries, but this one very, very inclined to read. So.

Visual Dictionary, Marianne Webster's second edition. I highly recommend that. I did not add that, although probably I should. did not add that to Book Tracker, but maybe I should. Yeah.

Tom Anderson (36:12)
You

Maybe you should.

Yeah, and looking at this, it's very similar to the DK publishing books. Cause we bought a bunch of those for our kids when they, you know, when they're four or five, eight, whatever. you know, lots of pictures, which.

Jeff (36:30)
Yeah, yeah, exactly right.

Tom Anderson (36:41)
you makes everything more interesting when you can actually see what it is talking about. Like you were just saying there with like the church and the rooftop and everything there. I always liked when we do reading there bedtime with the kids, you know, we'd crack these books open and I always thought it was very enjoyable. So I get where you're coming from. Like they're just fun to look at because you can actually see it and you know, they make it really interesting with the way that they lay it out and the

Jeff (36:45)
Correct.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's.

Tom Anderson (37:11)
the there's some storytelling around it too. ⁓ Particularly with the DK books because they're more topical or more topic based or like the one I'm looking at now that I pulled up just as a sample I think is called the encyclopedia of animals the ultimate guide to our planet's wildlife. I think we have this one ⁓ or one very similar to it but those are fun. I like those.

Jeff (37:34)
Yeah, and this is, you're exactly right, this is in that family. And that's what makes it interesting is it is something that you can kind of explore and you can learn something ⁓ using pictures.

Tom Anderson (37:48)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff (37:48)
And

in that case, you're kind of putting a name to a face. You know, you're you're finding a way to to understand a thing without maybe having any other any other understanding of it before simply because it has pictures and then explanations with some details. So when we're talking about that Romanesque church, you know, it tells you that Romanesque style of architecture lasted in Europe from the mid 11th century.

to the Gothic period. ⁓ You know, characterized mainly by thick walls, rounded arches, ⁓ barrel vaults and small windows. So you get, you know, a really nice understanding. It's almost like an encyclopedia, but without the detail that you know, the in depth detail of, know, who first came up with Romanesque architecture or anything like that. So pretty, pretty cool stuff.

Tom Anderson (38:46)
All right, so.

Jeff (38:49)
Last on our list, Tommy boy.

Tom Anderson (38:51)
Last

on our list. So iOS 26.4 was updated or was released not too long ago, a couple weeks maybe. ⁓ Four quick things to know coming out of that that we wanted to kind of share with you. I think we hit on it a little bit ⁓ last episode. said, it's rumored to have improvements anywhere on the keyboard for typing. And it appears that that is...

which is very welcome change because man there were times I was already throw the phone against the wall. I so aggravated with that thing. ⁓ Apple said in the release notes improved keyboard accuracy when typing quickly ⁓ and so that does seem to be the case.

Jeff (39:21)
Hmm.

Yeah, and you

made a recommendation in your newsletter which I followed which was to reset the keyboard that that makes a difference too because a lot of times I think it remembered the stupidity that it had it and And I have found that to be True, so I'm finding this to be much better than it had been before But I did do the keyboard reset that you were talking about in the newsletter

Tom Anderson (39:45)
Mm-hmm.

Okay, good.

Yeah, mine has been pretty good too. I did that as well. ⁓ The resetting the keyboard dictionary is easy. It's in your settings, go to general. This is where it gets a little scary for people because it says transfer or reset phone. Okay, so you do that. And then you get into that section where you can do like the erase all contents and settings do not do that. ⁓ You just want to go to reset, and then reset keyboard dictionary and we'll put a link.

Jeff (40:11)
Hehehehe

Yeah.

Tom Anderson (40:26)
in the show notes to the last newsletter that had that in it has all this other stuff in it too. can go read it there if you want to sign up, you'll get this stuff sent to you by the way, tomfanderson.com shameless plug. Because that's what we do. I shed all of my shame. A couple other things real quick. Urgent reminders came out a couple of releases ago, I feel like it was 26 to

Jeff (40:38)
You should be ashamed of yourself,

Good

Tom Anderson (40:55)
maybe. ⁓ And that let you set a task that you have in reminders, you could set it as urgent, and you would give it a due date and a time. What was different there with that is when the due date arrived, instead of getting a notification, you would get an alarm just like if you'd set an alarm, you know, to go off at five o'clock or something like that. So it would show up on the lock screen. ⁓ And then you could snooze it, it would go into live activity and everything. ⁓

which overall I think is a very nice addition. And so they've updated that a little bit to make it a little easier. So you can long press any reminder and tap Marcus Urgent, or you can use the quick toolbar when you tap onto a reminder to edit it. There's a little calendar icon there. and they've added a section at the top. If you're using an iPhone, it'll be on the left. If you're on Mac or iPad, where your today scheduled and all those, ⁓ kind of smart lists are there's an urgent

smart lists there so it will collect all of the urgent reminders so you can find them there.

Jeff (41:58)
Very nice. Yeah, a couple of other things. Stolen device protection now and by default. And there is support for AI apps in CarPlay now so you can use AI in your car. So have you used that at all, Tom? Or no?

Tom Anderson (42:16)
Yes.

so the apps have to get updated, ⁓ to support it. And yeah, as far as I know, only chat GPT has updated their app. see it. I have not seen Claude or Gemini. Don't know if perplexity might, I don't know. I don't, I don't have that one. So I'm not sure, ⁓ if they have or not. Now, a couple of things to note with that it's voice only. So it's not like throwing your wallet text up on the car play screen, which would be.

Jeff (42:25)
to support it again.

Tom Anderson (42:47)
chaotic. We don't need that. There's people are poor enough drivers as it is. ⁓ There's no woke or woke. There's no woke word to activate it. There's no wake word either. So if you say, you know, like you would say, Hey, idiot Apple Assistant, ⁓ there's you can't say hey, Claude. So you can't get that. You have to actually open the app on the carplay thing. So it's voice only when you do that. I hit chat GPT

Jeff (42:48)
dangerous

hahahaha

May Idiot Apple assist it.

Tom Anderson (43:17)
The other day just test it. and I don't know if it was noise or what, but it felt like I was using Siri because it was kind of dumb too, because I said, what are the latest rumors on the iPhone fold?

any updates on that or something like that. And it's like, the iPhone 14 Pro is the latest model available and the iPhone I was like, okay, we're done. Great start. So that, that's probably a one off. mean, it's usually pretty good ⁓ with that. But so anyway, those are there. If that's something you want to do, I some people have asked for that. they can, you know, ruminate on things is there.

Jeff (43:36)
Yeah.

Let's shh.

Yeah, works for me.

Tom Anderson (44:02)
driving in the board, whatever, want talk about something. But anyhow, I think that's it, Jeff.

Jeff (44:08)
Tom, we've done it again. We burned another 45 minutes of everybody's time. ⁓ Thanks for sticking around. If you're around this late in the game, we do appreciate all of our listeners and thank you for coming along. Tom Engine's got that ⁓ newsletter that you can get at his newsletter address, tomfanderson.com slash newsletter. ⁓

pretty much off social media, not 100%, but you might be able to find me on threads occasionally at Reyes Point. You can get to us at feedback at basicafshow.com, plus in your podcast app, you've got the ability to send us some ⁓ feedback there as well, including voicemail. So feel free to voicemail us if you're so inclined.

Tom Anderson, think that's the end of the road for us. We've got Psychokinetics, Show Music, greatly appreciate Psychokinetics and Celsius 7 and Randall Martin Design for...

fancy pants, two idiot robot ⁓ logo, which we love. Still, still great stuff. Yeah, 100%.

Tom Anderson (45:20)
We do. 100%. Yep.

All right. Well, I think that will do it. ⁓ So thanks for being here and we'll see you next time.

Jeff (45:32)
See ya.