Podcast · Tech & Science

Accidental Tech Podcast

by Marco Arment, Casey Liss, John Siracusa · English · Tech & Science

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

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 2 hr 8 min
Latest: 1 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

1 Oct 2026 · 2 hr

711: Hot Dog on an Actuator

Pre-show: Marco has M6 performance numbers 🗣️ It’s St. Jude time! 🗣️ Podcastathon on Friday October 2 @ noon eastern The Marco Offset™ Follow-up: John’s mouse pad (via Andy) Rounded corners are, bad, maybe? AirPower… desk? 🤨 John’s weird AirPods 5 issues Finding Intel apps in macOS System Settings → General → About → Intel-based Apps Learn more… M5 Ultra Mac Studio GPU scores New Mac mini storage caveats 𝓍OS 27 Screen Time woes (Timestamp link to 8m50s) iOS 27 vs. Pi-hole dazfuller Aaron Vegh GM vs. CarPlay Casey’s blog post Casey’s mea culpa Wait, just kidding Apple Watch is listening……

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E710 · 24 Sep 2026 · 2 hr 13 min

710: That New Mouse Pad Feeling

🗣️ It’s St. Jude time! 🗣️ Podcastathon on Friday October 2 @ noon eastern The Marco Offset™ Flying Spaghetti Monster Follow-up: New treats John iPhone 18 Pro John’s case AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case IP57 Dust protected Immersion, up to 1m, for 30 minutes Oddities Volume control Marco Apple Watch S12 Ceramic Apple Watch S12 bezels are bigger than S10 ? Mac mini Casey: Apple Watch S12 Aluminum How should Apple have handled iPhone Duo dev tools? (via Oscar Echeverri) Photos libraries on external drives (via Larry Fieman) Preliminary M5 Ultra GPU Geekbench scores Chart Apple watch…
E709 · 17 Sep 2026 · 2 hr 8 min

709: Steel-Cable Insurance

🗣️ New ATP Member’s Special: ATP Insider: Show Q&A 🗣️ It’s St. Jude time! 🗣️ The Marco Offset™ Todd Vaziri on James Bond homages in the event video Comparison video Previously, in 2018 Making of (via Techzha ) Preliminary Geekbench scores A20 Pro (iPhones 18 Pro) CPU GPU M6 CPU GPU M5 Ultra CPU iPhone 18 Pro Max & Apple C2 Solar phone charging? 🤔 (via flanker ) Pragmatic #38: Watch This Time and Space Aperture blades on iPhone 18 Pro / Pro Max camera MKBHD’s review PetaPixel’s Review Explaining starbursts Straight vs. rounded examples Debate on DPReview forums iPhones 18 Pro Face ID…
E708 · 10 Sep 2026 · 3 hr 4 min

708: Primary, Tertiary, and Third Cousin

🗣️ It’s St. Jude time! 🗣️ The Marco Offset™ September 2026 event MacRumors on the cellular chips SynthID Standard Apple Audio Intelligence Privacy Overview Surface Duo PowerBook Duo Rafa’s toot about layouts Apple Developer Videos Post-show: Jetty update Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple’s new business terms in the EU Ben Thompson’s breakdown Gruber’s take Adrian Weckler at Irish Independent Sponsored by: ElevenLabs : AI Customer Support Agents Factor : Healthy Eating, Made Easy Quince : Elevated essentials and staples that last Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member…
E707 · 3 Sep 2026 · 2 hr 6 min

707: Haunting the Campus Like a Ghost

🗣️ It’s St. Jude time! 🗣️ The Marco Offset™ Follow-up: Luz fooled me , Jerry! Extremely convincing fake by Daniel Luz Mea culpa Apple fooled us all Siri blobs fix System Settings → Screen Time → Content & Privacy → Content & Privacy (turn the switch on) → Siri → Writing Assistance (turn the switch off) John is happy with new Macs timetable Are photo libraries on external disks supported? Knowledge base Iris Yankees / Sox in Apple Vision Pro Dithering Motivations for SME adoption (via shac ron ) ✅ Tim Cook exit interview AT 688: A Company Man at 1h8m29s (Overcast timestamp link) Phil takes…
E706 · 27 Aug 2026 · 2 hr 38 min

706: No One Is Getting a Good Deal Tonight

Pre-show: Marco’s casement windows Screen clips Screen clips, installed (white prototypes for visibility) TPU for AMS 🗣️ New Member’s Special: ATP Movie Club: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind Follow-up: macOS 27 UI tweaks Redesigned stoplights in β6 Video Stoplights Stretchy buttons Video Porsche 911, 996 generation In defense of the fried egg Porsches Turning off the Siri logo macOS 27 got the new Preview icon LLM determinism when temperature = 0 Write-up by Horace He IEEE standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic 𝓍OS 27 Photos Shared Album gotchas See also Other people’s phones Not sped…
E705 · 20 Aug 2026 · 2 hr 30 min

705: Relentless in a Gentle Way

Pre-show: Marco may have to dance with the devil Daikin Home Assistant integration Home Assistant Green Follow-up: The OpenAI doughnut What if it’s an eye? (via Elijah Yap) Or perhaps red blood cell shaped? (via Chris Lawrence) Biconcave disc Time Capsule was to solve the laptop-backup problem Multiple Apple IDs with the same number (via Adam Wunn) RAMageddon Apple gets lower display prices Apple raises trade-in values 🎉 Unforgetful is out! 🎉 E-Mail Addresses That Would be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone Skybridge Mac Power Users #861: Stephen Builds a New Task App Kanban…
E704 · 13 Aug 2026 · 2 hr 8 min

704: Past the Ternus Horizon

Pre-show: Marco has a rose and thorn Lutron Caséta Fan Control Fanimation Technology Connections video Follow-up: Marco’s favorite feedback (about Myke ) was from Analog(ue) 😬 SQLite bug write-up Blackbird Post-show Neutral Professional negotiators / “headhunters” are very much a thing CarEdge (via John Siracusa) Delivrd (via Roger Coxon) Wall Street Journal ( News+ link ) The Car Chick (via Juan Boyce) The #1 trusted automotive expert for women and smart men Your Car Buying Advocate (via Ian McCullough) Two options from Colin Macdonald Automatch Consulting Insight Auto Consulting Casey…
E703 · 6 Aug 2026 · 2 hr 32 min

703: Part of a Healthy Breakfast

Pre-show: The Overcast “kicking machine” Adam Wunn’s blog post Previously in ATP #324: Automatic Kicking Machine Follow-up: Marco gives John the gift of transcript search in build #1169 [ The system works! — Ed. ] Build #1172 includes Siracusa Replay Mode Be wary of Sonos + Pi-hole or other ad blockers (via Will Smidlein) Ubiquiti High Availability Redundant Power Supply USP-RPS SmartPower Cable USP-Cable “Odd” RAM amounts (via Joe Lion ) Multiple Apple accounts (via TJ Usiyan) Some science about Sony’s axe of PlayStation discs SuperDuper 4 Previously in the SuperDuper blog… Apple Upgrade…
E702 · 27 Jul 2026 · 2 hr 31 min

702: Isolate the Evil

Pre-show: Three old men talk about the Tickety Tocks Follow-up: Adam Wunn published his email as a blog post Sharing files in Screen Sharing.app (via Ingmar Wittkau) Video game preservation (via Jason Griffey) Supplying power to Marco’s army of Mac minis Ubiquiti “Shadow Mode High Availability” An update on Passwords.app “doing the hard thing” macOS iOS More clipboard changes in macOS 27 Video in question Apple is reportedly looking to acquire AI chip companies P. A. Semi Apple is actually spending money on Broadcom Hartley Charlton at MacRumors Slate Truck price & availability announced…
E701 · 23 Jul 2026 · 2 hr 11 min

701: I Improved My Town

Pre-show: Marco’s Mac mini catastrophe CyberLynk / Mac Mini Vault The dead ATS The proposed replacement 🗣️ New Member’s Special: ATP Tier List: Emoji Follow-up: Member’s Special video trimming / John’s Vibe Coded App LosslessCut Casey has leveled-up his Sonos experience Previously on ATP Version 85.01 announcement post FAQ post Louie Mantia makes the case for Squircle Sony 💔 💿 A nefarious motivation for Sony ceasing to sell games on disc (via Glen Jarvis) CD sales are going up Price increase corner: Apple Music edition Chart by BasicAppleGuy AppleCare+ too FileMaker In defense… CVE…
E700 · 16 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 56 min

700: A Wet Dishrag Full of Lies

Pre-show: Anniversary Corner! catatp (see also Statistics ) Bootleg visualization Follow-up: Public beta check-in Casey’s iMessage notification issue Cache in front of CloudFlare Workers! Apple keeps futzing with rendering of .icon files Mac-assed Mac Apps Steve Troughton-Smith on ChatGPT Gruber #1 Gruber #2 Gus Mueller Gruber Globe key on Apple’s extended keyboards (via Philip Hofstetter ) LaunchAgent ~/Library/LaunchAgents Casey’s former keyboard Tina’s keyboard: MMMR3LL/A Shouldn’t the Studio Display get a price bump? (via Brian Nehring ) Regarding skipping M6 Pro/Max/Ultra (via…
E699 · 7 Jul 2026 · 2 hr 20 min

699: Not the Correct Squircle

Pre-show: Casey’s oops Magic TrackPad Magic Keyboard Marco’s Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard Follow-up: Casey may have fixed his notification problem! Mac-“Arsed” Mac App skill (via Bart Reardon ) RAMAgeddon Feel free to donate to St. Jude any of the money you may have saved by buying early! (via Jonathan) Will Apple rethink unified memory given these prices? (via ShutterAperture ) Steam Machine difficulties Interview on YouTube (Timestamp link to 12m48s) Collusion! Well, maybe . Would a gold Mac mini be cheaper than a spec with tons of RAM? Awax did math We’re Fable is so back, baby More at Ars…
E698 · 30 Jun 2026 · 2 hr 14 min

698: And Do What?

Pre-show: Who’s bored? 🗣️ New Member ’s Special: ATP Dev: Mac-assed Mac Apps Follow-up: Nugs and Sonos As the prophecy foretold… ☹️ Mythos is back, but Fable isn’t Rumors about Siri AI indexing Corrections about 8TB SSDs (via Aaron Raimist) Price increases abound! ☹️ On the Apple TV price hike (via Chris Carley) Steam Machine ( More ) Xbox Micron points fingers at Apple ( News+ Link ) Steve Troughton-Smith’s take Previously, in Palm Pilots Apple asks Trump to save their 🥓 Financial Times No M6 Pro/Max/Ultra‽ Touchscreen MacBook Pro Intel to fabricate the M7‽ GFHK ? More reporting New Siri…
E697 · 26 Jun 2026 · 2 hr 6 min

697: The Chart Is Terrifying

Pre-show: Casey has some fantastic news about nugs.net for Marco Marco’s trip report Gucci Osteria Follow-up: John guested on a preview of Designed in California , published as part of Upgrade #624 (also on YouTube ) Apple Intelligence 🤝 external boot disks (via Doug Weinfield) Spotlight indexing in 𝑥OS 27 Steve Riggins notes it takes a while Alex concurs Apple’s AI Tech Talk What will Siri be capable of? (via Jochen Marschall ) Bootleg video (via sayrer ) Is Spatial Reframing in 𝑥OS 27 geographically-aware? (via Kevin Buterbaugh) Tesla 🤝 CarPlay? New CarPlay features (via Alec Hurdle)…
E696 · 15 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 59 min

696: It Seems Petty, But I Endorse It

Pre-show: We are not dangerously capable We convince ourselves not to pivot to video Accidental Neutral : The Rivian R2 FYI, Marco: Casey has officially called dibs on the R3X 😈 Follow-up: It’s Road Trip (via Jason Paul) Indexing for the new Spotlight Passwords app does the hard thing macOS 27 “Golden Gate” was the codename for macOS Big Sur… and eWorld 1.1 Microsoft Bob You can use Touch ID for Administrator access There’s a way to skip the Siri waitlist (via Steve Troughton-Smith ) sudo defaults write "/Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/GenerativeModels.plist" "EnhancedSiriWaitlist"…
E695 · 9 Jun 2026 · 2 hr 51 min

695: The Crystal Pepsi of Aqua

WWDC 2026 Watch the Keynote (alternatively, on YouTube ) Craig Hockenberry on Spotlight Word wall Rob Rhyne’s toot Weird holes Change Detection .well-known Dear EU, 🖕. Love, Apple Post-show: Casey’s unexpected afternoon Music Video Craig’s toot Tim’s Good Morning video [Alternatively, on Xcancel ] TN3212: Adopting gesture recognizers for Sidecar touch support (via Vince ) Sam Henri Gold Members-only ATP Overtime: The foldable iPhone takes shape White foldable phone More details Sonny Dickson’s images [Alternatively, on Xcancel ] Case leaks Sponsored by: Squarespace : Save 10% off your first…
E694 · 4 Jun 2026 · 2 hr 20 min

694: Potential and Homework

Pre-show: 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 Happy Pride ! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ John and dynamic DNS Former & future sponsor Tailscale (but seriously, I’m obsessed —CL) Tailscale Funnel DynDns.org no-ip.org Follow-up: Ferrari Luce John’s remembered video clip of sandwiching the body (extracted by RG ) John’s EV Stupidity Checklist Wassym Bensaid, Chief Software Officer at Rivian, being a dummy Bambu ’s battle with its users They were already in hot water (via Steve Riggins ) Jose agrees Faking alarm reminders (via Ben Smith ) Moving files between volumes Steven Op de beeck demonstrates this with a tiny file and a large…
E693 · 29 May 2026 · 2 hr 2 min

693: Negative Bonus Points

Pre-show: Marco has something to commend Ubiquiti marketing video Spanning Tree Protocol Sonos & Networking Documentation Follow-up: Formula 1 on Apple TV The case for alarm reminders (via Matthew Cave ) SVG can do animations — and way more! (via Vítor ) SVG can do THAT‽ Yes, you can use AI for ffmpeg , but have you tried Lossless Cut ? SF Symbols in Marco’s Reminder app (via Clarko ) How can we bemoan Electron and cheer WebView s? (via Julian Gamble) If Finder moves are no good, are mv s the same? Defrag lives on …in APFS diskutil apfs defragment [disk] enable [disk] is something along the…
E692 · 21 May 2026 · 2 hr 7 min

692: A Thinking Hitch

Pre-show: 🗣️ New ATP Member ’s Special: ATP Movie Club: Her Immersive Inlet: Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness Follow-up: Cut/copy/paste in Finder Terminal John’s Terminal.app state restoration woes tcsh John’s Terminal settings Window tab John’s Terminal settings Tab tab Escape sequence extended tooltip .cshrc Terminal apps for macOS with text-based config files Fancy shell prompts like Starship KornShell Some other terminal resources The Linux Field Guide by Uros Popovic (via Derek ) The terminal, the TTY, and the shell The Secret Rules of the Terminal by Julia Evans Wizard Zines…
E691 · 14 May 2026 · 1 hr 55 min

691: A Menlo Phase

Pre-show: Project Hail Mary Reconcilable Differences #286: Ain’t Nothin’ Gonna Break My Stride Setlist Bandcamp Luke Bloom — Bad D. H. T. — Listen to Your Heart Apocalyptica Vitamin String Quartet Johnny Cash — Hurt Follow-up: CapEx vs. OpEx (via Andrew Leahey ) Bloomberg “Hot lot” (via Anonymous & Matt Jones) Ultra/Neo/etc Is the “iPhone Ultra” the 20th anniversary iPhone ? (via Janne Ojaniemi ) Did we forget about “Studio”? (via Karan J ) What’s the ∆ between an iMac Neo and a Studio Display? (via Zoran Nešić ) Time Machine …with lots of small files (via Jon Wilson & Andrew Hathaway)…
E690 · 8 May 2026 · 1 hr 55 min

690: Turn Left at the Next Tree

Pre-show: Two thirds of your hosts are sick 🤧 Follow-up: Backblaze & cloud backups Carbon Copy Cloner & Backblaze (via Barry Rubenstein) Support document Maestral Arq’s approach (via Daniel Luz ) Neo-ing… other things Mythos What makes this different (via William Moran) GPT-5.5 is equivalent? cURL security/bug reports Severe Linux security issue uncovered using AI AI is still ruining everything See also: MacBook Neo More from Tim Culpan Paul Haddad’s toot showing $25K-$35K Mac Studios for sale on eBay An examination of Apple’s CapEx Apple’s R&D spending hits new record SG&A MG Siegler’s…
E689 · 30 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 56 min

689: The Positive Effect of Enthusiasm

Pre-show: Mythos Anthropic’s blog post Follow-up: ATP Store Yes, it happened again. The ATP Neo Silver made it! UPenn is an Ivy Kieran Healy’s story Marina Epelman’s thought US News & World Report 2026 Best Engineering Schools Gurman’s transition coverage Tim Cook’s remarks to employees Comparison between Cook & Ternus The Ability to be Hotter New material proves to be more heat conductive Backblaze is no longer backing up cloud storage Backblaze Mac Release Notes for version 9.2.2.878 Backblaze Windows Release Notes for version 9.2.2.877 Response on Reddit Reparse point Additional response…
E688 · 21 Apr 2026 · 2 hr 6 min

688: A Company Man

🗣️ ATP STORE IS LIVE! 🗣️ Follow-up: GL.iNet KVM security issues? Mark Wadham’s write-up Dan Godin at Ars Technica MacBook Neo cores 🤝 BMW heated seats? (via Edward Munn ) Joe Lion waxes poetic about RAM on Apple Silicon More component delays It’s Ternus time Fashion Cook’s shoes Ternus’s Shirt Cook’s Shirt Johny Srouji named Chief Hardware Officer Tim’s letter New York Times coverage Marco’s blog post Post-show: John quizzes Marco & Casey Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue Infinite Loop by Michael S. Malone Revolution in the Valley folklore.org Jason’s recommendations Members-only…
E687 · 16 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 56 min

687: You Can Bend This Line

Pre-show: Casey requests an app from Marco Roon Nugs 🗣️ ATP STORE IS LIVE! 🗣️ 🗣️ New ATP Member Special: ATP Dev: Nuggets of Wisdom Follow-up: Suunto is… not young (via Henri Sivonen) Garmin did beat Suunto to GPS watch though The other neat explainer John was thinking of (via Ben Landsberg ) Previously: Eric Portis on Color Spaces Bartosz Ciechanowski on… anything Is Apple running out of A18 Pros ‽ 😱 Apple IDs & passkeys (via Vitor ) Others with this issue Apple said it’d be fixed… two years ago Stealing TV… may not be so wise. Shocker! (via Nye Hughes) See also: Krebs on Security…
E686 · 9 Apr 2026 · 2 hr 2 min

686: Write Two Letters

Pre-show: The new Ceramic Shield 2 in the iPhone 17 Pro is the real deal UniFi Travel Router Cascades trail Shenandoah National Park 🗣️ ATP STORE IS LIVE! 🗣️ Follow-up: Studio Display XDR price drop‽ 😱 Stephen Robles 1 2 Casey’s snarky toot Tangentially related: John’s Google One price drop John’s upgrade cycle (via Ryan Himmelwright) How much hotter can a Mac get? Mac Studio power consumption Mac Pro power consumption Apple’s implementation of Passkeys (via Ben Frearson) Apple subsidiary fined over $500k for breaching Russian sanctions RetinaDisplays.com CIE 1931 & Apple’s 2026 CMFs…
E685 · 1 Apr 2026 · 2 hr 16 min

685: The Ability to Be Hotter

Pre-show: Happy independence day, John! The Great Saunter Pedometer++ The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist 🗣️ New ATP Member Special: ATP Tier List: Home Screen Icons More about the flag Follow-up: Overcast transcripts Missed Apex MacBook Neo Tim Cook on the MacBook Neo launch New Ice Book? (via Adrian Bengtson) iBook “Snow” Teardown by Framework founder Nirav Patel Framework MacBook Neo vs. Chromebooks “NFW”, says Henry “This could be a breath of fresh air”, says Ari “Medium” Core and M5 Pro/Max information from Apple Chance Miller at 9to5 Mac Original article 🇩🇪 PCI Express…
E684 · 26 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 55 min

684: It’s Not What Young People Do

Follow-up: Overcast & Transcriptions Marco had never seen inside a datacenter What about podcasts that include their own transcripts (via Matt King ) Apple Podcasts transcript options tag MP3 ID3 “SYLT” tag What is Marco using for a job queue? Perhaps Faktory ? (via Drew Stephenson) beanstalkd Ansible Monitoring & control interface Imagine a Beowulf cluster of the minis… (via Aaron Dippner) System X RDMA over Thunderbolt was added in macOS 26.2 I Ran a Trillion Parameter AI on a Mac Apple Didn’t Have to Go This Hard Apple Insider Mac fleet management advice Apple Business AirPods Max…
E683 · 19 Mar 2026 · 2 hr 22 min

683: I Didn’t Want to Melt My Rug

Follow-up: You’re welcome, world Formula 1 A brief, renewed pitch to watch this season Cameras Are not a large portion of the coverage (via Matt Rigby) Failures don’t [usually] matter (via The Racing Line ) Great camera overview video The other perk of in-car footage (via Eric Fox) On getting Sky Sports replays (via Brendan Webb) Rosetta A deep dive from Colin McKellar Instant Final Cut Pro deprecation warning (via Tom Obarski) iPhone 17e teardown MacBook Neo Gruber on the camera & mic on-screen indicators Apple Platform Security Guide On Apple Exclaves (Medium link) CPU benchmark correction…
E682 · 12 Mar 2026 · 2 hr 17 min

682: Medium Core

Pre-show: Casey brings us back to Anniversary Corner Related episode of ATP Follow-up: An explanation for John’s post that broke containment (via Thomas Dickson) MacBook Neo John’s theory about color & clamshells The M1 MacBook Air was American Walmarts only. (via Pierre-Luc Gagné ) Aside also via P-L: does the Neo run Rosetta 2 ? MacBook Neo inputs 🤝 iPad Air inputs (via Andrew Larson) SSD speeds (via The Verge ) The  logo iPhone 5 intro video is what John was thinking of (via Peter Puleio ) Jason’s review Dave2D’s review Teardown Tyler Stalman on the Neo running “pro” apps Performance…

About Accidental Tech Podcast

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

Accidental Tech Podcast is a English tech & science podcast from Marco Arment, Casey Liss, John Siracusa. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Marco Arment, Casey Liss, John Siracusa
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 2 hr 8 min
Latest episode: 1 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id617416468
Website: atp.fm

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