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Welcome, everybody, to Mac chat. Marty and I are excited to be here to chat all things Mac with you today. How are you doing, Marty?
I'm doing good, thanks. And how are you?
I'm great, thank you. Yeah, I'm super excited about our topics today. It's really great.
Yeah, we're going to do some Mac chat, so it'll be fun.
We are. Yes, indeed. And if anyone has any suggestions for things they want us to talk about in the future, please, please, please send your feedback. But we'll get going today. I thought it would be interesting for us to share how we started with the Mac and whether we had vision or like, what devices we used and kind of how that progressed. So what about you, Marty? How did you start in using the Macd?
I started using Mac when the original Macintosh came out and did that for a while through the nineties, when Apple kind of had a lull. We'll just say we did go back to windows for a while, but in the late nineties, it was, I guess it was kind of. Yeah, around the late nineties, they came back with Steve Jobs, came back and they rebranded and came with a whole new line of computers. And once I got, I think the first one at that time was the g three iMac, which is one of those all in ones, and it was colored. I never looked back since then and been on Mac ever since.
So that's cool. That's cool. And what were you using the Mac for at that point?
I was using it for digital media stuff, you know, so doing graphic design work, doing video stuff, all of that. So. Yeah, and I was using it for day to day, like business type stuff as well. You know, the browsing the web and doing research and emailing and, you know, all the basic things.
That's great. But it was definitely a content creation device for you.
Oh, yeah, for sure. Because, you know, on that machine, one of the cool things was they introduced Firewire. So you literally could have a camera plug it in with Firewire and it would just start capturing your video right onto the machine. And that was super awesome. You didn't have to do anything else, just worked. It was really cool.
So that's great. Were you working employed doing that stuff, or were you just enjoying doing that audio and video content creation as just hobby?
No, I was working. I was in the music business at that time.
Oh, awesome. Yeah. Mac's known for its cool content creation apps and programs. That's great.
Yep, definitely.
Yeah.
I want to say around that time, too, it was like the first iteration of imovie started coming on the scene. So it was pretty cool, too, at that time, and being able to do some digital media stuff, video and, you know, things like that, a lot more accessible with those machines. So it was pretty cool to be able to see people have, you know, that more accessible space, to be able to do that kind of stuff without having to spend a bunch of extra money on outboard gear and, you know, capture cards and all that other stuff. So it was a really cool time. That was. It was a great time then.
That's great. A lot of innovation that no one else was really doing that you couldn't have gotten on windows, I'm sure.
Exactly. Well, you could have. You just would have had to get, you know, like a capture card and all kinds of other things. There wasn't something that was just stock out of the box. You can plug it in and just go, you know, you had to.
Yeah, that's cool. So when did you start to. Because Mac's been ahead of the game a lot of times with accessibility. When did you start using accessibility options?
Ten years ago.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah. So good old voiceover. And that did you kind of launch?
Yep, definitely. At that time, I had already had an iPhone and already had modern Macs, so I just needed to learn how to use voiceover with what I was already doing, although I wasn't really doing video editing or any of that anymore, but I was able to do some of the other things still day to day stuff and, you know, some audio stuff, you know, things like that, so.
Mm hmm. Cool. That's great. Well, as for me, I got my first iPhone six months after it became accessible. So in January of 2010, my brother got me my first iPhone, and he's the reason why I have my job now. Because if I couldn't have afforded, I was self employed, I couldn't have afforded getting anything like that at the time. And because I learned to use it, you know, that's why I'm working at my job right now, which is so cool. So I thought, well, as long as I have to get a new computer, why not just get something that works well in the whole Apple ecosystem because I was really enjoying the thought of having my files and my emails and just everything kind of syncing. And because I was self employed, I wasn't working in a corporate office or anywhere, you know, I didn't have a reason not to use programs that were not like corporate. So it seemed like a really good choice. And at the time, my VR counselor was supportive of whatever I asked for because I was reasonable. And so I got my first Mac in 2012. It was a 2011 MacBook Air, eleven inch, I think it was really tiny little thing. And it was great. And I remember learning because I have no usable vision. I remember learning looking up vision Australia, podcasts and tutorials and things with David Woodbridge. And I remember starting and basically taught myself and of course relied heavily on Appleviz and, you know, didn't really get any instruction. I just kind of learned it and I loved it. And the thing I love about the Mac is that when it doesn't talk, I can just turn voice over off and back on again and then it's talking. I don't have to think, oh, there's a stupid windows update happening or there's some driver being installed. It's just really, it's just, it's awful. I just can't tell you how much I dislike the windows updates and everything to do with that. So it just works. So, yeah, that's how I got my first Mac. And then I got a couple other things. And then I was super excited about the M one s. They came out in 2020, and now I'm on an M three pro and I love it.
So it's definitely really cool to see the change in the way the system runs when you go into that much new technology. The MacBook Air now with the M one processor doesn't even have a fan, doesn't need it.
It's crazy.
It doesn't get hot and it's super fast and it's great.
Yeah, that's what I was really looking forward to because if I did any recording, I didn't want to have the fan noise in the background. So that's really, really cool for doing audio stuff.
Yep, I'm loving all the m stuff. I still have my original M one. When the first M one came out, I originally got the Mac mini with M 1 tb hard drive, 16 gigs of ram, which was for the most part, maxed out at that time. And the machine is still great. It still just is a workhorse. It still is super fast. I mean, it's really great, you know, so they're way overpowered. It's awesome. They're just great.
Yeah, yeah, it's so cool. And I just love all the ports and everything, so.
Yep, for sure.
Yeah, it's great. I really enjoy mine too. And yeah, I probably bought overbought, but I would rather have more power than I need than wished I would have because you can't really reconfigure them after you buy them. So.
Yep, that is true. Which is a whole other topic that we may have to come back to another day.
Yep. Yeah, we could do that. Very cool. So lately I've been playing a bit more with chat GPT and I wanted to talk to you about that a little bit and ask what if you have any experience with it, you know, AI stuff. I mean, I hope people aren't tired about hearing, tired of hearing about it. But the, the issue with websites recently with Windows and with Mac is that there were some unlabeled buttons. And recently I heard through social media that they had fixed those unlabeled buttons on windows. So I was hoping against hope that they had fixed those unlabeled buttons on Mac going to the chat GPT website. The problem, there is a way to label buttons, and I wanted to mention this in case anybody's in safari and you have an unlabeled button that you want to label, if you press vo slash or control option slash, it will open up a little edit box for you to, you know, type the label for the button. Well, I thought, oh, how cool is that? I was working with the IRA visual interpreting service and they actually looked up that command for me because I don't ever use it. So I forgot it. Anyway, I thought, oh perfect, I'll just label these unlabeled buttons and I'm good to go. Well, unfortunately, the visual of the button changed the next time I loaded the website. It was just a tiny bit different. So voiceover didn't recognize the label that I had put on the button, which was super frustrating because I thought that was going to be my answer. I'm like, hey, I found it. Eureka. I found it. I can label this button. Well, I couldn't, so I was kind of sad and I wrote down the order of the buttons and I kind of left it for a while. Well, then I came back this week to the chat GPT website and the buttons are labeled. You know, there's the file browser button and the insert URL button and the upload button and all the buttons are labeled. Have you played with the chat GPT website on the Mac at all?
I have. I checked it out originally in Safari, and I was doing that for quite a while in the beginning, and it was fine for me and did everything I needed it to do. The only kind of bummer is you got to open up a browser, go to it, and do all that. So I was really excited when they came out with what's called the MacGPt, which is what I'm currently using, and that localizes your chat GPT. So that just like anything else, you open up the app and you can just do what you need to do and just go from there. Since that has happened, they now have an official chat GPT Mac app, which you can install on your computer, although I have not tried it yet, but I heard that it does run pretty good. I'm still using the MACD and that's still working really well for me. So I'm just sticking with that for right now.
That's great. I'm going to have to check that out and see how it compares to using the website. I mean, I'm sure it's an app like a web app, but I wonder if it feels different or has any different button labeling or configurations that I would navigate my way through.
For the most part, it kind of just feels like the website, but you can just, you know, open it straight away.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
So that's great. Does it save your history too? Because I find all my. Yes there on that website.
Yeah, it all saves your history. All your history right there. And as a matter of fact, when I installed it, you know, one of the things you do is put in your credentials. And once I did that, you know, all of my history was just right there. So.
Okay. Yeah, because I too have a, I have a GPT plus subscription because I don't want to be limited, you know, by whatever I might have been limited by, so.
Exactly.
That is great. Yeah. And a really cool use for that when I did the website. So one of my students where I work speaks Vietnamese. That's their native language. And so I wanted to give this student a manual, a user guide for braille display that she has. And so I thought, well, why not just upload the user guide? And it was 17 pages, and then I can ask it to translate it into Vietnamese. And so I was able to find the upload file, and I browsed my Mac for the file, found it, hit the upload button, and then in less than a minute, I got notification along the way that chat GPT was, you know, writing a response I got this wonderful. What I think is wonderful, I have to find out from her if it actually translated properly. But yeah, that'd be interesting to see.
How that came out.
Yeah.
How accurate it was, you know.
Right, right. For sure. What I didn't immediately find because I didn't tab around for a few seconds. But anyways, there is a copy button that allows you to copy it to the clipboard. And then I went and pasted it into text edit and then a nice little vietnamese voice started speaking stuff I didn't understand. I'm like, oh, that sounds good to me. So then, yeah, I saved it and sent it to her and I'll be really interested. Stay tuned and next month I'll tell you how it turned out. But I think translating things is just such a cool feature, especially if the website for the braille display product does not offer a manual or even a getting started guide in the language that the person speaks natively. So that was a really, really cool use for the chat GPT and I'm really looking forward to that in the future.
Yeah, that sounds great.
Yeah. So it was completely accessible. Now, the only thing I encountered this morning while using the website is that I needed to, well, I was asking chat GPT to give me a list of a resource for commands for Microsoft Word, for Mac keyboard commands. It didn't furnish me with a URL, it just find it. And then the sentence had a link and the word here, you know, find it, link here kind of thing. And there was no way I could navigate to the here and click on the link. It wasn't clickable. And then when I was working with Ira to see, you know, if it was me or, you know, could she open it. She was able to open it and she had the suggestion of ask it to give you a full URL because unfortunately the website that it recommended was not found. And so that was kind of amusing. So I wrote it back, chat GPT and I said, give me a full URL for this resource for an actual active webpage. And it did and I was able to click on the link and go there. So sometimes the verbiage is really important, like give me a full URL rather than an embedded link within a sentence because I didn't find that I could actually click on it no matter where I was in the actual word I. So.
Oh yeah, it sounds like being able to ask for the full link solves that problem.
It did, yeah. So I'm looking forward to more things like that because it, it's sure a time saver when I'm teaching to be able to give people links and references and, you know, resources that they can use and helps me out a lot, too, so.
Sounds great.
Yeah. Well, anything you're looking forward to coming up for the Mac? What you're like, what you wish Apple would do or what you're looking for that they might do and that sort of thing. Because I know next month when we talk, we'll be talking about if they did anything for Apple. Macs and things.
Yeah. There has been rumors that in this next round, across the Mac lineup, that they're going to change the base of what you get right out of the box without having to do any updates. And currently on majority of the base computers, it's a 256 gig SSD hard drive and eight gigs of ram. So if you want to have a little bit more hard drive space or more power, then you have to update those things. And I have heard through the rumor mill, and we'll see if they actually do this or not. They're going to change the base to 512 on the hard drive, SSD, and then 16 gigs of Ram. And that would be great. If they did that, that would be something I would really welcome. So I hope they do do that.
Absolutely. Yeah. As it should be. I mean, eight gigs of Ram. Come on.
Yeah. 256 gig hard drive. You can get away with it, but it's a little slim, right?
It is, yeah. I would be looking forward to that, too. Even though I don't need to get a new computer, I think people should have that base option. That's, you know, increased resources and increased storage. I think that's great.
Yep. I do, too. So hopefully they'll do that and I guess we'll see. We only got, what, a week to go, so we'll see what happens.
I know.
Unless they don't talk about new Macs at this event and they wait and push it out till October sometime.
Oh, yeah. Guess we'll have to wait and see. And I'm looking forward to the new operating system, too. And.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Sequoia. Yep.
Yep.
Definitely. Definitely.
Another interesting thing that I had heard, and this is, again, rumor mill, but they are coming. Or the rumor mill says there's going to be a new Mac mini and it's going to be redesigned. Supposed to be a lot smaller, kind of more like the size of an Apple tv. There's going to be no more USB a. So that would be, I believe, the last place they have it. Maybe it's still on the iMac. But otherwise, I think the USB a across the board otherwise is gone.
Hmm. That's sad. Well, I guess we got to live with change, but I still have some things that plug in that way, but. Oh, well. But I'm happy with my Mac mini that I have now, so I'm gonna. I'm good with that. But, yeah, it'll be interesting to know what's coming down the pike with next week and what's Mac related that they discuss. So.
Yep. We will see, and we'll definitely report back once we find out what they're doing.
Yeah. Great. Well, is there anything else you can think of that you wanted to chat about before we tell our good folks how to get in touch with us?
No, I think we covered our bases for today. I think we're good.
Yeah, sounds great. Thanks for chatting about everything with me.
Yeah, no problem. It's a great time. I'm looking forward to moving forward and bringing everyone Mac chat, and it'll be a good time.
Awesome. And if folks want to know how to get in touch and give us feedback, where do they send an email? Marty?
They can send us an email at feedback, unmute show and comments, questions, suggestions, all the things you can find us there.
That's great. Thanks, Marty.
Yep. Have a great week, everyone.