ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Let me post that we're live to Twitter, if it still exists.

00:00:03 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:00:05 ◼   ► Is it still running?

00:00:06 ◼   ► Who even knows? What a disaster. Holy jamoles.

00:00:12 ◼   ► [beep]

00:00:13 ◼   ► What a week. So...

00:00:14 ◼   ► My goodness.

00:00:15 ◼   ► I was slightly optimistic last week.

00:00:19 ◼   ► I think I'm less optimistic now.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't need to do any navel-gazing other than to say

00:00:25 ◼   ► I regret not pushing back on you a little bit more last week.

00:00:29 ◼   ► It doesn't really matter. I think all three of us can agree. Oh man, things are happening and it's not good.

00:00:35 ◼   ► It's not good. It was today, I believe, that

00:00:40 ◼   ► anyone could start signing up for Twitter Blue, the new version of Twitter Blue,

00:00:45 ◼   ► where you get a check mark, a verified check mark for signing up.

00:00:50 ◼   ► And so any normal person who is reading all these tweets who sees a Twitter user with the, you know, display name,

00:00:57 ◼   ► let's say LeBron James and a blue check mark next to them, they don't need they don't look at the actual handle for this account

00:01:05 ◼   ► They just see that LeBron James is saying

00:01:07 ◼   ► Oh, I want to get traded or whatever the fake thing said earlier today

00:01:10 ◼   ► And so news outlets are now picking this up because that thing is getting retweeted and you see Oh LeBron James with the blue

00:01:17 ◼   ► Check said he wants to get traded, but it's just some dummy who paid $8 for blue checkmark

00:01:22 ◼   ► Yeah

00:01:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, that's the silly version of it.

00:01:25 ◼   ► The less silly one are the people

00:01:27 ◼   ► who are doing cryptocurrency promotions.

00:01:28 ◼   ► Like somebody imitated the official Twitter account

00:01:32 ◼   ► and said, "New, Twitter Blue is now available,

00:01:35 ◼   ► "and to get it, you just need to get this cryptocurrency

00:01:37 ◼   ► "and go to this link or whatever."

00:01:38 ◼   ► And it had thousands of retweets.

00:01:40 ◼   ► That's real people potentially losing real money

00:01:44 ◼   ► on someone who's just scamming,

00:01:45 ◼   ► trying to take advantage of the fact

00:01:48 ◼   ► that it's pretty easy to make

00:01:49 ◼   ► an imitation Twitter account now.

00:01:51 ◼   ► And they basically were up for two hours

00:01:53 ◼   ► before they got banned, right?

00:01:55 ◼   ► Because the enforcement of like,

00:01:56 ◼   ► hey, you're not allowed to do this is not lightning quick.

00:01:59 ◼   ► And so in that two hours, how much money did they make?

00:02:01 ◼   ► And was it more than $8?

00:02:02 ◼   ► 'Cause if it's more than $8,

00:02:03 ◼   ► it's worth their time to just keep doing this forever.

00:02:06 ◼   ► - Right, and then my other favorite thing,

00:02:09 ◼   ► I'm not gonna be able to dig up show notes, entries for this,

00:02:11 ◼   ► but my other favorite thing was Twitter briefly

00:02:15 ◼   ► had the blue check mark,

00:02:17 ◼   ► which used to mean that you have like,

00:02:18 ◼   ► and all three of us are verified,

00:02:20 ◼   ► if it was forever ago for all of us that this happened.

00:02:22 ◼   ► And if memory serves, I had to provide like a copy of,

00:02:24 ◼   ► like a scan of my driver's license to become verified

00:02:27 ◼   ► or something along those lines.

00:02:28 ◼   ► So for the verification, hence verified,

00:02:33 ◼   ► all three of us had to provide some sort

00:02:34 ◼   ► of actual government credential, a scan at least,

00:02:37 ◼   ► of a government credential to Twitter,

00:02:38 ◼   ► which yeah, you could fake that, blah, blah, blah.

00:02:39 ◼   ► But it was still, they were trying.

00:02:42 ◼   ► Now, apparently what they're doing is blue just means

00:02:45 ◼   ► you're either one of the old farts like us

00:02:48 ◼   ► that had already been verified,

00:02:49 ◼   ► or you're paying the $8 to get yourself Twitter Blue and thus verification,

00:02:54 ◼   ► and then certain government accounts and certain important people have briefly had,

00:03:00 ◼   ► I think it's already been canned, a different checkmark that indicates that you're actually who you say you are.

00:03:05 ◼   ► So the way we fixed the checkmark problem was by making more checkmarks.

00:03:11 ◼   ► Like, "Oh, how? Why? Why?"

00:03:14 ◼   ► But then I think they undid the gray checkmark or they took it away from a bunch of people.

00:03:18 ◼   ► I think it's in the process of being unwound now.

00:03:22 ◼   ► So this general chaos or whatever, it reminds me of the discussion we had about this back

00:03:28 ◼   ► when Elon made the offer for Twitter, I don't know, however many months ago that was.

00:03:33 ◼   ► And at that point I was not necessarily optimistic, but I could see a lot of the potential upsides

00:03:40 ◼   ► of Twitter getting new ownership that is not as beholden to just not rocking the boat and

00:03:48 ◼   ► keeping the share price up and growing and all those other things because you have many

00:03:52 ◼   ► more options when you're a private company.

00:03:54 ◼   ► I still think that's true in terms of, you know, pretty much no matter how much Elon

00:03:59 ◼   ► screws this up, like, "Oh, I'm trying this, I'm trying that, I'll try this, oh, it doesn't

00:04:03 ◼   ► work, I'll undo it, I'll do this," you know, doing things haphazardly, not really having

00:04:07 ◼   ► much forethought, doing a cruddy job on a lot of them, causing bugs.

00:04:11 ◼   ► That doesn't really, like, you can do that for a long time because there's no one telling

00:04:16 ◼   ► you to stop as long as you continue to just pump money into the company and he

00:04:20 ◼   ► has sold a bunch of his Tesla shares recently it's easier to have a years

00:04:25 ◼   ► long you could say gradual decline into chaos or you could say a long

00:04:32 ◼   ► runway to try to figure out something that works and in the process of doing

00:04:37 ◼   ► that maybe people flee maybe they go away maybe they come back but the

00:04:40 ◼   ► network effects of social networks are such that it's actually you actually

00:04:44 ◼   ► have to do something to actively send people away, like something that is harmful for them

00:04:49 ◼   ► to be there. If you just slowly remove value, people will stay for a really long time. Witness

00:04:53 ◼   ► Instagram, which I feel like it's not really removing value, but they're less, it's less nice

00:04:58 ◼   ► than it than it was in the past. But the network effect is strong and the habit is strong. So

00:05:03 ◼   ► I do feel like despite all of this silly flailing, as a private company with one random with one

00:05:09 ◼   ► person just making random decisions from day to day, hour to hour, moment to moment, you can do

00:05:14 ◼   ► that for a really long time because no one's going to stop him, right? He's just, you know,

00:05:19 ◼   ► he does it until he gets bored or until everybody leaves and everyone's not going to leave, you know,

00:05:24 ◼   ► people will trickle out, but you know, anyway, so I feel like this is the type of thing that it's

00:05:29 ◼   ► going to be exhausting if you try to keep up with it from moment to moment and it's more just kind

00:05:35 ◼   ► of like sit back and watch it go. I mean and the good thing about making lots of

00:05:41 ◼   ► decisions and trying things that I'm doing them is that probably eventually

00:05:44 ◼   ► you'll find something that's not bad. We'll keep you posted, doesn't happen yet, but you

00:05:52 ◼   ► know it seems like it should happen eventually and having that runway of

00:05:56 ◼   ► just like look I can do whatever I want and no one's gonna stop me and I have a

00:05:59 ◼   ► lot of money allows for a lot of these decisions to take place. I just hope that

00:06:04 ◼   ► it doesn't actually get so bad that Twitter becomes less useful because I really do use

00:06:10 ◼   ► it a ton.

00:06:11 ◼   ► Not that it has replaced RSS for me, but it has supplanted RSS as the primary place where

00:06:16 ◼   ► I get content for the show, where I learn about the world, where I follow the news.

00:06:21 ◼   ► I've always been a big fan of Twitter and I will continue to use it as long as it provides

00:06:25 ◼   ► that value to me.

00:06:26 ◼   ► Yeah, same.

00:06:27 ◼   ► You know, a lot of people are really sitting back and enjoying the shot in "Freud"

00:06:31 ◼   ► of like, oh, look at this jerk

00:06:32 ◼   ► who's making a fool of himself.

00:06:34 ◼   ► And that's true, and he is, and thank God for that,

00:06:36 ◼   ► because he could use it.

00:06:37 ◼   ► And I do think it's kind of amazing,

00:06:39 ◼   ► I saw some tweet earlier that basically

00:06:42 ◼   ► he has turned Twitter into a platform

00:06:44 ◼   ► that is mostly dedicated to dunking on him.

00:06:47 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:06:48 ◼   ► - He's become the permanent main character.

00:06:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, which is, I think, he, I think,

00:06:53 ◼   ► could use some of this.

00:06:55 ◼   ► - Well, you're just assuming that he,

00:06:57 ◼   ► I don't think any of it is penetrating, I mean, really.

00:07:00 ◼   ► When you're as famous and as rich as he is,

00:07:02 ◼   ► people are constantly saying terrible things to you

00:07:04 ◼   ► and eventually you just learn to ignore it.

00:07:08 ◼   ► And then eventually I feel like you learn to ignore it all,

00:07:10 ◼   ► even the valid criticism,

00:07:11 ◼   ► and that's how you get Elon Musk.

00:07:13 ◼   ► - Well, but at this point, I think he is,

00:07:16 ◼   ► the things he's trying are going over like lead balloons,

00:07:18 ◼   ► and I think he can't help but see the backlash on some level.

00:07:23 ◼   ► So I think that's, maybe it'll introduce some

00:07:27 ◼   ► very much needed humility to him, but--

00:07:28 ◼   ► That's the thing about him and people like him and Trump,

00:07:32 ◼   ► to some degree, is that these are people

00:07:34 ◼   ► who care about what the other,

00:07:39 ◼   ► they admire and look up to some other people,

00:07:43 ◼   ► and they care about what those people think.

00:07:45 ◼   ► So Elon Musk cares about what MKBHD thinks

00:07:49 ◼   ► about the new gray checkmark feature,

00:07:51 ◼   ► because MKBHD is a big famous person and a tech person,

00:07:55 ◼   ► and it's not like Elon cares

00:07:57 ◼   ► about what people writ large think,

00:08:00 ◼   ► but he cares about what other famous people think,

00:08:02 ◼   ► what other tech people think,

00:08:04 ◼   ► what other rich entrepreneurs think.

00:08:05 ◼   ► Like there is a cohort of people

00:08:07 ◼   ► that he cares about their opinions of,

00:08:08 ◼   ► and it's a big set of people,

00:08:11 ◼   ► which is why he'll try something like the gray check mark

00:08:13 ◼   ► and then get yelled at by the six people he cares about,

00:08:16 ◼   ► and he'll take what they say seriously.

00:08:17 ◼   ► He'll ignore the million other people

00:08:19 ◼   ► who told him the same things, you know,

00:08:20 ◼   ► weeks and months and, you know,

00:08:22 ◼   ► like it's not like he's listening to quote unquote everybody,

00:08:24 ◼   ► but there are people they care about,

00:08:26 ◼   ► And so if they do something silly and it doesn't work,

00:08:27 ◼   ► he'll be like, "Whoops, that was bad.

00:08:29 ◼   ► "Let me try something else."

00:08:30 ◼   ► And that feels like what the process is going on right now

00:08:32 ◼   ► is he's trying things and listening to the small

00:08:37 ◼   ► in the grand scheme of things, but still large,

00:08:39 ◼   ► set of people that he respects and considers his peers

00:08:43 ◼   ► as captains of industry or famous people or whatever.

00:08:47 ◼   ► I mean, it's what we all do.

00:08:48 ◼   ► We can't listen to everybody,

00:08:49 ◼   ► but we do listen to our peers.

00:08:51 ◼   ► Just so happens that Elon's peers

00:08:52 ◼   ► are other famous people or whatever.

00:08:54 ◼   ► So that acts as a feedback mechanism to let him know, "Hey, the great check mark seems

00:09:00 ◼   ► kind of silly," or whatever.

00:09:02 ◼   ► Unfortunately, a lot of his interactions online are not just with people that he understands

00:09:09 ◼   ► and respects and wants to interact with, but those people may not be the people that everyone

00:09:14 ◼   ► else on Twitter understands and wants to interact with and respects.

00:09:16 ◼   ► So when he gives lots of air times to QAnon conspiracy theorists and alt-right people

00:09:22 ◼   ► or whatever, maybe that upsets other people.

00:09:24 ◼   ► But there is a feedback loop happening here,

00:09:26 ◼   ► it just remains to be seen whether it will

00:09:28 ◼   ► eventually produce better results.

00:09:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, and you know, honestly, like,

00:09:32 ◼   ► a lot of people out there are like,

00:09:33 ◼   ► "Well, this place is over, burn it to the ground."

00:09:35 ◼   ► And I don't have that attitude.

00:09:37 ◼   ► As much as I don't like him as a person,

00:09:39 ◼   ► and I'm liking him less and less as the days go on here,

00:09:44 ◼   ► but as much as I dislike him as a person,

00:09:47 ◼   ► I want Twitter to work, I want it to succeed,

00:09:50 ◼   ► because I still get a ton of value out of it.

00:09:53 ◼   ► And there is no direct replacement.

00:09:56 ◼   ► People think oftentimes, oh, we'll just all go to Mastodon

00:09:59 ◼   ► or whatever, insert thing here, app.net back forever ago.

00:10:02 ◼   ► People think, oh, well I'll go over here

00:10:04 ◼   ► and we'll make a better place there.

00:10:07 ◼   ► That's not really how this works.

00:10:09 ◼   ► First of all, as I mentioned last time,

00:10:10 ◼   ► you're never gonna get everyone to go over

00:10:12 ◼   ► to any one particular place.

00:10:13 ◼   ► So that's problem number one,

00:10:14 ◼   ► and that's the biggest problem.

00:10:16 ◼   ► Problem number two is if somehow you magically succeeded,

00:10:19 ◼   ► you'd have all the same problems that Twitter has.

00:10:21 ◼   ► Like you would have all the same challenges of moderation

00:10:23 ◼   ► and extremism and hate and harassment and misinformation.

00:10:27 ◼   ► Like you'd have all of the same problems

00:10:29 ◼   ► and you'd just have either no company,

00:10:32 ◼   ► if it's some kind of decentralized thing, to deal with it

00:10:34 ◼   ► or you would have a smaller and less effective company

00:10:37 ◼   ► possibly to deal with it.

00:10:39 ◼   ► So ultimately, if we want this form of communication

00:10:44 ◼   ► to persist and to be a thing that exists in the future

00:10:48 ◼   ► which I think enough people get a lot of value out of it

00:10:51 ◼   ► that we probably should want that.

00:10:53 ◼   ► The easiest path to get there

00:10:55 ◼   ► and the most likely path to get there

00:10:57 ◼   ► and possibly the only path to get there

00:10:58 ◼   ► is to make Twitter succeed.

00:11:00 ◼   ► None of us want this guy to succeed

00:11:02 ◼   ► because he's a huge dickhead and we all know that

00:11:04 ◼   ► and nobody wants him to, you know, whatever.

00:11:08 ◼   ► As I mentioned last episode,

00:11:09 ◼   ► I didn't think that highly of the previous leadership

00:11:12 ◼   ► but still I use the platform

00:11:14 ◼   ► because it's where all my friends are,

00:11:16 ◼   ► it's where I get a lot of my information,

00:11:18 ◼   ► It's where I conduct a lot of my business.

00:11:19 ◼   ► And it isn't just trying to sell stuff I make or anything.

00:11:22 ◼   ► It's stuff like posting programming questions.

00:11:25 ◼   ► And like, hey, I got this error.

00:11:26 ◼   ► What does this mean?

00:11:27 ◼   ► And all of their iOS developers are there,

00:11:28 ◼   ► and they're all answering stuff.

00:11:30 ◼   ► Or I can see what other people do, and what other people try.

00:11:33 ◼   ► I can see if something's going on in the world.

00:11:35 ◼   ► I can see stuff there.

00:11:37 ◼   ► It provides a lot of value.

00:11:39 ◼   ► You can't just pick up all of that and move it somewhere else

00:11:41 ◼   ► and have all of our problems magically solved.

00:11:43 ◼   ► Because A, you can't pick it up and move it,

00:11:44 ◼   ► and B, the problems would still be the same.

00:11:46 ◼   ► So as much as it pains me to say anything positive

00:11:49 ◼   ► about this guy, I want this company to succeed

00:11:54 ◼   ► because I want the product to continue to exist.

00:11:57 ◼   ► And my biggest concern is not that they'll do weird stuff

00:12:00 ◼   ► with the product because I think the feedback mechanism

00:12:02 ◼   ► there, as John was just saying,

00:12:04 ◼   ► it's not great but it exists.

00:12:06 ◼   ► And if he really takes a big steaming turd

00:12:10 ◼   ► and everyone reacts the way they've been reacting

00:12:12 ◼   ► and he sees that and takes it back,

00:12:14 ◼   ► okay, well that's iteration.

00:12:16 ◼   ► We'll all dunk on him the whole day, it'll be kind of funny, we'll get some laughs out

00:12:20 ◼   ► of it and then we'll move on.

00:12:21 ◼   ► My biggest concern is it won't stay up because all the people he fired all knew how to run

00:12:26 ◼   ► it and we keep hearing all these stories of like, "Well, this one part of the infrastructure

00:12:32 ◼   ► was basically held together by three people and they're all fired."

00:12:35 ◼   ► And there's all sorts of things like that that he basically like, you know, slice and

00:12:40 ◼   ► dice the company apart with this mass layoff he just did.

00:12:43 ◼   ► a lot of those people were like the only

00:12:46 ◼   ► institutional knowledge of how certain things worked

00:12:49 ◼   ► or they had a process for keeping certain things running

00:12:52 ◼   ► that now no one knows or no one is assigned to do.

00:12:56 ◼   ► And that applies for lots of things.

00:12:57 ◼   ► That applies for technical stuff

00:12:59 ◼   ► all the way to things like policy decisions

00:13:01 ◼   ► and abuse prevention and stuff like that.

00:13:04 ◼   ► There's basically just giant gaping holes

00:13:06 ◼   ► and missing teams 'cause he came in

00:13:08 ◼   ► and slashed everything without fully understanding

00:13:10 ◼   ► what anything did.

00:13:11 ◼   ► And that is where my main concern comes.

00:13:14 ◼   ► It's not the product.

00:13:15 ◼   ► The product, they'll figure out eventually

00:13:18 ◼   ► because there's good feedback on that.

00:13:20 ◼   ► My concern is all the people who are now gone

00:13:22 ◼   ► who are holding the place together,

00:13:24 ◼   ► now it will fall apart in certain ways.

00:13:26 ◼   ► And I think we have a rough year or two ahead

00:13:31 ◼   ► of just infrastructure, policy, content abuse

00:13:36 ◼   ► to deal with on Twitter.

00:13:38 ◼   ► And I think eventually they'll figure it out

00:13:40 ◼   ► and they'll get people in there and people will come up

00:13:43 ◼   ► to speed and problems will be fixed.

00:13:45 ◼   ► And I think eventually, I hope, I mean I'm always an optimist

00:13:48 ◼   ► at this kind of stuff, I think eventually they will

00:13:50 ◼   ► bring it together and it will kind of solidify

00:13:54 ◼   ► and move forward in some clear direction.

00:13:56 ◼   ► But I think it's gonna be a really rough road

00:13:58 ◼   ► between now and whenever that solidifies.

00:14:01 ◼   ► And that, it could take a year, it could take more

00:14:03 ◼   ► than a year, I don't know.

00:14:04 ◼   ► Maybe somehow miraculously it'll only take a few months.

00:14:07 ◼   ► but it's gonna be rough, but I think,

00:14:10 ◼   ► I still maintain the attitude of I want this to work

00:14:13 ◼   ► because Twitter is a platform we all love to hate.

00:14:17 ◼   ► The reality is we all use it,

00:14:19 ◼   ► and I'm finally willing to admit,

00:14:22 ◼   ► you know what, I like it, fine.

00:14:23 ◼   ► I like Twitter, I want it to stick around.

00:14:25 ◼   ► I don't have anything to replace it.

00:14:27 ◼   ► I don't want to replace it.

00:14:28 ◼   ► Nothing can replace it.

00:14:30 ◼   ► I hope it sticks around.

00:14:32 ◼   ► - This is another example of how famous,

00:14:35 ◼   ► much admired billionaires get graded on a curve, right?

00:14:38 ◼   ► Again, if you weren't a billionaire

00:14:40 ◼   ► and you did any of the things he's doing,

00:14:42 ◼   ► you would be so shamed and it would just be like,

00:14:46 ◼   ► you know, you're like,

00:14:47 ◼   ► what do you do when you take over a company?

00:14:48 ◼   ► Well, I obviously have to cut some staff.

00:14:50 ◼   ► Okay, how are you gonna do that?

00:14:51 ◼   ► The clumsiest way possible with no forethought.

00:14:54 ◼   ► And then a day later regret it so much

00:14:57 ◼   ► that you try to hire people back.

00:14:59 ◼   ► It's just like, it's just the dumbest things.

00:15:02 ◼   ► Because he's a billionaire, I was like, no,

00:15:03 ◼   ► he's a secret genius.

00:15:05 ◼   ► It's like, no, he's just doing a bad job.

00:15:08 ◼   ► And again, cutting people, laying off people

00:15:11 ◼   ► from a company that people think had too many,

00:15:14 ◼   ► I don't disagree that maybe Twitter had too many employees

00:15:16 ◼   ► and needed to be thinned down,

00:15:18 ◼   ► but there are good ways to do it and bad ways to do it.

00:15:20 ◼   ► He's just doing it badly.

00:15:21 ◼   ► And there may be consequences to that

00:15:23 ◼   ► or he may get away with it,

00:15:24 ◼   ► but it's like when you are rich and famous,

00:15:26 ◼   ► almost anything you do, people will bend over backwards

00:15:28 ◼   ► to find a way to explain that actually it's great.

00:15:30 ◼   ► When really, if you again took Joe Shimo off the street

00:15:33 ◼   ► said, "Grestin, you're the CEO of Twitter now."

00:15:35 ◼   ► And they did all these things, they'd be like, "Boy, you took this guy off on the street

00:15:37 ◼   ► and he's making a lot of really easy mistakes here."

00:15:39 ◼   ► Like, when you come into a company, sure, you gotta lay people off, but you know, take

00:15:43 ◼   ► a day or two to figure out which people you should lay off, and then don't regret it a

00:15:47 ◼   ► day later and try to beg them to come back.

00:15:48 ◼   ► And it's just, just doing basic things badly is seen as like a badge of honor when you

00:15:54 ◼   ► are a bazillionaire.

00:15:55 ◼   ► When you're not a bazillionaire, it's just seen as being bad at your job.

00:15:58 ◼   ► Well, look at it this way, he is fitting in with the tradition of Twitter management.

00:16:03 ◼   ► he is bumbling about making crummy decisions.

00:16:05 ◼   ► - Well, no, the alternate manager

00:16:06 ◼   ► wouldn't make any decisions, they would do nothing.

00:16:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, they only bumbled about.

00:16:10 ◼   ► - Wow, fair.

00:16:11 ◼   ► It actually is, as much as I am so here

00:16:15 ◼   ► for dunking on Elon Musk, I will say that for better

00:16:19 ◼   ► and for worse, they're at least shipping things, kind of.

00:16:23 ◼   ► - Are they shipping, I don't think anything

00:16:24 ◼   ► that actually got released to the point

00:16:25 ◼   ► where it's extended to all users.

00:16:27 ◼   ► Like I wonder if they start pulling the release back

00:16:29 ◼   ► before it's even just, you know, been visible to everybody.

00:16:32 ◼   ► I can't even keep track of what they think they've deployed and what they haven't.

00:16:34 ◼   ► And yeah, this is going to be probably fairly disastrous in the short term.

00:16:39 ◼   ► And again, there's good ways to do that in bad ways than there is to do it in the bad

00:16:42 ◼   ► way.

00:16:43 ◼   ► But that's the thing of being insulated from consequence.

00:16:44 ◼   ► You're insulated from consequence because A, it's a private company, you don't have

00:16:47 ◼   ► shareholders to do it, and B, he's got a bazillion dollars.

00:16:49 ◼   ► So when you're insulated from all consequence, it's like, well, all consequence for him,

00:16:54 ◼   ► I mean.

00:16:55 ◼   ► Not all consequence from us.

00:16:56 ◼   ► This is the point a lot of people made in the feedback.

00:16:58 ◼   ► It's all well and good to say, oh, well, Elon is insulated from the consequences of his

00:17:01 ◼   ► actions but we're not insulated from the consequences of action.

00:17:04 ◼   ► It's possible for him to do things that affect everyone else really badly, right?

00:17:09 ◼   ► We'll see how that happens.

00:17:11 ◼   ► But for him, it's like he always lives to fight another day.

00:17:14 ◼   ► And so it's like people look at it as admirable.

00:17:17 ◼   ► It's admirable to have no consequences for yourself because you're all sad and you're

00:17:20 ◼   ► a bazillionaire, right?

00:17:22 ◼   ► I guess people wish they were in that position.

00:17:23 ◼   ► They can make as many mistakes as they wanted and never suffer for them because it'll all

00:17:28 ◼   ► be fine.

00:17:29 ◼   ► But there may be consequences for the rest of us.

00:17:31 ◼   ► So hopefully he gets nudged in the right direction and the mistakes he's already made don't end

00:17:36 ◼   ► up being, even just a very simple consequence, which is not a big deal, but like, "Hey, Twitter

00:17:40 ◼   ► goes down again because some infrastructure thing fell over and it takes an hour to come

00:17:43 ◼   ► back up."

00:17:45 ◼   ► That's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things and it might be a blessing for some

00:17:47 ◼   ► people depending on how well Twitter is going that day, but it is a consequence.

00:17:52 ◼   ► And if you were the CEO of the company and you took over and then in the first month

00:17:55 ◼   ► you had a bunch of downtime, people would say, "Boy, that new CEO did a bad job."

00:17:58 ◼   ► But when it's a private company and you're Elon Musk and you don't care, so what?

00:18:03 ◼   ► Yeah, and that's something like, again, I want this to work because Twitter is, again,

00:18:11 ◼   ► as much as we love to crap all over it, it is very important to a lot of people and it

00:18:17 ◼   ► provides a lot of very important functions to a lot of people and a lot of businesses

00:18:20 ◼   ► and a lot of our friends.

00:18:23 ◼   ► It's a very important site.

00:18:25 ◼   ► of important stuff happens on Twitter.

00:18:27 ◼   ► And this is why I'm not rooting against it.

00:18:28 ◼   ► I really want to succeed.

00:18:30 ◼   ► People think, oh, we'll just go back

00:18:32 ◼   ► to blogging and everything.

00:18:33 ◼   ► It's like, well, yeah, some people will.

00:18:36 ◼   ► But the world you think you're going to go back to,

00:18:40 ◼   ► it doesn't exist anymore.

00:18:41 ◼   ► It's like a ghost town of rotting wreckage

00:18:44 ◼   ► of what was there that's been neglected for 15 years

00:18:46 ◼   ► or whatever.

00:18:47 ◼   ► People think they're just going to go somewhere else

00:18:49 ◼   ► and have all the same functions or features.

00:18:51 ◼   ► And I'm telling you, it's not that way.

00:18:55 ◼   ► The best chance for most of us is for Twitter to succeed.

00:19:00 ◼   ► And that way we can choose to keep using it or not.

00:19:02 ◼   ► But that decision isn't forced upon us.

00:19:04 ◼   ► That's the easiest decision because we

00:19:05 ◼   ► don't have to change anything.

00:19:06 ◼   ► But over the history of the internet, things do go away.

00:19:11 ◼   ► There used to be extremely popular Usenet groups that

00:19:13 ◼   ► eventually just became ghost towns, like you said,

00:19:16 ◼   ► because everyone used to move to Web Bulletin boards.

00:19:19 ◼   ► And Web Bulletin boards had years in a heyday

00:19:21 ◼   ► where it was a big, great place to be and everyone loved

00:19:23 ◼   ► hanging out there and had great features never understood them and they had they figured

00:19:26 ◼   ► out the moderation but then those web bulletin boards most of them or many of them became

00:19:30 ◼   ► ghost towns because everybody moved to Facebook or to Twitter or to whatever and eventually

00:19:34 ◼   ► these places will become ghost towns and it's not like so the thing that replaces them will

00:19:37 ◼   ► be like Twitter but better because web forums was not the same as usenet different technology

00:19:42 ◼   ► different atmosphere different people different like pros and cons it was fairly different

00:19:46 ◼   ► but it was like a place to hang out online right just like Facebook was myspace usenet

00:19:52 ◼   ► today. So if Twitter does go down in flames eventually and becomes a ghost town, the thing

00:19:57 ◼   ► that replaces it will not be, it's just like Twitter, but a different. It'll be something

00:20:00 ◼   ► entirely different because that's the way these things go. We all collectively find

00:20:04 ◼   ► a place to hang out online that we enjoy and we all don't want it to end or change or be

00:20:09 ◼   ► different but in my lifetime alone there's been like five or six different places that

00:20:13 ◼   ► I've hung out online with small groups of people, large groups of people on the entire

00:20:18 ◼   ► internet and most of them have gone away and what they've been replaced with has not been

00:20:22 ◼   ► been just like that but with a different masthead on the top, but it's been entirely different.

00:20:27 ◼   ► You could argue that Slack is kind of like Hotline, if any old school Mac users know

00:20:32 ◼   ► that, and you could argue that web forums is kind of like Twitter, or of course there's

00:20:38 ◼   ► Discourse, the modern reinvention of web forums, so everything old is new again, but yeah,

00:20:43 ◼   ► I don't think Twitter is forever, but if you wanted to say what's the shortest distance

00:20:48 ◼   ► to not causing tons of disruption,

00:20:51 ◼   ► it would be like make Twitter good.

00:20:52 ◼   ► But failing that, if Twitter does fail,

00:20:55 ◼   ► something will replace it eventually,

00:20:57 ◼   ► and what does probably won't look like Twitter does,

00:21:00 ◼   ► because that tends to be not the way these things go.

00:21:03 ◼   ► - Well, and I think what is most likely to replace Twitter

00:21:05 ◼   ► is not having its value as a public square.

00:21:10 ◼   ► Like, you know, the Twitter founders use this phrase,

00:21:13 ◼   ► and it's kind of douchey when they do a lot of times,

00:21:16 ◼   ► but there is some value to it,

00:21:17 ◼   ► in the sense that on Twitter,

00:21:19 ◼   ► you can just like @mention someone,

00:21:22 ◼   ► and first of all, every important person

00:21:25 ◼   ► you can think of is probably there.

00:21:26 ◼   ► Every, like, the owner of different companies is there,

00:21:30 ◼   ► like different executives, celebrities, sports figures,

00:21:34 ◼   ► politicians, they're all there.

00:21:36 ◼   ► Whoever writes the app that you wanna have a question about

00:21:40 ◼   ► or anything, they're probably there.

00:21:42 ◼   ► Almost everyone who you might want to contact is there.

00:21:46 ◼   ► Now, in the grand scheme of things,

00:21:47 ◼   ► it's way smaller than something like Facebook,

00:21:49 ◼   ► but it's different.

00:21:50 ◼   ► It's like the people who you would want to interact with

00:21:52 ◼   ► in public in some way or have a public question,

00:21:55 ◼   ► any company you might want to interact with,

00:21:56 ◼   ► they're all there.

00:21:58 ◼   ► And you can just like @mention them

00:21:59 ◼   ► or DM them if they're open,

00:22:01 ◼   ► and you can like reach these people.

00:22:03 ◼   ► And maybe they'll respond, maybe not,

00:22:04 ◼   ► but they'll probably at least see it,

00:22:06 ◼   ► or somebody will see it who works for them or whatever.

00:22:08 ◼   ► And that's something that it doesn't really exist

00:22:12 ◼   ► in any other platforms in that way.

00:22:14 ◼   ► Facebook is a giant black hole of,

00:22:18 ◼   ► we're gonna hide almost everything by default

00:22:20 ◼   ► from everybody until, unless you pay us to boost your post

00:22:23 ◼   ► so the people who wanna see it actually will see it.

00:22:25 ◼   ► It's all this mess at Facebook.

00:22:27 ◼   ► And all these algorithmic filters that they can

00:22:30 ◼   ► extract money from people trying to reach their own audience.

00:22:33 ◼   ► - And Elon made a couple of faints in that direction

00:22:35 ◼   ► to say, oh, if you pay for the $8 thing,

00:22:37 ◼   ► your replies will be more prominent

00:22:39 ◼   ► in the algorithmic timeline.

00:22:40 ◼   ► It's a time-tested thing, it's just that Facebook

00:22:42 ◼   ► has billions of people and Twitter has a few hundred millions.

00:22:45 ◼   ► - Right, but if Twitter goes away,

00:22:48 ◼   ► what's most likely to happen is everybody will flee

00:22:52 ◼   ► partly to private things like Slacks and Discords

00:22:55 ◼   ► and everything, which people have already been doing.

00:22:58 ◼   ► And so now if we wanna just kinda say something

00:23:00 ◼   ► to our friends, we have other places to do that.

00:23:02 ◼   ► We have chat groups, we have message groups,

00:23:04 ◼   ► we have WhatsApp or iMessage or we have Slack

00:23:07 ◼   ► or we have Discord or whatever.

00:23:09 ◼   ► There's all different ways that people have private chats

00:23:11 ◼   ► between themselves that is not trying to be some kind of broadcast.

00:23:16 ◼   ► If you're going to have a broadcast, Twitter's the best place for that.

00:23:20 ◼   ► It's way better, and for most audience types, it's way better than the other platforms,

00:23:25 ◼   ► and because it's much more reliable in a lot of ways, it's simpler in a lot of ways, and

00:23:28 ◼   ► if you have the kind of audience that uses Twitter, which is not most of the world as

00:23:32 ◼   ► I was saying, but if you have the kind of audience that uses Twitter, and we do, then

00:23:38 ◼   ► that's where these people all are.

00:23:39 ◼   ► And it would be a shame if that went away because, you know, suppose you go over to

00:23:44 ◼   ► Macedon or whatever, app.net, you know, it's like if you go to some smaller Twitter network

00:23:50 ◼   ► clone, then you can try to broadcast stuff there, but you just have way fewer people.

00:23:57 ◼   ► Way fewer people.

00:23:58 ◼   ► And so the value of having it be public at all is diminished.

00:24:03 ◼   ► And then at that point you have the liability of things being public without a lot of the

00:24:07 ◼   ► the benefit of things being public because it isn't a large enough group. If you're going

00:24:10 ◼   ► to talk to a small group, you're better off having that group be private. That way you

00:24:14 ◼   ► don't have the liabilities and problems of it being public. If you're going to talk to

00:24:17 ◼   ► somebody in public, you want it to be the biggest public area you can find. Twitter

00:24:22 ◼   ► is that for a lot of people, and us included, and most people who would listen to a show

00:24:26 ◼   ► like this. That is where most people who like information, that's usually where they are.

00:24:32 ◼   ► And so it would be a massive loss if that went away.

00:24:35 ◼   ► And nothing is out there to replace it right now.

00:24:38 ◼   ► And on the infinite timescale, John's right.

00:24:41 ◼   ► Something will come along and replace it,

00:24:43 ◼   ► because that happens over time.

00:24:44 ◼   ► But that happens after something has become irrelevant

00:24:47 ◼   ► and people have left voluntarily,

00:24:49 ◼   ► not when a popular platform implodes

00:24:52 ◼   ► while it's still popular.

00:24:54 ◼   ► Well, Google Reader and RSS, I mean, that's not just--

00:24:58 ◼   ► that's not that that's what made RSS go away.

00:25:00 ◼   ► RSS and blogs had a slow fade to sort of less prominence, partly because new things came

00:25:06 ◼   ► along and were exciting and people would tweet instead of blog.

00:25:10 ◼   ► But anyway, it's just if younger people listening have never been through this, all I just wanted

00:25:16 ◼   ► to point out is this stuff does happen.

00:25:19 ◼   ► Nothing is forever.

00:25:20 ◼   ► Even Facebook, even though it seems like it's forever, is probably not forever.

00:25:23 ◼   ► I feel like the timelines are getting longer as the internet has matured.

00:25:25 ◼   ► In the early days of the internet, things would last like a month or a week and come

00:25:29 ◼   ► and go and they'd seem like the biggest thing ever. Now things are lasting way longer because

00:25:32 ◼   ► these companies are so big, but even IBM, which seemed unstoppable in my youth, eventually

00:25:37 ◼   ► didn't go away. IBM still exists, but boy is it different than it was. The concept that

00:25:41 ◼   ► I have in my head at IBM has no match to what they are today. Mostly for the better for

00:25:48 ◼   ► the world, I think, but not for the better for IBM.

00:25:51 ◼   ► Oh, stop it. IBM wasn't bad for the world.

00:25:54 ◼   ► Big Blue.

00:25:55 ◼   ► - Yep, hey Big Blue, as I've said many, many times

00:25:58 ◼   ► on the show, Big Blue paid for basically my life

00:26:00 ◼   ► until I was an adult, so I will always have a,

00:26:03 ◼   ► I will always defend them, even if they made

00:26:05 ◼   ► a lot of questionable choices.

00:26:07 ◼   ► Speaking of questionable choices,

00:26:08 ◼   ► if you haven't already gone to ATP.fm/store,

00:26:12 ◼   ► now is the time, you are basically out of time.

00:26:14 ◼   ► We are going to close the store, what is it,

00:26:18 ◼   ► Saturday, Sunday, sometime this week,

00:26:19 ◼   ► it doesn't matter, sometime this weekend, so--

00:26:21 ◼   ► - The shirts are going back in the vault.

00:26:23 ◼   ► - Walt Disney would be so proud of us.

00:26:24 ◼   ► So yeah, so the ATP store, it is up, but it is not up for much longer.

00:26:30 ◼   ► So now is the time.

00:26:31 ◼   ► If you are at all interested in an M2 shirt, either the colorful logo on black or the monochrome

00:26:39 ◼   ► logo on very colorful shirts, or the classic ATP logo shirt, or the hoodie, now is the

00:26:46 ◼   ► time.

00:26:47 ◼   ► You are running out of time because all of this stops on Sunday the 13th.

00:26:50 ◼   ► So go to ATP.fm/store.

00:26:53 ◼   ► Now, Marco, if you wanted to save a little bit of money,

00:26:56 ◼   ► is there a way you could do that

00:26:57 ◼   ► while still getting excellent, excellent merchandise?

00:26:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, so first, if you live outside of the US,

00:27:01 ◼   ► move to the US.

00:27:02 ◼   ► - No, that's true.

00:27:04 ◼   ► - You'll save a lot on shipping.

00:27:05 ◼   ► - That's a tough sell lately, but okay.

00:27:07 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Yeah, oh goodness.

00:27:09 ◼   ► - Barring that, you could, or in addition,

00:27:12 ◼   ► you could join us as a member at atb.fm/join,

00:27:16 ◼   ► and you will get a coupon code in your membership panel

00:27:19 ◼   ► for 15% off your merchandise order.

00:27:22 ◼   ► Excellent. So you can go to ATP.fm/store and ATP.fm/join.

00:27:28 ◼   ► Now, this is where Jon would say, "Well, here's what you can do.

00:27:31 ◼   ► You can join for just a month, and then you can cancel because we're gentlemen,

00:27:35 ◼   ► and we let you cancel, and we don't hassle you about it.

00:27:38 ◼   ► And you can just cancel and get your 15% off and then move on with your life.

00:27:41 ◼   ► But if you're already joined, why don't you check out the bootleg?

00:27:45 ◼   ► Why don't you check out the ad-free version of the show?

00:27:47 ◼   ► You might like either one of those, or both even.

00:27:49 ◼   ► Hey, listen to all three versions, listen to version with the ads, and then listen to

00:27:52 ◼   ► the bootleg, and then listen to the one without the ads, you get the full experience.

00:27:55 ◼   ► It's perfect.

00:27:56 ◼   ► And don't forget our Movie Club episodes, and maybe there'll be something we'll make

00:27:58 ◼   ► in the future.

00:27:59 ◼   ► You never know.

00:28:00 ◼   ► So you don't have to cancel, don't listen to Jon.

00:28:02 ◼   ► Jon isn't always right, usually yes, but not always, don't listen to Jon.

00:28:05 ◼   ► Just let that ride, just let that baby ride.

00:28:07 ◼   ► So anyway.

00:28:08 ◼   ► And again, the end date is Sunday, November 13th.

00:28:12 ◼   ► The time is clearly marked on the site, they'll tell you how many days, hours, minutes that

00:28:17 ◼   ► are left.

00:28:18 ◼   ► One thing to remind people if they're listening to this later, if you go to AGP.FM/store and

00:28:23 ◼   ► the sale has already ended, you will see stuff for sale there.

00:28:26 ◼   ► We sell our leftover merchandise, but also we sell the on-demand versions of certain

00:28:30 ◼   ► shirts.

00:28:31 ◼   ► I'm not sure which ones they're going to be, but as I say every time we have these sales,

00:28:34 ◼   ► the on-demand ones, they're less expensive, but they're also not as nice.

00:28:39 ◼   ► They're less expensive because they're not as nice.

00:28:40 ◼   ► The printing process is not the super fancy, extremely expensive printing process that

00:28:45 ◼   ► we do use for the shirts that we're selling here now.

00:28:47 ◼   ► So if you want a shirt, don't be fooled

00:28:49 ◼   ► into getting the on-demand ones.

00:28:50 ◼   ► Like again, when the on-demand store is there,

00:28:52 ◼   ► it'll be clear, it won't say there's limited time,

00:28:54 ◼   ► blah, blah, blah.

00:28:55 ◼   ► It's a different store, it has different text

00:28:56 ◼   ► at the top of the page, but the shirts will look similar.

00:28:59 ◼   ► We're probably going to sell some similar designs

00:29:01 ◼   ► to the ones you see up here now, and it'll just be shirts,

00:29:03 ◼   ► it won't be hoodies or anything like that.

00:29:06 ◼   ► So don't accidentally buy an on-demand shirt

00:29:08 ◼   ► if you come to the store on November 20th or something.

00:29:10 ◼   ► Be aware that the store does change over

00:29:12 ◼   ► and we drain old merchandise and put the on-demand shirts on.

00:29:15 ◼   ► So this is telling you if you have any desire to have this shirt, get it for yourself and

00:29:20 ◼   ► give it to someone else to give to you as a Christmas present.

00:29:23 ◼   ► They'll be happy they don't have to shop for you and you'll be happy that you got the good

00:29:25 ◼   ► version of the shirt.

00:29:28 ◼   ► We haven't mentioned the chicken hat, the pint glass, or the mug because hey, they're

00:29:30 ◼   ► already sold out.

00:29:31 ◼   ► So if you snooze you lose and that's why you need to go to ATP.fm/store.

00:29:37 ◼   ► Now's the time because you're almost out of time.

00:29:39 ◼   ► And don't forget to click through on the hat, the pint glass, and the mug and click the

00:29:43 ◼   ► the bring it back button to let us know if you want one of these the next time we sell

00:29:48 ◼   ► them which will probably be like I don't know the spring or whatever whenever whenever do

00:29:51 ◼   ► the next sale sometime next year that bring it back thing will let us know how many people

00:29:55 ◼   ► want more hats if we sold every check in that we're ever going to sell and we don't need

00:29:57 ◼   ► to make anymore or there's still people who missed out on it and want one the only way

00:30:00 ◼   ► we know that for sure is if you enter your email address and then click the bring it

00:30:04 ◼   ► back button yes I know it's annoying to enter email address we're not going to take that

00:30:09 ◼   ► value at face value because we know some people won't click it or whatever but just it'll

00:30:12 ◼   ► give us a rough idea.

00:30:13 ◼   ► All right, let's do some follow up.

00:30:16 ◼   ► We were talking about rewind.ai last week.

00:30:19 ◼   ► This is the lifestream thing.

00:30:22 ◼   ► And apparently the CEO caught wind of it and listened.

00:30:24 ◼   ► So hi, Dan.

00:30:26 ◼   ► And clarified for us that since we recorded, in fact, he had a tweet about it, when we

00:30:33 ◼   ► launched two days ago, we shared that we would use a cloud transcription service.

00:30:37 ◼   ► That didn't go over so well with some folks.

00:30:38 ◼   ► You don't say, Dan.

00:30:40 ◼   ► So today we decided that we would entirely ditch the cloud transcription and only do

00:30:44 ◼   ► transcription locally on your Mac.

00:30:45 ◼   ► And then there was another tweet where Dan pointed us to that tweet.

00:30:49 ◼   ► So thank you, Dan, for following up.

00:30:52 ◼   ► And yeah, not going to the cloud, which I am in full support of.

00:30:54 ◼   ► Isn't it weird that like, if you are running this company, like you know that people are

00:30:58 ◼   ► going to look at your product and be scared of it for security reasons.

00:31:02 ◼   ► And you're surprised when people don't like the fact that you're sending the audio that

00:31:06 ◼   ► you're constantly recording to a cloud transcription service.

00:31:08 ◼   ► I don't I didn't that meeting I guess you say like look people aren't gonna like it

00:31:11 ◼   ► But I guess people are used to this anyway. I mean they do with their Amazon echoes and stuff

00:31:14 ◼   ► I think though I think they'll just be okay with it. It's like why not like just not do that

00:31:19 ◼   ► Like better like it's got to come up right you got to have to have the meeting and someone's gonna say no

00:31:23 ◼   ► I think it will be okay. I think people will choke this down

00:31:26 ◼   ► It's like just why why not you know they do so well everything else like we're all privacy security

00:31:31 ◼   ► Trying to say all the right things whenever take money

00:31:33 ◼   ► It's like don't use a cloud transcription service like you know that's gonna come up

00:31:37 ◼   ► and they reverse so quickly.

00:31:38 ◼   ► And maybe they just didn't have the local transcription ready in time, and that's why

00:31:42 ◼   ► they had the cloud one in the first version.

00:31:43 ◼   ► It's hard to know, but it just definitely seems like a silly fumble for a launch.

00:31:48 ◼   ► So Jon, speaking of screen recording, let's talk about some enterprise spyware, baby.

00:31:52 ◼   ► And we mentioned this on the last show, and I talked about this similar stuff on a recent

00:31:56 ◼   ► episode of RecDiff, and someone wrote in to say that there's a corporate security product

00:32:00 ◼   ► called D-TEX that watches what you do using the screen recording APIs and macOS to try

00:32:05 ◼   ► Try to identify if you're leaking or stealing data to calculate how productive you are.

00:32:08 ◼   ► So this is from Alex and this is a whole genre of software that is basically corporate spyware,

00:32:14 ◼   ► corporate malware that is trying to watch the employees, especially if they're remote

00:32:18 ◼   ► employees, who knows what they're doing there.

00:32:20 ◼   ► Up to and including doing exactly what Rewind is doing is like literally recording your

00:32:24 ◼   ► screen all the time and I guess having somebody or some machine learning thing review it to

00:32:29 ◼   ► make sure you're not playing mind sweeper all day.

00:32:32 ◼   ► Yeah, corporate spyware is not great, it doesn't reflect well that you don't think you can

00:32:35 ◼   ► trust your employees, but it is definitely a thing.

00:32:38 ◼   ► So again, Rewind is the kinder, gentler version of that where you do it to yourself.

00:32:44 ◼   ► And hopefully the company that you choose to buy the software from, you trust in some

00:32:48 ◼   ► way, whereas enterprise software is someone else does it to you, and like all enterprise

00:32:51 ◼   ► software, the person who buys it is not the person who has to be subjected to it.

00:32:56 ◼   ► We had some breaking news just before recording.

00:32:58 ◼   ► a friend of the show, Jason Snell, has done some research for us because we're not allowed

00:33:02 ◼   ► to.

00:33:03 ◼   ► Yeah, so last week I was complaining about the smart folders and the sidebar of photos

00:33:07 ◼   ► and how they seem totally disconnected from the sort of machine learning powered search

00:33:10 ◼   ► field in the upper right.

00:33:11 ◼   ► And I also think I said that people are excluded from that, but that's not true.

00:33:14 ◼   ► You can, person is one of the things in the pop-up menu.

00:33:17 ◼   ► But Jason figured out, as I requested, if someone knows how this works, please tell

00:33:20 ◼   ► me.

00:33:21 ◼   ► Jason figured out that if you say in the smart album field, if you say "text is," like that's

00:33:28 ◼   ► That's what you pick from left menu, you pick text.

00:33:30 ◼   ► If you type a word in the field, text is whatever, it's like you had put that term into the upper

00:33:38 ◼   ► right search field.

00:33:39 ◼   ► It does also search the OCR text, like that's what you might think it is, like oh, this

00:33:44 ◼   ► photo has text in it.

00:33:45 ◼   ► It does do that, but it also understands the concept of like what is a dog or whatever.

00:33:51 ◼   ► So Jason wrote an article about it at sixcolors.com, we'll put a link in the show notes.

00:33:54 ◼   ► He did an example of searching for a person is,

00:33:58 ◼   ► or he did person includes.

00:33:59 ◼   ► Person is John Syracuse,

00:34:00 ◼   ► so 'cause he's got pictures of me.

00:34:02 ◼   ► And text is microphone,

00:34:04 ◼   ► or I think he did text is camera in the example thing.

00:34:07 ◼   ► And what it'll do is it'll find pictures

00:34:09 ◼   ► where the machine learning thinks have a camera in them,

00:34:11 ◼   ► and also pictures where the person is labeled as me.

00:34:15 ◼   ► And so I'll find pictures of me with a camera,

00:34:16 ◼   ► and that's exactly what it did.

00:34:18 ◼   ► It doesn't do the autocomplete thing

00:34:19 ◼   ► like the search field does,

00:34:20 ◼   ► so you can't tell that what you're typing,

00:34:22 ◼   ► if it's a search, if it's like a keyword,

00:34:24 ◼   ► or if it's like an ML keyword or if it's like OCR text,

00:34:27 ◼   ► if you type it in the upper right,

00:34:28 ◼   ► it shows you like an icon next to each one

00:34:30 ◼   ► to let you know what you're doing.

00:34:31 ◼   ► And also in my brief experimentation,

00:34:34 ◼   ► when you type in that text is field,

00:34:36 ◼   ► every time you type a character,

00:34:37 ◼   ► it wants to update the number of items matched

00:34:39 ◼   ► and in my library, there's like a two second pause

00:34:41 ◼   ► each time I type a character.

00:34:42 ◼   ► So the performance is not great either.

00:34:44 ◼   ► - Nice.

00:34:44 ◼   ► - But at least it's possible.

00:34:45 ◼   ► And then for people who don't know,

00:34:47 ◼   ► the icing on this cake is that smart albums

00:34:49 ◼   ► don't sync to iOS, so they're invisible

00:34:51 ◼   ► to most of the world.

00:34:51 ◼   ► I will enjoy using this feature on my local instance.

00:34:55 ◼   ► And the jury's still out as to whether there's a way

00:34:57 ◼   ► to do nested Boolean logic, like instead of just saying

00:35:00 ◼   ► and all these conditions together or all these conditions,

00:35:02 ◼   ► basically to be able to have parentheses

00:35:03 ◼   ► with sub-expressions with different logic.

00:35:06 ◼   ► Not sure if that's possible, but if it is,

00:35:07 ◼   ► there'll probably be a few next week.

00:35:09 ◼   ► - Indeed.

00:35:10 ◼   ► All right, and then with regard to my confusion

00:35:13 ◼   ► on the iPad volume buttons,

00:35:15 ◼   ► Andre Aguilar shared that there is indeed a setting,

00:35:18 ◼   ► which I think I had made brief mention to,

00:35:21 ◼   ► mention of last week you go into settings then sound and the setting is called fixed position volume controls which defaults to off

00:35:28 ◼   ► But what's interesting is an unnamed listener who has been listening since neutral points out that this is not available on my iPad the m2

00:35:36 ◼   ► iPad nor on the iPad 10th generation and there's an Apple support document about this which reads on most iPad models with iPad OS

00:35:42 ◼   ► 15.4 and later you can allow the volume controls to change based on how you hold your iPad

00:35:46 ◼   ► With iPad Pro 11 inch 4th gen, iPad Pro 13 inch 6th gen, and iPad 10th gen, the dynamic volume buttons are always on.

00:35:53 ◼   ► And I also thought it was kind of interesting,

00:35:55 ◼   ► and I think somebody else pointed this out to me, that it's reversed for right-to-left languages.

00:35:59 ◼   ► So in the same document,

00:36:01 ◼   ► with languages that have writing that goes from right to left, you increase the volume with the button on the left or top, and

00:36:06 ◼   ► decrease the button with the bottom button, decrease the volume with the button on the right or the bottom, which is a nice touch.

00:36:12 ◼   ► So yeah, it turns out I can't change this back

00:36:15 ◼   ► Even if I wanted to even though a lot of people have this still have this ability and are apparently using it because they were

00:36:21 ◼   ► All reporting in to me that that's what they did real-time follow from Jason reminding of the the old ways

00:36:26 ◼   ► From back in the iTunes days to get nested boolean logic

00:36:30 ◼   ► One of the ways you do it is you would make a playlist and then you would reference that playlist in your smart album

00:36:34 ◼   ► So every sub expression you'd have to make a separate entity

00:36:37 ◼   ► I mean you can do it with albums you can if you make a smart album and then reference that within your thing

00:36:42 ◼   ► The problem is you have to have a bunch of these sort of sub-expression albums or smart

00:36:47 ◼   ► albums in your sidebar.

00:36:48 ◼   ► I guess you could bury them in a folder or something.

00:36:50 ◼   ► But yeah, that old technique from iTunes continues to work.

00:36:53 ◼   ► It's just super gross.

00:36:54 ◼   ► Apple should just stay at that.

00:36:55 ◼   ► That's the billion logic.

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00:38:33 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:38:35 ◼   ► - Jon, you got some excellent news about the,

00:38:39 ◼   ► How do you pronounce it?

00:38:40 ◼   ► It's not XNU.

00:38:41 ◼   ► Is that, what is the verbalization of this?

00:38:44 ◼   ► - Znu?

00:38:44 ◼   ► - I don't know.

00:38:45 ◼   ► I think I've only ever read it.

00:38:46 ◼   ► No, I must have heard it in a WWZ thing.

00:38:49 ◼   ► It's not XNU, that's for sure.

00:38:51 ◼   ► If you work on Darwin and you know how to pronounce

00:38:54 ◼   ► the name of the kernel that's spelled XNU,

00:38:55 ◼   ► write in and tell us.

00:38:57 ◼   ► I'm sure there's no controversy about how to express

00:39:00 ◼   ► a computer term that most people read and never speak.

00:39:02 ◼   ► - Yes, exactly.

00:39:03 ◼   ► - Anyway, this is a tweet from Longhorn,

00:39:04 ◼   ► who has never_released on Twitter.

00:39:06 ◼   ► a good follow who knows lots of deep technical stuff.

00:39:10 ◼   ► And it was tweeted in response to the kernel sources being released for Mac OS 13.

00:39:16 ◼   ► For people who don't know, the core OS of Mac OS, iOS, iPad OS, TV OS, audio OS, reality

00:39:24 ◼   ► OS, am I missing any OSes?

00:39:26 ◼   ► Maybe the car OS, maybe not, is Darwin, which is like a BSD Unix-like derivative with the

00:39:34 ◼   ► the mock microkernel with the BSD layered on top of it.

00:39:37 ◼   ► That's all open source.

00:39:38 ◼   ► And every time Apple comes out with a new operating system,

00:39:40 ◼   ► like when they come out with a new version of Mac OS,

00:39:42 ◼   ► shortly after that, they post the open source version

00:39:45 ◼   ► of like here's the version of Darwin

00:39:48 ◼   ► that is underneath Mac OS 13 Ventura.

00:39:51 ◼   ► So they just did that.

00:39:52 ◼   ► And then people come over it to see what they can find.

00:39:54 ◼   ► And what Longhorn found is something that

00:39:57 ◼   ► they didn't point out directly, but they just said this

00:39:59 ◼   ► and I follow them enough that I trust them.

00:40:02 ◼   ► ECC support is coming to ARM 64 Mac OS

00:40:05 ◼   ► with page-level granularity retirement on faults.

00:40:08 ◼   ► That is what Longhorn says.

00:40:09 ◼   ► And you know what that means?

00:40:11 ◼   ► Mac Pro Day is getting closer.

00:40:13 ◼   ► 'Cause why would they add ECC support to Darwin

00:40:16 ◼   ► for ARM 64 and Mac OS?

00:40:18 ◼   ► What kind of Mac might benefit from ECC?

00:40:21 ◼   ► Arguably all of them would benefit from ECC.

00:40:23 ◼   ► - There it is.

00:40:24 ◼   ► - But the Mac Pro is the most likely to have one

00:40:27 ◼   ► and Apple itself has already preannounced the Mac Pro.

00:40:30 ◼   ► A long time ago, lest we forget,

00:40:31 ◼   ► They said there's one more machine that needs to move to Apple Silicon, and that's the Mac Pro.

00:40:35 ◼   ► But we'll talk about that later, and later is getting later and later.

00:40:38 ◼   ► But sometime in 2023, probably, we'll get to see the new Mac Pro, and it seems like

00:40:42 ◼   ► it might have ECC memory, and I'm excited.

00:40:44 ◼   ► Now remind all of us why ECC memory is important and useful.

00:40:48 ◼   ► So RAM is not perfect.

00:40:51 ◼   ► Sometimes RAM has faults, and you'll try to read some bits, and the bits you get will

00:40:55 ◼   ► not be the same bits as the bits that were written there.

00:40:57 ◼   ► And as you can imagine, that can really screw things up on your computer.

00:41:01 ◼   ► There are lots of parts of the computer that try to help make that not happen.

00:41:06 ◼   ► One of the many ways that you can help with that is called ECC, or error correcting code.

00:41:11 ◼   ► And it's a very old way of essentially putting a bunch of redundant data in the data that

00:41:17 ◼   ► you store so you can tell when the data you read is not the data that you wrote.

00:41:22 ◼   ► Sometimes you can also correct the error if you have enough information to fix the one

00:41:27 ◼   ► bit that you know is flipped based on these the extra information you could put in there

00:41:31 ◼   ► and when you have as the amount of ram you have increases uh if your percentage of error stays the

00:41:37 ◼   ► same you're much more likely to hit an error because if you know if the percent is like one

00:41:41 ◼   ► in a million bits well what if i told you you have 500 million bits that's much worse odds than if

00:41:46 ◼   ► you had 500 bits right so big computers with big memory where you really care about there being any

00:41:51 ◼   ► kind of fault have historically employed ECC for error correction.

00:41:56 ◼   ► There are other techniques in hardware that also help with this.

00:41:59 ◼   ► ECC is a very specific one, but until and unless it's replaced by something better,

00:42:05 ◼   ► it's one of the most important tools we have in the toolset for making sure that the RAM

00:42:10 ◼   ► in your computer is reliable.

00:42:11 ◼   ► Didn't the iMac Pro have ECC RAM, did it?

00:42:15 ◼   ► Sure did.

00:42:16 ◼   ► As someone was pointing out in the chat room, the later DDR standards, I think I talked

00:42:19 ◼   ► about this on an episode of ETC like a year or two ago.

00:42:21 ◼   ► The later DDR standards incorporate ECC-like functionality

00:42:25 ◼   ► within them just to function,

00:42:26 ◼   ► because that's just how they're made.

00:42:28 ◼   ► But again, I trust Longhorn to know this stuff.

00:42:31 ◼   ► And so if there is evidence of ECC stuff in RM64 on Mac OS,

00:42:35 ◼   ► I think that just take it at face value.

00:42:37 ◼   ► And I think there's just gonna be some kind of ECC RAM

00:42:40 ◼   ► in whatever SOC is coming in the Mac Pro.

00:42:43 ◼   ► - I can't wait.

00:42:44 ◼   ► I can't wait.

00:42:44 ◼   ► Even though I'm probably not gonna buy it,

00:42:45 ◼   ► I still can't wait.

00:42:47 ◼   ► Ventura and third party preference pains.

00:42:50 ◼   ► What's the deal with that?

00:42:51 ◼   ► - So my first question when I was writing line item is,

00:42:54 ◼   ► I've been calling them preference pains since 2001.

00:42:58 ◼   ► But now that it's called system settings,

00:43:00 ◼   ► what the hell is it called?

00:43:02 ◼   ► What are they called?

00:43:03 ◼   ► What we mean is the little icons on the left

00:43:04 ◼   ► that you click on to see stuff like mouse

00:43:06 ◼   ► or users and groups or privacy.

00:43:08 ◼   ► And like, what are those called?

00:43:10 ◼   ► Go to the--

00:43:12 ◼   ► - Sections?

00:43:13 ◼   ► - Go to the privacy and security section?

00:43:15 ◼   ► - No, they're settings gears, obviously.

00:43:18 ◼   ► If it's a preference pane, then it must be a settings gear.

00:43:20 ◼   ► - Go to the network settings, I guess it's just network.

00:43:22 ◼   ► Anyway, we used to call them preference panes.

00:43:24 ◼   ► It was nice alliteration there,

00:43:26 ◼   ► and now I don't know what the heck they're called,

00:43:27 ◼   ► so that's one thing.

00:43:28 ◼   ► - Settings sections, it rolls right off the tongue.

00:43:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, we had some questions from people like,

00:43:31 ◼   ► "Hey, system settings is overhauled.

00:43:34 ◼   ► "What about my third-party preference panes?"

00:43:37 ◼   ► The third-party software can make

00:43:38 ◼   ► little preference panes in there.

00:43:40 ◼   ► For example, Backblaze, frequent sponsor of our show,

00:43:43 ◼   ► used to put a little icon that was amongst all your other icons in System Preferences.

00:43:48 ◼   ► What happens to it in Ventura?

00:43:50 ◼   ► For the most part, if you had a third-party preference pane installed, it will continue

00:43:55 ◼   ► to work in Ventura.

00:43:56 ◼   ► It's just at the bottom of the list alongside, you know, they're kind of grouped together,

00:44:00 ◼   ► all the third-party ones.

00:44:02 ◼   ► Backblaze in particular has basically decided they're out of the preference pane game.

00:44:08 ◼   ► So if you are running the latest version of Backblaze, it still shows up in your little

00:44:13 ◼   ► sidebar in Ventura, but when you click on it, all it loads is basically an empty preference

00:44:18 ◼   ► pane with a button that says Backblaze preferences.

00:44:20 ◼   ► And when you click it, it just launches a Backblaze app.

00:44:23 ◼   ► So it's still there for you to find it so you didn't say, "Hey, where the heck did Backblaze

00:44:26 ◼   ► go?

00:44:27 ◼   ► Is it still installed?"

00:44:28 ◼   ► But they basically moved their functionality out into an app, and a lot of the functionality

00:44:31 ◼   ► was outside of the preference pane before anyway.

00:44:33 ◼   ► Preference panes are weird, especially weird like when you're running on an ARM Mac and

00:44:37 ◼   ► Then you have an x86 preference pane and it has to run through Rosetta and it's being

00:44:41 ◼   ► launched and trying to show the content inside an ARM process which is the system settings

00:44:46 ◼   ► app itself.

00:44:47 ◼   ► So third party preference panes have been not out of favor but just sort of marginalized

00:44:52 ◼   ► over the past few years.

00:44:53 ◼   ► I still run some important ones like my mouse acceleration software, Steer Mouse is still

00:44:59 ◼   ► a preference pane.

00:45:00 ◼   ► It seems a little bit weird in Ventura but it does work and it does, you know, I just

00:45:05 ◼   ► clicked it and I and I guess the next part of this item here I just clicked it

00:45:10 ◼   ► while I was talking and it crashed in exactly the same way as I have pasted

00:45:14 ◼   ► into our show notes nice legacy loader x86 died when trying to look at this

00:45:20 ◼   ► deer mouse preference pane sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't anyway

00:45:24 ◼   ► isn't your entire computer a legacy loader x86 oh why is it doing why is it

00:45:29 ◼   ► doing like legacy look because it's not like it's I'm not running the arm

00:45:32 ◼   ► version of system settings. I don't have an ARM CPU, so what is going on? Anyway, it crashed. It's

00:45:37 ◼   ► a little bit janky like many things in Adventurer's system settings, but for people wondering,

00:45:42 ◼   ► preference panes are still a thing, barely, and it seems like some of the companies that are more on

00:45:48 ◼   ► top of their game, like Backblaze, are kind of moving out. We got an excellent, excellent,

00:45:54 ◼   ► excellent tweet from Mark Yu. This is one of those things where incredible brevity is exactly

00:46:01 ◼   ► what you need in order to make this great, which is something that I'm not good at. But Mark writes,

00:46:05 ◼   ► here's, I'm filling in actually, so the context here is what is a smart versus magic versus cover

00:46:12 ◼   ► versus folio on the keyboards? How do we decode this? We were talking about this like two or three

00:46:16 ◼   ► weeks ago. Mark writes, "Smart. Screen turns on when opened. Magic has full travel keys, not the

00:46:22 ◼   ► nubs. Cover. Screen side only. Folio. Both sides. Combine those as needed." Boom. Nailed it. As far

00:46:29 ◼   ► As far as I can tell, this is accurate.

00:46:31 ◼   ► - I mean, you're just back solving

00:46:32 ◼   ► for the products they release.

00:46:33 ◼   ► When they release a new one, you have to get a new map.

00:46:35 ◼   ► So it's not as if this helps you parse anything,

00:46:37 ◼   ► but it is a nice retroactive taxonomy.

00:46:41 ◼   ► - Yep, this was extremely well done,

00:46:43 ◼   ► and I am very impressed.

00:46:46 ◼   ► And speaking of nomenclature,

00:46:47 ◼   ► what's going on with Stage Manager?

00:46:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, we were asking a couple shows ago,

00:46:50 ◼   ► what do you call those piles of things

00:46:52 ◼   ► on the side of the screen?

00:46:53 ◼   ► Stage Manager and Mac OS.

00:46:55 ◼   ► What are they called?

00:46:56 ◼   ► Well, according to the menus, apparently, they are called sets, because the menu item

00:47:03 ◼   ► in the window menu in the finder is you can say "remove window from set."

00:47:07 ◼   ► So I guess that makes some sense, but it's still kind of weird.

00:47:10 ◼   ► Like what set did you put the thing in?

00:47:12 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:47:13 ◼   ► It would be nicer if they had a branded name that made more.

00:47:14 ◼   ► I mean, they can call the thing the Dynamic Island, but they decided the things on the

00:47:17 ◼   ► side of StageMatter are just called sets.

00:47:19 ◼   ► Anyway, that appears to be what they are.

00:47:23 ◼   ► news. Earlier today I wanted to do something on my iPad where I was flipping back and forth

00:47:28 ◼   ► between two different windows and I wanted each of these, or two different apps, and

00:47:31 ◼   ► I wanted each of these apps to take up most of the screen and it occurred to me, "Ah,

00:47:36 ◼   ► I could use Stage Manager for this." Sure enough, I turned on Stage Manager. I was only

00:47:40 ◼   ► using it for about five minutes, but not only did it not crash, it was actually kind of

00:47:45 ◼   ► nice. I only used it for a few minutes and I quickly turned it off as soon as I was done,

00:47:51 ◼   ► But for those five minutes, I actually kind of enjoyed it.

00:47:53 ◼   ► So that was a neat moment.

00:47:54 ◼   ► - I feel like stage manager for the Mac,

00:47:56 ◼   ► as I said many times, it's basically spaces

00:47:59 ◼   ► for people who want more visibility.

00:48:02 ◼   ► They don't want stuff to be hidden off to the side

00:48:05 ◼   ► that they can't see.

00:48:05 ◼   ► Like mentally, I have to know that there are

00:48:07 ◼   ► these various spaces.

00:48:08 ◼   ► I have to bring in Mission Control to see them.

00:48:09 ◼   ► It's like, "Why don't we just put it all on one screen

00:48:10 ◼   ► "and you can cycle through sets of windows?"

00:48:12 ◼   ► And you sacrifice some screen space for those little sets,

00:48:16 ◼   ► and you can even hide those if you want

00:48:17 ◼   ► and make them appear just when you need them.

00:48:20 ◼   ► But I think it's easier for people to manage

00:48:22 ◼   ► because it's like, it doesn't suddenly make

00:48:24 ◼   ► a bunch of virtual screens all around them.

00:48:25 ◼   ► People, you know, if you like Spaces,

00:48:27 ◼   ► you're probably already using it,

00:48:28 ◼   ► but if you don't like virtual screens,

00:48:30 ◼   ► Stage Manager tries to be, it's like virtual screens,

00:48:32 ◼   ► but a little bit more comfortable

00:48:34 ◼   ► if you don't like having virtual screens.

00:48:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, as someone who really, really, really likes Spaces

00:48:40 ◼   ► and uses them heavily,

00:48:41 ◼   ► when I've tried Stage Manager on the Mac,

00:48:43 ◼   ► its mental model does not match my mental model

00:48:47 ◼   ► for how things should work.

00:48:48 ◼   ► so I really didn't care for it on the Mac.

00:48:51 ◼   ► But in limited use on the iPad,

00:48:52 ◼   ► when you have a very constrained problem,

00:48:55 ◼   ► it actually was reasonably nice.

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00:50:39 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:50:43 ◼   ► - Jon, tell me, you've got scare quotes around the word new,

00:50:47 ◼   ► but in the show notes it says you've got,

00:50:49 ◼   ► quote, new, quote, phone and mouse.

00:50:51 ◼   ► What did you break?

00:50:53 ◼   ► - Well, I talked about it on the mouse before,

00:50:55 ◼   ► that it was being wonky again,

00:50:56 ◼   ► and then I figured out that sticking the Post-It note

00:50:59 ◼   ► under the little shaky button,

00:51:00 ◼   ► but I still had the one that was being wonky, right?

00:51:02 ◼   ► Because I fixed the noisy one with the Post-It note,

00:51:03 ◼   ► but then it was the wonky one.

00:51:04 ◼   ► So I decided to just do another warranty repair

00:51:07 ◼   ► on the wonky one, 'cause why not?

00:51:09 ◼   ► This time they did not ask me

00:51:11 ◼   ► to send them a video of it not working.

00:51:12 ◼   ► I have no idea why because they have no idea who I am.

00:51:16 ◼   ► I had no record of my previous returns.

00:51:19 ◼   ► Everything is new.

00:51:20 ◼   ► It was all done through chat.

00:51:21 ◼   ► It took a long time and it did require me to dig up the original receipt and send them

00:51:25 ◼   ► a picture of that and a bunch of other stuff.

00:51:28 ◼   ► It got done.

00:51:30 ◼   ► They sent me a shipping label, so I have to send the old mouse back, which I did.

00:51:36 ◼   ► They eventually sent me a new mouse.

00:51:38 ◼   ► This is a Microsoft computer mouse, pictured in your mind.

00:51:41 ◼   ► They came to my house in a box that was 19 inches by 14 inches by 6 inches.

00:51:46 ◼   ► What?

00:51:47 ◼   ► I was like, what is this?

00:51:48 ◼   ► It was huge.

00:51:49 ◼   ► I recently ordered a bike handlebar that came in a smaller package than that.

00:51:54 ◼   ► Inside the box was a smaller box and inside the smaller box was a mouse wrapped in bubble

00:51:57 ◼   ► wrap.

00:51:58 ◼   ► I have to say, every time I've gotten one of the, you know, I've done it twice now,

00:52:01 ◼   ► both of these mice that I've gotten replaced, when the replacement one has come, they all

00:52:06 ◼   ► look just like dirty and scuffed up.

00:52:10 ◼   ► They do not look new the whole thing with like Apple refurb stuff is there's like every part of it that you can see your touch

00:52:15 ◼   ► Is brand new not the case when getting a mouse replaced by I don't know what they do like I again

00:52:20 ◼   ► I didn't pay enough attention to look at the serial numbers, but did they just replace the guts of my mouse?

00:52:24 ◼   ► No

00:52:24 ◼   ► this is this is scuffed up in a way that my mouse wasn't in different places like it just seems dirty and

00:52:29 ◼   ► Grimy and not like I'm getting a new mouse and again

00:52:33 ◼   ► It just comes wrapped in bubble wrap like literally the bear mouse

00:52:36 ◼   ► with bubble wrap wrapped around it.

00:52:37 ◼   ► Not even any tape to hold the bubble wrap on.

00:52:39 ◼   ► Just, ah, wad it into the bubble wrap,

00:52:40 ◼   ► shove it in the box, shove it in the bigger box.

00:52:43 ◼   ► I'm glad I got it replaced for free under warranty,

00:52:45 ◼   ► but now I've had two of these

00:52:46 ◼   ► and they've both been replaced under warranty,

00:52:47 ◼   ► so it's not going too well over here on Microsoft Mouse Land.

00:52:50 ◼   ► But anyway, that is my quote unquote new mouse,

00:52:52 ◼   ► which is absolutely not new.

00:52:54 ◼   ► And in fact, I'm not sure if they even still sell this mouse

00:52:57 ◼   ► 'cause a bunch of people are like,

00:52:58 ◼   ► oh, I have a Microsoft discount.

00:52:59 ◼   ► Do you wanna get a discounted version of this mouse?

00:53:01 ◼   ► And they all look at their store,

00:53:03 ◼   ► they're like, oh, I guess you can't get this mouse discounted.

00:53:05 ◼   ► Well maybe when it comes back to the store.

00:53:06 ◼   ► You can still get the Surface Precision Mouse which is as far as I can tell, this mouse

00:53:11 ◼   ► but grey.

00:53:12 ◼   ► But I want the black one.

00:53:13 ◼   ► The Microsoft Precision Mouse.

00:53:14 ◼   ► It's black.

00:53:16 ◼   ► And maybe they're just not selling that anymore.

00:53:18 ◼   ► Maybe it's because they all die within a year.

00:53:19 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:53:20 ◼   ► Maybe they're just giving me, rotating through this batch of cruddy ones that they have in

00:53:25 ◼   ► their factory.

00:53:26 ◼   ► Anyway, I'm using my quote unquote new mouse.

00:53:29 ◼   ► And the phone thing.

00:53:30 ◼   ► So I think last episode I complained about the camera on my iPhone 14 Pro.

00:53:37 ◼   ► I think I said it gets a lot of glare from the sun and I wish I had a lens hood to stop

00:53:41 ◼   ► the glare from the sun.

00:53:42 ◼   ► I was using my hand over the...

00:53:44 ◼   ► I would hold up the phone to take a picture, walking around in the fall and the sun is

00:53:48 ◼   ► low and I would get this glare and I'd put my hand over it to try to make a lens hood

00:53:50 ◼   ► and my fingers would go in the picture.

00:53:52 ◼   ► It was annoying me.

00:53:53 ◼   ► I'm like, "Well, it's just this new camera with the big lenses and lots of lens elements.

00:53:57 ◼   ► They're just catching a lot of glare."

00:53:58 ◼   ► I guess that's why, you know, I use lens hoods on my real cameras.

00:54:01 ◼   ► But then a couple people wrote in to me and said, "I had the same problem with my iPhone

00:54:06 ◼   ► 14 Pro camera, and I brought it into the Apple store, and it turns out my camera was messed

00:54:10 ◼   ► up and they replaced it for me."

00:54:12 ◼   ► So I'm like, "Huh."

00:54:13 ◼   ► So I took a bunch of test pictures.

00:54:15 ◼   ► I just put in our little Slack channel, and Marco can use this in the show thing if he

00:54:19 ◼   ► wants because it's not incriminating.

00:54:21 ◼   ► It's a picture of some mushrooms growing on some random person's lawn in my neighborhood,

00:54:24 ◼   ► right?

00:54:25 ◼   ► So it's not even my house.

00:54:26 ◼   ► And you can see at the top of the photo,

00:54:28 ◼   ► like I have a gray haze coming down,

00:54:31 ◼   ► like sun glare basically.

00:54:33 ◼   ► And that gray haze, like you can make something

00:54:36 ◼   ► like that happen with any iPhone camera or any camera at all

00:54:39 ◼   ► especially without a lens hood on it.

00:54:41 ◼   ► But it is much more severe on my iPhone 14 Pro camera

00:54:45 ◼   ► than on my wife's iPhone 13 Pro

00:54:47 ◼   ► or any other iPhones in the house.

00:54:48 ◼   ► And I just thought it was part of this camera.

00:54:50 ◼   ► But then I've seen, you know,

00:54:52 ◼   ► someone said they got the thing repaired.

00:54:54 ◼   ► They showed a close-up picture of the main camera

00:54:57 ◼   ► on the back of their phone,

00:54:57 ◼   ► and they said the lens actually looked cloudy.

00:54:59 ◼   ► So I turn over my phone, I look at the main camera lens,

00:55:01 ◼   ► which is like the biggest one, and you know what?

00:55:03 ◼   ► It did look a little bit cloudy,

00:55:05 ◼   ► almost like there was condensation on it

00:55:06 ◼   ► or oil covering it or whatever,

00:55:08 ◼   ► something you wouldn't notice

00:55:09 ◼   ► unless you had light hitting it at an angle.

00:55:12 ◼   ► And so I took a whole bunch of test pictures to say,

00:55:15 ◼   ► I was gonna bring these with me to the Apple Store

00:55:17 ◼   ► and say, "Here, this is what my camera's doing,

00:55:18 ◼   ► "and it seems like it shouldn't be like this."

00:55:21 ◼   ► And it doesn't take much to make this happen.

00:55:23 ◼   ► You just need the sun to be a little bit low

00:55:24 ◼   ► and you don't even need the sun in the photo.

00:55:27 ◼   ► Like this mushroom picture, the sun is not in the photo.

00:55:29 ◼   ► The sun is above the frame of the camera,

00:55:31 ◼   ► but it's producing so much glare

00:55:33 ◼   ► and just gray haze coming down.

00:55:35 ◼   ► And I tried it with all the cameras.

00:55:36 ◼   ► 3X camera didn't have it.

00:55:38 ◼   ► The 0.05 had it and the 1X had it.

00:55:40 ◼   ► But the 3X was, and that's part of the reason

00:55:42 ◼   ► I could tell that it wasn't quite the same.

00:55:43 ◼   ► Now, obviously focal length changes

00:55:45 ◼   ► how much glare you're gonna get and stuff like that.

00:55:48 ◼   ► So it's not like an apples-to-apples comparison,

00:55:49 ◼   ► but I thought I had enough

00:55:50 ◼   ► to make a Genius Bar appointment.

00:55:52 ◼   ► And I did, and I brought the phone in,

00:55:54 ◼   ► and the good thing is I sat down at a table and I said,

00:55:57 ◼   ► let's just grab a 14 Pro right here

00:55:59 ◼   ► and let's do a comparison.

00:56:00 ◼   ► Let's find something glarey here

00:56:03 ◼   ► and take a picture of it with these two cameras side by side,

00:56:05 ◼   ► the 14 Pro that's security chained to this table,

00:56:08 ◼   ► and mine, and see if there's a difference.

00:56:11 ◼   ► One thing I learned is it's surprisingly hard

00:56:13 ◼   ► to find a place to demonstrate this inside an Apple store,

00:56:16 ◼   ► because yes, there are glarey lights in the ceiling,

00:56:18 ◼   ► but they're not that glarey, they're pretty gentle.

00:56:20 ◼   ► And if you aim the camera up at the ceiling lights,

00:56:23 ◼   ► everything up there is gray.

00:56:24 ◼   ► So you're never going to see a gray haze, right?

00:56:27 ◼   ► So the technique we came up with was have one iPhone 14 Pro

00:56:30 ◼   ► turn on the flashlight on the back

00:56:32 ◼   ► and point it at the other one and then reverse it.

00:56:35 ◼   ► And you could see it was pretty clear

00:56:37 ◼   ► that the one in the Apple store did not suffer from glare

00:56:40 ◼   ► as much as mine did.

00:56:41 ◼   ► So the person did take the camera into the back

00:56:42 ◼   ► and ran it through their camera tester thing

00:56:44 ◼   ► and said the camera tester thing didn't find anything

00:56:46 ◼   ► malfunctioning in terms of color reproduction or whatever,

00:56:49 ◼   ► but they could see that it was clear from the photos

00:56:51 ◼   ► that they were taking that comparing my 14 Pro

00:56:54 ◼   ► to the 14 Pro in the store, there was a difference.

00:56:57 ◼   ► They could not replace the camera

00:56:59 ◼   ► because they just don't have camera parts.

00:57:01 ◼   ► I don't know if this is a, you know,

00:57:03 ◼   ► Shanghai zero COVID shutdown thing,

00:57:06 ◼   ► or just like early on in the production run of any phone,

00:57:08 ◼   ► they don't have parts.

00:57:10 ◼   ► So they said, "But we can replace the whole phone."

00:57:11 ◼   ► I said, "Okay, do that then."

00:57:13 ◼   ► So, you know, and they said,

00:57:16 ◼   ► "Okay, well, we'll replace the whole phone,

00:57:17 ◼   ► but we don't have this phone,

00:57:18 ◼   ► So you have to come back when we have it in stock.

00:57:19 ◼   ► So eventually they got it in stock.

00:57:21 ◼   ► And I knew it was coming next, and I was dreading it.

00:57:23 ◼   ► I even discussed it with the person when I was there.

00:57:26 ◼   ► I'm going to go pick up a new, basically a brand new version

00:57:29 ◼   ► of my exact same phone, a black iPhone 14 Pro with whatever,

00:57:32 ◼   ► 256 gigs or whatever.

00:57:35 ◼   ► But I can't just hand them my old phone.

00:57:37 ◼   ► I can't just erase my old phone and hand it to them

00:57:39 ◼   ► and take the new one because I have too much multi-factor

00:57:42 ◼   ► authentication crap on here.

00:57:44 ◼   ► And some of it cloud syncs, like Apple's multi-factor cloud

00:57:48 ◼   ► but some of it doesn't.

00:57:50 ◼   ► We went through this before.

00:57:51 ◼   ► Last time I got my phone two years ago,

00:57:53 ◼   ► and I was complaining that the Google Authenticator app

00:57:55 ◼   ► didn't have a way to transfer stuff.

00:57:56 ◼   ► Now Google Authenticator does have a way to transfer stuff,

00:57:59 ◼   ► but it's a manual way.

00:58:01 ◼   ► So you see where this is going, don't you?

00:58:03 ◼   ► I'm going to go to the Apple Store to "pick up my phone."

00:58:07 ◼   ► And then what's going to happen?

00:58:09 ◼   ► I'm going to sit there and have to do device-to-device transfer

00:58:13 ◼   ► for my old phone for the new phone,

00:58:15 ◼   ► wait for that to complete,

00:58:17 ◼   ► And then do a 30-second export import from Google Authenticator, right?

00:58:23 ◼   ► Oh my god.

00:58:24 ◼   ► And I couldn't think of a way around this. They're not going to let me leave the store with two phones.

00:58:29 ◼   ► Nope.

00:58:30 ◼   ► I should have just asked them and said, "Can I just take both of them and bring back the old one later?"

00:58:34 ◼   ► Because I don't need to be here for this, right?

00:58:36 ◼   ► Not a chance. Nope.

00:58:37 ◼   ► But it's not really happening. And there's no way to make it go faster.

00:58:41 ◼   ► the Google Authenticator thing, like, I mean,

00:58:44 ◼   ► I guess I could have done, taken like screenshots

00:58:47 ◼   ► of the QR codes, but like that's a terrible security.

00:58:51 ◼   ► Don't do that.

00:58:52 ◼   ► Do not, don't write down your passwords

00:58:53 ◼   ► and don't take screenshots of the QR codes

00:58:55 ◼   ► for your multi-factor authentication.

00:58:56 ◼   ► Like I could have done that, but I just didn't want to.

00:58:59 ◼   ► Anyway, I went to the Apple store

00:59:01 ◼   ► and I did device device transfer.

00:59:04 ◼   ► - And of course the new iPhone, when it came out of the box,

00:59:05 ◼   ► wasn't running 16.1 and my new phone was.

00:59:08 ◼   ► So first I got to do an OS update.

00:59:09 ◼   ► - Oh God.

00:59:11 ◼   ► I started doing the OS update and the person,

00:59:13 ◼   ► I mean these people do this all day

00:59:14 ◼   ► so they know what they're doing.

00:59:15 ◼   ► They said, if that progress bar doesn't seem

00:59:17 ◼   ► like it's moving, let me just bring out the computer.

00:59:19 ◼   ► And they had like a computer running Apple Configurator 2

00:59:21 ◼   ► and they'll just, with the 16.1 already downloaded.

00:59:24 ◼   ► And so we waited for like three minutes

00:59:26 ◼   ► and said, "No, that progress bar is not satisfactory."

00:59:28 ◼   ► They just brought out a MacBook Air,

00:59:32 ◼   ► plugged my phone into it and did, you know,

00:59:34 ◼   ► blasted on 16.1.

00:59:35 ◼   ► Still took a while, but it was way faster

00:59:37 ◼   ► than waiting for the update to run.

00:59:38 ◼   ► Then I had to do a device-to-device transfer,

00:59:40 ◼   ► which took forever.

00:59:41 ◼   ► And then after that was finally over,

00:59:43 ◼   ► then at that point I'd been there so long,

00:59:45 ◼   ► I was like, you know what,

00:59:46 ◼   ► I'm gonna install my test flight apps,

00:59:48 ◼   ► and I'm gonna do the multi-factor thing.

00:59:50 ◼   ► And after you do device-to-device transfer,

00:59:53 ◼   ► I'm still shocked when I pick up my phone

00:59:54 ◼   ► and it has a whole bunch of grayed out icons

00:59:56 ◼   ► that say "Waiting" underneath them.

00:59:57 ◼   ► Like, wait, you just did, oh, it doesn't do the apps.

00:59:59 ◼   ► It just always downloads the apps from the app store.

01:00:02 ◼   ► I needed to download Google Authenticator ASAP.

01:00:05 ◼   ► I don't care about all the other apps.

01:00:07 ◼   ► And there's a way to do that.

01:00:08 ◼   ► We may have even talked about it on this very program,

01:00:10 ◼   ► but it was so long ago that I forgot about it.

01:00:12 ◼   ► If you hold down your finger on one of those grayed out icons

01:00:15 ◼   ► that says Waiting, a pop-up menu appears,

01:00:17 ◼   ► and you can select Prioritize Download.

01:00:20 ◼   ► And your phone will bump that app to the front of the queue.

01:00:23 ◼   ► So I did prioritize download on Google Authenticator

01:00:25 ◼   ► and a bunch of my other authenticator apps,

01:00:27 ◼   ► and downloaded them, and I transferred all the stuff.

01:00:29 ◼   ► So I spent a little bit over 3 and 1/2 hours

01:00:33 ◼   ► sitting in an Apple store.

01:00:35 ◼   ► I had the forethought to bring my iPad with me,

01:00:37 ◼   ► because both my phones would be out of commission during this whole time.

01:00:40 ◼   ► And I just sat there and dorked around on my iPad and listened to other people's tales

01:00:44 ◼   ► of woe with their computers and iPads and stuff.

01:00:49 ◼   ► And I got to look at all of the current crop of Apple hardware.

01:00:53 ◼   ► And yeah, that was how I spent an entire day.

01:00:55 ◼   ► It was great.

01:00:56 ◼   ► It was awesome.

01:00:57 ◼   ► See, this is why Funemployed Jon is very helpful.

01:01:02 ◼   ► Because what would you have done if you had an actual job?

01:01:04 ◼   ► I would have had to go on a weekend.

01:01:05 ◼   ► But like, I thought of this, it's like,

01:01:07 ◼   ► this is why I'm kind of all in on iCloud keychain

01:01:10 ◼   ► for multi-factor stuff.

01:01:11 ◼   ► I don't wanna ever have to do this,

01:01:13 ◼   ► but like, if I need to get a new phone,

01:01:16 ◼   ► if something happens and I get like a warranty repair,

01:01:18 ◼   ► I'm gonna have to do this again, right?

01:01:20 ◼   ► And I know there's other ways about it.

01:01:21 ◼   ► Like I can and have transferred my multi-factor stuff

01:01:24 ◼   ► to other secure devices in the house,

01:01:26 ◼   ► so I could just trust that it's all gonna be there

01:01:27 ◼   ► and then bring the new phone home and do that.

01:01:29 ◼   ► Maybe I'll do that next time,

01:01:31 ◼   ► but like, you know what I mean, redundancy.

01:01:32 ◼   ► I just feel like I don't wanna just have the stuff

01:01:35 ◼   ► The whole point of me having backups,

01:01:37 ◼   ► like having this on this device

01:01:38 ◼   ► and also on another iPad or something,

01:01:40 ◼   ► is that it's in more than one place.

01:01:41 ◼   ► And if my phone falls in a lake,

01:01:43 ◼   ► I don't lose all my multi-factor stuff, right?

01:01:44 ◼   ► So having it in one place, even for a short period of time,

01:01:47 ◼   ► makes me a little nervous,

01:01:48 ◼   ► but after three and a half hours in an Apple store,

01:01:51 ◼   ► breathing through a mask the whole time, of course,

01:01:53 ◼   ► maybe I'll think better of it.

01:01:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's painful.

01:01:57 ◼   ► But don't worry, it's not like you've wasted any time

01:02:00 ◼   ► doing any sort of login or setup of Apple products,

01:02:02 ◼   ► because you didn't get a new Apple TV, right?

01:02:05 ◼   ► Well, device-to-device transfer on the phone is the,

01:02:08 ◼   ► as we learned last time I made a terrible mistake,

01:02:10 ◼   ► is the best chance you have of all your apps

01:02:13 ◼   ► not requiring you to log in.

01:02:14 ◼   ► If you get one of the new Apple TVs, which I did,

01:02:17 ◼   ► you have no chance of protecting your login information.

01:02:21 ◼   ► There's nothing you can do apparently.

01:02:23 ◼   ► You get a new Apple TV, I got one, it's smaller, it's cute.

01:02:27 ◼   ► One of the funny things about the new Apple TV,

01:02:30 ◼   ► 'cause people do reviews of it online,

01:02:32 ◼   ► and very often they would take a picture of it

01:02:34 ◼   ► next to the old hockey puck,

01:02:35 ◼   ► 'cause what else are you gonna take a picture of?

01:02:36 ◼   ► Look, it's smaller, right?

01:02:38 ◼   ► I think I saw at least two reviews that made me think,

01:02:42 ◼   ► is the new Apple TV matte black instead of glossy black?

01:02:46 ◼   ► It's not matte black,

01:02:47 ◼   ► but there is a matte black protective piece

01:02:50 ◼   ► of plastic around it.

01:02:51 ◼   ► And like every protective piece of plastic

01:02:53 ◼   ► on every electronic device ever,

01:02:54 ◼   ► sometimes people don't notice it and forget to take it off.

01:02:58 ◼   ► And people had actual product shots in their reviews

01:03:01 ◼   ► on reputable tech sites where they forgot to,

01:03:04 ◼   ► I would assume forgot to, peel off the matte black,

01:03:08 ◼   ► the carefully precision cut, almost invisible matte black

01:03:11 ◼   ► wrapper around the brand new Apple TV,

01:03:13 ◼   ► and it looked like the new Apple TV was matte.

01:03:15 ◼   ► It's not as glossy.

01:03:16 ◼   ► Take off the sticker.

01:03:17 ◼   ► - Doesn't it cover up the ports on the back?

01:03:20 ◼   ► - Yes, it does. - I thought it did.

01:03:21 ◼   ► - But they were just taking, you know,

01:03:22 ◼   ► they were just taking like the pictures of it.

01:03:23 ◼   ► Like any picture of merchandise,

01:03:24 ◼   ► you don't show the cords, right?

01:03:26 ◼   ► No cords on the Sony TVs on the Sony site,

01:03:28 ◼   ► no cords on the Apple TV.

01:03:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, but you would think like if they're reviewing it,

01:03:31 ◼   ► they would at some point try to plug a cord in and realize,

01:03:33 ◼   ► "Oh crap, I have to peel this whole thing off."

01:03:35 ◼   ► - They did, but by then the photography people

01:03:37 ◼   ► had already taken all their pictures probably.

01:03:39 ◼   ► Like I don't know, multiple different things.

01:03:41 ◼   ► Speaking of the cords though, that's one of the things.

01:03:44 ◼   ► They changed the cord layout on the back.

01:03:45 ◼   ► Obviously I got the one with Ethernet.

01:03:48 ◼   ► And I think, now I'm gonna have to remember.

01:03:50 ◼   ► I think the layout used to be Power HDMI Ethernet.

01:03:55 ◼   ► And now it is Power Ethernet HDMI.

01:03:58 ◼   ► So basically previously HDMI was dead center in the thing

01:04:01 ◼   ► And now HDMI is not dead center.

01:04:02 ◼   ► And HDMI cable is the thickest and stiffest cable

01:04:05 ◼   ► that connects to this tiny little puck.

01:04:08 ◼   ► I kind of understand why they did it,

01:04:09 ◼   ► because most people don't have ethernet.

01:04:11 ◼   ► And so with the old arrangement, it

01:04:13 ◼   ► would be one cord in the middle and one cord on the left,

01:04:15 ◼   ► if you're looking at it from the front.

01:04:17 ◼   ► Now it would be one cord on the left and one cord on the right

01:04:19 ◼   ► with empty ethernet in the middle for most people.

01:04:21 ◼   ► But honestly, if you buy the one with the ethernet,

01:04:23 ◼   ► maybe you--

01:04:23 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:04:23 ◼   ► Maybe you just want the Thread Radio.

01:04:25 ◼   ► But anyway, they changed the cord arrangement.

01:04:27 ◼   ► But yeah, you plug that thing into your TV,

01:04:29 ◼   ► And it says like, "Oh, bring your phone nearby," or something.

01:04:32 ◼   ► It's one of those like weird come ons of some magical technical thing.

01:04:35 ◼   ► Like, "We'll just do the magical thing, so just come here."

01:04:38 ◼   ► And it says, "Oh, I found your phone.

01:04:40 ◼   ► I think I know who you are.

01:04:41 ◼   ► I'll set this up for you."

01:04:42 ◼   ► And I have the home screen syncing configured so it remembers all the apps I had installed

01:04:46 ◼   ► and where I put them on the home screen and does it all.

01:04:48 ◼   ► And you're like, "Wow, this is awesome.

01:04:49 ◼   ► Really easy Apple setup experience and my Apple TV is back exactly how I left it.

01:04:54 ◼   ► Look at this."

01:04:55 ◼   ► It's like you can tell, almost nothing changed except the box got smaller and in a completely

01:04:58 ◼   ► an audible fan has been eliminated.

01:05:00 ◼   ► - And if you have TestFlight, because remember,

01:05:02 ◼   ► TestFlight is just not a thing to Apple.

01:05:04 ◼   ► If you have TestFlight apps, then they are not installed

01:05:07 ◼   ► by default, just like on the phone.

01:05:08 ◼   ► - You have TestFlight apps on Apple TV?

01:05:11 ◼   ► - Plex and channels, Plex and channels,

01:05:13 ◼   ► I think are the only ones, but yes.

01:05:14 ◼   ► - Why am I not on the Plex TestFlight?

01:05:16 ◼   ► - I don't know, because you didn't evangelize

01:05:18 ◼   ► as well as I did, apparently.

01:05:19 ◼   ► - Apparently not.

01:05:20 ◼   ► Anyway, but no, that's all, as Jason Snell said

01:05:24 ◼   ► in another article, he's not really on top

01:05:25 ◼   ► of his game lately, at sixcellars.com,

01:05:27 ◼   ► that's all an illusion.

01:05:28 ◼   ► Don't be fooled into thinking your Apple TV is back

01:05:30 ◼   ► exactly the way you left it,

01:05:31 ◼   ► because every single one of those icons,

01:05:32 ◼   ► if you click on it, has no idea who you are.

01:05:34 ◼   ► And you have to log back in.

01:05:36 ◼   ► And every one of these apps has a different way

01:05:38 ◼   ► to log back in.

01:05:39 ◼   ► Sometimes it wants you to enter your username and password.

01:05:42 ◼   ► Why can't Apple TV, one of Apple's own platforms,

01:05:46 ◼   ► use iCloud Keychain for the Apple ID

01:05:48 ◼   ► that you are logged into the Apple TV with

01:05:50 ◼   ► to get your username and password?

01:05:52 ◼   ► I don't know, but it doesn't.

01:05:54 ◼   ► Instead, you have to use your phone as a remote,

01:05:56 ◼   ► and your phone is also logged into your Apple ID

01:05:59 ◼   ► and can read your iCloud keychain,

01:06:00 ◼   ► and so your phone will look up your username and password

01:06:02 ◼   ► in iCloud keychain and send it as text to the text field

01:06:06 ◼   ► that it is being used to enter.

01:06:08 ◼   ► Why can't you do the Apple TV?

01:06:09 ◼   ► I have no freaking idea why, it drives me nuts.

01:06:11 ◼   ► Sometimes you'll have to go to servicename.com/activate

01:06:15 ◼   ► and type in a four digit code and get in that way.

01:06:18 ◼   ► Sometimes it will say, hey, just launch the Disney+ app,

01:06:20 ◼   ► and if it's on the same network as us,

01:06:21 ◼   ► it will let you log in.

01:06:22 ◼   ► - Allegedly.

01:06:24 ◼   ► - I'm glad Jason said in the article,

01:06:25 ◼   ► That has never worked for him.

01:06:26 ◼   ► It's never worked for me either.

01:06:27 ◼   ► Remember last time I said maybe it's because I'm not on Wi-Fi

01:06:30 ◼   ► and it says you have to be on the same Wi-Fi network

01:06:32 ◼   ► and there's like the technologist in me saying,

01:06:34 ◼   ► do they mean Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi?

01:06:36 ◼   ► Or is that just like the catch-all word for network

01:06:39 ◼   ► because people don't know that there are other kinds

01:06:40 ◼   ► of networking than Wi-Fi?

01:06:41 ◼   ► 'Cause my TV isn't on Wi-Fi,

01:06:44 ◼   ► it's connected through ethernet only

01:06:46 ◼   ► and it's not connected to Wi-Fi

01:06:47 ◼   ► because Google TV OS doesn't let you do both of them

01:06:50 ◼   ► at the same time.

01:06:51 ◼   ► And so it never worked for me,

01:06:52 ◼   ► but it also never worked for Jason.

01:06:53 ◼   ► So then you gotta do using your own password.

01:06:55 ◼   ► So laborious and you know, poor me, just like Jason, I have subscribed to way too many streaming services.

01:07:01 ◼   ► Yeah, I know it's such a terrible thing to do. But anyway, I spent not three and a half hours, but at least probably

01:07:07 ◼   ► 45 minutes, maybe an hour,

01:07:09 ◼   ► going through all my services and logging them all back in, reconnecting my Plex,

01:07:14 ◼   ► finding all my shares on Infuse, logging into all the different services, log in with TV provider, get redirected to the Verizon page,

01:07:21 ◼   ► Log in, bounce back, pick up your phone,

01:07:24 ◼   ► enter this thing in, pull things out of the key chain.

01:07:27 ◼   ► So laborious.

01:07:28 ◼   ► I'm glad new Apple TV doesn't come out very often.

01:07:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, it is a real, real pain.

01:07:34 ◼   ► And I went through it when I got my new Apple TV

01:07:36 ◼   ► with ethernet.

01:07:37 ◼   ► Disney Plus sign in thing did not work for me for Beans.

01:07:41 ◼   ► So just like you said, I'm glad Jason had said something.

01:07:44 ◼   ► Like in the grand scheme of things, it's fine.

01:07:45 ◼   ► All my stuff is in one password,

01:07:47 ◼   ► but the inconsistency across all these apps,

01:07:49 ◼   ► not surprising but frustrating nevertheless like you know again some

01:07:53 ◼   ► sometimes it's slash activate slash pair then it's oh I need a username password

01:07:56 ◼   ► and and the Apple TV does remember you know an email address that it that any

01:08:01 ◼   ► email addresses that you use to sign into stuff which is nice but then you

01:08:05 ◼   ► still got to be on your phone or your iPad and you got to go and grab the

01:08:07 ◼   ► password from one password and be ready to paste it in the field it's like it's

01:08:11 ◼   ► none of this is a big deal but it's just frustrating and we're not gonna have

01:08:15 ◼   ► time to talk about the ads thing but this is just another one of those like

01:08:18 ◼   ► paper cuts that seem to be appearing more and more often in in Apple stuff or

01:08:22 ◼   ► or maybe a more complimentary way of looking at it is so many other paper

01:08:26 ◼   ► cuts have gone away that these ones that are left stand out more I'm not sure

01:08:30 ◼   ► which one it is it doesn't really matter but you know in the same way that if

01:08:33 ◼   ► they add ads everywhere in these OS is it's gonna be you know more and more

01:08:38 ◼   ► frustrating well something like this is just frustrating it's not a big deal is

01:08:42 ◼   ► just frustrating it's weird though because like they write tvOS it's their

01:08:47 ◼   ► own platform. You sign in with your Apple ID. One of the options you have is to not

01:08:51 ◼   ► be prompted for further authentication when making purchases. That's an option in the

01:08:56 ◼   ► settings. You can say, "Hey, I'm signed into my Apple ID, and I just want to be able to

01:08:59 ◼   ► buy stuff. Don't prompt me for my password when I buy stuff." So you can spend money,

01:09:03 ◼   ► real money, without entering anything, but somehow the platform has no ability to do

01:09:09 ◼   ► what every other Apple platform can do, which is look up your passwords in iCloud and Keychain

01:09:14 ◼   ► and stick them into fields when you're logging into something.

01:09:17 ◼   ► And this is on--

01:09:20 ◼   ► maybe in version 1, they don't have that fine,

01:09:21 ◼   ► but eventually it will come.

01:09:22 ◼   ► Now it's way past overdue.

01:09:24 ◼   ► I don't call this a paper cut.

01:09:25 ◼   ► I would call this a feature that should have been there

01:09:27 ◼   ► a long time ago.

01:09:28 ◼   ► And there must be some reasonably sound

01:09:30 ◼   ► technical reason for why they just don't want to do that.

01:09:32 ◼   ► But I cannot think of what it might be not knowing

01:09:35 ◼   ► the details.

01:09:36 ◼   ► And it just-- and not that that's the greatest thing.

01:09:38 ◼   ► That's the minimum of, hey, just auto-fill my passwords

01:09:40 ◼   ► from my keychain like I do on my phone, on my Mac, on my iPad,

01:09:43 ◼   ► on anything else.

01:09:44 ◼   ► just auto fill for my key chain, right?

01:09:45 ◼   ► But on top of that is every other effort Apple

01:09:48 ◼   ► has ever done to like sign in with your TV provider

01:09:51 ◼   ► or universal sign in for everything

01:09:53 ◼   ► and all those different approaches that they've touted

01:09:56 ◼   ► in various keynotes have not been adopted universally.

01:09:59 ◼   ► So now every time you launch an app,

01:10:01 ◼   ► it's just like, gee, I wonder how this Apple

01:10:02 ◼   ► want me to log in.

01:10:04 ◼   ► Will it try to use Apple thing?

01:10:05 ◼   ► Will it try to use sign in with provider?

01:10:07 ◼   ► Some of the apps I discovered,

01:10:09 ◼   ► if you sign in with like one app,

01:10:11 ◼   ► like one Fox affiliated app,

01:10:12 ◼   ► other Fox affiliate apps already know that you're logged in

01:10:15 ◼   ► 'cause they probably do the application group sharing thing

01:10:17 ◼   ► or whatever behind the scenes, right?

01:10:19 ◼   ► It's just super weird and you know,

01:10:21 ◼   ► and like this is, not that people buy new Apple TVs

01:10:25 ◼   ► very often, but this is one of the main

01:10:27 ◼   ► and only friction points for regular people

01:10:31 ◼   ► to use Apple TV because people do subscribe

01:10:35 ◼   ► to streaming services and sometimes they subscribe

01:10:37 ◼   ► and unsubscribe, but you're like,

01:10:37 ◼   ► you're gonna have to do this.

01:10:38 ◼   ► There's no avoiding, you have to sign in to Netflix.

01:10:41 ◼   ► You have to have something like,

01:10:41 ◼   ► you can't use these streaming services without signing in.

01:10:43 ◼   ► If you pay for one, you have to authenticate.

01:10:45 ◼   ► So everyone's gonna have to go through this.

01:10:47 ◼   ► And it's not a simple process

01:10:49 ◼   ► if you haven't done it 50 times.

01:10:50 ◼   ► And even if you just subscribed

01:10:51 ◼   ► to two or three streaming services,

01:10:53 ◼   ► it's not a good sort of like first impression, right?

01:10:56 ◼   ► That's why the first impression of a device,

01:10:57 ◼   ► device transfer on the phone is like,

01:10:59 ◼   ► "Oh, I got a new phone.

01:11:00 ◼   ► "It knows that I got a new phone.

01:11:01 ◼   ► "It'll bring all my junk to the old phone."

01:11:02 ◼   ► Most people don't use TestFlight, so it's not a big deal.

01:11:04 ◼   ► Most people don't have two-factor outside of Apple stuff.

01:11:07 ◼   ► That's a good experience.

01:11:08 ◼   ► TV is like, not a decade away from that,

01:11:11 ◼   ► but at least five years behind the times.

01:11:13 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:11:15 ◼   ► I also was very confused.

01:11:17 ◼   ► I don't recall how much I talked about this last episode,

01:11:20 ◼   ► but I wasn't sure the right way to accomplish

01:11:24 ◼   ► what I wanted to do with my Apple TVs,

01:11:26 ◼   ► because what I wanted to do was trickle down, right?

01:11:29 ◼   ► So take the 4K Apple TV that was in the living room,

01:11:31 ◼   ► put that in the bedroom,

01:11:32 ◼   ► take the 1080 Apple TV that was in the bedroom,

01:11:34 ◼   ► that becomes a travel Apple TV.

01:11:36 ◼   ► But I wasn't sure the right-est way to do this, because--

01:11:40 ◼   ► I can tell you the wrong way to do it,

01:11:41 ◼   ► which is to have a plan to carefully rename them

01:11:44 ◼   ► to what they're going to be when they get in their proper homes,

01:11:47 ◼   ► and then forget to do that.

01:11:48 ◼   ► That's the way.

01:11:50 ◼   ► See, I did only the first step.

01:11:52 ◼   ► I had the plan, and then I executed the plan.

01:11:55 ◼   ► And that seemed to work just fine.

01:11:56 ◼   ► So what we're saying is basically,

01:11:58 ◼   ► go to the living room one, and then go to general settings,

01:12:01 ◼   ► whatever, and rename your living room one

01:12:03 ◼   ► from whatever it's called now, which may mention living room.

01:12:06 ◼   ► rename it to bedroom.

01:12:07 ◼   ► But oh, you can't rename it to bedroom

01:12:09 ◼   ► because if you try to rename it to bedroom,

01:12:10 ◼   ► it'll put bedroom parentheses two at the end.

01:12:12 ◼   ► So first, go upstairs to the bedroom

01:12:14 ◼   ► and either shut that one down,

01:12:16 ◼   ► no, there is no shutdown function for Apple TV,

01:12:18 ◼   ► I searched for it.

01:12:19 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:12:20 ◼   ► Just yank it from the plug,

01:12:21 ◼   ► it's just like a TiVo or whatever,

01:12:22 ◼   ► or rename it away from being bedroom.

01:12:25 ◼   ► Then go back downstairs and rename the one downstairs

01:12:28 ◼   ► into bedroom, then bravely unplug everything

01:12:32 ◼   ► because there's no way to shut down.

01:12:33 ◼   ► I guess you can put it to sleep if you wanna unplug it,

01:12:35 ◼   ► but honestly it doesn't make a difference,

01:12:36 ◼   ► I don't think then hook up your new one and then you can name your new one living room

01:12:40 ◼   ► And it won't be home living room parentheses, too

01:12:41 ◼   ► If you're lucky if you're unlucky like me and forget to do that you're you know, you just gotta go through this again

01:12:46 ◼   ► But even if you remember to do it, I think you need some time for it to like settle

01:12:50 ◼   ► Otherwise they forget what they were named and you'll end up with the parentheses - anyway cool

01:12:55 ◼   ► Yeah, so I did do exactly what you described because I thought about it for probably longer than I should admit

01:13:01 ◼   ► Hey

01:13:01 ◼   ► I was like I guess what I can do is I could start the bedroom TV and rename them and go to the living room

01:13:05 ◼   ► and rename that and then add the new one

01:13:07 ◼   ► and hopefully it'll all work out.

01:13:08 ◼   ► And it did, but I don't know,

01:13:10 ◼   ► I almost feel like I expected or it certainly hoped

01:13:15 ◼   ► that when I set up the new Apple TV,

01:13:17 ◼   ► it could be like, oh, am I taking over for the old one?

01:13:20 ◼   ► And I guess the difficulty there is that I would have

01:13:22 ◼   ► to have both of them online simultaneously

01:13:24 ◼   ► and often in an entertainment center

01:13:25 ◼   ► that's not something that's easy to do.

01:13:27 ◼   ► - But these are Wi-Fi, so you just plug them both in.

01:13:29 ◼   ► Like the thing I'm thinking of as an example,

01:13:31 ◼   ► I mean, I already just mentioned the phone,

01:13:32 ◼   ► but the great example of doing this right is,

01:13:34 ◼   ► again, frequent sponsor, Eero, replacing your router,

01:13:37 ◼   ► the thing that provides internet to your entire house,

01:13:40 ◼   ► seems like it would be the most fraught example of,

01:13:43 ◼   ► hey, I wanna swap one device from another,

01:13:45 ◼   ► or Indiana Jones, "Raid of the Lost Ark" style,

01:13:48 ◼   ► with the bag of sand and the idol.

01:13:49 ◼   ► 'Cause the thing needs to talk to the internet

01:13:52 ◼   ► to figure out who you are and what your info is.

01:13:54 ◼   ► Like Eero has like a cloud sync notion of your identity,

01:13:57 ◼   ► you have an Eero account, right?

01:14:00 ◼   ► It needs to talk to the internet to do that,

01:14:01 ◼   ► but it is the internet,

01:14:03 ◼   ► It is providing the internet, it's providing IP addresses,

01:14:05 ◼   ► we're doing all the routing.

01:14:06 ◼   ► I got a new Eero and I plugged it in and I said,

01:14:08 ◼   ► "Hey, you're the new Eero, here's the old one."

01:14:10 ◼   ► And it said, "Okay, I'll replace the old one."

01:14:12 ◼   ► And it's like, "Done."

01:14:13 ◼   ► Nothing, didn't have to do anything.

01:14:15 ◼   ► It swapped itself in as my router with no errors,

01:14:18 ◼   ► no problem, it understood what it was doing

01:14:20 ◼   ► and it was like, and I get a new Apple TV

01:14:23 ◼   ► and it's like an all-day project, what the hell?

01:14:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's so true.

01:14:26 ◼   ► That's all right.

01:14:28 ◼   ► I am liking the new Apple TV.

01:14:30 ◼   ► I can't say I notice anything that's particularly different,

01:14:33 ◼   ► but I mean, I like it.

01:14:34 ◼   ► And now my 4K bedroom TV, which is not fancy at all,

01:14:39 ◼   ► but now it has a 4K Apple TV attached to it.

01:14:41 ◼   ► So that's kind of cool for the once a month

01:14:43 ◼   ► that I actually use it.

01:14:45 ◼   ► Speaking of settings, I was thinking of noticing

01:14:47 ◼   ► a difference.

01:14:48 ◼   ► It didn't remember how I had configured

01:14:51 ◼   ► in terms of audio/video.

01:14:52 ◼   ► So I had to go back through and do all those settings again

01:14:55 ◼   ► that we talked about before, like match content on or off,

01:14:58 ◼   ► What do you want the menu screen to be, HDR or no, Dolby Vision, screen size, audio format,

01:15:04 ◼   ► like every single one of those options.

01:15:05 ◼   ► It had no recollection of what they were previously, so it just had to start, you know, reset everything

01:15:10 ◼   ► again.

01:15:11 ◼   ► Fun.

01:15:12 ◼   ► You want to tell me about your boy Bono and what he's been up to recently?

01:15:17 ◼   ► This is a funny bit from it.

01:15:19 ◼   ► So Bono's got a new book out, it's like an autobiography about, I don't know, about,

01:15:24 ◼   ► you know, his life and his band.

01:15:25 ◼   ► He's the lead singer of the band U2.

01:15:27 ◼   ► And there was a, going around a couple weeks ago, it was excerpts from it in the various

01:15:31 ◼   ► reviews.

01:15:32 ◼   ► One of them was about the infamous album that Apple distributed for free onto everyone's

01:15:38 ◼   ► iPhone or into everyone's iTunes library, more precisely, whether you wanted it or not.

01:15:44 ◼   ► And Bono had an apology in the book about that, quoting from the book.

01:15:51 ◼   ► As one social media wisecracker put it, "Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen,

01:15:55 ◼   ► my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper. For the less kind, the free U2 album

01:16:00 ◼   ► is overpriced." Bono said he was sorry. He said, "If just getting our music to people

01:16:08 ◼   ► who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea. But the idea was getting our

01:16:11 ◼   ► music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, and maybe there might

01:16:15 ◼   ► be some pushback. At first I thought it was just an internet squall, but quickly realized

01:16:18 ◼   ► we'd bump into a serious discussion about big tech. I'd take full responsibility,"

01:16:22 ◼   ► bonuses. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue. I thought if we could

01:16:27 ◼   ► put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite. I think,

01:16:32 ◼   ► who cares about the U2 album or whatever, but I think it's interesting why we still remember it,

01:16:37 ◼   ► and why was it such a big deal. Giving stuff away for free is usually not frowned upon. Even if you

01:16:44 ◼   ► don't want it, people will take free stuff just because it's free. I mean, that's why you end up

01:16:48 ◼   ► tasting all those weird free samples at Costco. Yeah, it's free, whatever. And that's something

01:16:52 ◼   ► you're putting inside your body but like you know free anything here it's a free thing whatever

01:16:56 ◼   ► why did everyone hate the free album i'm not entirely sure that bono really understands why

01:17:02 ◼   ► people hated it so much because he as a famous rock star who's not particularly tech savvy

01:17:07 ◼   ► probably doesn't know or care about these intimate details he knows it was a mistake

01:17:11 ◼   ► and he takes responsibility for it because he argued for it or whatever uh but like why why

01:17:18 ◼   ► Why did everyone get so angry about the U2 album being on their devices?

01:17:23 ◼   ► I think it's instructive, again not that we're going to talk about it this week but we probably

01:17:27 ◼   ► will later, about the ad stuff, of how it feels to have a powerful entity that doesn't

01:17:34 ◼   ► know or care that you exist do something to one of your personal technology devices without

01:17:41 ◼   ► your consent that you didn't ask for and can't undo.

01:17:48 ◼   ► And if the thing that they're doing is putting free music in your iTunes library, who cares,

01:17:52 ◼   ► not a big deal.

01:17:53 ◼   ► It is probably the smallest deal you can think of.

01:17:56 ◼   ► It's like all that means is that there is an album in your iTunes library that I didn't

01:18:00 ◼   ► put there and maybe I'm not interested in.

01:18:02 ◼   ► But even that tiny bit is like every time you go in there, you're like, "That stupid

01:18:08 ◼   ► U2 album is there again.

01:18:09 ◼   ► I don't even like them."

01:18:11 ◼   ► Or maybe, worst case scenario, it's the only thing in your library and every time you connect

01:18:14 ◼   ► it up to your car, it starts playing a song and it starts playing one of those songs from

01:18:18 ◼   ► the YouTube album because that's all you've got in there because you use Spotify.

01:18:21 ◼   ► It's the tiniest thing, but that tiny thing put in literally every single person's iTunes

01:18:27 ◼   ► library whether you want it or not and you couldn't get rid of it until they get that

01:18:31 ◼   ► thing later where you get to delete it before all the big blowback.

01:18:35 ◼   ► That just makes everybody go off the deep end.

01:18:38 ◼   ► And I think justifiably, because it reveals the control that the large companies have

01:18:44 ◼   ► over our lives.

01:18:45 ◼   ► They mostly don't exercise, or they exercise for good, like stopping malware or putting

01:18:49 ◼   ► signatures for malicious software or whatever.

01:18:52 ◼   ► Just to do this...

01:18:53 ◼   ► And you know, we're trying to do the nice thing.

01:18:57 ◼   ► We're trying to give people free music or whatever.

01:19:00 ◼   ► Doesn't matter what the motivations are, it's just like that album just sitting in there,

01:19:05 ◼   ► Even if you didn't care about it when it came out,

01:19:07 ◼   ► a week later, two weeks later, a month later,

01:19:09 ◼   ► especially if you're not into the tech news

01:19:10 ◼   ► and you miss the story where it's like,

01:19:11 ◼   ► hey, go to this page where you can delete it

01:19:12 ◼   ► from your library, which that page, I'm assuming,

01:19:14 ◼   ► is still up at Apple's website somewhere

01:19:16 ◼   ► because there could still be people

01:19:17 ◼   ► who have this in the library

01:19:18 ◼   ► and don't know that you can delete it.

01:19:19 ◼   ► We should probably try to find it for the show notes.

01:19:21 ◼   ► But most people don't know or care about that.

01:19:23 ◼   ► They just know that every time they look

01:19:25 ◼   ► in their iTunes library, there's this album

01:19:26 ◼   ► that they didn't want there,

01:19:27 ◼   ► and they just get madder about it and madder about it.

01:19:29 ◼   ► Someday there's gonna be some person

01:19:30 ◼   ► who's had that in their iTunes library for 20 years,

01:19:32 ◼   ► not knowing how to get rid of it,

01:19:33 ◼   ► and they're gonna be so angry about it,

01:19:35 ◼   ► if they ever meet Bono,

01:19:36 ◼   ► that's the first thing they're gonna yell at him about.

01:19:38 ◼   ► So I understand why Bono apologized,

01:19:40 ◼   ► but I do think it's an instructive lesson about

01:19:44 ◼   ► the smallest, most well-intentioned thing

01:19:49 ◼   ► can cause a complete open revolt,

01:19:52 ◼   ► whereas other things that companies do

01:19:54 ◼   ► that people don't notice that are way, way worse,

01:19:57 ◼   ► nobody cares.

01:19:58 ◼   ► Selling access to your demographic information

01:20:02 ◼   ► to advertisers and tracking you across multiple sites.

01:20:04 ◼   ► That's invisible to people.

01:20:06 ◼   ► They don't even see it, and they don't care about it

01:20:08 ◼   ► and is in general way worse.

01:20:09 ◼   ► But the U2 album, every time I see it,

01:20:11 ◼   ► I feel like people just get madder and madder.

01:20:13 ◼   ► It wasn't even very good.

01:20:14 ◼   ► - No, it wasn't.

01:20:15 ◼   ► March 14th, 2020, Blackguard91 writes,

01:20:20 ◼   ► "How could I remove U2's Songs of Innocence

01:20:23 ◼   ► "from iTunes and iPhone in 2020?

01:20:25 ◼   ► "I'm doing a little long overdue maintenance

01:20:27 ◼   ► "on my iTunes account, thanks to coronavirus/social

01:20:29 ◼   ► distancing and I still have Songs of Innocence album stuck on my phone. I never really cared

01:20:33 ◼   ► for YouTube with constant ambush of their music over the years has elevated them to

01:20:37 ◼   ► Nickelback levels of discomfort. Web searches have revealed a web tool that I missed by

01:20:41 ◼   ► about six years that Apple provided to remove the album, but it was engineered prior to

01:20:44 ◼   ► the advent of two factor authentication and does not properly work with modern Apple infrastructure.

01:20:49 ◼   ► How can I get rid of it?" To which Joseph_S writes, who is apparently a community specialist

01:20:54 ◼   ► for Apple, "Hey there, thanks for using the Apple Support communities, blah blah blah

01:20:58 ◼   ► blah blah, you need to contact Apple Support, here's how you can do it."

01:21:03 ◼   ► So that's the answer.

01:21:04 ◼   ► That's nice.

01:21:05 ◼   ► So, you know, at a company that cared more about the web, that page would both still

01:21:10 ◼   ► exist and still work.

01:21:12 ◼   ► I guess it hasn't worked for six years and I guess you can contact Apple so they can

01:21:15 ◼   ► get rid of it, but man, like, and that's the other thing about this.

01:21:19 ◼   ► They realize the mistake they made from the blowback and they introduce the tool to remove

01:21:22 ◼   ► which most people don't know about

01:21:24 ◼   ► because most people just are not following the tech press

01:21:26 ◼   ► and who cares, right?

01:21:27 ◼   ► And then, like, that was it.

01:21:29 ◼   ► Like, you know, they said, "Well, this problem is,

01:21:31 ◼   ► we'll never have to worry about this again

01:21:32 ◼   ► because people who want to remove it will use the tool,

01:21:34 ◼   ► and people who don't care don't care."

01:21:36 ◼   ► It's like, no, most people care

01:21:38 ◼   ► and have no idea you introduced that tool.

01:21:40 ◼   ► So you should have a solution for that long term, right?

01:21:43 ◼   ► Whatever hack they did to give this to everybody,

01:21:46 ◼   ► there should be an accompanying hack,

01:21:48 ◼   ► which is basically like a button

01:21:49 ◼   ► on every single person's Apple ID page

01:21:51 ◼   ► that never goes away, and the only thing that button does

01:21:53 ◼   ► is delete YouTube Apple.

01:21:55 ◼   ► Like just, that's gotta be there forever now.

01:21:56 ◼   ► That's your price for this mistake.

01:21:58 ◼   ► It's forever on every account.appleid.apple.whatever,

01:22:01 ◼   ► like you have to have the delete YouTube album button,

01:22:03 ◼   ► and you can never get rid of it,

01:22:05 ◼   ► and you have to test it every time

01:22:06 ◼   ► you do any kind of change to iCloud.

01:22:08 ◼   ► - This is such classic Apple.

01:22:10 ◼   ► So I found what is allegedly the link.

01:22:12 ◼   ► And you know how Apple is really good

01:22:14 ◼   ► about having really clean and pretty URLs?

01:22:16 ◼   ► I mean that genuinely, like they really honestly do.

01:22:19 ◼   ► The URL here is buy.itunes.apple.com/webobjectsbaby/mzfinance.woa/wa/offeroptout.

01:22:30 ◼   ► That is your URL.

01:22:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's the Steve Jobs equivalent.

01:22:34 ◼   ► You want a bumper case?

01:22:34 ◼   ► Fine, have a bumper case.

01:22:36 ◼   ► You wanna be able to delete the thing?

01:22:37 ◼   ► Fine, go to a WebObjects URL.

01:22:39 ◼   ► - Yep, and for the record, it's a 404.

01:22:41 ◼   ► - I always pronounce it "woe" in my head.

01:22:43 ◼   ► Mzfinance.woe.

01:22:45 ◼   ► - WebObjects application?

01:22:48 ◼   ► - Probably.

01:22:49 ◼   ► - The WOA extension, some web object, Guru probably knows.

01:22:52 ◼   ► - So apparently the iPhone 15 buttons allegedly

01:22:56 ◼   ► are going to be quite a bit different.

01:22:58 ◼   ► Ming-Chi Kuo writes, "My latest survey indicates

01:23:01 ◼   ► that the volume button and the power button

01:23:03 ◼   ► on two high-end iPhone 15, the new iPhone models,

01:23:08 ◼   ► may adapt a solid state button design

01:23:09 ◼   ► similar to the home button design

01:23:10 ◼   ► of the iPhone 7, 8 SE2 and 3.

01:23:13 ◼   ► To replace the physical mechanical button design,

01:23:15 ◼   ► there will be taptic engines located

01:23:17 ◼   ► on the internal left and right sides

01:23:18 ◼   ► to provide force feedback to make users feel

01:23:20 ◼   ► like they're pressing physical buttons.

01:23:22 ◼   ► Due to this design change,

01:23:23 ◼   ► the number of Taptic Engines used in each phone

01:23:25 ◼   ► will increase from the current one to three.

01:23:27 ◼   ► As a result, the existing Taptic Engine suppliers,

01:23:29 ◼   ► LuxShare ICT, which is the first one in AAC technologies,

01:23:32 ◼   ► the second one will be significant beneficiaries.

01:23:35 ◼   ► It is expected that high-end Android smartphones

01:23:37 ◼   ► will also follow Apple's design

01:23:39 ◼   ► to create new selling points,

01:23:40 ◼   ► which is a structural positive

01:23:42 ◼   ► for the mobile phone vibrator industry.

01:23:44 ◼   ► - I love the way people tweet when they're like,

01:23:46 ◼   ► their beat is like part suppliers for the iPhones.

01:23:49 ◼   ► It's such a different perspective.

01:23:50 ◼   ► Like, what's important about this?

01:23:52 ◼   ► It means more phone vibrators.

01:23:54 ◼   ► It's really good for these companies that make them.

01:23:58 ◼   ► I find this fascinating.

01:23:59 ◼   ► Is there something wrong with the power

01:24:03 ◼   ► and volume buttons on our current phones?

01:24:05 ◼   ► I guess because they move, it makes waterproofing harder.

01:24:09 ◼   ► What else is wrong with them?

01:24:10 ◼   ► - Anything on an iPhone that moves

01:24:12 ◼   ► or that is an entry point for dust and stuff

01:24:15 ◼   ► is also a service liability in the sense

01:24:17 ◼   ► that it's something that can break,

01:24:18 ◼   ► it's something that people will break on their phones

01:24:21 ◼   ► or that will fail on the phones

01:24:22 ◼   ► and that either the person or Apple

01:24:24 ◼   ► will be responsible for repairing it.

01:24:26 ◼   ► So there's that angle too, but is this plan,

01:24:30 ◼   ► I mean if this is real, which I think it's plausible.

01:24:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, we'll see.

01:24:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, you gotta think like,

01:24:35 ◼   ► are they really gonna be saving that much?

01:24:38 ◼   ► Like so they have the cost of two new Taptic engines,

01:24:40 ◼   ► they have to put them somewhere and I--

01:24:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, the space.

01:24:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, I have to imagine that they're gonna take up

01:24:45 ◼   ► up more space than the buttons do.

01:24:48 ◼   ► Maybe I'm wrong, but I mean, that's what I would assume.

01:24:52 ◼   ► - And then the battery power to every time

01:24:53 ◼   ► you hit the button, your little burst of electricity

01:24:56 ◼   ► to move a little mechanical thing.

01:24:57 ◼   ► - I mean, that being said, when they moved the home button

01:25:01 ◼   ► to a haptic, a taptic engine, which I think it was,

01:25:04 ◼   ► was that the iPhone 7, or was it before then?

01:25:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it was a 7.

01:25:06 ◼   ► That was great, I love the iPhone 7.

01:25:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, like, we had our doubts when that information

01:25:12 ◼   ► came out back then, and it came out and it was fine.

01:25:16 ◼   ► I would even say possibly good.

01:25:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it was better than the physical one,

01:25:19 ◼   ► but that physical button was like,

01:25:21 ◼   ► I mean, forget about tiny dust particles.

01:25:23 ◼   ► You could fit an entire cat inside there,

01:25:25 ◼   ► and people did shove their entire cat,

01:25:26 ◼   ► and like those home buttons would break all the time

01:25:28 ◼   ► 'cause you were pressing it constantly, and it really moved.

01:25:31 ◼   ► You could put cereal in there, cookie crumbs,

01:25:34 ◼   ► potato chips, whole pets, like,

01:25:37 ◼   ► just everything would go in there.

01:25:38 ◼   ► You know, you think the lightning port

01:25:40 ◼   ► is bad for collecting stuff.

01:25:41 ◼   ► the home button was a nightmare.

01:25:43 ◼   ► But I do wonder how much of your pet

01:25:45 ◼   ► you can shove into the crevices

01:25:47 ◼   ► on the side of the power button on a modern iPhone.

01:25:50 ◼   ► - I think from a product quality perspective,

01:25:53 ◼   ► I would trust Apple to do this well

01:25:54 ◼   ► because they already have done it well.

01:25:56 ◼   ► So I think it would feel fine and we wouldn't notice

01:25:58 ◼   ► and we'd get used to it.

01:25:59 ◼   ► It'd be one of those weird things that everyone says like,

01:26:01 ◼   ► oh, remember when it was a real button

01:26:02 ◼   ► and now you can't even tell unless the phone's off

01:26:04 ◼   ► or whatever, like, you know, it'd be one of those things.

01:26:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, like I don't object to it

01:26:08 ◼   ► 'cause I think it's gonna be bad,

01:26:09 ◼   ► but boy, in terms of cost of parts, complexity.

01:26:13 ◼   ► - And space, that's the thing, internal space,

01:26:15 ◼   ► that to me, I can't imagine this is worth it.

01:26:17 ◼   ► - Internal space, I mean, we'll see,

01:26:19 ◼   ► maybe these things have gotten way smaller

01:26:21 ◼   ► and you just need to be little for this,

01:26:23 ◼   ► but it's so fascinating, it makes sense

01:26:27 ◼   ► because look, if your job is to waterproof the iPhone

01:26:29 ◼   ► and you're sick of your weak point was the headphone jack

01:26:32 ◼   ► or your weak point is the home button,

01:26:34 ◼   ► you're knocking them down one by one.

01:26:35 ◼   ► Every year it's like, what's the next thing

01:26:36 ◼   ► that can make this phone more waterproof, right?

01:26:39 ◼   ► And maybe these just came up on the list, right?

01:26:42 ◼   ► I hope.

01:26:44 ◼   ► Yeah, the fascinating thing is the last bit here, again,

01:26:46 ◼   ► from the perspective of someone who's

01:26:48 ◼   ► talking about parts manufacturers for iPhones.

01:26:51 ◼   ► It is expected that high-end Android smartphones will also

01:26:54 ◼   ► follow Apple's design.

01:26:55 ◼   ► It's just expected that whatever Apple does,

01:26:57 ◼   ► even if it doesn't make any sense,

01:26:59 ◼   ► even if it seems to be dumb, they'll

01:27:01 ◼   ► copy it because Apple does it.

01:27:02 ◼   ► Like, there's no other reason you need to do it.

01:27:05 ◼   ► They could have done it five years ago

01:27:07 ◼   ► if it was a good idea.

01:27:09 ◼   ► They could have done it, but as soon as Apple does it,

01:27:11 ◼   ► well they'll do it too just because Apple did it

01:27:14 ◼   ► and they can say, oh whatever Apple has, we have that too.