691: A Menlo Phase

What It Covers

Accidental Tech Podcast episode 691 covers Apple Intelligence advertising lawsuit settlement, Apple's chip supply diversification efforts with Intel and Samsung, TSMC production constraints affecting Mac Studio availability, Time Machine reliability problems on macOS, file management workflows in Finder and terminal, and terminal app customization preferences among the three hosts.

Key Questions Answered

• •Apple Intelligence Settlement: Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action lawsuit covering US purchasers of iPhone 16 and iPhone 15 Pro models bought between June 2024 and March 2025. Eligible claimants receive $25 per device, potentially scaling up to $95 depending on claim volume. The features advertised at WWDC 2024 and in television commercials remain unshipped as of recording, making this one of Apple's most public product delivery failures in two decades.
• •TSMC Supply Constraints: Tim Cook confirmed on an earnings call that the primary bottleneck for products like Mac mini and Mac Studio is availability of advanced node SoCs, not memory chips. Cook stated supply-demand balance would take several months to resolve. NVIDIA has now displaced Apple as TSMC's largest customer, driven by AI inference and training demand, which directly competes with Apple for limited advanced node fabrication capacity at TSMC facilities.
• •Apple Chip Diversification Strategy: Apple reached a preliminary agreement with Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices, while also holding exploratory talks with Samsung about chip production. The strategy mirrors Apple's earlier China manufacturing investment model — funding competitors to TSMC to create healthy supply chain competition. Older chip designs for lower-end products are the likely candidates, freeing TSMC Taiwan capacity for cutting-edge SoCs like the M5 Ultra.
• •Time Machine Reliability Problems: Time Machine continues accumulating reliability issues on macOS, including backup drives filling completely despite being twice the size of the source volume, requiring repeated reformats. The core problem is insufficient visibility into what the backup process is actually doing — users cannot see which files are being backed up or why incremental backups take unexpectedly long. Apple has not publicly highlighted Time Machine improvements at WWDC in years despite ongoing user-reported failures.
• •Node Modules and Backup Exclusion: The open-source tool Asimov automatically scans the file system for known dependency directories like node_modules and excludes them from Time Machine backups. Manual exclusion via the tmutil command-line tool with extended attributes is possible but fails in practice because developers clone repositories and run npm install across many ad-hoc directories. The problem compounds with AI coding agents that clone repositories to unpredictable locations during automated workflows.
• •Twentieth Anniversary iPhone Naming: Rumors describe a twentieth anniversary iPhone featuring an edge-to-edge display with a slight one-to-two millimeter screen curve on all sides, likely still requiring a hole-punch camera due to under-display camera quality limitations. The hosts argue Apple would avoid naming this product "iPhone Ultra" because that name implies an ongoing product tier, while this device functions more like a concept car or one-off experiment, similar to how the iPhone X introduced a new form factor with deliberate transition years following.
• •Terminal App Switching Costs: Switching from Apple's built-in Terminal app to alternatives like iTerm2 or GPU-accelerated options involves significant hidden friction: line spacing, margin widths, font rendering, and text layout all require manual tuning through text-based config files rather than GUI settings. Apple Terminal's session restoration of windows, tabs, and working directories — while inconsistently functional — represents years of accumulated muscle memory. The perceived switching cost requires any alternative to deliver substantially better functionality to justify migration effort.