687: You Can Bend This Line
Accidental Tech Podcast
Marco Arment
4.3 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2026
⏱️ 116 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
- Pre-show: Casey requests an app from Marco
- 🗣️ ATP STORE IS LIVE! 🗣️
- 🗣️ New ATP Member Special: ATP Dev: Nuggets of Wisdom
- Follow-up:
- Suunto is… not young (via Henri Sivonen)
- The other neat explainer John was thinking of (via Ben Landsberg)
- Is Apple running out of A18 Pros‽ 😱
- Apple IDs & passkeys (via Vitor)
- Stealing TV… may not be so wise. Shocker! (via Nye Hughes)
- See also:
- Ads are coming to Apple Maps
- AI-generated code & copyright
- Ask ATP:
- Post-show: Casey’s silly new toy
- Members-only ATP Overtime: John tries to reach acceptance
- Apple approves AMD & Nvidia eGPU drivers
- What if Apple adopted “MPX”-style modules? (via Jan Wedekind)
- Bandwidth comparisons
- Thunderbolt 5
- 80 Gbit/s symmetric
- 120 Gbit/s unidirectional for displays
- SSD (M5 Max MacBook pro, 4 TB)
- 109 Gbit/s (13.6 GB/s) read
- 142 Gbit/s (17.8 GB/s) write
- PCIe speeds on PCIe 5.0
- 1 lane: 32 Gbit/s (4 GB/s)
- 16 lanes: 512 Gbit/s (64 GB/s)
- …as compared to the Mac Pro’s 64 lanes across 4 slots (2,048 GBit/s)
- 17× Thunderbolt 5’s maximum single-direction speed
- Thunderbolt 5
- Internal vs. external SSD
- 2025 Mac Studio: ~5.5 GB/s
- OWC Envoy Ultra: ~5.1 GB/s; 8 TB for $2,250
- OWC Thunderblade: ~5.75 GB/s; 8 TB for $2,700
- PolySoft third-party internal SSDs
- Kickstarter (ended November 2024)
Sponsored by:
- Leesa: A mattress for every body and budget.
- Zapier: Put AI to work across your company—for real.
- Quince: Elevated essentials and staples that last
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Marco, we've covered this in the show before, but hi, it's me and I have no memory. You are using, I almost said iTunes, you're using the music app as your playback app of choice. Is that correct? That makes it sound like I like it more than I do. Fair. Yes, I am using it to play music. All right. Here's what I need from you. I need you and me. And I think we probably have some mutual friends that would be interested as well. And even though this is a terrible idea, it would be an amazing idea. I need you and me and maybe others to work on like a, I guess it would kind of be vaguely similar to a classical music app, but an app for people who are just binging the same |
| 0:38.2 | like five artists nonstop forevermore. And there's 800 albums per artist. This is part of the |
| 0:45.6 | JAMS app. I'm telling you, you need to do it. So here's the thing with the JAMS app. So this is an app that |
| 0:51.5 | I intend to make probably with the help of AI at some point. |
| 0:55.0 | It's one of those apps that like it would never be worth the time to code the whole thing |
| 0:59.1 | from scratch without something like AI helping. Because again, like as we talked about before, |
| 1:03.4 | like the market for an app that caters to Jamben users and Jamben users who buy a bunch of the downloaded music and Jamben users who buy a bunch of the downloaded music and jam-ban |
| 1:14.0 | users who buy a bunch of the downloaded music and also want an app like this we're talking |
| 1:18.9 | five people like it's every one of those just like it strips it down and down and down further and |
| 1:23.1 | the thing is like there are other music listening apps out there and and and even like the jam band |
| 1:29.9 | um crowd there's a lot of overlap between like the the like audio file slash like power user of |
| 1:38.8 | music crowd and jam band listeners so there are already apps um is this one is this one called Roon, I think is one of them. |
| 1:46.9 | There's apps that like specialize in things like, you know, high bit rate or, you know, high, |
| 1:51.1 | high sample rate, lossless playback and go into like fancy daks and DSD and stuff like that. |
| 1:56.7 | Like there's all these like high-end audio file, you know, formats and apps that specialize in catering to those formats. |
| 2:05.3 | That world already exists. |
| 2:07.7 | And we wouldn't be any, like, anybody who wants that world, we wouldn't satisfy their desire. |
| 2:16.2 | And so, like, we're going to rule out people who don't care about jam bands. We're going to rule out people who don't buy all the jam band recordings or otherwise acquire them, like people who just want streaming. We're going to rule out people, among who's left, we're going to rule out people who, who actually want, like, those, like, high-end, you know, high bit rate audio file, |
| 2:35.5 | high fidelity, you know, kind of things. And then we're going to limit it just to people |
| 2:39.0 | who are on Apple's platforms because, you know, screw that. And then also, then it's going to be |
| 2:44.6 | like people who like our choices and our taste. And so I think it would be a very small market, which is why it is |
| 2:52.8 | probably worth doing it with AI, but probably not any other way. Well, the reason I bring this up, |
... |
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