Chapter 1: What adventures did the hosts have during their spring break?
For spring break last week, we went on a tour of Southwest Virginia, which was a lot of fun, despite there being very little in Southwest Virginia. But we found what there was to do and did it.
Now we're going to hear from all four people who live there.
Yeah, right. And I say that as someone who went to school in Southwest Virginia. And actually, I wasn't planning on talking about this, but it occurred to me in the hotel in Blacksburg, the hotel room had the unthinkable within it. And it made me exceedingly happy. What do you think was in that hotel room? Ethernet port. Correct. Nailed it.
Not only was there an Ethernet jack, but it was connected and worked, which was incredible. So I was very happy using my little unified travel router to connect to the Ethernet. But anyways, that's not actually why I'm bringing this up.
I'm bringing this up because there's a trail, like a hike, about half an hour outside of Blacksburg, which I had heard about so many times when I was in school that, oh, you know, we're going to go hike the Cascades. We're
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Chapter 2: What unique feature made the hotel experience memorable?
And I'd never actually done it when I was down there. But the kids and Aaron and me, we all did some hikes a couple of spring breaks ago in the Shenandoah National Park. Really enjoyed that. And so during this three-night vacation slash tour, we did a trio of hikes as well. And the biggest one was this first one at the Cascades Trail.
And you basically drive from nowhere to further nowhere and then drive through a neighborhood and spontaneously just come out at like a parking situation and like a little hut with a bathroom. And then you start on this hike that goes to these really beautiful waterfalls. And the waterfalls have the water cascading down them. I presume that's the genesis of the name, right?
Well, anyways, on the way out of the hike, we did the two miles out, two miles back. Kids were absolute troopers, did a great job. And then I was going to get in the car and I was wearing my beloved workout shorts and one of my ATP exercise t-shirts, which we're sort of not really going to talk about in a second.
And what do I hear as I'm getting an Aaron's Volvo for the second time in the last, whatever it is, seven months, I hear clunk, clunk, crash.
I just want to pause here for a second and ask the longtime ATP listeners, how long into that story did you figure out that Casey was going to tell us that he dropped his phone again? That is a great measure. Obviously, Marco and I are cheating because we see the show notes and we know where he's going with this. But I'm just curious for the people listening. You're listening. Casey's winding up.
He's got a big wind up on his pitches. He's going along. When did you figure out, oh, Casey dropped his phone again, didn't he?
I think as soon as I said hike is probably when it happened.
Was it hike? Was it just like going on vacation? Was it middle of nowhere?
Oh, it's so true. I want to be so mad at you, but you're absolutely correct.
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Chapter 3: What hiking experience did they have at the Cascades Trail?
But yes, so at the end of the hike, I'm getting back in the car and I hear thunk, thunk, crash. And sure enough, my phone had fallen out of my workout shorts, which has happened from these same shorts once before. You'd think I would have learned, but no, no, I didn't.
Get some new shorts with bigger pockets. Get pockets with zippers. Something, anything.
These shorts actually do have zippers, but the zipper broke, unfortunately. And so here we are. Again, this is a problem of my own creation. But anyways, I looked down, and sure enough, the pop socket had yeeted itself halfway across the parking lot. Are we allowed to say yeet?
We're not too old to say that?
Oh, no, we are. No, I think that's actually your generation.
no no it's it's no yeah i think it's isn't that millennial thing i think it is no it's absolutely much younger than us all right well anyway i i say you can say it i declare that you can say it oh thanks dad because it because it's because it's out of style now so it's suitably unfashionable exactly well and definitely i mean it's definitely out of style now that we're using it precisely right so you can tell yeah
So the pop socket had launched itself across the parking lot. And sure enough, my phone was face down and it was on blacktop cement, whatever it was. And I think to myself, oh, all right, it's been about six months. That's probably about due for me to shatter the phone. And I picked it up. And it was pristine. It was perfectly fine.
This is the second time this has fallen from a Volvo XC90 out of my pocket onto the pavement, face down, both times. It has been pristine. Is there a case on it or no? No case. I think now I'm going to absolutely jinx myself. So let me do a little Foley work and... knock on wood, I think I can declare Ceramic Shield 2 the real deal.
And so I went back to the keynote from September to see who was introducing it and what they said, and it was Kyan Drance, and she said very little about it, but she did say there's three times better scratch resistance, and that they infused ceramic in a different way, in different molecular or chemical bonds or whatever, but the only real marketing phrase was three times better scratch resistance.
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Chapter 4: How did the hosts react to Casey's phone mishap?
deal with probably whatever the multitasking system ends up being. I'm sure you can simulate all that. But I don't think that's going to replace the experience of actually handling it in terms of knowing how your app should look and work on that device. I think any iOS developer responsible for design and layout and controls
who has any budget ability to do this, is probably going to want to have an iPhone Fold of their own. Even if it's not their daily carry phone, it's probably a good idea to have it and maybe live with it for like a week or two or something just so you can figure out how it handles and design your app accordingly.
Because that is going to be a pretty different experience for apps if the rumors are at all true.
All right, we have some important breaking news. The ATP store is back, baby. You can go to atp.fm slash store where John will proceed to take us on a nickel tour of all the different things that he has in store for you.
Yes, this is, in fact, the WWDC 2026 store. Seems like the WWDC store comes earlier every year, but really it's always around this time. We try to get people their items in time to attend WWDC, which is a thing that is rare these days because it doesn't hold a lot of people and most people don't get to go. But, you know, that's the theory, so that's why it's so early, FYI.
So get your orders in now. Here's what we've got. The first product is actually four products. It's the opposite of the iPhone intro. And I'll explain why. So this is, it's a t-shirt and it's ATP Neo. And these are shirts inspired by the MacBook Neo because they come in the color combinations that the MacBook Neo comes in. They're called ATP Neo Indigo, Blush, Citrus, and Silver.
Here's the concept. The shirt should be more or less the color of like the body of the Neo. And the logo, it's just the monochrome ATP logo, should be the color of the keyboard. And as you know, the keyboards on all the MacBook Neos are color matched to the device. So even though when you look at like the pink one and like the yellowy citrus one, you're like, oh, they both have white keyboards.
They don't. The pink one has like a lightly pinkish keyboard and the citrus one has like a lightly yellow keyboard. And it's the same for all of them. The keyboards are not the same color on these devices. So the logo is not the same color on these shirts.
And that's why they have to be four separate shirts because the way Cotton Bureau does it, if you have a different ink color, that's a different shirt because, you know, you're printing a different thing on it. So, and the other thing is, to get shirts that are colored like the MacBook Neo, we unfortunately don't have the clout to say, make me a shirt that matches this color.
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Chapter 5: What reflections are shared about the podcast's history and its impact on the hosts?
That's really freaking cool and really freaking weird. But it's good stuff.
It was delightful. It was incredibly heartwarming to listen to. And actually, I listened to it in the car on the way upstate with my family. And so my son got to hear that. He's like, that's you. And they're talking about you. And it was a very nice experience for all of us.
My father's voice coming back from the car player. It's recorded.
Yeah.
Who knew?
And I think I accidentally blew them off and didn't get interviewed because I blew them off. And that was not my intention. Sorry about that. But thank you for making this podcast. It was delightful.
Yeah, I think when Casey presented the ideas like this person wants to talk about podcast ads, like it wasn't clear that this was going to be because I was just surprised anyone. And and, you know, and I said, hey, I'll talk to the person about podcast. I don't know what they want to talk to me about, but I know about podcast ads a little bit.
And it turned out it was good that I did it because I featured in it more than I thought I would.
Yeah. And it was interesting. I think for anybody who is interested in like the kind of mechanics behind podcast ads, why everything's moving to DAI now, why, you know, ads like the kind we do seem to be significantly on the decline and, you know, going extinct. There's a lot of good info there, both from us and from the reporters and also from Lex Friedman.
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Chapter 6: What insights are provided about Apple's 50th anniversary and its significance?
I'm shocked that you knew how to do this.
Did he remember or did he have to figure it out again?
Did AI post to your blog, Marco? Did you give the contents of the post to some AI and say, please figure out how to get this on Marco.org?
Nope. And I also did not use any AI tools in writing this blog post.
Very well done. All right. So all snark aside, why don't you tell us about this, please?
So everybody was celebrating Apple's 50th anniversary last week, and I do think it's worth pointing out that we didn't do anything on this podcast to celebrate it.
I mean, Casey's the one who should feel bad about that, but that is exactly appropriate for me. He's Mr. Anniversary. I'm Mr. No Anniversary, No Nothing, so I'm on message. That's true.
And honestly, and, you know, I think like, you know, the other podcasts in our in our kind of nearby podcast neighbor sphere, I think they did a good job covering it. And whatever they did was more of a like anniversary celebration than anything we would have done. And so I'm happy to have left that to the other podcasts. They did a very nice job with it. So.
For me, you know, I was trying to figure out, like, should I post something about Apple's 50th? I had a little bit of a hard time deciding on an angle because, you know, my feelings about Apple these days are mixed. They do a lot of good and they do a lot of bad. And there's a lot about them that I still love. There's a lot about them that I will always love.
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Chapter 7: How does Marco's letter to John Ternus encapsulate concerns about Apple's direction?
I know that's actually a thing with presidents.
Sit down and write two letters, right, Casey? Nope.
Yeah.
Come on, Marco. For your first and last day. I forget the rest of the reference. I don't remember where this came from. It's probably apocryphal or maybe it's a real thing. But anyway, the thing is I can't even give you the context. So basically like a new political leader comes into power. and finds two envelopes on his desk. And they say, if you get in trouble, open up the first envelope.
If you get into trouble again, open up the second one. Oh, yeah, yeah. He eventually gets into trouble. He opens up the first envelope, and inside is a piece of paper that says, blame everything on me. Basically, blame everything on your predecessor. Mm-hmm. Uh, and then he, he does that and it works and then time passes and he gets in trouble again.
He opens a second envelope and it says, sit down and write two letters.
It's very good.
A letter to John Ternus. Blame everything on Tim. Is it the first letter?
Yeah.
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Chapter 8: What are the key features and comparisons made between the Suunto and Apple Watch?
And so what I what I wanted to do here was basically like and in some ways, you know, I I'm pretty sure Apple execs see blog posts. They they see press. They see this kind of thing. They don't hear podcasts. Probably not, but at least not all of them.
But I was pretty sure that if I wrote this this way, if it was reasonably short, if it was reasonably constructive, and if I named it a letter to John Ternus, I was pretty sure there was a good chance he'd probably see it at some point. From his vanity Google searches?
Yeah.
Who knows? But somehow this would be sent to him by somebody. I think the odds of that, knowing the way Apple's execs do read a lot of stuff that is posted by our community, I figured there was a good chance he'd see it. And if not, enough higher-ups would see it. It would still do some good. And what I wanted to do was basically just... Reinforce our principles.
Not just what Apple stands for, but what we who are on what we view as the good side of personal computers. What we believe in with computers. And number one is we love computers. Number two is computers serve us and they enhance our lives. We don't need our computers to...
control us, restrict us, take advantage of us, and that we are the owner of the computer and we are the customer being served. We are not the resource being harvested by a barrage of upsells and privacy invasion and tracking and all that other stuff. I believe Apple best represents those ideals in the computing industry by a mile. They are way ahead of everyone else in all of those ideals.
But I also firmly see and believe while they are ahead of everyone else, their own adherence to those ideals is declining and has declined significantly under the Tim Cook era. As they've pushed into services and upsells, there are promos everywhere. There are ads everywhere.
The computer does feel like it is taking control away from its customers and owners and treating us more like resources to be harvested and annoyed. I think Apple is – they're in a dangerous place here for their ethics, their morals, their quality, and for the things that we care about.
So what I was hoping to do with this is keep it very short and try to advocate for this mindset to not be forgotten. And a little bit of historical reference to Jobs and Woz because I do think Jobs and Woz both in their very different ways, both very much believed in these things and practiced them. Woz wasn't honestly there for that long, but certainly the Jobs era, Jobs practiced this.
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