Casey Liss

All right, and then tell me about performance, specifically with the M4 Pro and M4 Pro Max.

Oh, but maybe they'll come screaming back. We'll see.

All right, and then a handful of people wrote in to correct us when we said, oh, you can't buy a Mac with 8 gigs of RAM anymore. Au contraire, Walmart is still selling that M1 MacBook Air with 8 gigs of RAM for $700, although as we record this, it's actually on sale for $650. But yeah, that still exists. That's still a thing in their lineup.

The new USB-C accessories, including those color-matched ones that we were talking about a little bit ago, apparently they require macOS Sequoia because they do not work with anything before it or even the 15.2 beta, which is too bad. Reading from MacRumors, the new USB-C accessories require macOS Sequoia 15.1 to work properly.

And as noted on the MacRumors forums, earlier versions of macOS do not work. There are reports from users running macOS Sonoma and Ventura who are having issues with the new devices. With the keyboard, touch ID and function keys don't work, and with the magic mouse, the scrolling doesn't function. In some cases, the accessories are recognized as older devices, inhibiting proper functionality.

And this isn't a problem limited to just people running older versions of macOS because there are also reports from developers who have installed the first macOS Sequoia 15.2 beta. It appears that the macOS Sequoia 15.2 beta was released before Apple could add in support for the new Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard, and Magic Trackpad.

Daniel Luz writes that the Apple $69 1-meter Thunderbolt 5 cable is a passive cable. 1-meter is the USB... What is IF here? USB IF?

Thank you. The 1-meter is the USB IF's limit for passive cables, as is expected. Every compliant passive Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 cable is compatible with Thunderbolt 5. It's unclear to me, writes Daniel, what the situation is for Thunderbolt 3. There appears to be a Gen 3 that works.

If you have an old USB 4 cable, you might already have a Thunderbolt 5 cable as long as it's passive and at most one meter long. So perhaps the only difference between this new Thunderbolt 5 cable and the one that ships with the studio display is higher power delivery.

No capes! Daniel Nelson writes that there is at least one dock that supports 10 gigabit Ethernet, the OWC Thunderbolt Pro dock. I think I was the one who had said, as far as I know, there are no docks that exist that have 10 gig Ethernet. I knew that my beloved CalDigit TS4 has two and a half gig, but Daniel points out there is this one from OWC that does include 10 gig.

iFixit has torn down the iPad mini A17 Pro to see if there's any physical or hardware reasons for jelly scrolling improvements. And after watching this like six or seven minute YouTube video, I can tell you that no, there doesn't appear to be any hardware changes, but they do put the old one and the new one in super duper slow-mo or they take super slow-mo videos of them.

And you can see that it is unquestionably better now, but not perfect.

Kilvor writes in regarding the quote-unquote fork in the road for Apple TV, i.e. whether or not it wants to keep pursuing GPU and CPU power beyond what is needed for streaming video so it can play games better. The latest Apple TV is actually worse for games, even if the chip is better on paper, since in practice it thermal throttles a lot earlier.

This is according to an old colleague who was working on an Apple Arcade title, Absolute Monkey's Paw.

Finally, in follow-up, keyboard cleaning corner. We were asked about this, I think, in an Ask ATP, but basically, you know, how do you clean your keyboard when you're powering off the computer and then mashing on any freaking key? We'll turn it back on.

And I think we had a couple of solutions at the time, but I also wanted to bring up a friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, writes and makes Cleanup Buddy. We'll put a link in the show notes, which is another one of those tools that'll basically disable the keyboard for a little while.

And then Daniel Piper, or maybe Pepper Piper, I believe, wrote in and said, cleaning the keyboard on an ARM Mac can be achieved by doing the following. Hold down the left control and left command keys and the right shift key for seven seconds. And then while still holding down those keys, press the power button for another seven seconds.

After that, the computer can only be powered on by using the power button. I tried this, and it didn't work. Then I turned off my computer, and I tried it again, and it didn't work. Then I tried it, and I turned my computer back off, tried it for a third time, and I'll be damned if it didn't work. And it really does do exactly what Daniel said.

I guess I just screwed it up the first time, and I think your computer has to be off to actually have it engage.

No, except that it only does it until the next boot. So you can clean your keyboard, do whatever, as long as you don't touch the power button. And then once you turn the computer back on, it forgets that this is the mode it was in, and it goes back to any button can turn the computer back on again, which I don't like. I wish I could make this like a permanent setting.